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    The design of the whole of tins able sermon , and the best manner of the preacher will be seen in the following passage : « Let us ^ put the case of a man living within the gripe of upstart power , holding his tenement and his means of

    support from one of those profligates , unhappily too numerous , who stick at no crime to gratify their pride and sensuality—compared with whom the rich man in the parable is an angel of light . His poor dependent fears God and hates wickedness . He will not become the instrument of oppression ; he will not

    sacrifice his daughter to a tyrant ' s lust ; he will not contribute by his vote to send a wretch into the council of the nation , who would sell his country , as Judas did his Master , for thirty pieces of silver ; nay , perhaps , he can but ill conceal his honest indignation , when he hears him praised by unprincipled selfishness . In his rectitude he finds his ruin . A debt

    which he cannot pay , or a vexatious suit which he cannot support , sends himself to a jail , and exposes his innocent and destitute family to hazards and sufferings , from the very contemplation of which the heart recoils .

    " Here is an instance of a good man suffering , from the violence of the wicked , for the sake of righteousness . Is it only a fictitious case to uphold an inference which fact would not bear out ? Or is

    it one of a few solitary examples which are not to be heeded in a general estimate ? Read the history of the world . Mark those little tyrants , so numerous in every country , who are for ever grinding the faces of the industrious poor , by

    exactions and oppressions , for which the law has no remedy . See the statesman and the lawyer , too often plundering under the pretence of defending ; and O 1 that it could not be said , Behold even the minister of religion , employing the name of God to bind slavery and

    degradation about the necks of his offspring . Honest simplicity and unprotected goodness become , in a thousand ways , the prey of artifice and malignity ; and when we think of the numberless oppressors and deceivers of this description , in all parts of the earth , who seem to exist and

    to feed upon human misery , especially where despotism is established , it is impossible for a heart of sensibility to dwell , without horror , upon this single source of human wretchedness . And is it within the compass of credibility , that these evils , which have no compensation here , shall receive none hereafter ? Can it be true , that for these cruelties the man of violence has nothing to fear ; that for

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    these sufferings the man of righteousness has nothing to hope ; that the oppressor and the oppressed , the tiger and his victim , are to lie down < juietly together and rise no more for ever ? Then virtue is indeed a phantom , and religion a dream . Then even the monster who hates

    virtue upon principle j because It is the living reproach of his own character ; who dreads patriotism , because it opposes a barrier to his ambition ; who abhors honest piety , because it will not give its sanction to his usurpations and enormities ; who organizes violence upon an extensive scale , and tramples upon

    the ^ good that resist it , with the same indifference as he does upon the worm under his feet ; who makes havoc his pastime , and rises to empire over the bodies of millions , and upon the awful ruins of justice and humanity—then may even this man repose upon his pillow in security and peace . He may occasionally

    have some fears for his personal safety , perhaps some remorse for his most flagrant atrocities . But the worst that can happen is death . And can this be the final result of a moral government , conducted by infinite wisdom and benignity ? Upon such a scheme , what source of consolation is left to injured innocence and suffering worth ? And who upon such

    terms would bear the proud man ' s scorn , with all the buffetings that patient merit of the unworthy takes , when he might either improve his state by dexterous villainy , or leave it by a voluntary death ? A supposition involving such consequences must appear absurd and incredible . It were , indeed , more easy to believe that there is no God , than to believe that he

    governs the world upon such a plan . " - ^—Pp . 62—66 . The fourth Sermon is a re-publication . It was preached and printed

    many years ago , on occasion of the death of Dr . Towers . Dr . Lindsay has consulted no less the gratification of his readers than his own reputation , by preserving it in this collection . The the text is 1 Cor . xv . 53—57 , and in

    the following passage the subject is well stated and divided ; we quote it the rather because it is one of the few instances in which the preacher follows the old and , in our judgment , most useful plan of announcing distinctly and numerically the division of a discourse :

    ** What I propose in addressing you from these words is , to point out the ground of peculiar thankfulness to God , which both the common and enlightened Christian has above all other men in an-

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    Review . —Dr . Lindsay ' s Sermons . 39

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1820, page 39, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2484/page/39/