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principles of licentiousness and abominations, as we are to the French. That nation, steeped as it has been in infidelity, and infected as it still is with it, is becoming the moral corrupter of the world the destroyer of mankind.

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We have seen the influence of infidelity on individuals—we have brought before you their standards of morality and virtue, tending to weaken and destroy virtue, and to strengthen every vice--we have seen the licentiousness of their lives, and listened to their obscene and blasphemous ribaldry-we have looked again, and have seen scathing, blighting and mildew following their footsteps, and the blackness of darkness surrounding them, as they wend their way along the deep recesses of moral depravity! We will now show you their death, for "the death-bed is the detecter of every man's thoughts!"

"Here resistless demonstration dwells;

Here tired dissimulation drops her mask;
Here real and apparent are the same."

The stoutest heart will sometimes quake with fear, and
the bold blasphemous man, who, in health, defied his
God, has been shaken with terror, and confessed that,
which all his life, he had denied and labored to destroy.
"The grave, dread thing!
Men shiver when thou art named. Nature, appall'd,
Shakes off her wonted firmness. Oh! how dark
Thy long extended realms, and rueful wastes,
Where nought but silence reigns, and night, dark night!"
These scenes have shaken all of man's boasted firmness,
and made him drop his mask, and appear just as he
really is without disguise. It is often said, that "expe-
rience is the best instructor." A man's boasted victory
over the fear of death is nothing, if made in health.

It is only in death, that experience can serve us on this subject. We will, therefore, show what experience we have of the moral efficacy of infidelity in death.

William Pope, of Bolton, in Lancashire, after having abjured religion he joined himself to an infernal infidel crew, was suddenly taken sick, and such was the nature of his disease, that he confessed that the hand of God was upon him, and prayed to die, that he might go to hell and receive damnation! Rev. Messrs. Rhodes and Barrowclough called upon him, in order to pray for him; but with the fury of an incarnate demon, as soon as they approached his dying bed, he spit in their faces, and threw at them every thing he could reach, and with demoniac vigor struck one of the ministers on the head; and then, calling for damnation, which he said was sealed against him, and raving and cursing God, cried, "I am going to hell!" and closed his congested eyes in eternal night!

Lord P. of Northamptonshire, a man of wealth, of fashion, and of learning, embraced infidel sentiments, and took every opportunity to revile religion. Getting his children and servants together in the hall, he would, with infernal mirth and revelry, blaspheme his God, and make them do the same! At length he drew near his wretched end; and finding that he must die, the "powers of the world to come took hold of him." In the horror of his dying moment, he said to a friend in his room, "Go into my library, and bring me the cursed book"-(meaning that which had made him an infidel.) His friend went; but soon returned, saying, I cannot find it. The noblemen then cried with vehemence, Go, look till you do find it! I cannot die till it is destroyed!" He soon returned with it; when

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the nobleman, seizing it with his dying hand, with mingled horror and revenge, tore it to atoms, and cast it into the fire! Having thus taken vengeance on the instrument of his ruin, he breathed his soul into the hands of the God who gave it, amid inexpressible forbodings of the wrath to come!

Capt. John Lee, who was executed for forgery, became an infidel through reading the writings of David Hume. But most deeply did he lament, and bitterly bewail, when it was too late, his untimely fate. In a letter to a friend, written the night before his execution, he says, "I leave to the world a mournful memento that however much a man may be favored by personal qualifications, or distinguished by mental endowments, genius will be useless, and abilities avail but little, unless accompanied by a sense of religion, and attended by the practice of virtue."

George Villiars, (the younger,) Duke of Buckingham, was the richest man, and one of the most accomplished and splendid geniuses, as well as one of the greatest infidels, and most profligate and infamous libertines of his day. When he found that he must die, all his boasted courage and philosophy forsook him. In writing to Dr. Barrow he says, "O, Doctor, what a profligate have I been! Now, when a few days would be worth hecatombs of worlds, I cannot flatter myself with the prospect of half a dozen hours! How despicable [continues he] is that man who never prays to his God, but in the time of his distress! In what manner can he supplicate that omnipotent Being, in his affliction, with reverence, whom, in the tide of his prosperity, he never looked upon with dread? The companions of my former libertinism would scarce believe their eyes, were you

to show them this epistle. They would laugh at me, or pity me as a timorous wretch, who was shocked at the appearance of futurity. A future state may well strike terror into any man; and he must have uncommon courage indeed, who does not shrink at the presence of God. You see, dear Doctor, the apprehension of death will soon bring the most profligate to a proper use of their understandings. I am hunted by remorse, despised by my acquaintance, and, I fear, forsaken by my God. Dear Doctor, to purchase a smile from a blockhead whom I despised, I have frequently treated the virtuous with disrespect; and sported with the holy name of Heaven, to obtain a laugh from a parcel of fools, who were entitled to nothing but my contempt." He then closed this touching letter in these emphatic words, "Come and pray for the departing spirit of unhappy Buckingham." He died as the fool-without hope, despised, and cast off.

Take another instance of a nobleman, of splendid genius and acquirements, but who drank in infidelity as the "ox drinketh in the water brook." He, like thousands of others, began to relent when hope had nearly fled forever. In a letter to an intimate companion, he says, "Dear Sir, before you receive this, my final state will be determined by the Judge of all the earth. In a few days, at most, perhaps in a few hours, the inscrutable sentence will be passed. It is impossible for me to express the present disposition of my soul— the vast uncertainty I am struggling with! No words can paint the force and vivacity of my apprehensions! Every doubt wears the face of horror, and would perfectly overcome me, but for some faint beams of hope which dart across the tremendous gloom! What tongue

can utter the anguish of a soul suspended between the extremes of infinite joy and eternal misery? I am throwing my last stake for eternity, and tremble and shudder for the important event. Good God! how have I employed myself! What enchantment hath held me! In what delirium has my life been past! What have I been doing, while the sun in his race, and the stars in their courses have lent their beams, perhaps only to light me to perdition! I look back upon my past life, and but for some memorials of infamy and guilt, it is all a blank, a perfect vacancy! I might have grazed with the beasts of the field, or sung with the winged inhabitants of the woods, to a much better purpose than any for which I have lived. And, oh! but for some faint hope, a thousand times more blessed had I been to have slept with the clods of the valley, and never have heard the Almighty's fiat, nor waked into life at his command, I have often met death insulting on the hostile plain, and with a stupid boast defied his terrors, with courage as brutal as that of the war-horse. I have rushed into the battle, laughed at the glittering spear, and rejoiced at the sound of the trumpet; nor had a thought of any state beyond the grave, nor the great tribunal to which I must have been summoned, and where all my secret guilt had been revealed, nor the minutest circumstance concealed. It is this which arms death with all its terrors; else I could still mock at fear, and smile in the face of the gloomy monarch. It is not giving up my breath. It is not being forever insensible. This is not the thought at which I shrink. It is a terrible hereafter -that something beyond the grave at which I recoil. Those great realities, which, in the hours of mirth and vanity, I treated as phantoms-as the idle dreams of

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