mand; and that the true fear of God was the motive from which they acted, appears from the recompense they received: "Because the midwives fear"ed God, God dealt well with them and made their "families great and prosperous." The mixed multitude which went with Moses out of Egypt, though not genuine Israelites, were surely in some degree worshippers of the God of Israel; for idolaters, in the proper sense of the word, would hardly have been permitted to follow the armies of the Lord. And after forty years, when the Israelites arrived at the land of Canaan, Joshua's spies found in the town of Jericho a woman who confessed that "Je"hovah the God of Israel, he is God in heaven "above and in the earth beneath." And from this persuasion and in confident expectation of the execution of his vengeance on her guilty country, she entertained the Israelitish spies and managed their escape, for which she is commemorated by St. Paul in his epistle to the Hebrews among the eminent examples of faith.

These remains of true religion which were found in Egypt and Canaan so late as the days of Moses and Joshua are I think a proof, that a total apostaey from the invisible Creator to the worship of fictitious deities as the sole managers and masters of

this lower world, general as it was now become, had not however long prevailed in the countries where the corruptions of idolatry were of the longest standing, and may be supposed to have made the greatest advances.

And as for the idolatry of the older and the milder sort, which retaining the worship of the true God and acknowledging his providence, added a superstitious adoration of certain inferior spirits, whọ were supposed to have a delegated command under the controul of the Supreme over different parts of nature, from this even the chosen family itself was not always pure.

When the patriarch was to take up his abode at Bethel, the place where God appeared to him when he fled from Esau, which he considered as sanctified by God's immediate presence, we find him ordering his household to put away their strange gods; of which they had no small variety, as appears by the sacred historian's expression, that in compliance with this injunction they gave unto Jacob all their strange gods. These were probably the idols which Rachel brought with her from Mesopotamia, with others introduced by Judah's marriage with the daughter of a Canaanite.

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Upon occasion of this removal to Bethel the patriarch reformed the worship of his family and his dependants, and took measures to prevent an immediate revival of the corruption. He put the objects of superstitious adoration out of sight, burying the idols under an oak near Shechem. But none that is conversant with the sacred history of the Israelites can doubt, that after Jacob's death his descendants contracted a new stain, and in the later years of their sojournment in Goshen were deeply infected with the idolatry which then prevailed in Egypt, to which in the desert they discovered an attachment. The molten calf they made in Horeb was surely not the first they had worshipped.

I have now considered as I proposed the general state of religion in the world before the institution of the Jewish church. I have shewn you the seductive form in which idolatry began and the slow progress that it made; which is partly to be ascribed to the means employed by pious nations in the beginning to resist the corruption, but in much greater part, as I shall hereafter shew, to the merciful providence of God. Idolatry in that malignant form which disowns the true God, and attaches itself entirely to fictitious divinities, prevailed nowhere till some short time, perhaps a century or more before the deliverance

of the Israelites from their Egyptian bondage. Idolatry in its milder form, acknowledging the Supreme Providence, and retaining the fear and worship of the true God, but adding the superstitious worship of fictitious deities, prevailed every where from the days of Abraham, his single family excepted; insomuch that after the death of Abraham and Isaac, the chosen family itself was from time to time infected.

Now it is to be observed, that paganism in this milder form was rather to be called a corrupt than a false religion; just as at this day the religion of the church of Rome is more properly corrupt than false. It is not a false religion; for the professors of it receive, with the fullest submission of the understanding to its mysteries, the whole gospel. They fear God. They trust in Christ as the Author of salvation. They worship the three Persons in the unity of the Godhead. The Roman church therefore hath not renounced the truth, but she has corrupted it; and she hath corrupted it in the very same manner, and nearly in the same degree, in which the truth of the patriarchal religion was corrupted by the first idolaters; adding to the fear and worship of God and his Son, the inferior fear and worship of deceased men, whose spirits they suppose to be invested with some

delegated authority over Christ's church on earth. Now the corruptions being so similar in kind and pretty equal in degree, the idolaters of antiquity and the papists of modern times seem much upon a footing.

Nor can I understand that these idolaters, so long as they acknowledged the providence and retained the worship of the true God, and believed in the promises to the fathers, were more separated from the church of Noah by their corruptions, than the papists now by similar corruptions, are separated from the true catholic church of Christ.

The ancient idolaters were not separated from the patriarchal church till their superstition ended in a total apostasy. The superstitions of Romanists may terminate in a similar apostasy equally complete, and then will they be equally separated from the church of Christ. And this I And this I say not in any bitterness of zeal against those of the Roman communion, whom I maintain to be as yet a part of the great Shepherd's flock, although in danger of being lost, but merely to compare past things with present, and to show by the analgy of modern times what was the true state of religion in the world at large in the mid