and thank him
that he has no occasion for him; and has the vanity to think that his
neighbours must imagine well of him too.

The negative man, though he is no drunkard is yet intoxicated with the
pride of his own worth; a good neighbour and peace-maker in other
families, but a tyrant in his own; appears in church for a show, but
never falls upon his knees in his closet; does all his alms before men,
to be seen of them; eager in the duties of the second table, but
regardless of the first; appears religious, to be taken notice of by
men, but without intercourse or communication between God and his own
soul: Pray, what is this man? or what comfort is there of the life he
lives? he is insensible of faith, repentance, and a Christian mortified
life: in a word, he is a perfectly a stranger to the essential part
of religion.

Let us for a while enter into the private and retired part of his
conversation: What notions has he of his mispent hours, and of the
progress of time to the great centre and gulph of life, eternity? Does
he know how to put a right value on time, or esteem the life-blood of
his soul, as it really is, and act in all the moments of it, as one that
must account for them? if then you can form an equality between what he
can do and what he shall receive; less can be founded upon his negative
virtue, or what he has forborne to do: And if neither his negative nor
positive piety can be equal to the reward, and to the eternity that
reward is to last for, what then is to become of the Pharisee, when he
is to be judged by the sincerity of his repentance, and rewarded,
according to the infinite grace of God, with a state of blessedness to
an endless eternity?

When the negative man converses with the invisible world, he is filled
with as much horror and dread as Felix, when St Paul reasoned to him of
temperance, righteousness, and of judgment to come; for Felix, though a
great philosopher, of great power and reverence, was a negative man, and
he was made sensible by the Apostle, that, as a life of virtue and
temperance was its own reward, by giving a healthy body, a clear head,
and a composed life, so eternal happiness must proceed from another
spring; namely, the infinite unbounded grace of a provoked God, who
having erected a righteous tribunal, Jesus Christ would separate such as
by faith and repentance he had brought home and united to himself by the
grace of adoption, and on the foot of his having laid down h