1793] ^^^' WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. 38 1 



CHAPTER LVII. 



The Eight Sermons on the great Visitation of Pestilence remarked on — 

 Distinguished, even above the Author's other Pulpit Discourses, by 

 Seriousness and Solemnity — Extracts from several of them. 



The visitation of pestilence, 1793, was an event in Philadel- 

 phia, at this time the metropolis of the United States, so awful; 

 its effects, by death, upon our then society so considerable, and 

 the terror which it continued to inspire, for some years so wide- 

 spread, that I may venture to refer somewhat fully to the sermons 

 of Dr. Smith upon the calamity. 



We note primarily that, solemn and serious as most of Dr. 

 Smith's pulpit discourses are, these are characterized by solemnity 

 and seriousness beyond the common degree. He was now sixty- 

 seven years old. "Uncertain," he says, "of the number of days, 

 or months, or years remaining to me, but certain that they cannot 

 be many, and those attended with the decay of mental as well as 

 of bodily faculties," he naturally, after a life marked by such vicis- 

 situdes and such calamities as his had been, sought at the present 

 moment to lead his hearers into paths of righteousness, with no 

 thought whatever of the impression which he himself would make 

 on any one. In sermons upon occasions of ceremonious worship, 

 such as in the sermon before the Grand Master and Grand 

 Officers of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Free and Ac- 

 cepted Masons of the State of Pennsylvania, celebrated on the 

 anniversary of St. John the Evangelist, we see bold and lofty 

 rhetoric. What exordium, for example, can be finer than the one 

 in his Masonic sermon of 1778?* Bishop Atterbury's celebrated 

 one upon the text from St. Matthew and St. Luke, "Blessed is he 

 that shall not be offended in ;;/r," where the Bishop at once breaks 

 out, "And can any one, blessed Lord, be offended in thee?" is not 

 more bold. It has no pretensions to rhetoric. Dr. Smith, in his 

 discourse before the Masons, is preaching from the text of i Peter 



* Works, Vol. II., p. 43. 



