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A LETTER

ON

POLITICAL DEBATE,

Printed in the Year 1793.

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TO

THE REV. D**** W**********

DEAR AND REVEREND SIR,

THE kind present of your book, and your kind intention in addressing your sermons to me by name, deserved a more early acknowledgement. I am pleased with every mark of regard from a Christian brother, though I could have wished not to be held up to public notice: and Mr. J-t, who likewise meant well, has made the business a little more awkward to me by styling me Doctor, an honour which the newspapers informed me (for I have no official intelligence) has been conferred upon me by the college of Princeton in America. However, by the grace of God, I am determined not to assume the title of Doctor, unless I should receive a diploma from a College in the New Settlement at Sierra Leone. The dreary coast of Africa was the university to which the Lord was pleased to send me, and I dare not acknowledge a relation to any other.

I need not express my approbation of your sermons in stronger terms than by saying, that I have seldom met with any thing more congenial to my own sentiments and taste. I read them with great satisfaction.

Though I have very little time for reading, had your whole volume consisted of such sermons, I should have gone through it much sooner: but your lectures on Liberty, though ingenious and well writ

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ten, were not so interesting to me. It was therefore longer before I could find leisure to finish them; and this has occasioned the delay of my letter; for I thought it would be premature to write till I could say I had read them.

I hope I am a friend to liberty, both civil and religious, but I fear you will hardly allow it, when I say, I think myself possessed of as much of these blessings, at present, as I wish for. I can, indeed, form an idea of something more perfect; but I expect no perfection in this state: and, when I consi. der the Lord's question, "Shall not my soul be "avenged on such a nation as this?" I cannot but wonder that such a nation as this should still be favoured with so many privileges, which we still enjoy and still abuse.

Allow me to say, that it excites both my wonder and concern, that a minister, possessed of the great and important views expressed in your two sermons, should think it worth his while to appear in the line of a political writer, or expect to amend our consti, tution or situation, by proposals of a political reform. When I look around upon the present state of the nation, such an attempt appears to me no less vain and unseasonable, than it would be to paint a cabin while the ship is sinking, or a parlour when the house is already on fire. My dear Sir, my prayer to God for you is, that he may induce you to employ the talents he has given you in pointing out sin as the great cause and source of every existing evil, and to engage those who love and fear him, instead of losing them in political speculation, for which very few of them are tolerably competent, to sigh and cry for our abounding abominations, and to stand in the breach, by prayer, that, if it may be, wrath may yet be averted, and our national mercies prolonged. This, I think, is the true patriotism, the best, if not

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