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selves in the temple of God, though placed there by other hands than his they head the flock without his consent to whom it belongs, and without his having said, as to Peter, Feed my sheep; and, as they have taken the charge without call and without ability, the flock are led without edification and without fruit, alas! and often with shame. O peace of Jesus Christ! which surpassest all sense, sole remedy against the troubles which pride incessantly excites in our hearts, who shall then be able to give thee to man?

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The reader will notice, that the last words of those questioning members, In cities, In the circle of domestic walls, In the palaces of kings, In the sanctuary, are emphatic, and consequently assume the rising inflection.

Do the Accomplishments of Nature increase the Enormity of our Guilt?

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J. BUT what is more. If the virtues and accomplishments of nature are at all to be admitted into the controversy between God and man, instead of forming any abatement upon the enormity of our guilt, they stamp upon it the reproach of a still deeper and more determined ingratitude. Let us conceive it possible, for a moment, that the beautiful personifications of scripture were realized; that the trees of the forest clapped their hands unto God, and that the isles were glad at his presence; that the little hills shouted on every side, and the valleys covered over with corn, sent forth their notes of rejoicing; that the sun and the moon praised him, and the stars of light joined in the solemn adoration; that the voice of glory to God was heard from every mountain and from every water-fall; and that all nature, animated throughout by the consciousness of a pervading and presiding Deity, burst into one loud and universal song of gra

tulation :--Would not a strain of greater loftiness be heard to ascend from those regions where the allworking God had left the traces of his own immensi❤ ty, than from the tamer and the humbler scenery of an ordinary landscape ?-Would not you look for a gladder acclamation from the fertile field, than from the dried waste, where no character of grandeur made up for the barrenness that was around you?

Would not the goodly tree, compassed about with the glories of its summer foliage, lift up an anthem of louder gratitude, than the lowly shrub that grew be neath it? Would not the flower, from whose leaves every hue of loveliness was reflected, send forth a sweeter rapture than the russet weed, which never drew the eye of any admiring passenger? And, in a word, wherever you saw the towering eminences of nature, or the garniture of her more rich and beau→ teous adornments, would it not be there that you looked for the deepest tones of devotion, or there for the tenderest and most exquisite of its melodies ? 1

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We have here a very long part of a sentence belonging to the questioning state, beginning thus, Let us conceive it possible— But the answering state is nearly as long.

Fashionable Sins Exposed.

CHRISTIANITY is, in one sense, the greatest of all levellers. It looks to the elements, and not to the circumstantials of humanity; and regarding as altogether superficial and temporary, the distinctions of this fleeting pilgrimage, it fastens on those points of assimilation which liken the king upon the throne to the very humblest of his subject-population. They are alike in the nakedness of their birth. They are alike in the sureness of their decay. They are alike in the agonies of their dissolution. And after the one is tombed in sepulchral magnificence,, and the

other is laid in his sod-wrapt grave, are they most fearfully alike in the corruption to which they moulder. But it is with the immortal nature of each that Christianity has to do; and, in both the one and the other, does it behold a nature alike forfeited by guilt, and alike capable of being restored by the grace of an offered salvation. And never do the pomp and the circumstance of externals appear more humiliating, than when, looking onwards to the day of resurrection, we behold the sovereign standing without his crown, and trembling, with the subject by his side, at the bar of heaven's majesty. There the master and the servant will be brought to their reckoning together; and when the one is tried upon the guilt and malignant influence of his Sabbath companies and he is charged with the profane and careless habit of his household establishment-and is reminded how he kept both himself and his domestics from the solemn ordinance-and is made to perceive the fearful extent of the moral and spiritual mischief which he has wrought as the irreligious head of an irreligious family-and how, among other things, he, under a system of fashionable hypocrisy, so tampered with another's principles as to defile his conscience, and to destroy him.-O! how tremendous will the little brief authority in which he now plays his fantastic tricks, turn to his own condemnation; for, than thus abuse his authority, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. And how comes it to pass, we ask, that any master is armed with a power so destructive over the immortals who are around him? God has given him no such power. The state has not given it to him. There is no law, either human or divine, by which he can enforce any order upon his servant, to an act of falsehood, or to an act of impiety. Should any such act of authority be attempted on the part of the master, it should be followed up on the part of the servant by an act of disobedience. Should your master or mistress bid you say, not at home, when you know that they are at home, it is your duty to refuse compliance with such an order:

and if it be asked, how can this matter be adjusted, after such a violent and alarming innovation on the laws of fashionable intercourse, we answer, just by the simple substitution of truth for falsehood-just by prescribing the utterance of, engaged, which is a fact, instead of the utterance of, not at home, which is a lie-just by holding the principles of your servant to be of higher account than the false delicacies of your acquaintance-just by a bold and vigorous recurrence to the simplicity of nature-just by determinedly doing what is right, though the example of a whole host were against you; and by giving impulse to the current of example, when it happens to be moving in a proper direction. And here we are happy to say that fashion has of late been making a capricious and accidental movement on the side of principle-and to be blunt, and open, and manly, is now on the fair way to be fashionable-and a temper of homelier quality is beginning to infuse itself into the luxuriousness, and the effeminacy, and the palling and excessive complacence of genteel societyand the staple of cultivated manners is improving in firmness, and frankness, and honesty, and may, at length, by the aid of a principle of Christian rectitude, be so interwoven with the cardinal virtues, as to present a different texture altogether from the soft and the silken degeneracy of modern days.

Chalmers.

We have here one or two long sentences, in which is required a good deal of suspension of the voice, joined with much serious energy. The sentence, And when the one is tried, affords us a decided example of suspension--the rising inflection terminating at destroy him,--and as the sense ends at condemnation, we have here the falling inflection. Some words decidedly emphatic ; such as, truth, falsehood, engaged, not at home, fact, a lie, etc.

If Christianity is in the Heart, it will manifest itself in the Life of its Possessor.

LET, therefore, every pretender to Christianity vindicate this assertion by his own personal history in the world. Let him not lay his godliness aside, when he is done with the morning devotion of his family; but carry it abroad with him, and make it his companion and his guide through the whole business of the day; always bearing in his heart the sentiment, that thou God seest me;' and remembering, that there is not one hour that can flow, or one occasion that can cast up, where his law is not present with some imperious exaction or other. It is false, that the principle of Christian sanctification possesses no influence over the familiarities of civil and ordinary life. It is altogether false, that godliness is a virtue of such a lofty and monastic order, as to hold its dominion only over the solemnities of worship, or over the solitudes of prayer and spiritual contemplation. If it be substantially a grace within us at all, it will give a direction and a colour to the whole of our path in society. There is not one conceivable transaction, amongst all the manifold varieties of human employment, which it is not fitted to animate by its spirit. There is nothing that meets us too homely to be beyond the reach of obtaining, from its influence, the stamp of something celestial. It offers to take the whole man under its ascendancy, and to subordinate all his movements: nor does it hold the place which rightly belongs to it, till it be vested with a presiding authority over the entire system of human affairs. And therefore it is, that the preacher is not bringing down christianity-he is only sending it abroad over the field of its legitimate operation, when he goes with it to your counting-houses, and there rebukes every selfish inclination that would carry you ever so little within the limits of fraudulency; when he enters into your chambers of agency, and there detects the character of falsehood, which lurks under all the plausibility of your multiplied and excessive charges;

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