tary fasts; St. Paul had just spoken of involuntary privation' in hunger and thirst.' On chap. vi. 5, Calvin says, St. Paul doth not mean hunger which arose from want, but the voluntary exercise of abstinence.' So Whitby paraphrases ver. 4 and 5, constantly enduring all sorts of sufferings, and exercising all kinds of self-denial for the Gospel's sake.""

3. I cannot surrender my belief that the church intended "that we should literally obey the rules of fasting laid down in our prayerbook," that she intended us to "fast forty days in succession ;" and I believe that they who observe this ordinance inwardly as well as outwardly, (of course not outwardly only,) will become "better Christians." At the same time we must not " put new wine into old bottles;" nor can we all at once, after long disuse, rush beneficially into every detail of our church's system and practice. But I am satisfied that the more we observe all her orders, even her forms, so it be not done formally, but as an expression of inward feeling, the less we shall be disposed to regard any of them with indifference, or to think we have power to dispense with any of them. If my view of the case be correct, it is a sin not to keep every prescribed fast-the magnitude of it I do not pretend to estimate; but it seems to me an act of disobedience to the church, whom all ought, and some are bound, to obey. What led me into these remarks was their connexion with my illustration of repeating the responses, to which R. W. H. refers. I cannot but fear, with him, there would be much mockery if the whole congregation were to repeat them. Still, where should the line be drawn? Should the school-children be silenced? or should none be exhorted to unite but the truly pious? (In that case all sinful singers ought to be removed, for the third commandment may be broken in music as well as in plain reading.) Then what will become of that wonderful class of men, the parish-clerks, who, by common consent, perform the vocal part of the congregation? Are they always men of prayer? Nay; may not we find sometimes, even among the clergy, a "notorious evil liver"? and have not the best to lament occasional wanderings, when uttering words addressed to the Most High? Can we do more than confess that there are certain evils attendant upon the public worship of God, which it is easier to lament than to remove?

Thanking R. W. H. for the good humour with which he received my little pleasantries, I beg to remain, Sir, your obedient servant, L de R.

ON THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF LUNATICS.

SIR, Some estimate of the existing state of religion among the insane will be indispensable, if the question of the cure of their souls is to be entertained. I beg, therefore, to submit to your consideration a few cursory reflections under this head. There will be nothing in these observations with which all who are informed upon the subject are not familiar; yet many, I believe, do not possess even this limited information.

In entering upon this inquiry I would first of all observe, that a

distinction is to be drawn between religion as it subsists in the belief and practice of the professor, and religion as the ultimate principle of spiritual life, by which the true religious condition of the individual is determined. In ordinary cases they are adjudged identical, the one being taken for the index of the other; but with the lunatic a discrepancy will often be detected by unguarded inconsistency of character. The religion of the patients, it is charitably hoped, never undergoes a radical change for the worse after the depreciation of their moral constitution; and hitherto they have seldom been the subjects of a divine renewal during the continuance of the disorder. Their spiritual condition, therefore, when the term is used in its highest sense, may be presumed to remain generally unchanged from the commencement of insanity.

Whether the extent of religion among them corresponds, as might consequently be expected, with its prevalence in the several classes of the community to which they respectively belong, is a question which cannot easily be decided. The number, however, in whom religion appears to have been the ruling principle of life is sufficiently limited to raise the presumption that its influence is somewhat more extended among society at large; in other words, that the victims of insanity are not most generally those whose characters have been subjected to the practical influences of evangelical truth.

