Let us try whether this is so or not. Do you not take the name of God in vain? Do you remember the sabbath-day, to keep it holy? Do you not speak evil of the ruler of your people? Are you not a drunkard, or a glutton, faring as sumptuously as you can every day? Making a God of your belly? Do you not avenge yourself? Are you not a whoremonger or adulterer? Answer plainly to your own heart, before God the judge of all.
Why then do you say, you believe the scripture? If the scripture is true, you are lost. You are in the broad way that leadeth to destruction. Your damnation slumbereth not. You are heaping up to yourself wrath against the day of wrath, and revelation of the righteous judgment of God. Doubtless, if the scripture is true, (and you remain thus) it had been good for you if you had never been born.
40. How is it that you call yourselves men of reason? Is reason inconsistent with itself? You are the farthest of all men under the sun from any pretence to that character. A common swearer, a sabbath-breaker, a whoremonger, a drunkard, who says he believes the scripture is of God, is a monster upon earth, the greatest contradiction to his own, as well as to the reason of all mankind. In the name of God, (that worthy name whereby you are called, and which you daily cause to be blasphemed) turn either to the right hand or to the left. Either profess you are an infidel, or be a christian. Halt no longer thus between two opinions. Either cast off the bible, or your sins. And in the mean time, if you have any spark of your boasted reason left, do not count us your enemies (as I fear you have done hitherto, and as thousands do wherever we have declared they who do such things shall not inherit eternal life) because we tell you the truth: seeing these are not our words, but the words of him that sent us. Yea, though in doing this, we use great plainness of speech, as becomes the ministry we have received. For we are not as many who corrupt (cauponize, soften, and thereby adulterate) the word of God. But as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ.
*41. But, it may be, you are none of these. You abstain from all such things. You have an unspotted reputation. You are a man of honour, or a woman of virtue. You scorn to do an unhandsome thing, and are of an unblameable life and conversation. You are harmless, (if I understand you right) and useless from morning to night. You do no hurt,—and no good to any one, no more than a straw floating upon the water. Your life glides smoothly on from year to year; and from one season to another, having no occasion to work,
“You waste away
In gentle inactivity the day.”
42. I will not now shock the easiness of your temper, by talking about a future state. But suffer me to ask you a question about present things. Are you now happy?
*I have seen a large company of reasonable creatures, called Indians, sitting in a row on the side of a river, looking sometimes at one another, sometimes at the sky, and sometimes at the bubbles on the water. And so they sat, (unless in the time of war) for a great part of the year, from morning to night.
These were doubtless much at ease. But can you think they were happy?—And how little happier are you than they?
*43. You eat, and drink, and sleep, and dress, and dance, and sit down to play. You are carried abroad. You are at the masquerade, the theatre, the opera-house, the park, the levee, the drawing-room. What do you do there? Why, sometimes you talk; sometimes you look at one another. And what are you to do to-morrow? The next day? The next week? The next year? You are to eat, and drink, and sleep, and dance, and dress, and play again. And you are to be carried abroad again, that you may again look at one another! And is this all? Alas, how little more happiness have you in this, than the Indians in looking at the sky or water!