on to tear away the veil with which your neighbour tries to hide his faults: the time is not far distant, when, if some one veils not yours, the rocks and mountains will not serve you for a covering; and truth will be sufficient to prove you deserving of everlasting misery.

Yet this is not all. God is taking account of something mortals overlook. What was your motive for that injurious truth you told this morning? For that remark you made to another's prejudice, too true to be disputed? You will say you had no bad motive: but did you consider before you spoke, whether you had or not? It will not do to run a risk in this. While you are keeping the register of others' faults with so much justice, there is One more just than you, who registers your thoughts, and every secret motive of your heart. Jealousy is sin: envy is sin strife is sin: unkindness, retaliation, anger, hatred, variance; all are sins: nay, evil speaking itself is declared in holy writ to be so. Will you risk the accumulation of sin upon your soul, and swell the dark catalogue that is against you, for the mere sake of setting the characters of men in their proper light, and undeceiving every body as to their neighbours' actions?

That those who make light of sins in themselves, and sport of it in others, should do this, we need not so much wonder. But to return again to those who call themselves religious, distinctively from a careless and unbelieving world. You know, or pretend to know, the extent of nature's corruption; you bewail before Heaven your inability to conquer it: you may sometimes feel there is absolutely no good in you. How then can you venture to appoint yourselves the judges of your fellow-creature, and take delight in exposing and talking of their faults? VOL. I. I

Do you not know the difficulty of conquering one native and deep-rooted sin? Do you not know the tears a Christian sheds in secret, for the sins he cannot conquer? Do you not know that the path of life is dangerous, and full of temptations, we have not in ourselves the power to resist? And yet you go on criticising, censuring, exposing one another; whispering from house to house of this person's inconsistencies, and that person's neglects; and one should not do this, and another should not say that. Oh! it is little, little indeed, with all your profession, you know of your own heart, or it would surely find you other work.

If you think any one is more undeserving in the sight of God than you are, you have a step downward yet to make, ere you reach the place of safe

ty at your Saviour's feet: and when you come there, whatever God, who reads all hearts, may think, you who read only your own, will believe that it is worse than any other. And, Oh! if you did really know, so well as you profess to do, the agony of conscious sin to one who hates it; you would not, by your hard speeches, add one feather's weight to the intolerable burden. Would you have mocked at Peter when he denied his Lord? When Paul besought relief for the weakness that exposed him to Satan's influence, and was denied, would you have reproached him with it? Yes, you would; but remember that your Saviour did not.

If such is the evil, where is the remedy? What the best principle cannot exterminate, may seem to admit of none. Take up the thistle before it has taken root too deeply. Where there is not a malicious love of mischief in the heart, which I trust is very seldom, we speak evil because we always have done so, and because we have always heard it done.

Let the young be watchful against the habit, and resist the example. To assist them in this, the first thing is to induce a habit of thinking as well of others as they can; for those who think no evil will say none. You hear something you are disposed to blame; but you may have misconstrued the words. The speaker may have used stronger expressions than he was aware of; he may have regretted them as soon as spoken. Accustom yourself to such reflections as these. You see, or are told of an action you disapprove: perhaps there was some reason for it no one knows; some temptation, that at least extenuates it; some mistake that led to it. Try to believe so.

You are shocked by defects and vices of character in others say to yourself, ere you condemn, some neglect of education, some bad example, some physical disorder, or mental imbecility, may have caused all this: you will be in no hurry to speak the worst, while you are thus endeavouring to think the best; and it will besides keep you in better humour with your fellow-creatures, and consequently more amiable in your deportment towards them. The next thing is to accustom yourself to watch your own actions, and the secret movements of your own heart, and to lay by the account of them. Then, when you are disposed to censure, there will come the thought, "I once felt that evil passion too; I remember when I committed the same fault; I have not that wrong propensity; but then I have this other, which is quite as bad." This habit will make you humble and whatever makes you humble, will make you lenient. Another preventive is to store your mind with other matters, and provide yourself with better things to talk about; for it is the want of mental occupation that makes us so busy with other men's matters, and

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the want of something to say, that makes us speak so much evil of each other. Let those who would resist this habit, consider the difficulties, the dangers, the sorrows, that lie in the path of all to their eternal home; the secret pangs, the untold agonies, the hidden wrongs. Thus the heart will grow soft with pity towards our kind. "How can I tell what that person suffers? That fault will cost him dear enough without my aid." Thus you will fear, by a hard word, to add to that which is too much already, as we shrink from putting the finger on a sore. And lastly, accustom yourselves to entreat Heaven for your fellow-creatures: asking pardon and forbearance of God, towards what is wrong in them. Then I am sure you will not be eager to expose, and hasty to condemn them. Strenuously accustom yourself to all these things from your childhood upward, and it may be, that the disgraceful thistle will not grow.

My young readers have often complained to me that I tell no stories. They might as well complain that the baker sells no sugar-plums, and the draper deals not in trinkets; all very good things in themselves; but of that of which there is enough, there needs no supply of ours. Yet, lest my young friends should believe I think it wrong to write a story; or that I cannot write one, I intend, for once, to conciliate their favour, and compound a story; which, contrary to the ordinary practice of story-tellers, I beg to assure them is not true. This is a bold assertion. Am I going to lay aside my office, and ceasing to listen to the realities of life, take an imaginary flight among things that neither are nor can be? Most surely not. The skilful lapidary finds his jewels in the mine, shapes them and sets them, and the work is his; but still the stones are real, and on their reality depends the value of his work. So have I sought in nature the materials of my fiction: it is made up of truth, though in itself not true. I tell nothing that I have not heard and seen, though not