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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DISCOURSES. JEREMIAH VI. 8. Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee; lest I mhke thee desolate, a land not inhabited. The piety of our ancestors has transmitted to us the usage of assembling year by year, at the opening of the season, to seek, with prayer and fasting, a blessing from the God of harvest. Elsewhere, such a solemnity is considered as appropriate to occasions of great publick distress, and a stranger coming among us, might ask what reason of this kind we could have for observing it. He had found, he would say, a numerous people, living on a bountiful soil, in a temperate climate, with every thing called for by the reasonable wishes of man, within the reach of their industry; with a free and at the same time well established government, relations of extended and profitable intercourse abroad, and the rights of person and reputation, property and conscience, protected by equal laws and just magistrates at home. He had heard of no interruption of any of the channels of publick prosperity; no intestine broil, nor wide devastation of flood or fire, storm or earthquake; no famine, pestilence, nor war. The observation, however, would be superficial, and the inference groundless. If seasons of publick distress and peril call for publick fasting, humiliation and prayer, we have cause to keep a fast this day. It is truly a day for a reflecting man to ' afflict his soul,' to ' bow down his head as a bulrush, and spread sackcloth and ashes under him.' Not less than ten thousand citizens of this nation, as there is good reason to believe, have fallen during the year now past, victims to one mortal scourge, prematurely cut off", cut off in the midst of their days. They did not die by pestilence. How happy if they had Their sufferings then w...