because
in duty bound to do it; and having, too, the comfort of the fullest
persuasion that even if your judgment should disallow it, your affection
would pardon it. It is possible, indeed, that the (as it seems to me)
awful consideration which I have last put forward may have been
misstated or misapprehended. Would God it may be so! happy should I be
to find either by reason or revelation that the principles of this world
were other than I have estimated them to be, and consequently that their
fate would be other likewise. I may be under darkness and delusion,
having consulted with none in this matter; but till it is shown that I
am so, I am bound by all the most solemn ties, ties not created in this
world nor to be dissolved with it, but eternal and changeless as our
spirits and He who made them, to regulate my actions with reference to
these all-important truths--the apostasy of man on the one hand, the
love of God on the other. Of my duties _to men_ as a social being, can
any be so important as to tell them of the danger under which I believe
them to lie, of the precipice to which I fear many are approaching,
while thousands have already fallen headlong, and others again, even
while I write, are continuing to fall in a succession of appalling
rapidity? Of my duties _to God_ as a rational and responsible being,
especially as a being for whom in common with all men the precious blood
of Christ has been given, can any more imperatively and more
persuasively demand all the little I can give than this, the proclaiming
that one instance of God's unfathomable love which alone so transcends
as almost to swallow up all others? while those others thus transcended
and eclipsed are such as would be of themselves by far the highest and
holiest obligations man could know, did we not know this.

Thus I have endeavoured to state these truths, if truths they are, at
least these convictions, to you, dwelling upon them at a length which
may perhaps be tedious and appear affected, simply as I trust, in order
to represent them to your mind as much to the life as possible, I mean
as nearly as possible in the light in which they have again and again
appeared, and do habitually appear, to my own, so as to give you the
best means in my power of estimating the strength or detecting the
weakness of those grounds on which the conclusions above stated rest. (I
have not mentioned the benefit I might hope myself to derive from this
course of livi