poet's delightful numbers might have conveyed truths worthy of so perfect a vehicle. "This centre moved," does indeed extend its pervading influence in the very manner ascribed to the opposite principle; does indeed spread from its throne in the individual breast, to all those successive circles, " wide and more wide," of which the poet makes self-love the first mover.*

The Apostle James appears to have been of a different opinion from the Ethic bard; he speaks as if he suspected that the pebble stirred the lake a little too roughly. He traces this mischievous principle from its birth to the largest extent of its malign influence.-The question," whence come wars and fightings among you?" he answers by another question -"come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members ?"

* Self-love thus push'd to social, to divine,
Gives thee to make thy neighbour's blessing thine.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to make
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads;

Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race.

The Author hopes to be forgiven for these remarks: she has hazarded them for the sake of her more youthful readers.-She has not forgotten the time when, in the admiration of youthful enthusiasm, she never suspected that the principle of these finished verses was less excellent than the poetry.

The same pervading spirit which creates hostility between nations, creates animosity among neighbours, and discord in families. It is the same principle which, having in the beginning made "Cain the first male child," a murderer in his father's house, has been ever since in perpetual operation; has been transmitted in one unbroken line of succession, through that long chain of crimes of which history is composed, to the present triumphant spoiler of Europe.-In cultivated societies, laws repress, by punishing, the overt act in private individuals, but no one thing but the Christian religion has ever been devised to cleanse the spring.

"The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?" This proposition, this interrogation,we read with complacency,and both the aphorism and the question being a portion of scripture, we think it would not be decent to controvert it. We read it however with a secret reservation, that it is only the heart of all the rest of the world that is meant, and we rarely make the application which the Scripture intended. Each hopes that there is one heart which may escape the charge, and he makes the single exception in favour of his own. But if the exception which every one

makes were true, there would not be a deceitful or wicked heart in the world.

As a theory we are ready enough to admire self-knowledge, yet when the practice comes in question we are as blindfold as if our happiness depended on our ignorance. To lay hoid on a religious truth, and to maintain our hold, is no easy matter. Our understandings are not more ready to receive than our affections to lose it. We like to have an intellectual knowledge of divine things, but to cultivate a spiritual acquaintance with them cannot be effected at so cheap a rate. We can even more readily force ourselves to believe that which has no affinity with our understanding, than we can bring ourselves to chuse that which has no interest in our will, no correspondence with our passions. One of the first duties of a Christian is to endeavour to conquer this antipathy to the self-denying doctrines against which the human heart so sturdily holds out. The learned take incredible pains for the acquisition of knowledge. The philosopher cheerfully consumes the midnight oil in his laborious pursuits; he willingly sacrifices food and rest to conquer a difficulty in science. Here the labour is pleasant, the fatigue is grateful, the very difficulty is not without its charms. Why do we feel so differently in our religious

pursuits? Because in the most operose human studies, there is no contradiction of self, there is no opposition to the will, there is no combat of the affections. If the passions are at all implicated, if self-love is at all concerned, it is rather in the way of gratification than of oppo. sition.

There is such a thing as a mechanical Christianity. There are good imitations of religion, so well executed and so resembling as not only to deceive the spectator but the artist. Selflove in its various artifices to deceive us to our ruin, sometimes makes use of a means, which if properly used, is one of the most beneficial that can be devised to preserve us from its influence, the perusal of pious books.

But these very books in the hands of the ignorant, the indolent, and the self-satisfied, produce an effect directly contrary to that which they were intended to produce, and which they actually do produce on minds prepared for the perusal. They inflate where they were intended to humble. As some hypocondriacs, who amuse their melancholy hours with consulting indiscriminately every medical book which falls in their way, fancy they find their own case in every page, their own ailment in the ailment of every patient, till they believe they actually feel every

pain of which they read, though the work treats of cases diametrically opposite to their ownSo the religious valetudinarian, as unreasonably elated as the others are depressed, reads books descriptive of a highly religious state, with the same unhappy self application. He feels his spiritual pulse by a watch, that has no movements in common with it, yet he fancies that they go exactly alike. He dwells with delight on symptoms, not one of which belongs to him, and flatters himself with their supposed agreement. He observes in those books what are the signs of grace, and he observes them with complete self application; he traces what are the evidences of being in God's favour, and those evidences he finds in himself.

Self-ignorance appropriates truths faithfully stated but wholly inapplicable. The presump-" tion of the novice arrogates to itself the experience of the advanced Christian. He is persuaded that it is his own case, and seizes on the consolations which belong only to the most elevated piety. Self-knowledge would correct the judgment. It would teach us to use the pattern held out as an original to copy, instead of leading us to fancy that we are already wrought into the assimilation. It would teach us when we read the history of an established Christian, to labour af