men, a large majority of whom subsist by fraud; to habits calculated to poison the source and principle of all integrity, he gives efficacy, countenance, and concurrence. Even his virtues

he suffers to be subsidiary to the cause of vice. He sees with calmness, depredation committed daily and hourly in his company, perhaps under his very roof. Yet men of this description declaim (so desperately deceitful is the heart of man) against the very knaves they cherish and protect, and whom, perhaps, with some poor sophistical refuge for a worn-out conscience, they even imitate. To such, let the Scripture speak with emphatical decision- When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him.'

The reader will easily observe, in this quotation, a command of language, and a power of style, very superior to what is met with in the great mass of sermons. We shall make one more extract.

But in addition to fraud, and all its train of crimes, propensities and habits of a very different complexion enter into the composition of a gamester: a most ungovernable FEROCITY OF DISPOSITION, however for a time disguised and latent, is invariably the result of his system of conduct. Jealousy, rage, and revenge, exist among gamesters in their worst and most frantic excesses, and end frequently in consequences of the most atrocious violence and outrage. By perpetual agitation the malignant passions spurn and overwhelm every boundary which discretion and conscience can oppose. From what source are we to trace a very large number of those murders, sanctioned or palliated indeed by custom, but which stand at the tribunal of God precisely upon the same grounds with every other species of murder? From the gaming-table, from the nocturnal receptacles of distraction and frenzy, the duellist rushes with his hand lifted up against his brother's life! Those who are as yet on the threshold of these habits should be warned, that however calm their natural temperament, however meek and placable their disposition, yet that, by the events which every moment arise, they stand exposed to the ungovernable fury of themselves and others. In the midst of fraud, protected by menace on the one hand, and on the other, of despair; irritated by a recollection of the meanness of the artifices and the baseness of the hands by which utter and remediless ruin has been inflicted; in the midst of these feelings of horror and distraction it is, that the voice of brethren's blood "crieth unto God from the ground"—" and now art thou cursed from the

earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand." Not only THOU who actually sheddest that blood, but THOU who art the artificer of death thou who administerest incentives to these habits who disseminatest the practice of them -improvest the skill in them-sharpenest the propensity to them at THY hands will it be required, surely, at the tribunal of God in the next world, and perhaps, in most instances, in his distributive and awful dispensations towards thee and thine here on earth.'

Having paid this tribute of praise to Dr. Rennel's first sermon, we are sorry so soon to change our eulogium into censure, and to blame him for having selected for publication so many sermons touching directly and indirectly upon the French Revolution. We confess ourselves long since wearied with this kind of discourses, bespattered with blood and brains, and ringing eternal changes upon atheism, cannibalism, and apostasy. Upon the enormities of the French Revolution there can be but one opinion; but the subject is not fit for the pulpit. The public are disgusted with it to satiety; and we can never help remembering, that this politico-orthodox rage in the mouth of a preacher may be profitable as well as sincere. Upon such subjects as the murder of the Queen of France, and the great events of these days, it is not possible to endure the draggling and the daubing of such a ponderous limner as Dr. Rennel, after the ethereal touches of Mr. Burke. In events so truly horrid in themselves, the field is so easy for a declaimer, that we set little value upon the declamation; and the mind, on such occasions, so easily outruns ordinary description, that we are apt to feel more, before a mediocre oration begins, than it even aims at inspiring.

We are surprised that Dr. Rennel, from among the great number of subjects which he must have discussed in the pulpit (the interest in which must be permanent and universal) should have published such an empty and frivolous sermon as that upon the victory of Lord Nelson; a sermon good enough for the garrulity of joy, when the phrases, and the exultation of the Porcupine,

or the True Briton, may pass for eloquence and sense; but utterly unworthy of the works of a man who aims at a place among the great teachers of morality and religion.

Dr. Rennel is apt to put on the appearance of a holy bully, an evangelical swaggerer, as if he could carry his point against infidelity by big words and strong abuse, and kick and cuff men into Christians. It is a very easy thing to talk about the shallow impostures, and the silly ignorant sophisms of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, D'Alembert, and Volney, and to say that Hume is not worth answering. This affectation of contempt will not do. While these pernicious writers have power to allure from the Church great numbers of proselytes, it is better to study them diligently, and to reply to them satisfactorily, than to veil insolence, want of power, or want of industry, by a pretended contempt; which may leave infidels and wavering Christians to suppose that such writers are abused, because they are feared; and not answered, because they are unanswerable. While every body was abusing and despising Mr. Godwin, and while Mr. Godwin was, among a certain description of understandings, increasing every day in popularity, Mr. Malthus* took the trouble of refuting him; and we hear no more of Mr. Godwin. We recommend this example to the consideration of Dr. Rennel, who seems to think it more useful, and more pleasant, to rail than to fight.

