individual becomes a drunkard at once: Peu et peu— "little by little." It is by the serpent's stealth that he passes from an occasional glass, to a perfect sot. No man at once plunges into the grossest vice, or the commission of the foulest crimes; he is first an infant in iniquity, but soon becomes a giant in transgression. Visit the incarcerated victims of our gloomy prisons, or listen to the heart-chilling tales of cruelty and blood, from the condemned criminal, as he prepares to launch into an undone eternity; and you will find, perhaps, without a single exception, that they first neglected religion, then doubted its truth, and then embraced infidelity, which nerved and prepared them for the commission of any deed, however sanguinary or venal it might chance to be. Infidelity is the great moral maelstrom, in which have been shipwrecked the honor, the prospects, and brightest hopes of unnumbered thousands. Its circumference is so large, and its first movement so slow, that you will sail round the mighty sweep and scarcely feel its motion. But as your circles grow smaller, your velocity increases; till, by the rapidity of your whirl, you awake from your slumber-only to see the hopelessness of your condition, and to give one deep and awful groan as you go down the fearful vortex. Think not that I am following a luxuriant fancy, or exaggerating the real danger, or attempting unnecessarily to alarm your fears. Very far from me be such an unworthy motive. But when the servant of God sees the "sword coming," and warns not the men in danger, though they perish in their sins, yet their blood will be found upon the skirts of his coat. And when he returns not to "discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not," he sacrifices to the fear of man, or upon the altar of popularity, the souls committed to his solemn charge. How low and debasing have been the principles of infidels, thus far examined! But we have a still darker picture yet to behold, in the history and lives of these great philosophers, during the course of another lecture -a picture, at the sight of which the cheek of the good man will turn pale, and the knees of terror quake. I cannot give a full disclosure of the abominations of infidelity; for if I did "I should a tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy warm blood; Make thy two eyes, like stars, to start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porcupine. To ears of flesh and blood." I dare not lead you into the kennels of vice, and show you the shamelessness of some of the deeds in which infidels glory. I will show you enough, however, to convince you that all you have ever heard of infidelity is true, and that the one half has not been disclosed. I will point you to some of their dying beds, that you may see how, in anguish unutterably great, they closed up the time of their allotted probation, to appear in the presence the great God they despised-but now their inexorable Judge. Yet, as we have already said, the deepest shades must remain in darkness, until brought out to the light and abhorrence of open day in the fearful judgment. Hobbes and Shaftesbury, with a host of other infidel writers, have contended that there is no natural or moral right, except that which dwells in the great leviathan-the civil magistrate and power. Hence, Hobbes unblushingly affirms, "that it is lawful to do and to get whatever we can with safety;" while endless multitudes of his corrupted coadjutors have taught in every corner of the streets, that pollution of every kind and of every form, is lawful and desirable; and that "animal enjoyment is the only real good." The infidels of the French school have thrown off even the restraint that these English infidels seemed to feel. But all alike proclaim, "that our bodies are begun by chance, continued without design, and perish without hope." O, what a brilliant constellation of worthies would such men form! How pure and unsullied must be their reputations! Who would dare to let his fancy picture the state of society under the control of such principles? Inflamed and brutal passions, assuming the province of executioner and judge, would heap in undistinguished ruin all that is innocent, and lovely, and pure. The bloody histories of Caligula, Nero, and Heliogabulus, or the more deeply tinged and darkly stained histories of Danton, Murat, and Robespierre, show what would be our doom and the history of our own beloved country, under the dominion of infidel philosophy. Cursed with such rulers, and drinking in the same poisoned streams, each of us would exhibit in our own conduct the exact counterpart of that of our rulers; while by appetite we should be changed into a herd of swine, and by passion, into raving tigers. Whatever we disliked, whether true or false, good or bad, in itself, would of course be hunted with relentless cruelty until it was destroyed. Red hot plates of iron, and pincers would be made to tear the quivering flesh; while caldrons of boiling oil, and burning brazen bulls, and seats of fire and flame, torture and butchery, would be but the sports and daily employments of men. have been the scenes where infidelity has triumphed. Such Children, by every polluted connection, would be thrown into ditches and ponds, or dashed against the wall, to save their wretched parents-not from disgrace, for this would not be known-but from the trouble of their maintenance; while those who should escape this more to be desired fate, would grow up without a parent, without a home, or without a friend. Then this world would be an extensive theater of pollution and blood, and at once be turned into one vast den; one tremendous charnel house! That this is, from its very nature, the tendency of infidelity, will you, can you doubt? When men publicly teach that man has no conscience; is under no moral obligation; that there is no other right, natural or moral, than power; that there is no crime in intention; that our feelings are our standard of right and wrong; that revenge is a virtue; that adultery and lewdness are necessary; that it is right to get what we can; that religion is a farce, and the Bible priestcraft; that humility and devotion are monkish and debase the mind; that the soul is material, and dies with the body; that the body is begun by chance, lives by chance, dies by chance, and rots by chance; that all virtue and good in the universe exists alone in animal gratification, and that we are born like monkies, live like swine, and die like fools. Such is the splendid catalogue of infidel virtues! It would, it must, in its triumph, accomplish all that we have said in the destruction of morals and the subversion of good order. To show you still further, in another lecture, the pure morality of these moral renovaters of the earth, we shall disclose more of their sentiments, and show you their abominable lewdness, hypocrisy, and profanity. Such have been the mental hallucinations of some of these philosophers that they have doubted their own existence. Hobbes reasoned himself into a belief that there was no moral difference between actions, and that there was no such distinction as right and wrong! Hume at last thought there was nothing in the world but ideas and impressions. Berkley thought that matter did not exist. Descartes doubted even his own existence; and the celebrated Pyrrho thought that if he did exist it was in such a particular form that nothing could hurt him. Such are the wild speculations of sceptics. When we once leave divine revelation, we are at the mercy of every wave and of every wind. O, how unlike that man are these infidels, who, with the book of God in his hand, "takes his excursive flight over those golden tracts, where lie scattered the suns and systems of astronomy;" where God has poured all the exhaustlessness of creative wealth, and all the wonders of his omnipotent power. It is in these untraveled, unmeasured fields of cloudless transparency, that he finds himself overpowered with wonder, by the awfulness and glory of the eternal God; and wherever he turns his delighted eye, he sees, as if blazing in the escutcheonry of heaven, the clearest attributes of his high divinity. Lost, as he feels himself to be, amid encircling glories and unutterable splendors, he listens only to the |