SERMON II.

ECCLESIASTES VII. 2, 3.

It is better to go to the boufe of mourning, than to the boufe of feafting.

T

HAT I deny-but let us hear the wife man's reafoning upon it-for that is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to his beart: forrow is better than laughter for a crack'd-brain'd order of Carthufian monks, I grant, but not for men of the world. For what purpose, do you imagine, has God made us? for the focial fweets of the well-watered vallies where he has planted us, or for the dry and difmal deferts of a Sierra Morena? are the fad accidents of life, and the uncheary hours which perpetually overtake us, are they not enough, but we must fally forth in queft of them,-belye our own hearts, and fay, as your text would have us, that they are better than thofe of joy? did the Best of

Beings fend us into the world for this endto go weeping through it,—to vex and shorten a life short and vexatious enough already? do you think, my good preacher, that he who is infinitely happy, can envy us our enjoyments? or that a being fo infinitely kind would grudge a mournful traveller the short reft and refreshments neceffary to fupport his fpirits thro' the stages of a weary pilgrimage? or that he would call him to a fevere reckoning, because in his way he had haftily fnatched at fome little fugacious pleasures, merely tó fweeten this uneafy journey of life, and reconcile him to the ruggedness of the road, and the many hard juftlings he is fure to meet with? Confider, I befeech you, what provision and accommodation, the Author of our being has prepared for us, that we might not go on our way forrowing how many caravanfaras of rest-what powers and faculties he has given us for taking it-what apt objects he has placed in our way to entertain us;-fome of which he has made. fo fair, fo exquifitely fitted for this end, that they have power over us for a time to charm away the fenfe of pain, to chear up the dejected heart under poverty and sickness, and make it go and remember its miseries no more.

I will not contend, at prefent, against this rhetoric; I would chufe rather, for a moment, to go on with the allegory, and say we are travellers, and, in the most affecting sense of that idea, that like travellers, though upon business of the last and nearest concern to us, may furely be allowed to amuse ourselves with the natural or artificial beauties of the country we are paffing through, without reproach of forgetting the main errand we are fent upon; and if we can so order it, as not to be led out of the way, by the variety of profpects, edifices, and ruins which folicit us, it would be a nonfenfical piece of faint-errantry to shut our eyes.

But let us not lofe fight of the argument in purfuit of the fimile.

Let us remember, various as our excurfions are, that we have ftill fet our faces towards Jerufalem-that we have a place of rest and happiness, towards which we haften, and that the way to get there is not fo much to please our hearts, as to improve them in virtue ;that mirth and feafting are ufually no friends