though it be to set before you a view of the wonders of Divine Providence, which this PRINCIPLE presents and opens to us.

For what I proposed, after explaining my text, was to shew, that the doctrine of it, which ascribes THE GENERAL CALAMITIES, ARISING FROM NATURAL CAUSES, TO GOD'S DISPLEASURE AGAINST SIN, displays his glory in the fairest colours, and establishes man's peace and happiness on the most solid foundations.

And, secondly, that the present fashionable opinion, THAT NATURAL EVENTS PROCEED NOT FROM A MORAL RULER, AND HAVE NO RELATION TO MORAL GOVERNMENT, is the source of perpetual disquiets and alarms to the abandoned and forlorn inhabitants of the earth.

1. First then, we may observe, that the application of natural events to moral government, in the common course of Providence (a disposition of things to be distinguished from that whereby God, in the constitution of universal nature, hath annexed happiness to virtue-and to vice, distress and misery) connects the character of Lord and Governor of the intellectual world, with that of Creator and Preserver of the material: A consideration of great use, as for other religious purposes respecting God's glory, sq particularly for this, that it redresses the old Manichean impiety, so derogatory to it, which makes an evil Principle a sharer with him in the direction of the Universe: For the constant undisturbed course of the natural system, when compared with the disorders of

the

the moral, first gave birth to that monstrous imagination. Now this doctrine, of the PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY, the direction of natural events to moral government, obviates all irreligious suspicions; and not only satisfies us that there is but one Governor of both systems, but that both systems are conducted by one scheme of Providence.

To form the constitution of Nature in such a manner that, without controlling or suspending its laws, it should continue through a long succession of ages to produce its physical revolutions, as they best contribute to the preservation and order of its own system, just at those precise periods of time when their effects, whether salutary or hurtful to man, may serve as instruments for the government of the moral world; e. g. that a foreign enemy, amidst our intestine broils, should desolate all the flourishing works of rural industry; that warring elements, in the stated order of natural government, should depopulate and tear in pieces a high-viced city, just in those very moments when moral government required a warning and example to be held out to a careless world, is giving us the noblest as well as most astonishing idea of God's GOODNESS and JUSTICE

Had the government of the moral system generally required the control and alteration of natural laws in that sensible effect which we call a miracle * it

* We can see but two necessary occasions of this extraordinary dispensation;-the one, to attest and support the truth of a new Religion coming from God; the other, to administer a Theocratic government. These are occasions worthy the divine Wisdom, and necessary in the nature of things.

might have argued defect of wisdom. Had the government of the natural system required the operation of such laws as would be always disturbing and defeating the sanctions of the moral, it might have argued defect of power. But where the stated laws of Physics, while they are promoting their own purpose, are, at the same time, so contrived as to support, invigorate, and enforce the sanctions of Religion, this, I say, must needs give us the noblest, as well as most astonishing idea, of God's WISDOM and POWER.

Nor do the glories of this Dispensation afford less consolation and comfort of security to the truly pious man. For when it is understood, that the course of nature was, by the laws imposed upon it from the foundations of the world, so contrived as to co operate with the laws of moral government, such an one, on the appearance of any of these public warnings to awake the nations from their lethargy of vice, will never be terrified and distracted with the vain apprehensions of an undistinguishing desolation, which is out of his power to avoid; as being well assured, from the nature of the judgment, that a sincere purpose of amending the public manners will be able to avert the approaching vengeance.

Nor let men so rationally instructed in the ways of God suffer their well-placed confidence to be shaken by this plausible sophistry, "That it is utterly unphilosophical to suppose that a present and instantaneous change in our conduct can stop or avert a natural event, established by a strong connected series of causes, which have kept operating ever since the foundations of the world." We can

tell

tell these pretending reasoners that our religious confidence is not derived from so absurd a principle, a principle erected on the narrow and unfaithful ground of superstition. Our conclusions are drawn from the most reasonable conceptions that man can entertain of his Creator and Lord: Who, when he made the world (in which all time was as an instant before him), the free determinations of the human Will, and the necessary effects of Laws physical, were so fitted and accommodated to one another, that a sincere repentance in the moral world should be sure to avert an impending desolation in the natural; not by any present alteration or suspension of its established Laws, but by originally adjusting, all their operations to all the foreseen circumstances of moral agency: So as to make Matter and Motion (besides their other purposes) to serve for the regulation of the Understanding and Will. We should blush, let me tell them, to be thought so uninstructed in the nature of Prayer as to fancy it can work any temporary change in the dispositions of the Deity, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever: Yet we are not ashamed to maintain, that God, in the chain of causes and effects, which not only sustains each system, but connects them all with one another, hath so wonderfully contrived, that the temporary endeavours of pious men shall procure good and avert evil, by means of that PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY which he hath willed to exist between moral actions and natural events.

Thus we see, these two essential doctrines of Religion, "God's JUDGMENTS in physical and civil

events,"

events,' and "the efficacy of the good man's PRAYER," stand equally on one and the same Principle, the belief of that original connexion between the natural and moral World.

And here let me expostulate with those unhappy men, who, from a confessed truth that these more general desolations proceed entirely from natural causes, have too confidently concluded that they cannot be esteemed the warnings of a moral Governor: and therefore, after having been most alarmed by them while they were impending, have been the first to ridicule their own imbecility; which had led them, before they were aware, to the very brink of repentance. An instance of this unmanly conduct we saw amongst ourselves, when Heaven, in mercy, not long since shook a guilty land. A repetition of the stroke so alarmed and terrified its inhabitants, that, in their fright, they seemed in haste to give a specimen of their contrition and reformation. But a third shock not coming at the expected interval as that between the first and second, the rash project of amending their manners vanished like a morning mist; and they returned with equal speed to their accustomed follies and dissipations. And to what was all this owing but to a double blunder, unbecoming a nation of Philosophers? They had first entertained a false idea of these Warnings, as if they were phænomena out of nature, prodigious and miraculous; and when they came to understand that they were only the effects of physical causes, they then, by as shameful an ignorance, concluded that they had nothing in them formidable or threa

tening