as my tenant, such a rakish fellow, or a highwayman; No!  I live a sober, regular, retired life:  I am a good man, I go to church; God, I thank thee._ Now, through a mans boasts of his virtue in contradiction to the vices mentioned, yet a person had better have them altogether than the man himself; or he is so full of himself, so persuaded that he is good and religious enough already, that he has no thoughts of any thing, except it be to pull of his hat to God Almighty now and then, 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 his life as a ransom for them, had appointed them to salvation, when all the philosophy, temperance, and righteousness in the world besides had been ineffectual.  And this, I say, it was, that made Felix, this negative man tremble.