The opinion thus hazarded gains confirmation from a reference to the statistical tables which indicate the causes of disorder, since they are such, in a very large proportion of cases, as would be materially counteracted by either the restraints or the consolations of the Gospel. For additional proof of this fact, I have only to refer to the indisputable testimony of the learned and judicious Dr. Pritchard, who supports his own views by quotations from M. Georget, M. Pinel, and M. Esquirol. I extract the following quotations from Dr. Pritchard's work. "The observations," says M. Georget," which I have had it in my power to make, the more numerous ones which I have compared in authors, have convinced me that, among one hundred lunatics, ninety-five at least have become so from the influence of affections and moral commotions." "In a computation made by M. Pinel, from observations of five years, cases of insanity produced by moral causes were to those occasioned by physical causes in the proportion of 464 to 219." In a memoir presented" by M. Esquirol to the Society of Medicine in 1818, it was concluded that cases of madness occasioned by moral causes are to those arising from physical causes in the proportion of four to one." He gives it as his opinion, that " care and anxiety, distress, grief, and mental disturbances, are by far the most productive causes of insanity;" and that," next to the examples of insanity produced by care and anxiety, the greatest number of cases are those arising from the influence of strong passions and emotions." Dr. Pritchard also points out the very general influence which moral causes have in predisposing the character for receiving an impression from any of the exciting causes of madness. He endeavours, moreover, to prove that "all monomaniacs begin by having disordered

feelings and inclinations, and that the intellectual disease appears to follow. Excess of self-love is an ingredient," he observes, “in every modification of monomania." . . . . . “The illusion is always some notion as to the powers, property, dignity, or destination of the individual affected, which is grafted upon his habitual state of desire or aversion, passion or feeling."

It is, therefore, unquestionable that moral causes are very extensive and influential in promoting insanity. We are sure that such malignant influence could not acquire so great an ascendancy, whether it be anxiety, or grief, or self-love, or the indulgence of criminal desires, if grace and the precepts of the gospel, if humility, if purity of heart, and if unshaken confidence in the promises of God, possessed that supreme power over the mind which, if they want, it is not necessarily indeed from the absence, but certainly from the deficiency, of religion that they want it.

Undoubtedly, however, there are patients of (the most) sincere and unblemished piety. H. B, a female patient in the MPA-, was for many years a pew-opener in her parish church. When I knew her she was an inmate of the infirmary ward; and when the door was locked for the night, she used frequently to read aloud to her fellow-patients a chapter from the Testament, and some of the Collects for evening prayer; and, in the dark winter nights, she still repeated from memory the hallowed forms to which she had so often listened in the house of God. Nothing can be more beautiful than such exhibitions of piety in the lunatic, when the dreadful malady is the effect of physical causes, and when its delusions have no connexion with moral delinquency, or with over-wrought doctrinal speculations. These are cases in which divine grace is still found sustaining the tone of the moral feeling, and still sanctifying and blessing the child of affliction.

Among patients in whom religion has exerted, in a degree, its legitimate authority, there will be found some, I am inclined to believe, who have been guilty of deviations from the paths of piety and rectitude, of no venial kind, of which the malignant effects are perpetuated, even after the penitent offender may be divinely absolved from the guilt. The subject is involved in so much obscurity, both in a religious and psychological point of view, that one is hardly justified in adventuring an opinion. But if it may be said without presumption, I cannot avoid the conclusion, that religious melancholy is not always that groundless self-accusation which the patient is so fruitlessly persuaded to believe it. Despair must not be traced, in every case, to that source. For the most bitter grief can hardly be excessive, provided there be an apprehension, at the same time, of the hope which the gospel holds out to the chief of sinners. It is the absence of this hope, or rather, the want of spiritual power to apprehend it, and not the excess of remorse, that is the result or cause of the insanity. The patient's fears, indeed, will often engender absurd conceptions; but these delusions constitute neither the disease nor its cause, and, in a religious point of view, are of little importance, except in so far as

they pre-occupy the mind, and prevent its faculties from being concentrated upon the promises of pardon, so that the soul is retarded by them from returning into the way of peace.

The following is a case which painfully illustrates the reality sometimes existing in the fears of despondency. J. C had joined a religious society early in life, and for twenty years had continued a blameless and zealous member of the congregation, when, owing to some act which indicated a want of strict integrity, he was dismissed from an inferior office which he held in the chapel, and was subsequently induced to leave his own employment, and to live with an ungodly relative, upon the promise of sharing a small property. Raillery and evil example soon produced their natural consequences; he abandoned the practice of religion altogether, discontinued attending a place of worship, and laid aside private prayer. The relative died; the promised bequest had been dissipated by intemperance; and J. C was left without resources, and, in a short time, became the inmate of an asylum-classed as a case of religious melancholy. Who that knows anything of the jealousy of the Christian's God, would venture to affirm, that his despondency had no judicial connexion with the sins to which his guilty conscience attributed it? I was encouraged to labour for his recovery, but in this attempt his quiet was never extenuated: rather his mind was directed gradually to the reality of his offence, conjointly with the mercies of God, that by this means, a "godly sorrow" might supplant a delusive despair. After five months' frequent intercourse with him, he consented to receive the Holy Communion privately administered-a measure which signs of sincere contrition appeared to justify, although mingled with great infirmities, the effects partly of the disorder; and, from this time, he always allowed that he had some hope of salvation, and subsequently became a public communicant, and as frequent an attendant at divine service as infirm health and paralyzed energies would permit.

