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business of the few next days, would explain to any enlightened European why other nations did fall in the storms of the world, and why we did not fall. The Christian patience you may witness, the impartiality of the judgment-seat, the disrespect of persons, the disregard of consequences. These attributes of Justice do not end with arranging your conflicting rights, and mine; they give strength to the English people, duration to the English name; they turn the animal courage of this people into moral and religious courage, and present to the lowest of mankind plain reasons, and strong motives why they should resist aggression from without, and bind themselves a living rampart round the land of their birth.

There is another reason why every wise man is so scrupulously jealous of the character of English Justice. It puts an end to civil dissension. What other countries obtain by bloody wars, is here obtained by the decisions of our own tribunals: unchristian passions are laid to rest by these tribunals; brothers are brothers again; the Gospel resumes its empire, and because all confide in the presiding magistrate, and because a few plain men are allowed to decide upon their own conscientious impression of facts, civil discord, years of convulsion, endless crimes, are spared; the storm is laid, and those who came in clamouring for revenge, go back together in peace from the hall of judgment to the loom and the plough, to the senate and the church.

The whole tone and tenour of public morals is affected by the state of supreme Justice; it extinguishes revenge, it communicates a spirit of purity and uprightness to inferior magistrates; it makes the great good, by taking away impunity; it banishes fraud, obliquity, and solicitation, and teaches men that the law is their right. Truth is its handmaid, freedom is its child, peace is its companion; safety walks in its steps, victory follows in its train it is the brightest emanation of the Gospel, it is the greatest attribute of God; it is that centre round which human motives and passions turn: and Justice, sitting on high, sees Genius and Power, and Wealth and

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Birth, revolving round her throne; and teaches their paths and marks out their orbits, and warns with a loud voice, and rules with a strong arm, and carries order and discipline into a world, which but for her would only be a wild waste of passions. Look what we are, and what just laws have done for us: a land of piety and charity; a land of churches, and hospitals, and altars; a nation of good Samaritans ; - a people of universal compassion. All lands, all seas, have heard we are brave. We have just sheathed that sword which defended the world; we have just laid down that buckler which covered the nations of the earth. God blesses the soil with fertility; English looms labour for every climate. All the waters of the globe are covered with English ships. We are softened by fine arts, civilised by human literature, instructed by deep science; and every people, as they break their feudal chains, look to the founders and fathers of freedom for examples which may animate, and rules which may guide. If ever a nation was happy, if ever a nation was visibly blessed by God-if ever a nation was honoured abroad, and left at home under a government (which we can now conscientiously call a liberal government) to the full career of talent, industry, and vigour, we are at this moment that people — and this is our happy lot. First the Gospel has done it, and then Justice has done it; and he who thinks it his duty to labour that this happy condition of existence may remain, must guard the piety of these times, and he must watch over the spirit of Justice which exists in these times. First, he must take care that the altars of God are not polluted, that the Christian faith is retained in purity and in perfection: and then turning to human affairs, let him strive for spotless, incorruptible Justice; --- praising, honouring, and loving the just Judge, and abhorring, as the worst enemy of mankind, him who is placed there to "judge after the law, and who smites contrary to the law."

THE LAWYER THAT TEMPTED CHRIST

A SERMON

PREACHED IN

The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter, York,

BEFORE

THE HON. SIR JOHN BAYLEY, KNT.,

ONE OF HIS MAJESTY'S JUSTICES OF THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH,

AND

THE HON. SIR JOHN HULLOCK, KNT.,

ONE OF HIS MAJESTY'S BARONS OF THE COURT OF EXCHEQUER,

AUGUST 1. 1824.

SERMON,

&c.

LUKE, X. 25.

AND, BEHOLD, A CERTAIN LAWYER STOOD UP, AND TEMPTED HIM, SAYING, MASTER, WHAT SHALL I DO TO INHERIT ETERNAL LIFE?"

THIS lawyer, who is thus represented to have tempted our blessed Saviour, does not seem to have been very much in earnest in the question which he asked: his object does not appear to have been the acquisition of religious knowledge, but the display of human talent. He did not say to himself, I will now draw near to this august Being; I will inform myself from the fountain of truth, and from the very lips of Christ, I will learn a lesson of salvation; but it occurred to him, that in such a gathering together of the Jews, in such a moment of public agitation, the opportunity of display was not to be neglected; full of that internal confidence which men of talents so ready, and so exercised, are sometimes apt to feel, he approaches our Saviour with all the apparent modesty of interrogation, and saluting him with the appellation of Master, prepares, with all professional acuteness, for his humiliation and defeat.

Talking humanly, and we must talk humanly, for our Saviour was then acting a human part, the experiment ended, as all must wish an experiment to end, where levity and bad faith are on one side, and piety, simplicity, and goodness on the other: the objector was silenced, and one of the brightest lessons of the Gospel elicited, for the eternal improvement of

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