LESSON CX.

On the dangers of moral sentiment, unaccompanied with active virtue.-ALISON.

Of the various appearances of melancholy weakness in youth, none is more general or more fatal to every duty or hope of the christian, than that, where the youthful taste is exalted above the condition in which life is to be passed. The faithful parent, or the wise instructer of the young, will ever assiduously accommodate the ideas of excellence to the actual circumstances and the probable scenes in which their future years are to be engaged; and every condition of life undoubtedly affords opportunities for the highest excellence of which our nature is susceptible. If, on the other hand, these hours are neglected,—if the fancy of youth be suffered to expand into the regions of visionary perfection,-if compositions, which nourish all these chimerical opinions, are permitted to hold an undue share in the studies of the young,-if, what is far more, no employments of moral labor and intellectual activity are afforded them to correct this progressive indolence, and give strength and energy to their opening minds, there is much danger that the seeds of irremediable evil are sown, and that the future harvest of life will be only feebleness, and contempt, and sorrow.

If, in the first place, it is to the common duties of life they advance, how singularly unprepared are they for their discharge! In all ranks and conditions, these duties are the same; every where sacred in the eyes of God and man;— every where requiring activity, and firmness, and perseverance of mind;-and every where only to be fulfilled by the deep sense of religious obligation. For such scenes, however, of common trial and of universal occurrence, the characters we are considering are ill prepared.—Their habits have given them no energy or activity;-their studies have enlightened their imaginations, but not warmed their hearts; their anticipations of action have been upon a romantic theatre, not upon the humble dust of mortal life.

It is the fine-drawn scenes of visionary distress to which they have been accustomed, not the plain circumstances of common wretchedness. It is the momentary exertions of generosity or greatness which have elevated their fancy, not the long and patient struggle of pious duty.-It is before

an admiring world that they have hitherto conceived themselves to act, not in solitude and obscurity, amid the wants of poverty, the exigencies of disease, or the deep silence of domestic sorrow. Is it wonderful that characters of this enfeebled kind should sometimes recoil from the duties to which they are called, and which appear to them in colors so unexpected ?--that they should consider the world as a gross and vulgar scene, unworthy of their interest, and its common obligations as something beneath them to perform; and that, with an affectation of proud superiority, they should wish to retire from a field in which they have the presumption to think it is fit only for vulgar minds to combat?

If these are the opinions which they form on their entrance upon the world and all its stern realities, it is the "fountain from which many waters of bitterness will flow.' Youth may pass in indolence and imagination, but life must necessarily be active; and what must be the probable character of that life which begins with disgust at the simple, but inevitable duties to which it is called, it is not difficult to determine.

From hence come many classes of character with which the world presents us, in what we call its higher scenes, and which it is impossible to behold without a sentiment of pity, as well as of indignation; in some, the perpetual affec tation of sentiment, and the perpetual absence of its reality; in others, the warm admiration of goodness, and the cold and indignant performance of their own most sacred duties; in some, that childish belief of their own superior refinement, which leads them to withdraw from the common scenes of life and of business, and to distinguish themselves only by capricious opinions and fantastic manners; and in others, of a bolder spirit, the proud rejection of all the duties and decencies which belong only to common men,—the love of that distinction in vice which they feel themselves unable to attain in virtue, and the gradual but too certain advance to the last stages of guilt, of impiety, and of wretchedness. Such are sometimes the "issues" of a once promising youth and to these degrees of folly or of guilt, let the parents and the instructers of the young ever remember, hat those infant hearts may come, which have not been kept with all diligence," and early exercised in virtuous activity.

Amid these delusions of fancy, life. meanwhile, with all

its plain and serious business, is passing;-their contemporaries, in every line, are starting before them in the road of honor, of fortune, or of usefulness; and nothing is now left them but to concentrate all the vigor of their minds to recover the ground which they have lost. But if this last

energy be wanting, if what they "would," they yet fail to 66 do," what, alas! can be the termination of the once ardent and aspiring mind, but ignominy and disgrace!—a heart dissatisfied with mankind and with itself; a conscience sickening at the review of what is passed; a failing fortune; a degraded character; and, what I fear is ever the last and the most frantic refuge of selfish and disappointed ambition,infidelity and despair.

