after, the moral equilibrium of the place; drunkenness abounded, debts were contracted, other evil weeds were brought from other places to thrive and flourish there in unblushing features, to disport meretricious blossoms, and to exhibit with insolence their sinful colours. He was grieved with this appearance, and he determined to lose no time in attempting to root them up; and he did so, and suppose that his satisfaction in conquering the fair was something like, although of a higher order, to the emotion of pulling up a weed.

I

Ah! and I have had to feel this in my own neighbourhood. Every public-house seems to me an evil weed beneath which the whole village suffers. What passions, what dissipation, what spendthrift habits are fostered there! What imperfect educations result from its existence. What domestic confusion, hateful animosities, what rebellion against God, what work for the magistrate and the policeman, what destruction to the purest and the highest interests of society! As I pass the publichouses in my village, and sometimes hear a wild song, or see a drunken man coming from them, I say to myself, oh, if I could only pull up that weed.

And in character, again, the mind is frequently like a neglected garden. Many a young man has a sensation like that which I experienced when I returned home the other day and encountered my garden foe. He neglects the garden of his mind. It never occurs to him, that he has a mind to tutor and cultivate. At last something induces him to step into it; and, behold, the whole garden

is overrun with weeds, and there are flowers and fruits there too, but they can scarcely be perceived-they are hidden beneath the rank foliage of the weeds. Thus, before the ground can be turned to any account all these enemies have to be removed, torn up by the roots-idleness, evil passions, dissipations, and fondness for loose company. Come, young man, whose eye is perusing this page-it may be, very casually surveying the garden, and wondering what gardener can reduce it to order and to beauty, come begin; see here at thy foot an unwholesome poison-root. Look over the whole garden of the mind; its false flowers are spreading-it is the poppy of idleness. Up with it, up with it! There! have not you now experienced the moral satisfaction of pulling up a weed?

There are a great many emotions which man is privileged to feel; the highest of these is the planting of good. Only a little lower, and partaking of the nature of it, is the rooting up evil; for, indeed, good would grow in the world if it were not for the evil weeds which thrive apace. The man who, in his garden, without having his mind awakened at all to the higher principles of goodness and benevolence and truth, tears up the dock-leaf or the nettle, and exults at the conquest he has obtained, is in that sentiment unconsciously related to the great and clear-sighted lover of God and goodness and truth, who seeks to tear up some wide over-shadowing heresy, some fruitful seed of wrong doing and wrong thinking. Evil books are like evil weeds. How their arguments spread and coil snake-like over the mind of an age! How their black leaves drink up and

pervert all healthful moisture! What poison-fountains they become to young thinkers! It is a great thing to kill a bad book-not by rooting up its author or injuring him, but by blighting, by the strong hand of truth, his teachings, and holding them up withering to the world, or carrying them out and casting them into the limbo of vanity. As with books, so with institutions; there are evil ones that spread out from the great central evil and creep parasitically around the columns of power, and trail and coil and shoot out over the rooms of state. Beneath such institutions there are many cottages that look like caves embowered in night-shade. God, from time to time in the ages of the world, raises up the gardeners, who tear up these institutions, paganisms, despotisms, Romanisms; and when man, looking back upon the past, threads his way through the mazy forest of old opinions, where errors shoot up like tall hemlock-trees, moorish marshy plants spread over the whole soil, and wild beds of poppy-flowers and opium plants spread over the whole times and kingdoms. When he feels, in spiteof much that remains to be done, all these have been cleared away that that rank soil has become verdant with beauty-if here and there interlaced with the unsightly, he feels a moral exultation as he contemplates-something like that moral satisfaction which cheers us when we pull up a weed.

There, we have opened up a train of thought which the reader may pursue with pleasure; but before we close, we may say this, that perhaps, even weeds have their value;

and if we can reach it, there is a moral satisfaction even in their remaining as well as in their rooting up. How much they concentrate and condense the carbon necessary for the sustenance of the globe, we do not know. To what degree they are at once the reservoirs, for what, if diffused, might poison the springs of animal life, we cannot say. Perhaps they are the common sewers of the gases inimical to animal nature. But we do know, that He whose words were always truth said, that to the end of the world tares and wheat would grow together. The earth cannot be an Arcadia-a platform of perfectibility. The tares which entwine around human institutions are a subject for our sorrow; but we may, while labouring to our utmost to eradicate them, and feeling joy in eradicating them, rejoice that evil in the world is overruled by the Author of Good, to be a means for the exercise of the highest faculties of benevolence, truth and goodness, and the education of a moral nature in the discrimination of weeds from flowers.

CHAPTER IX.

MENTAL AND MORAL FREEDOM.

THE inevitable consequence of the enlargement of the circle of our knowledge, and the progress of our mind in the great lessons of sound education, must be the increase of mental independence and freedom; and this is certainly the most valuable of all freedoms man can enjoy. He may be a freed-man from the chain of the oppressor, and the whip and scourge of the overseer; he may be free of his country, and may lift up his voice in the framing of her institutions, or he may roam at will through all her gay and beautiful forests and fields; he may be free of the city, and be entitled to sit in old chartered Guilds and Corporations; and all these freedoms have, or are supposed to have, their value; and the freedom to move to and fro amidst the glorious scenery of Nature, beneath her skies and stars, and over her heaths and moors, is indeed a noble and exhilarating freedom. Free of the mountain, the moor, the forest, and the heath; free to enter the ancient corporation of birds, and fluttering insects, and leaping squirrels, and bounding hares; it is a freedom, to our thinking, as far in value beyond the musty old parch