Section 12.
SECTION 12.
An address to antichristian moralists.
MORAL men, who ridicule the Christian faith; you suppose that your honesty counterbalances your sins, which, by a soft name, you call foibles; and for which you hope that God will never punish you with hell torments. I do not desire to make the worst of things. I wish you were as good as you fancy yourselves to be. I wish you may have been as exact in all the branches of your duty as you pretend. I would rejoice if the law of respectful obedience to your superiors, of courteous love to your equals, and of brotherly kindness to your inferiors, had always been fulfilled in your words and actions, in your looks and tempers. I am ready to congratulate you, if in all cases you have done to your fellow creatures exactly as you would be done to; and never plunged once into the gulf of intemperance. But permit me to ask, if you have fellow creatures, have you not a Creator? And if you have a Creator, do not reason and conscience command you to render him warm gratitude, cheerful praise, humble adoration, and constant obedience? But have you done this one year, one month, one day, one hour, in all your lives?
Although you are so ready to make us understand that you are not as other men, adulterers, unjust, uncharitable, hypocrites, &c, are you entirely satisfied with your own goodness? Nay, if you ever “looked into the perfect law of liberty,” and searched your breasts with “the candle of the Lord,” can you say, before the omniscient Searcher of hearts and spirits, that there is one of the commandments which you never broke in its spiritual meaning?
If, upon second thoughts, you cannot acquit yourselves; and if God’s dignity as a Creator, his veracity as a Lawgiver, his wisdom as a Governor, his justice as a Judge, his holiness as a God, forbid him to hold the guilty guiltless; or to forgive them in a manner inconsistent with any one of his infinite perfections; are you wise to despise all Advocate with him, a Divine Prophet, an atoning Mediator? Is it prudent in you to run from the city of refuge, to which you should flee with unabated swiftness? Do you act a reasonable part when you take shelter under the dispensation of the heathens, from the blessings that pursue, and from the light that surrounds you, in this Christian land? If I may allude to the mysterious divisions of Solomon’s temple — will ye obstinately remain in “the court of the Gentiles,” when you are graciously invited to enter into “the holy place,” with true Christians? Think ye, that because righteous heathens are saved without the explicit knowledge of Christ, ye may be saved upon their plan? If ye do, may the following remarks help you to see the unreasonableness of this conclusion!
1. Not to repeat the hints already given to baptized heathens, I ask, Is not a grain of sincere love to truth the very beginning of a true conversion? Is that man a sincere lover of light who runs away from the light of the sun and moon, under pretence that he has the light of a star? Do those people sincerely love money, who, when they are presented with gold and silver, throw it back to the face of their benefactor, because they have some brass? And is that moralist a sincere lover of truth, who contemptuously rejects the silver truths of the Jewish dispensation, and the golden truths of the Christian Gospel, under pretence that he is an adept in “the religion of nature,” and has what I beg leave to call, the brass of heathenism?
2. You talk much of “the religion of nature;” but should you not distinguish between the religion natural to man in his unfallen state, and that which is natural to him in his fallen condition? Is not the regimen which is natural to the healthy, unnatural and frequently destructive to the sick? If upright, innocent man, needed not a spiritual Physician, does it follow that depraved, guilty man can do without one? Does not heathenism allow the fall and degeneracy of man? Have not some of the wisest Pagans seen, though darkly, their need both of a Mediator, and of a propitiatory sacrifice? Do you think it prudent, so to depend upon your self righteousness, as to trample under foot the Jewish and Christian revelations, together with the discoveries of considerate heathens? Does your wisdom show itself to advantage, when it thus makes you sink below heathenism itself?
3. No adult heathen was ever saved without the repentance of the contrite publican. “I am a guilty, helpless sinner, totally undone, if the mercy of Him that made me do not extend itself to me. Great Author of my existence, pity, pardon, and save me for thy mercy’s sake.” Now, if you were brought to this genuine repentance, would you despise the light of revelation that recommends it, and leads on to farther attainments? Think ye, that those who sincerely rejoice in the dawn of day, will readily decry morning light? Is it not therefore much to be feared that Pharisaism and impenitency stand in your way to Christianity, more than a mistaken respect for reason and truth? Nay, does not reason bid you assent to well attested matters of fact? And are not the Jewish and Christian revelations so inseparably connected with notorious events, that it is less absurd to doubt the exploits of Alexander and Cesar, than to disbelieve the miracles of Moses and Jesus Christ?
4. The heathens, who were saved without the explicit knowledge of Christ, far from despising it as you do, implicitly desired it; and those that were blessed with a ray of it, rejoiced in it like Abraham. That precious knowledge is offered to you; and (shocking to say!) you reject it! you make sport with it! you pass jests upon it! you call it imposture! enthusiasm! O! how much more tolerable will it be for Pharisaic heathens; yea, for Chorazin and Bethsaida, in the day of judgment, than for you, if you die under so fatal an error! And how can ye flatter yourselves, that because righteous heathens, who have but one talent, shall be saved in the faithful improvement of it; you, who have five, shall be saved, though you bury four of them?
“O! but I, for one, improve the fifth: I am moral.” God forbid I should discountenance morality! I value it next to piety: nay, true morality is the second branch of true piety. Nevertheless, this you must permit me to say: Your morality hath either pride, impenitency, and hypocrisy at the bottom; or humility, sincerity, and truth. If the former, your morality, like Jonah’s gourd, has a worm at its root. When the sun of temptation shall shine warmly upon you, or when death shall lay his cold hand upon you, your morality will wither, and afford you neither safety nor comfort: but if it has sincerity and truth at the bottom; and if you are faithful, your little light will increase, the clouds raised by your prejudices will break, and you shall “see the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ,” because, like Saul of Tarsus, you do not oppose the truth maliciously, but “ignorantly in unbelief.” And O! may these pages convey to you the accents of that “truth which shall make you free!” and may the gracious voice, which formerly thundered in the ears of the great Jewish moralist, the fierce opposer of the Christian Gospel: “Saul! Saul! why persecutest thou me?” May that voice, I say, whisper to each of you, “Honestus! Honestus! why neglectest thou me? I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: Jesus, who yet act in the Mediator’s part between my righteous Father and thy self-righteous soul. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks of my truth, and the stings of thy conscience. I am a Sun of righteousness and truth: wrap thyself in unbelief no more: let the beams of my grace penetrate thy prejudiced soul, and kindle redeeming love in thy frozen breast. Nor force me, by an obstinate and final denial of me before men, to fulfil upon thee the most terrible of all my threatenings, by denying thee also before my Father and his angels;’ for, ‘if ye [to whom my Gospel is fully preached] believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.’”