men are, they are so much the worse fitted. To execute exemplary vengeance on those whose day of grace is over, to harden their hearts against complaints, and tears, and ancient and honourable prejudices, is a task which, though a genuine servant of God might, by a clear and indisputable call from God, be induced, and obliged, to undertake, he must of necessity undertake with the greatest unwillingness: and which he would be, almost, irresistibly tempted to execute by halves and tardily. Even in the highest orders of creation, they are not His good angels to whom God assigns the necessary parts of accusers and tormentors. The toils of the princes of the Seraphim are confined to the more pleasing charge of ministering to the wants, and warding off the dangers, and assisting the prayers, of the heirs of salvation: while it is Satan, who has the task, to which his malice best adapts him, of proving the faith, and of exercising the patience, and of avenging the crimes, of men, as their tempter, their persecutor, their adversary. What wonder then that the Almighty, when He desires to cut off an incorrigible offender, should choose His instruments from among those, whose tempers are fitted to acts of severity; and whose furious passions, like those storms which the heathens feigned to murmur in their parent cave, till a breach was made for their passage, rush, violently

and with blind rage, through whatever channel the Almighty sceptre opens for them.

Again, the task of punishing incorrigible sinners is a task extremely odious in itself; and which, if laid on a virtuous man, must materially diminish his influence among his fellow-creatures, and, consequently, the degree in which he can be useful. We do not, and we cannot, love the man, who inflicts pain on his brethren and the feelings of pity, which even a guilty sufferer raises in our hearts, are accompanied with feelings of indignation against the immediate cause of his suffering. The public executioner is, in no nation of the world, a popular character; nor can we suppose that God would usually invest those, whom He really favours, with the character of His ministers of wrath to their fellows.

Nor is this all; the task of executing God's anger on sinners would, to a good man, be not only painful and odious; it would also be often dangerous. He, who was once accustomed to inflict pain on others as a matter of duty, would be likely, by degrees, to find an unholy pleasure in the act, and to become the persecutor and oppressor of his brethren, not for God's sake, but for his own. Nor can we wonder, therefore, that He, who will not lead His people into temptation, should choose, for the most part, the rods of His anger and

the instruments of His righteous judgements, from among those, who are not called by His name; and who are already filled with the leading elements of rage and bitterness: nor that such a person, as Jehu, was taken as a fit agent to destroy the house of Ahab. Such men as these, indeed, are to the moral creation of God, what storms and tempests are to the natural it is by the whirlwind, and by the hurricane, not by the gentle breeze, that the air is purified from pestilence.

But, though such a person, as Jehu, might be an extremely proper instrument to effect the end proposed by God, it is still maintained by those, with whom I contend, that the end itself was unmerciful and unrighteous. "Jezebel, indeed," it will be said, "deserved her fate; but why were Joram and his threescore and ten brethren to perish for the sins of their parents? Surely that is a monstrous doctrine, which teaches, that, when the fathers have eaten a sour grape, the children's teeth shall be set on edge'; and the present instance of its application becomes still more prodigious, from the fact, that the death of Ahab, the original and actual offender, was, in the eyes of men, less grievous and more honourable, than the fate which overtook his children."

In answer to this objection, by which many

1 Jer. xxxi. 29.

weak brethren have been considerably scan. dalized, it is necessary, first, to call to your recollection, that the sufferings, which overtook the children of Ahab, as well as those, which are denounced against the descendants of such as broke the second commandment, were of a worldly and temporal nature only. It is not said, that God "visits the offences of the fathers, on the children”—by damnation. God forbid ! It is threatened only, that untimely death and disgrace in this world shall overtake them. But our worldly fortunes are well known to be regulated by God, in the ordinary course of His providence, on other principles than those of an exact adjustment of good and evil to the virtues and vices of the individual. The day is not yet come, in which every man is to rise with his body, and to give an account of his works. The eighteen, on whom the tower of Siloam fell, were not greater sinners, than all the rest who dwelt in Jerusalem: and if Ahab and Jezebel had been blameless characters, it would still have been no impeachment of God's justice, though they and their family had all come to disgraceful and untimely ends. But if God may, with perfect justice, dispose of the lives and fortunes of His creatures, as seemeth best to Him, without reference to any peculiar transgression whatever, it is too much to say, that He may

not in perfect consistency with all his attributes, exercise the same power, where a great example is to be made; and where, by the death of a few, a salutary terror may be struck into the multitude of His creatures.

In point of fact, indeed, it is certain, not only from Scripture, but from experience, that God has so ordered the course of this world, that, in very many instances, the sins of the fathers are, and must be, visited on their children. If a father be a proud and debauched spendthrift, he entails poverty, shame, and disease of body and mind on more than one generation of his descendants. If a father has acquired money or power by deceit or violence, it almost invariably happens, so much so as to be a common proverb among men, that these his ill-gotten goods are soon lost by his heirs ; who are thereby left in a worse condition, than if those goods had never been left to them. And these things are well and wisely thus ordained; because there is, with most men, no stronger restraint on their vices, than the apprehension that, by indulging them, they may injure, not only themselves, but those most dear to them and because, in particular, the chief temptation to acts of violence or deceit arises from the hopes of founding a family, and of leaving our children wealthy and powerful.

It is plain, then, that the objection, if it were