Before I read that sermon, I really thought I had lived in a free country; and it was an error I cherished, because it gave me a greater liking to the country I lived in.  I was, indeed, aware that a jealous, ever-waking vigilance, to guard the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom and our first duty.  However, I considered that treasure rather as a possession to be secured than as a prize to be contended for.  I did not discern how the present time came to be so very favorable to all exertions in the cause of freedom.  The present time differs from any other only by the circumstance of what is doing in France.  If the example of that nation is to have an influence on this, I can easily conceive why some of their proceedings which have an unpleasant aspect, and are not quite reconcilable to humanity, generosity, good faith, and justice, are palliated with so much milky good-nature towards the actors, and borne with so much heroic fortitude towards the sufferers.  It is certainly not prudent to discredit the authority of an example we mean to follow.  But allowing this, we are led to a very natural question:—­What is that cause of liberty, and what are those exertions in its favor, to which the example of France is so singularly auspicious?  Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of the kingdom?  Is every landmark of the country to be done away in favor of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution?  Is the House of Lords to be voted useless?  Is Episcopacy to be abolished?  Are the Church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers, or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics into a participation in sacrilege?  Are all the taxes to be voted grievances, and the revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution or patriotic presents?  Are silver shoe-buckles to be substituted in the place of the land-tax and the malt-tax, for the support of the naval strength of this kingdom?  Are all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded, that out of universal anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or four thousand democracies should be formed into eighty-three, and that they may all, by some sort of unknown attractive power, be organized into one?  For this great end is the army to be seduced from its discipline and its fidelity, first by every kind of debauchery, and then by the terrible precedent of a donative in the increase of pay?  Are the curates to be seduced from their bishops by holding out to them the delusive hope of a dole out of the spoils of their own order?  Are the citizens of London to be drawn from their allegiance by feeding them at the expense of their fellow-subjects?  Is a compulsory paper currency to be substituted in the place of the legal coin of this kingdom?  Is what remains of the plundered stock of public revenue to be employed in the wild project of maintaining two armies to watch over and to fight with each other?  If these are the ends and means of the Revolution Society, I admit they are well assorted; and France may furnish them for both with precedents in point.