SECTION V. 49 these instructions and examples of our parents, to abateour res- pect for things that are holy, to cast away our reverence for an oath and the awful names of God and his Son, and to indulge ourselves in this dangerous and criminal language, which is too much in use with the common multitude. I could wish indeed from my soul, that there might be no distinction everleft amongst us, to know a dissenter or a churchman by such forms of speech, or by an abstinence from them : I wish all our brethren of the established church would be as cautious and watchful against such unwarranted freedoms as some of them are, and would forbear to break the third command, which forbids us to take the name of the Lord our God in vain, or to trifle with things sacred : but if any of them will continue to practise it, let us not be ashamed to distingùish ourselves as the offspring of the puritants, and as protestant dissenters, who have learned of our fathers to pay a religious reverence to all that is holy. II. You and your predecessors have been very much dis- tinguished -from the bulk of the nation, by observing the Lord's- day with greater strictness, in employing the several parts of it in religious worship, private or public, so far as the strength and health of your bodies would permit; and so far as is consistent with the common necessities and occasions of life. This has been a distinction of considerable standing, and that not in a town or two, but generally throughout the nation. If persons heretofore neglected to worship God publicly above once a day, unless they were confined for want of health, or by the necessary duties of life ; if they counted it of no im- poitanee how they spent their time when public worship was ended; if they indulged themselves in little recreations abroad or at home, or in unnecessary businesses or amusements ; if they wasted the of ernoon in prolonging their dinners, and filled up those hours with the pipe or the glass, or with impertinent con. versation, which'the more serious employed in public assemblies of worship ; if they made the Lord's-day evening a season of familiar visits, wherein they wore away another hour or two in discourse of secular affairs, in trifling subjects, as now-a-days over a tea-table, or in the more gusttul and modish language of scandal and defamation ; if they made no account of any other part of the day besides that which was actually spent in I.ublic devotion, but turned it into hours of diversion and entertainment, we have been wont generally to conclude, and with good reason too, surely these persons can never be nonconformists, for their e fucation never would have permitted therl to pay so slight a regard to the Lord's-day. Well, my friends, how stands the case now amongst yòu ? IPhat do you more than others? Does the same distinction still remain between you aid your neighbours ? Or is it lost and van- VOL. V. D
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=