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monly the vice of profligate people-fuch as have no fear of God before their eyes; noify, brawling, hardened fellows, who terrify those beneath them, and are despised by every body elfe. You hardly, I fuppofe, know any of thefe curfing and swearing people, who are not bad men in other refpects: they are drunkards, or they are given up to a loose, diforderly life or are, in fome way, a nuifance to their neighbourhood. And if ever this vice is found in better people, where there is fome good, it is always thought a great injury and blemish to them; and their neighbours cry out, how forry they are to fee fo many virtues clouded by fuch a vice, And when you give the character of a good man, you commonly fay, as a high praife, he was never heard to fwear an oath in his life. Swearing therefore, I fay, fits ill upon all people; but if there are any that fhould particularly avoid this fhocking vice, it is thofe who are at the head of families-who have children and.fervants to inftruct, and keep in order. What a fhocking thing is it to breed up your own children in vice!to train them up in wickedness by your own example!--to be the devil's worst agents in fitting

fitting your own offspring for deftruction! If you teach them no good, for God's fake teach them no ill. Is it not enough, think you, to leave them to pick up vice as they can, but must you inftruct them in it?-muft you teach their infant tongues, by your example, till their lips begin glibly to form an oath? The cafe is the fame with regard to the fervants: it is the duty of masters to have an eye upon their behaviour -to keep them to their duty, and make them go regularly to church; but instead of that, if they teach them to fin by their example, I much fear that such masters will not only have their own fins, but, in a degree, the fins of others to anfwer for.

THUS I have endeavoured to deter you from the abominable practice of common fwearing.You will obferve, I am not calling you to any heights of religion-I am not calling you, in our Saviour's language, to pluck out an eye or cut off a hand; I am calling upon you only for one of the first steps of a chriftian life-that of not dishonouring your Maker's name. Let me then hope that all who are addicted to this wicked

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wicked practice, or are in the way of it, will confider, and think upon what I have faid against it; and for your own fakes, and for the fake of others, leave off a practice which can do you no good, and will moft undoubtedly, if you repent not, nor leave it off, in the end lead you to ruin.

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THERE IS JOY IN THE PRESENCE OF THE

ANGELS OF GOD OVER ONE SINNER THAT 10 REPENTETH, OF WOI

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IN the parable from which this verse is taken,

our Saviour intended to fhew the Jews that the Gentiles (reprefented by the prodigal fon) fhould be taken, on their repentance, into God's favour equally with themselves.

But though this was the chief intention of the parable, yet, like many of our Saviour's parables, it had two views; and the former part, at leaft, is capable of a much more general interpretation. In this light I propofe to confider it, and fhall point out the feveral pieces of inftruction that arife from it.

In the first place, we obferve the conftant readinefs we all fhew to leave our father's house.— that kind pro

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God. And we argue and act in this case most commonly as the prodigal did. The fober discipline of our father's houfe is too severe a bondage we have pallions and appetites which muft be indulged det us make an aèquaintance with the world—it is time now to enjoy a little of life thefe are the common delufions that carry us all, more or lefs, into a far country-into the paths of pleasure and indulgence. The father, no doubt, remonftrated to the prodigal, as God does to us in the gofpel, and fet before him the kind intention of all the reftraints that were put hipon him; and probably, with a prophetic figh, forewarned him, that fooner or later he fhould repent his rafhnefs. All being ineffectual, the father knowing there are fome people who can learn the leffons of wifdom only from experience, at length gave way; and the youth, we read, gathering all together, with a plentiful fupply of folly and self-sufficiency, took his journey into a far country and the farther from home the better: the greater diftance he went from his father's

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