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We read the above with profound satisfaction, and we take this method of tendering to the Unitarians of East Boston our most heartfelt thanks for the valuable service they have thus rendered to good morals. How greatly such an example is needed in this particular direction, it can not be necessary to remind our readers. We take leave to commend this action of the East Boston Unitarians to the attention of those professing a stricter creed. To buy a slice of cake at a fair, for the chance and with the hope of getting a gold ring which is concealed in the loaf, is a transaction which no casuistry can remove from the category of gambling. All "sales by chance " fall under the same character. If a minister goes into his pulpit on the Sabbath and preaches earnestly and eloquently to the young men of his congregation against the ruinous vice of gambling, and if, during the week, in the vestry of the same church, those young men be persuaded by pleasant smiles and soft voices to buy a slice of the ring-cake, or a ticket in a lottery or a raffle, and all, it may be, for the embellishment of the aforesaid pulpit, there is a painful inconsistency. And if one of the young men should win the gold ring, or, perchance a gold watch, and should find the scruples which had been strengthened by the faithful warning of his pastor strangely giving way, and, step by step, should pursue the downward road, until he should plunge recklessly and hopelessly into all the profligacy and wretchedness concealed in the gilded saloons they call "hells," would it not be according to the immutable law by which

"Tall oaks from little acorns grow "?

and would no part of the responsibility of that hopeless wreck lie at the door of those by whom the little acorn was planted? We commend this especially to the very serious consideration of those Christian matrons and maidens who may be honored with a place in the Committee of Management in getting up a Fair.

The great Soldiers' Fair, held in Boston two years ago, is still fresh in the memory of the community,as are also the things which were done there. An excellent army chaplain expressed to us at the time his deep sorrow, on the soldier's account, that so damaging an example should be set for them in the sober Christian city of Boston, in the raffles, lotteries, etc., by which the receipts of the Fair were unquestionably largely increased. Gambling, he said, was one of the most contagious and ruinous vices of the army: many a young man gambled there who never gambled before, and many wives and children and widowed mothers of soldiers suffered because the money which should, and otherwise would have been sent to them, was lost in gambling. Many a young man, he also said, had stood firm against all solicitations; but he feared lest, in such instances, the last barrier would

give way, when he learned that so many excellent people had been patronizing gambling in Boston for his especial benefit.

In past centuries lotteries were employed by European Governments as a means of raising revenues. In the year 1569 a drawing was held at the west door of St. Paul's cathedral, in which there were 40,000 shares, at half a sovereign each. This was for the repairing of the harbors of the kingdom. Within a recent period the French Government derived a large revenue from lotteries under its immediate direction, but so demoralizing were the results found to be, that the whole thing has been abolished now for some time by a law with very heavy penalties for its infraction-nothing less than confiscation and imprisonment. In England, for the same reason, the popular opposition had risen to such a height in 1823, that the last lottery was tolerated because it was the last. In the United States large sums of money were raised by lotteries in former times for great public works and for the founding of literary and philanthropic institutions, although as early as 1699 an Association of Ministers in Boston denounced the lottery as a "cheat," and its managers as "pillagers of the people." Within the present century express statutes for the suppression of lotteries have been framed in many States; in Tennessee, Virginia, Massachusetts, etc. In New York and Pennsylvania, lotteries have been declared to be public nuisances. It is well known that Art Unions have been ruled to be lotteries, and prohibited by the express decisions of both American and English

courts.

Can any one tell us what is the difference in principle between the lottery which was drawn at St. Paul's Cathedral in 1569, and the lotteries, raffles, grabs, and other sales by chance, so much in vogue in modern religious Fairs?

UNSANCTIFIED SCHOLARSHIP. The opinion gains with us, that the best writers on religion are religious men. In writings where the heart must come in so largely to interpret and express, as in Commentaries, theological treatises and works on practical godliness and of devotion, it seems absolutely necessary that the heart of the writer should be both favorably and piously affected towards his theme. Surely in interpreting and expressing the Word and will of God, his friends must be better than his enemies.

We are confirmed in the view by noticing the fact, that unsound religious theories are usually found connected with undevotional feeling in the same person. Indeed we feel assured that ardent piety must lead in the safe exposition of Scripture, and sound writing of theology. And this we say, thinking specially of not a few authors,

home and foreign, on biblical literature, the evidences of Christianity, interpretation and dogmatic theology. They so lack an experimental and hearty sympathy with their work, that it must be taken with a cautious allowance. Many of the German biblical scholars treat the Scriptures learnedly, but professionally as authors, as they would Homer or Philo. This is not reasonable or safe. Devoutly doing the will of God, gives great insight into his Word. Who but a devoted Christian can properly expound the Gospel and Epistles of the beloved disciple? Religious writing and preaching and teaching, as a profession, with only a professional interest in it, is no way safe; and if we mistake not, many errors in theology and religion have come into the church through unsanctified scholarship. Not that pious platitudes, and the names of the Deity, and sacred references, as common-places, make a work religious. A tone of deep, warm piety, practical godliness, and the outlines and bearings of a sound theology, may imbue and pervade a volume, that has little or nothing formally and technically religious in it. But plainly the pen that treats of holy things, to be safe and reliable, must be moved by a holy heart.

