CANON BAMPTON'S WILL.

xi

copy to be put into the Bodleian Library; and "the expense of printing them shall be paid "out of the revenue of the Land or Estates

given for establishing the Divinity Lecture "Sermons; and the Preacher shall not be paid, "nor be entitled to the revenue, before they " are printed.

"Also I direct and appoint, that no person "shall be qualified to preach the Divinity Lec"ture Sermons, unless he hath taken the de

66

gree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the "two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge; "and that the same person shall never preach "the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice."

LECTURE I.

LECTURE I.

ACTS i. 13, 14.

And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alpheus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas the brother of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren. HERE then were assembled in an obscure chamber, in a city the inhabitants of which were hated and despised by the generality of mankind, eleven men of humble birth, of sordid occupations, and of uncultivated minds; peasants, publicans, fishermen, with a few women, and the brethren of one, who had recently suffered an ignominious death as a public malefactor. The eventual consequence of this meeting has been a moral and religious revolution,

B

equally unprecedented in earlier, and unparalleled in later ages. The customs, the manners, the opinions, the laws and political institutions of vast nations; the whole system of public and private life, in the more enlightened parts of the world, have undergone a change more or less rapid, complete, and permanent. Ancient modes of religious worship have vanished from the face of the earth; a new code of morality has gradually incorporated itself into the civil polity and domestic relations of innumerable people; arts and letters, even war itself, have appeared to assume a new character, and to be directed on different principles. So entirely indeed has the whole framework of society been modified by the introduction of Christianity, that it is impossible to trace all its remote bearings upon the habits and character of mankind. The philosophic observer of the human race can discover no event in the whole course of its history so extensively influential, as the promulgation of that religion which was preached by the apostles of Christ.

Nor is this revolution less remarkable for the duration than the extent of its influence. Having survived for centuries, the religious belief of these men exists, as the established faith of all those nations, which are particularly distinguished for civilization of manners, or the culture of the understanding. Empires have risen and fallen, dynasties have flourished and sunk into oblivion; manners and opinions have undergone in other respects the most complete and universal change; commerce and arts and letters have migrated from one quarter to another: but amidst all the vicissitudes of human institutions, and the perpetual fluctuation of political affairs, Christianity retains its power, adapts itself to every state of society, and every form of government. It has resisted alike every foreign invasion, and every domestic insurrection against its authority.

Nor are the impediments over which it triumphed, or the hostility to which it has been perpetually exposed, to be lightly estimated. In all parts of the world the religion of Christ had to supersede and eradi