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whose faculty of perception is putrefying and dissolving even before the body. It is true that good men, of a high order, have been known to utter pleasantries in their last hours. But these have been pleasantries of a fine ethereal quality, the scintillations of animated hope, the high pulsations of mental health, the involuntary movements of a spirit feeling itself free even in the grasp of death, the natural springs and boundings of faculties on the point of obtaining a still much greater and a boundless liberty. These had no resemblance to the low and laboured jokes of our philosopher; jokes so laboured as to give strong cause for suspicion, after all, that they were of the same nature, and for the same purpose, as the expedient of a boy on passing through some gloomy place in the night, who whistles to lessen his fear, or to persuade his companion that he does not feel it.

3. Such a manner of meeting death was inconsistent with the scepticism to which Hume was always found to avow his adherence. For that scepticism necessarily acknowledged a possibility and a chance that the religion which he had scorned, might, notwithstanding, be found true, and might, in the moment after his death, glare upon him with all its terrors. But how dreadful to a reflecting mind would have been the smallest chance of meeting such a vision! Yet the philosopher could be cracking his heavy jokes, and Dr. Smith could be much diverted at the sport.

4. To a man who solemnly believes the truth of revelation, and therefore the threatenings of Divine vengeance against the despisers of it, this scene will present as mournful a spectacle as perhaps the sun ever shone upon. We have beheld a man of great talents and invincible perseverance, entering on his career with the profession of an impartial inquiry after truth, met at every stage and step by the evidences and expostulations of religion and the claims of his Creator, but devoting his labours to the pursuit of fame and the promotion of impiety, at length acquiring and accomplishing, as he declared himself, all he had intended and desired, and descending toward the close of life amidst

tranquillity, widely extending reputation, and the homage of the great and the learned. We behold him appointed soon to appear before that Judge to whom he had never alluded but with malice or contempt; yet preserving to appearance an entire self-complacency, idly jesting about his approaching dissolution, and mingling with the insane sport his references to the fall of "superstition," a term of which the meaning is hardly ever dubious when expressed by such men. We behold him at last carried off, and we seem to hear, the following moment, from the darkness in which he vanishes, the shriek of surprise and terror, and the overpowering accents of the messenger of vengeance. On the whole globe there probably was not acting, at the time, so mournful a tragedy as that of which the friends of Hume were the spectators, without being aware that it was any tragedy at all.

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READ AND REFLECT.

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READ AND REFLECT.

"Thou hast forsaken me, saith the Lord; thou art gone backward: therefore will I stretch out my hand against thee, and destroy thee: I am weary with repenting."-Jeremiah.

A VERY wonderful passage indeed; it were good for you, reader, to let loose your thoughts upon it in solitude; a calm but intense meditation on this verse, may, by God's blessing, lead you to take a new view of your situation and prospects for eternity. Be persuaded to shut yourself up with it, and may the Spirit of Eternal Truth apply it to your conscience and heart. I would assist your thoughts on this remarkable passage of Scripture by a few observations.

I. All sins have one common origin, namely, forsaking God. He is the life of our immortal being. The soul is his offspring; he breathed it into man, and he became a living soul. It originally bore God's image, for in the likeness of God made he him. All, therefore, who know anything to any purpose, know and testify, that there is a craving in the heart which nothing can satisfy but God himself. To know God, and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent, is eternal life. To love God, is to dwell in him; and to possess his favour is better than life. If peace, love, joy, and holiness, be happiness, then happiness resides in every child of God, for God dwells there. But there is a power ever busy in alienating the soul from him,—a subtle power, which works itself into every thing, and pervades every thing-a malignant power, which aims at nothing short of the ruin of all that is morally right and lovely in the creation of God,-a power, moreover, incessantly at work, pursuing its cursed enterprise with sleepless activity. Alas! the human heart is itself in league with it, and cheerfully lends its energies to the fearful work of its own destruction. To carry away the heart was the original design; to keep it away from God is now the unwearied effort of Satan.

All sinful pleasures are just so many substitutes for God; poor, wretched substitutes they are! no matter, the sinner will have them.-They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewn them out cisterns, broken cisterns, which can hold no water. My people would have none of so He gave them up to their hearts' lust, and they walked

me,

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