Under these circumstances is it not proper for you to consider whether you have not a part to act? When you look back to the history of your society and consider its admirable organization; and when you reflect on the respectable standing, to which the unostentatious propriety by which all its transactions have been governed, has raised it; you must be impressed with an honest zeal for its welfare; and that reverence which every ingenuous mind feels for the institutions and practices of their ancestors, strengthened as it is in this case by the best of all tests, a long experience, must induce you to oppose the innovations of the restless agitators of the present day: and your good sense will, I trust, enable you to distinguish between true religion and fanaticism, and not permit you to lose your reverence for the one, in contemplating the wild deformity of the other. And perhaps you may be induced to believe that your attendance at the meetings for discipline, may not be without its use; that your presence may give additional strength and encouragement to the long tried standard bearers, and though you may not feel yourselves called upon to take a very active part in their deliberations, your example may be of use to some of those froward spirits, who, whatever may be their exterior appearance, are less qualified for the important business than many of yourselves. I know there are individuals in every stage of life, who judge of preaching as others do of music, by the concord of sweet sounds; and who are convinced more by the harmony of a well turned sentence, than by the sentiment it is intended to convey; whose religion is founded on sensation rather than reflection, and is an affair of feeling instead of a deliberate sense of duty. To these I have nothing to say. My endeavour has been to show the inconsistencies into which men are led, by unfounded pretensions to a state of perfectability,[2] and an acquaintance with the inscrutable workings of Providence, (which all experience proves to be unattainable by man;) to show that such lofty aspirations are not in accordance with the genuine principles of the religion of Jesus Christ; and that it is by a submissive acquiescence in the measure of knowledge communicated, and an anxious endeavour to fulfil the obligations it imposes, rather than by curious researches into hidden things, that we best perform our duties here; and as no intelligent mind among you can believe that the suggestions of infinite wisdom are ever contradictory, it was part of my plan to show the inconsistencies in the doctrines of the great leader of the illuminati of your society. Footnote 2: