Page:A Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey (Lichfield).djvu/5

 PREACHED BY

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY,

ON BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY,

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." Hosea iv. 6.

is a very striking and painful, and at the same time instructive, picture which the prophet whose pregnant words I have just brought before you, and his contemporary prophets, exhibit of the religious and moral state of the people to whom they were sent. For in exact conformity with the declaration in my text is that of another and a greater prophet, writing about the same time, and upon the same subject: "Therefore," says Isaiah, in a chapter with which our Church has made us femiliar, "my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge." The two prophets, speaking in the name of that Almighty One whose commission they bear, and with whom to purpose is to accomplish, and the future is as the present, and having clearly before their eyes the vision of their country's impending desolation, here, as elsewhere, represent that which was yet only approaching as having already come: "My people are destroyed—my people are gone into captivity." But the point which must at all times concern us most in the passages before us, and in others to the like effect in the prophetic pages, and to which, on the present occasion, I have a particular inducement to invite your attention, is the cause of that prophetic denouncement, briefly, indeed, but emphatically