It is ever painful to trace the history of human degradation, and it would even be injurious to religion and virtue to do it, if it were not at the same time to exhibit the means by which these evils may be prevented. Of the character which I have now attempted to illustrate, the origin may be expressed in one word;-it is in the forgetfulness of duty, in the forgetfulness that every power, and advantage, and possession of our being, are only trusts committed to us for an end, not properties which we are to dispose of at pleasure;-in the forgetfulness that all our imaginary virtues are "nothing worth," unless they spring from the genuine and permanent source of moral and religious obligation.

Wherever, indeed, we look around us upon general life, we may every where see, that nothing but the deep sense of religion can produce either consistency or virtue in human conduct. The world deceives us on one side-our imaginations on another, our passions upon all. Nothing could save us; nothing, with such materials, could hold together even the fabric of society, but the preservation of that deep and instinctive sense of duty, which the Father of nature hath mercifully given to direct and illuminate us in every relation of life; which is "none other" than his own voice; to which all our other powers, if they aim either at wisdom or at virtue, must be subservient; and which leads if we listen to it, to every thing for which we were called into being, either here or hereafter.

us,

LESSON CXI.

Infidelity.-ANDREW THOMPSON.

WE have heard, indeed, cf men who affected to hold fast by the tenets of natural religion, while they repudiated those of divine revelation; but we have never been so fortunate as to see and converse with one of them whose creed, select, and circumscribed, and palatable as he had made it, seemed to have any serious footing in his mind, or any practical influence on his life; who could restrain his sneer at piety the most untinctured with enthusiasm; or who could check his speculations, however hostile to the system he had affected to embrace; or who worshipped the God in whose existence and attributes he acknowledged his belief; or who acted with a view to that immortality for which he allowed that the soul of man is destined.

It is true the votaries of infidelity are often placed in circumstances which constrain them to hold such language, and maintain such a deportment, as by itself might indicate the presence of Christian principle. They are frequently not at liberty to give that full play, and that unreserved publicity to their unbelief, in which, however, it is naturally disposed to indulge, and in which it would undoubtedly manifest itself, were it free to operate at large. And you may not therefore, at particular times, and in particular situations, perceive any marked distinction between them and the devoted followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

They may have a family, and in the tenderness of parental affection, and with the conviction that what they regard as altogether false may contribute as much to the virtue and happiness of their children as if it were altogether true, they may shrink from any declaration of infidelity within the domestic circle. They may acknowledge, in the season of their own distress, or they may suggest, amid the distresses of their friends, those considerations to which the mind, when softened or when agitated by affliction, naturally clings, even though it has no habitual conviction. of their truth, and no proper title to the consolation which they afford. They may be driven by bodily anguish, or by impending danger, to utter the language of a piety, which, till that moment, was a stranger even to their lips, just as the mariner has been known, amidst the perils and horrors of a shipwreck, to cry for mercy from that God whose existence he had never before confessed, but by his pro

faneness and his blasphemies. Or they may even be strongly and insensibly induced to accommodate themselves to prevailing customs, and to pay an outward homage to the faith of the New Testament, by occasionally attending its institutions, though they are all the while regarding it as a mere harmless fable, if not as a contemptible or a perni cious superstition.

But look at them when placed in those circumstances which put no such restraints upon what they may say and do as the enemies of Christianity; observe them when the pride of intellect tempts them to display their learning or their ingenuity in contending against the vulgar faith-or when they have a passion to gratify which needs the aid of some principle to vindicate its indulgence-or when they have nothing to fear from giving utterance to what they think and feel-or when they happen to be associated with those among whom the quality of freethinking prevailsobserve them as to the language which they employ, and the practice which they maintain with respect to religion, in the ordinary course and tenor of their lives; and then say what positive proofs they give you of the reality or of the efficacy of those religious principles which they profess to have retained, after putting away from them the doctrine of Christ.

Say, if instead of affording you positive proofs of such rem'anent and distinctive piety, they are not displaying daily and inveterate symptoms that God, and Providence, and immortality, are not in all their thoughts. Say, if you have not seen many a melancholy demonstration of that general irreligion which we have ascribed to them as the consequence of their throwing off the dominion of the Gospel. And say if you have not been able to trace this down through all the gradations of infidelity, from the speculative philosopher, who has decided that there is no Savior, till you come to the fool, who says, in the weakness and thə wickedness of his heart, that there is no God.

LESSON CXII.

Same subject-concluded.

IT is amidst trials and sorrows that infidelity appears in its justest and most frightful aspect. When subjected to the