To the Conductors of the New-York Magazine.

IN your magazine of the last month is inserted a sermon, said to have been delivered by a parson Hyberdines, and prefaced as a curiosity extracted from the Cotton Library, folio 53.

This production is profane and wicked, without the least alloy of wit or humour, and can serve no other purpose than to countenance the vicious and harden the profligate.

Every thing which tends to corrupt the public manners ought to be frowned upon by the friends of morality and decorum: the piece above mentioned certainly has this aspect: and the indulgence you have shewn it illy comports with the professions which ushered in your Literary Repository.

After these remarks, which unfortunately to be just must be severe, I in justice to you declare, that the subject of them is the first essay I have seen in your magazines from which religion or virtue ought to turn away; and that it requires no very great exertion of charity to believe, that the hurry of publication betrayed you to be the editors of a blasphemous narrative that ought long since to have mouldered in oblivion. R.
July, 1791.

[The Editors have inserted the following strictures on the publication alluded to, in order to evince the impartiality with which they ever mean to conduct the New-York Magazine. They admit with the writer of the remarks, that an unfavourable construction may be drawn from the sermon; though they are convinced, that the friend who sent it for insertion, considered it a piece of ingenuity, in which light alone the Editors themselves viewed it, and which will, no doubt, be accepted as an apology for its having been admitted.]

Though Henry objected stenuously to this sermon appearing in both the New-York Magazine and the Country Journal and Poughkeepsie Advertiser, he, himself, wrote something very like it.

See also:
    Anticipation: in praise of horse-thieves