herein direct and guide us, and lead us all to the perfection and happiness whereof we are capable! How many unjust and culpable complaints of human misery would then be done away! How fatisfied, how bleffed fhould we be in the focial and cheerful enjoyment of thy bounties! How greatly fhould we facilitate by mutual affection and friendship our progrefs on the way of duty and virtue, and how much more certainly and completely reach the end of our being! God, do thou fend the spirit of love, of pure and generous love into our hearts! Open the avenues of them to the charms of virtuous friendship. Enable us clearly to perceive and intimately to feel its excellent value; and purify us from all low, felfifh inclinations and paffions that are in oppofition to it. God, thou art for ever leading all to thy fupreme design, to univerfal good; to approach nearer to thee, the fun of being, the boundless, unimpaired centre of minds, the father of spirits, and to unite ever clofer the one to the other, is the perpetual tendency of all intelligent, fenfible beings, is also the aspiration of human fouls! May we be ever becoming more fufceptible of this happiness in both respects, and be ever deriving more felicity from this fource of life. Blefs to that end the contemplations we now propose to begin upon it. Give force to our reflections, and enable them to penetrate us with virtuous, generous fentiments and feelings. For this we prefent our fupplications to thee, as the votaries of thy fon Jefus, our ever bleffed deliverer

I 3

deliverer and lord; and, firmly relying on his promises, address thee further as he prescribed: Our father, &c.

PROV. Xviii. 24.

There is a friend that fticketh closer than a brother.

CHRISTIANITY has frequently been reproached as unfavourable to friendship, fince it does not exprefsly inculcate it; prefcribing indeed to its followers benevolence towards all, univerfal kindness and brotherly love, but not difcriminate friendship. Friendship, however, is not properly a duty, not an indifpenfable obligation for all; it is not to be commanded, like justice and general kindness; its rise, its direction very frequently depends on circumftances and incidents that are not in our own power; and even very intelligent and worthy perfons, of a fenfible and friendly heart, may and often muft, without any fault of theirs, forego the happiness of friendship, I mean ftrict and cordial friendship. At the fame time it must be confeffed, that the more a man opens his heart to univerfal benevolence, to philanthropy and brotherly love, those great commandments of the chriftian law; the more he allows himself to be governed by the fpirit of them: the more adapted and difpofed will he be to even the

most

Nay,

moft noble and moft exalted friendship. friendship would be a very general virtue, and the whole fociety of christians a band of friends intimately united together, if they all inviolably conformed to the precepts of that doctrine which they confess, and suffered themselves to be actuated by its fpirit.

Of this, what we know concerning the founder of christianity and its primitive confeffors, I will not allow us to doubt. When we fee Jefus repay the gentle, tender, affectionate difpofition of his disciple John with distinguished affection and confidence, when we fee this disciple fo often leaning on his breast, and hear him continually called the difciple whom he loved, when we fee our lord felecting the house of his friend Lazarus as his place of refuge and recreation; when we hear him say to his attendants, "Our friend Lazarus fleepeth, but I go to awake him;" when he afterwards haftens to his grave, weeps at the fight of his body, and the beholders exclaim, "See how he loved him!" when we behold the fympathy and compaffion which marked the friend of the human race, when he lays afide the more dazzling glories of his character, and mingles his tears with thofe of his friends, how can we entertain the leaft doubt of the friendly difpofition of Jefus, or think that fuch a difpofition is at variance with his fpirit and his doctrine? And the connection that fubfilted between Jefus and his difciples and followers in general, cer

tainly prefents us with an example of the most go nerous friendship. How indulgent, how affectionate, how familiar, was his converfe with them! How great his concern for them! "If ye feck me," faid he to the guards who came to feize him, "then let these go their way.' It is recorded of him, that, “having loved his own, he loved them unto the end." And, when he was shortly to be feparated from them, how he foothed, comforted, encouraged them! How he feemed entirely to forget himself and his most important concerns, in his attention to them! How tenderly he takes leave of them at the last supper, and enjoins them the commemoration of him! How he bears them in mind even during the whole course of his fufferings, and in the laft fad scene of them interests himself in their welfare! And how he hastened as it were, on his refurrection from the dead to fhew himself to them, and to dry up their tears! Was not this friendship, was it not the most exalted friendship? And the first christians, who, actuated by the spirit of chriftianity, were but one heart and one soul, who had in a manner all things in common, who were daily of one accord together: did not they compofe a band of the moft intimately connected friends, cemented together by the love of God and the love of Jefus and the love of each other?

No, christianity is by no means unfavourable to real, virtuous friendship. It rather infpires us with all the difpofitions, incites us to all the actions, and makes

makes us ready for all the facrifices wherein the characteristics and the glory of friendship confift. Only we should learn how properly to understand and appretiate it. And this is the purport of my present discourse. In it I will inquire with you into the value of friendship, one of the greatest bleffings of life. To that end I will firft fhew you, how friendship fhould be constituted in order to have a great value; then, wherein the value of it confifts; and laftly, how we should behave in regard to it, in order that it may be and procure to us what it is capable of being and procuring to us.

This will enable us to apprehend the truth of Solomon's fentence which we have taken for our text: "There is a friend that fticketh clofer than a brother."

Friendship, what a facred, venerable name, and how abused and profaned! Now the moft captivating garb of virtue: now the mafk of vice. Now the indiffoluble band of generous and noble fouls and now the most dangerous fnare of the betrayer of innocence. Here the parent of truth, of frankness, of fincerity; there the disguise of the moft artful treachery, and the deepest cunning. One while a powerful incentive to the fairest and moft magnanimous achievements; at another, the fordid means of profecuting and attaining the most selfish ends. And all this while, real friendship still maintains her station and fupports her dignity. She preserves the exalted place she has obtained among

the