The post office.

Apparent virtue.

A distinction.

individual of the community may be the abandoned slave of sin. The following is a striking illustration of it. A man may drop a letter containing a hundred dollar bill, into any post office in the country. He slips it through a little aperture, and does not know who is on the other side. The man who takes it up is a stranger. He passes it into the hands of another stranger; and thus it goes from hand to hand, from driver to driver, and clerk to clerk, for a thousand miles, and at last his correspondent safely receives the money from some one, he knows not whom. And what has been its protection? A sheet of paper, fastened with a little colored paste: or in its condition of greatest security, a leathern bag, closed by a lock, which any stone by the side of the road would shatter to pieces. The treasure is thus carried over solitary roads, through forests, and among the mountains; and is passed from one hand to another, in a state of what would seem to be most complete exposure. What honest men these agents thus trusted, must be! is the first reflection. Honest! Why the writer of the letter would not really trust a tenth part of the sum to the honesty of a single one of them. They may be honest, or they may not, but the careless observer who should attribute the safe result to the honesty of the me?, would be most grossly deceived. It is an adroit arrangement, -most admirably and skilfully planned, by human wisdom, and acting by means of principles which God has implanted, that secures the result. The merchant trusts the money to agents whom he does not know, not because he thinks they are honest, but because he knows they are wise; he relies on human nature, but it is the shrewd policy of human nature,—not its sense of justice.

Forgetting this distinction has been the means of a great proportion of the disputes which have raged in the world about human character. In philosophizing upon the subject, a writer, of a poetic turn, is deluded by the

No real difference of opinion about human character. beauty, the moral beauty, we may perhaps safely say, of results, which really depend on very different principles in human hearts, from what they seem to indicate. They who have the most romantic ideas of human nature in theory, do not fail of being sufficiently guarded and suspicious in their dealings with mankind; or if they do, they soon inevitably become soured by disappointed hopes, and while they panegyrize the race in the mass, they bitterly accuse and reproach it in detail. Besides, there is one proof, and that on a most extensive scale, of the real nature of worldly virtue; it is this,—a fact which no man competent to judge, will deny,- that all the arrangements of business in every community, and in every scheme of government which was ever formed by human skill, go on the plan of making it for the interest of men to do right, and not on the plan of confidence in the integrity and moral principle of their hearts. A government and a system of institutions based on the idea, that men were in a majority of cases, disposed to do their duty of their own accord, could not stand a day.

But all this is not the worst. It is not the falseness and hollowness of worldly virtues, nor the vices of heart and life which prevail every where among men, which are the great subjects of the charge which God makes against us. It is another thing altogether, viz. that men WILL NOT SUBMIT TO THE REIGN OF GOD OVER THEM. This is their settled, determined, universal decision. It is called in the Bible by various names;- ungodliness, rebellion, unbelief, enmity against God, and many others. Jehovah has proclaimed a law; men disobey it altogether. They do indeed some things which are commanded in that law, but then it is only because it happens to suit their convenience. He tells us we are not our own but his;- we pay no regard to it, but go on serving ourselves. He tells us that all will soon be over with us in this world, and that in a very short time we

Alienation from God: settled and universal.

Evidences.

must stand in judgment before him. Who believes it? He charges the man of wealth to act as his Maker's steward in managing his property, and sacredly to appropriate it to his cause; the wealthy man regards it just as much as he would a similar claim from the beggar in the street. He calls upon men of rank and influence to glorify him by exhibiting pure and holy lives, in the conspicuous stations in which he has placed them; look at the princes and nobles, the legislators and statesmen of this world, and see how they obey. By his word and by his spirit, he tells us of our undying souls, of the value of holiness and spiritual peace, of the deep guilt of sin, of mercy through a Savior, and of eternal life with him in heaven; men turn away from such subjects in utter contempt. These topics whenever introduced among the vulgar classes of society, will ordinarily be received with. open derision and scorn; and the refined circles of society, with as decided, though with a little more polite hostility, will not allow their introduction. There is as real, and certain, and determined a combination among men, to exclude God and his law from any actual control over human hearts, as if the standard of open rebellion was raised, and there were gathered around it all the demonstrations of physical resistance.

It is sometimes said that the reason why subjects connected with God and religion are so excluded from conversation in polite circles of society, is the fact, that when such subjects are introduced, they are so often a cloak of hypocrisy and deceit. I know it is so, and this fact constitutes the most complete and overwhelming evidence of the extent to which this world is alienated from God. Even what little professed regard there is for him here, is, two thirds of it, hypocrisy! This is, in fact, what the objection amounts to; and what a story does it tell, in regard to the place which God holds in human hearts. No. As men have generally made up their minds to have

Use of God's name.

False religions.

Mint, anise and cummin.

nothing to do with God, they are determined to hear nothing about him, unless it be in such general terms, and in such formal ways, as shall not be in danger of making an impression. We may almost wonder how eternal justice can spare this earth from day to day, when we reflect upon what is unquestionably the awful fact, that throughout all those countries where the true God is known, in four cases out of five in which his name is mentioned at all, it is used in oaths and blasphemies.

The world has been full of religions, it is true: but they have been the schemes of designing men, to gain an ascendency over the ignorant, by deceiving and bribing that conscience which God has placed in every heart to testify for him. It has been the studied aim of these religions to evade the obligation of moral law, and the authority of a pure, and holy and spiritual Deity. They substitute for it empty rites and ceremonies, in order to divert the attention of the sentry which God has stationed in the soul, while all the unholy lusts and passions are left unrestrained. The Pharisees gave a specimen which will answer for all. Unjust and cruel towards men, unfaithful and unbelieving towards God, and habitually violating and trampling under foot the whole spirit of his law, they would go out into their gardens, and carefully take one tenth of every little herb which grew there; and this they would carry with ridiculous solemnity, to the Temple of God, to show their exact observance of his commands! This is an admirable example of the spirit and nature of all false religions. Men will do any thing else but really give themselves up to God. They will go barefooted to Jerusalem, for the sake of being sainted on their return: they will fight under the crescent for plunder or military renown; they will build churches and contribute money to public charities, from a hundred different motives; but as to coming and really believing all that God has said, and giving up the whole

The door of salvation open.

Men will not enter.

soul to him, entering his service, and looking forward habitually to heaven as their home, they will not do it. It has been proposed to them again and again, in every variety of mode, and THEY WILL NOT DO IT. The prophets proposed it. Men stoned them. Jesus Christ proposed it. They crucified him. The apostles and their immediate successors proposed it. In the course of a very few generations they succeeded in bribing them, by means of worldly rewards and honors, to pervert their message, and leave the world undisturbed in its sins.

The preceding chapter of this work opened, perhaps the reader thought, a very broad door of salvation, and would lead one to ask, who can help being saved. It was indeed a wide door; one which all might enter; the condition simple, and universally proclaimed. "Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God for he will abundantly pardon." "In every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness, is accepted of him." But the difficulty is, that, widely extended as the gates of salvation are, and simple as is the entrance, men WILL NOT COME IN. They do not wish to be saved, and they will not seek salvation. They do not love holiness; they do not like the idea of serving God: penitence, humility, broken hearted submission to God's will, and spiritual peace and happiness, they do not like. They want to be making money, or gaining admiration, or enjoying sensual pleasure; and persuasion is not merely insufficient to change them, it does not even tend to change. You, cannot change the desires and affections of the heart by persuasion. No; plain, and simple, and open to every man, as is the way of life, men choose another way, and if the few imperfect exceptions which exist, were not accounted for in the Bible, we should be utterly unable to account for them at all; so fixed, and settled, and