SIN is often compared in the Scriptures to a disease, and the recovering from sin is represented under the image of healing. My intention is, to carry out this comparison to some points of useful, religious meditation.

Before going into the proposed detail we may observe, in general, that sin and disease resemble each other, in some respects, in the relation which they bear to our nature. Our nature is liable to both, but it was made, as its end, for neither. Nor was the soul made sinful, any more than the body was made sick. As their natural and perfect condition, our bodies were made for health, and our souls were made for virtue. Sin brings disorder into the moral constitution, as truly as discase brings disorder into the physical constitution, of our being.

Again; there is in our bodies a fine and beautiful organization, an exquisite adjustment of one part to another, which disease deranges. So does sin derange the moral system. It disturbs the healthful order of the affections. It pushes some of them to excess and goads them to fever, while others are struck with the chill of death. They flow in their wonted channels perhaps, but with irregular and intermitted action—not with the calm and even pulsations of vigorous life. Like obstructions in the bodily organs, like the inroads of disease upon the nerves and senses, like the jars of nervous irritability, like the film that dims the eye, or the heaviness that settles upon the ear, or the clog that weighs upon the limbs and fetters every muscular power,

such is sin to the soul; it brings obstruction and pain, darkness and disorder and ruin, upon the whole moral constitution of our nature.

The various forms of the moral disease, also, answer to the varieties of physical disease. There is the moral fever-the passion inflamed with pursuit, when all healthful moral aliment and all the powers of the soul are converted into one raging and consuming desire. Again, there is a stupor in the soul-the moral paralysis. The mind is insensible to the calls of conscience and religion, it scarcely feels the pain or even the consciousness-of rejecting them, so deep is its lethargy; it hears, but does not understand; it sees, but does not perceive; it has but a dull, benumbed and half-conscious sense of any thing that spiritually concerns it: that, I repeat, is the fearful moral paralysis-from which the soul must be aroused, or it will soon sink to utter perdition. There is the moral delirium. There is a mind which fancies it is well, when it is sick almost unto death; which although surrounded with signs of moral ruin, and an object of pity to every beholder, yet shocks the ear of every thoughtful spectator with its insane and boisterous merriment; which though essentially poor, and miserable, and destitute, yet thinks itself, and would have others think it, rich and fortunate, increased in goods, and full of goodly prospects. Many such are around us, morally insane, or palsied in every moral faculty, or burning with the fever of the passions. And many more are there, who are suffering in all the intermediate stages of moral disease. The variety of cases, indeed, is such that no limit can be set to it, and no description within the range of our present reflections can do it any justice

Let us, however, attempt to bring before our minds this unhappy condition, in which the world is suffering, under some other and more detailed points of comparison.

Sin, let us observe, then, is like disease in its origin, i. e. in its causes, in its commencement,—in its progress ;-in its effects;—in its remedies; and in the process of cure.

It is like disease in its origin—in its causes and its commencement. There is a liability to both these evils, we have already said, in our nature there is a liability, and that perhaps is all that we can say of what our nature does to create in us either disease or sin. But when we pass beyond this general and primary account of the come to distinct causes-to causes, for which men are responsible. Of disease the world, and the civilized world especially, is full of

matter, we

causes, which are artificial, which are originated by man, by modes of dress and of living, by processes of cookery and distillation, and by those habits of mind, those cares, anxieties and sorrows, which are superinduced by an artificial state of society. How much there is that is wrong in the whole fabric and plan of civilized life among us, in its very nurture and economy from the first step of our existence to the last-how much is wrong in all this, is a question which no reformer, as I apprehend, has yet sounded to its depths. We are a race far more weak and sickly than the savages, far more so than our British ancestors, far more so than the elder tribes of every nation ; we are such now by our very constitution, and our children are doomed to be such after us, and when or how the evil is to be remedied it is not easy to see. But be this as it may, such, or similar at least, are the causes of sin. They lie, many of them certainly, in circumstances, in the very foundations of society, in a wrong education, in prevailing false maxims, in artificial temptations, in the whole economy and in the very atmosphere of civilized life. Much occasion as there is to be disheartened at the wrong which men intentionally and wilfully do, there is still more cause to despair of remedying the evil which they do unconsciously-the evil which they do, in business, in conversation, in the scenes of recreation, and never call it evil because all along for years and through generations the world has been going on in the same way.

The operation of these causes is often imperceptible; and so it is, that sin in the heart, like disease in the body, takes its origin, it is scarcely possible to tell when, or where, or in what manner. It steals into the mind like the breath of a tainted atmosphere. As a man walketh forth amidst the evening damps, and unconsciously draweth from some noxious exhalation the seeds of a disease that is yet to destroy him; so doth he walk forth in the presence of evil moral influences, perchance at the same hour of eventide, and from the surrounding atmosphere of bad example, from the poisonous breath of evil communings, are engendered those vague impressions, those lax and licentious ideas, those guilty thoughts, whose fruit is death. If we look to have disease or sin present itself before us in some definite and alarming aspect at its first assault, we shall be greatly mistaken. When a disorder has become fever or consumption, it has indeed taken a distinct form, but it has then advanced far from its first secret lodgement in the system. And when the moral disorder has become