The spiritual character of the individual, abstractedly considered, admits, I am convinced, of being resolved into the same simple elements with the lunatic as with others. But if we view the religious condition of an asylum, as it developes itself externally in the practice and conversation of the patients, the spectacle presented is indeed strange and forbidding. Many even of those who are bound by their sacred calling to address themselves to the eradication of moral evil wherever it is found defacing creation, and who are daily conversant with misery and vice in every other form, are seen turning away from this scene with supercilious indifference, as too confused and incongruous to allow any conclusions to be drawn from it with confidence, and as a deviation from the ordinary laws of spiritual life, so wide, as to render the adoption of extensive remedial measures hopeless, if not absurd. The difficulty arises chiefly from the exhibition of the opposite extremes of moral conduct, sometimes in the same patient, and, possibly, even at the same period; together with the fact, established by medical authority, that a complete change in the religious character of the individual is occasionally an effect of the disorder. To reduce these confused moral elements to order, and to render the asylum

capable of being treated in some degree according to the rules by which the cure of souls is regulated in general, we must distinguish, whether this or that part of the conduct has the stamp of sincerity; and whether they will be heartily concurrent, or whether, from being in a state of thraldom, it be quiescent only, or constrained. And, cer tainly, however unquestionable the piety of some of the patients may be, and however palpable the want of it may be in others, the solution of the question under consideration is alike perplexing and painful.

The predominant characteristic of the insane in relation to religion is, I think, indifference-a state of feeling engendered among them, partly by the prevailing want of early training in the discipline of Christianity, and partly by the paralyzing influence of the disorder upon the faculties generally. Over a large proportion of the patients a veil is drawn, which hides equally from them the world without, and from us the world within, their souls. Few incidents occur in the routine of their daily life to elicit from them any recognition of the Deity, or to give evidence of their faith in his providence and promises. Even of those in whom the influences of Christianity are partially exhibited, its truths are in many cases very imperfectly comprehended, and its precepts insufficiently complied with; and we must attribute it, rather to education and the force of habit, than to sincere solicitude upon the subject, that the rudiments of our faith, and some of the offices of religion, are known and observed by them.

The outlines of individual character, however, are strongly marked in a few; and these supply data for forming an estimate of the religious condition of others, sufficient for our guidance in attempting its amelioration. On the one hand, we shall be led to conclude most favourably in some instances, although much of the inherent evil of our nature is frequently provoked, because piety in its turn will find opportunity for its development, forming, it may be, an inconsistent combination, but supplying indubitable evidence of the presence of grace within the heart. It follows, therefore, as a general rule, that uniform consistency of conduct, the criterion of a sincere profession in others, is a test which must not be enforced against the insane. With them, the virtuous effort and pious expression, provided they bear decisive marks of sincerity, may be received as evidence of true religion, notwithstanding the recurrence of vicious passion, or the outbreaking of profane language. Such exhibitions, awful though they be, must be regarded as the ebullition of feelings to which the best of men are subject, but which, with sound mental faculties, they are able, by Divine assistance, to quell, while the lunatic, possessing equal grace, but destitute of reason, is overpowered by them. In him, all that is virtuous must be allowed its full measure of excellence, while outward expressions of evil do not necessarily depreciate his moral character, more than it would be lowered in the case of others by similar thoughts and feelings, while those thoughts remained unexpressed, and those feelings ungratified. On the other hand, cases may be supposed in which the hollowness of a profession, betrayed by no inconsistency while the faculties remained unimpaired, might readily