After the world has returned to its sober senses upon the merits of the ancient philosophy, it is amusing enough to see a few bad heads bawling for the restoration of exploded errors and past infatuation. We have some dozen of plethoric phrases about Aristotle, who is, in the estimation of the Doctor, et rex et sutor bonus, and every thing else; and to the neglect of whose works he

I cannot read the name of Malthus without adding my tribute of affection for the memory of one of the best men that ever lived. He loved philosophical truth more than any man I ever knew, was full of practical wisdom, — and never indulged in contemptuous feelings against his inferiors in understanding.

seems to attribute every moral and physical evil under which the world has groaned for the last century. Dr. Rennel's admiration of the ancients is so great, that he considers the works of Homer to be the region and depositary of natural law, and natural religion.* Now, if, by natural religion, is meant the will of God collected from his works, and the necessity man is under of obeying it; it is rather extraordinary that Homer should be so good a natural theologian, when the divinities he has painted are certainly a more drunken, quarrelsome, adulterous, intriguing, lascivious set of beings, than are to be met with in the most profligate court in Europe. There is, every now and then, some plain coarse morality in Homer; but the most bloody revenge, and the most savage cruelty in warfare, the ravishing of women, and the sale of men, &c. &c. &c., are circumstances which the old bard seems to relate as the ordinary events of his times, without ever dreaming that there could be much harm in them; and if it be urged that Homer took his ideas of right and wrong from a barbarous age, that is just saying, in other words, that Homer had very imperfect ideas of natural law.

Of

Having exhausted all his powers of eulogium upon the times that are gone, Dr. Rennel indemnifies himself by the very novel practice of declaiming against the present age. It is an evil age-an adulterous age-an ignorant age-an apostate age- and a foppish age. the propriety of the last epithet, our readers may perhaps be more convinced, by calling to mind a class of fops not usually designated by that epithet-men clothed in profound black, with large canes, and strange amorphous hats-of big speech, and imperative presence-talkers about Plato-great affecters of senility -despisers of women, and all the graces of life-fierce foes to common sense-abusive of the living, and approving no one who has not been dead for at least a century. Such fops, as vain, and as shallow as their

fraternity in Bond Street, differ from these only as Gorgonius differed from Rufillus.

In the ninth Discourse (p. 226.), we read of St. Paul, that he had an heroic zeal, directed, rather than bounded, by the nicest discretion-a conscious and commanding dignity, softened by the meekest and most profound humility. This is intended for a fine piece of writing; but it is without meaning: for, if words have any limits, it is a contradiction in terms to say of the same person, at the same time, that he is nicely discreet, and heroically zealous; or that he is profoundly humble, and imperatively dignified: and if Dr. Rennel means, that St. Paul displayed these qualities at different times, then could not any one of them direct or soften the other.

Sermons are so seldom examined with any considerable degree of critical vigilance, that we are apt to discover in them sometimes a great laxity of assertion; such as the following:

Labour to be undergone, afflictions to be borne, contradictions to be endured, danger to be braved, interest to be despised in the best and most flourishing ages of the church, are the perpetual badges of far the greater part of those who take up their cross and follow Christ.'

This passage, at first, struck us to be untrue; and we could not immediately recollect the afflictions Dr. Rennel alluded to, till it occurred to us, that he must undoubtedly mean the eight hundred and fifty actions which, in the course of eighteen months, have been brought against the clergy for non-residence.

Upon the danger to be apprehended from Roman Catholics in this country, Dr. Rennel is laughable. We should as soon dream that the wars of York and Lancaster would break out afresh, as that the Protestant religion in England has any thing to apprehend from the machinations of Catholics. To such a scheme as that of Catholic emancipation, which has for its object to restore their natural rights to three or four millions. of men, and to allay the fury of religious hatred, Dr. Rennel is, as might be expected, a very strenuous anta