SERMON XXIV.

In what a variety of ways we may ferve and benefit others,

GOD, moft benign, moft bountiful being, from whom inceffant streams of life, of joy, of happiness flow down on all the parts of thy immense domain and are diffufed over us, thy creatures and children, to do good is thy delight; to do good should likewise be ours and really is! Thou haft ever united with it the moft fenfible and varied pleasure, haft tuned our hearts to fympathy and compaffion, and endowed us with innumerable talents and means, fupplied us with innumerable opportunities and motives, for yielding to these emotions of our hearts and for enjoying the pleafure that infallibly springs from them. All thy children, merciful father, may and should do good to their brethren and fifters, and all should be happy in that divine employment. God, what are all thy inftitutions, all thy laws but love, but calls and directions to felicity! What are our mutual dependence, our mutual wants and the connections in which we are placed together, but means and motives to ferve one another,

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another, and thus to promote our common welfare and to augment the sum of our focial pleasure? Oh who would not listen to thy call! Who would not willingly follow thy direction to be happy by making others fo! Who would not cheerfully do as much good as he ever can, in order to enjoy as much pleafure as ever he is capable of enjoying! Oh open thou thyself our hearts continually more to these sentiments and emotions, the nobleft, the most blissful emotions and fentiments by which we can be infpired; and let them to-day and every day of our lives be truly fruitful in good works. Continually to be acquiring a greater likenefs, to be drawing ever nearer to thee, our father, our tender and beneficent father, by benevolence and beneficence towards our brethren, and thereby to be rendering ourselves progreffively more fufceptible of thy complacency and worthier of the appellation of thy children: be that our most strenuous endeavour, our glory and our joy! Bless in this view the confiderations we are now about to begin. Let us all be taught and quickened by them to employ the gifts and endowments which thou haft granted us, according to thy will and to the general welfare. Thefe our fupplications we offer up to thy divine majefty in the name of thy fon Jefus, and in entire reliance on his promifes, thus farther addrefs thee: Our father, &c.

I PETER

1 PETER iv. 10.

As every man hath received the gift, even fo minifter the fame one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.

DOING good to others, rejoices every human heart that is not totally callous and corrupt. Doing good to others engages the approbation and applause of every man, is honourable in the fight of all. Our propensity to pleasure, to an agreeable mode of existence, and our appetite for approbation and honour may therefore, even without regard to the fuperior motives of virtue and religion, very powerfully impell us to beneficence. The generality of mankind too more or less feel the force of this impulfe. But every one is not in fuch affluent circumstances as to allow him to indulge his propenfity to beneficence by liberally diftributing prefents and alms among his indigent brethren. This is the privilege of the rich or the opulent. The want of thefe means is fometimes afflictive to thofe, who are not wealthy and yet would fain be bountiful; they are even apt to envy fuch as live in opulence, and to deem themselves unhappy on account of their ftraightened circumftances. But, generous as the principle of thefe judgments and feelings may be, they are however not perfectly

equitable,

equitable, and may very easily lead us into mistakes: wealth and affluence are unquestionably defirable, but not the only, not the principal means of benefiting others. No, God has put the practice of this amiable virtue, and the enjoyment of the pure pleafure annexed to it in the power of us all. Every one, the poor as well as the rich, the low as the high, the fervant as his master, may be the benefactor of his brother, and each may be fo in various methods. As man does not live by bread alone, but to his happiness has need of many other things, fo likewife we may do him good not only by bestowing on him the bread he wants, but by a thousand other kinds of bounty and relief. Every one, as the apotle tells us in our text, has received certain gifts, whereby he is enabled to ferve others, whereby as a good steward of the deity he can promote the welfare of his whole family on earth. To illuftrate this matter fomewhat more circumftantially, and thereby to call the attention of benevolent hearts to the various opportunities of really doing good, is the purport of my present discourse. I fhall merely point out, in what various ways we may benefit others, ferve and be useful to them.

The diverfity of fituations that fubfifts among mankind, and the place that each individual occupies in the greater and smaller societies to which he belongs; the diverfity of the wants and of the fufferings of mankind; the diverfity of the gifts and endowments, which God has distributed among them;

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and the diverfity of the methods, in which they may be applied to the general welfare, are four ticulars pregnant with information, how every one is able and ought to serve others by the gift that he has received of God.

How great is, firft, the diverfity of fituations among mankind, and how various therefore the opportunity and the inducement to ferve and be useful to one another in different ways! How many claffes and descriptions of perfons fill up the interval between the monarch, or the prince and the meaneft of his fubjects! And how various their deftination; how various the fphere of action affigned them; how manifold the good and useful, that each may contrive, adopt, project, promote and do therein! Each has his particular station in domestic and civil fociety; each his particular proximate or remote connections with the feveral members of it; each his allotted bufineffes and labours, which he may perform this way or that, better or worse. Each can contribute his share, each can contribute a great deal to the prefervation, to the fecurity, to the regularity, to the welfare of the whole; each can contribute his portion, each very much to the conveniency, to the pleasure, to the happiness, both of domestic and focial life. Each is in a certain fenfe indifpenfable, and each promotes by the good that he does in his ftation and calling, at the fame time the good that others do in their ftation and their calling, and which they could not do if any stoppage arofe in the

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