SOUR GRAPES TEETH ON EDGE. That old proverb in Israel, while wrongly applied by the Jews, for which they were rightly reproved, is as true now of transmitted character as it was of the fathers and children of Ezekiel's times. Intellectual traits have been observed to propagate themselves along the line of families and races, as certainly as the magnetized wire carries the telegram. This is very noticeable in the comparison of nations, as of the French or the Germans with the Anglo-Saxons. Certain habits or tendencies of mind become fastened, by repetition from age to age, upon the inhabitants of different countries, by which they become known in the community of the civilized world as familiarly as by their geographical location. So is it with the formation and descent of moral qualities. "False as a Carthaginian" was a proverb in ancient days. 66 Haughty as a Turk " is another of our own times. Within a narrower limit, we often are witnesses of the same thing. The taint of avarice, of dishonesty, of licentiousness, is seen to pass on from parent to child, until spreading out into a numerous kindred, it stamps a general reputation upon the whole. This is partly the effect of example-the young imitating the older, and, for aught we know to the contrary, the result also of an occult, yet real and powerful impress, of one vicious life upon others which spring from it in the order of nature. Who knows but there is a sort of spiritual photography even antedating birth, by which images are printed off in

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faint lines which the after exposure to the light will turn into striking likenesses of moral deformity?

No soul is to be regarded as an independent unit, as to its antecedents or consequents. It takes and it gives hues and outlines which determine the quality of new existences.

The inclination for strong drink lies, in myriads, as a predisposition of the appetite easily aroused, and throwing over its subject a lifelong dread of its power. Whether such influences are carried down through a physical or spiritual channel, or both, may be a difficult problem to solve. But no doubt is admissible as to the transmission. Parents often wonder at the quite contrary tempers of their offspring. Could they remember, with strict accuracy, the state of their own mental and moral and bodily rightness or wrongness through the past, generally and specifically, and did they fully understand the relation of this personal condition to the organisms emanating from themselves, they might conclude that it is not altogether accident, nor arbitrary fore-ordination which puts a Cain and an Abel, a Jacob and an Esau, a Joseph aud a Reuben, in the same household and brotherhoods. They would discover that it makes a vast difference whether they have eaten the sour grape or the sweet.

Contentious spirits are apt to come out of families which have vexed each other with neighborhood feuds and lawsuits, which have quarrelled for years about trifles not worthy of a second thought. Slanderous dispositions are seen to reproduce themselves in the same way and so on indefinitely. These things are like the subtle poison which sends scrofula through a family connection, through generations; a vitiating influence in the system hard to expel but easy to detect.

What sort of parents John Randolph had, we have forgotten. One might think they were somewhat singular. But that this strong man was not an atheist, as well as an Ishmael, he tells us was due to his mother's teaching him, in earliest childhood, to say; “Our Father which art in heaven."

Most observing persons have noticed, that, in the same community, certain families adhere to a religious or an irreligious career from age to age, bringing forward recruits, with a marked uniformity, to fill the succession of these distinctive characters. There are lineages, which, traced backward, are scarcely broken by an example of decided piety. Fathers and sons have come and gone, travelling all in the same broad road of unbelief; nothing to link their memories with the kingdom of God. They have had the same means of instruction, worship, grace as their neighbors, but unavailingly to break up this hereditary transmission of a worldly life. Peculiar

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forms of error thus reproduce themselves. A strong minded ancestor has made a creed, in fact if not in writing, for a numerous progerty. And grand-children and their offspring will wear the impress of that deception so deeply in their souls, that it would almost seem as if a decree of heaven had drawn an impassable line between such clusters of people and a religions profession. They are like sand-plains in the midst of fertile lands. They are not the children of Seth who call on the name of the Lord, save as, here and there, some heart has been driven, by conscious want and pain, to escape from all this freezing spiritual indifference to a living Intercessor, an Almighty Friend. The opposite of this picture is equally apparent, and is one of the most beautiful in society. Causes and effects lie along this tract of thought which, in this day of reducing cverything to fixed law, are worthy of more attention than they are receiving.

LANGUAGE. Does language mean any thing per se; or only what those who use it intend to signify by its phrases? If a writer be entitled to the benefit of his own definitions, however unusual, is he also entitled to the sense which he may put upon his words? Are these designed to conceal or explain thought? Readers of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables will recollect his curious chapter on the dialect of the gamins of Paris. This to them is as positive a language as it is nonsense to every body else. Raverty's Poetry of the Af ghans gives us some specimens of a like metempsychosis, in another direction. It is the Sufis' mystic tongue, in which wine is devotion; sleep, divine meditation; perfume, hope of divine favor; zephyrs (not the ladies', we presume) outbursts of grace; infidels, idolaters, libertines, men of purest faith; the idol they worship, God himself; the tavern, prayer or seclusion; beauty, divine perfection; curls and tresses, divine and infinite glory; wantonness, drunkenness, religious fervor and exaltation. This is ingenious; and we would commend to those far away masters of it some students of this occult art among ourselves, who are busily at work in turning our theological terminology, like an old coat, inside out; or rather, perhaps, turning the whole of it out of doors, so far as any legitimate meaning is concerned. We add a brief list of words which these writers are thus prestidigitating: inspiration; revelation: vicarious; atonement; sin; hell; justice; moral law; regeneration; holiness; religion; God. What they mean by these words has about as much relevancy to the facts themselves, as the jargon of Gavroche or the Sufis, to an ordinary dictionary. They are the lucus a non lucendo dialect of what the

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