Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/351

 the alienation of the thoughts; by such hearts God is not defied, he is only forgotten. Of this forgetfulness, the general causes are worldly cares and sensual pleasures. If there is a man, of whose soul avarice or ambition have complete possession, and who places his hope in riches or advancement, he will be employed in bargains, or in schemes, and make no excursion into remote futurity, nor consider the time, in which the rich and the poor shall lie down together; when all temporal advantages shall forsake him, and he shall appear before the supreme tribunal of eternal justice. The slave of pleasure soon sinks into a kind of voluptuous dotage; intoxicated with present delights, and careless of every thing else; his days and his nights glide away in luxury or in vice, and he has no cure, but to keep thought away; for thought is always troublesome to him, who lives without his own approbation.

That such men are not roused to the knowledge and the consideration of their real state, will appear less strange, when it is observed, that they are almost always either stupidly, or profanely, negligent of those external duties of religion, which are instituted to excite and preserve the fear of God. By perpetual absence from publick worship, they miss all opportunities, which the pious wisdom of Christianity has afforded them, of comparing their lives with the rules which the Scripture contains; and awakening their attention to the presence of God, by hearing him invoked, and joining their own voices in the common supplication. That carelessness of the world to come, which first suffered them to omit the duties of devotion, is by that omission, hourly increased; and, having first neglected the means of holiness, they in time do not remember them.

A great part of them whose hearts are thus hardened, may justly impute that insensibility to the violation of the Sabbath. He that keeps one day in the week holy, has not time to become profligate, before the returning day of recollection reinstates his principles, and renews his cau