for her father, (except when such affection was excessive,) a sin? Who ever expressed penitence for an act of charity, or for telling the truth, or for a deed of honesty and justice? If man is totally depraved, then all these acts and feelings, in an unconverted person are wrong. But no man of common sense ever thought of calling them so. Moreover, if we are totally depraved, then our reason and conscience are depraved also. And if our reason is depraved, how can we know that it counsels right, when it teaches us to obey and love God and truth, or when it shews us the reasonableness of Christianity. And if conscience is depraved, then there is an end of all moral distinctions, and we may put evil for good and good for evil, darkness for light and light for darkness. It grieves me therefore to hear people, seduced by a theory, asserting that we have no power by nature to understand or believe Christianity any more than the blind man has to see. If this were indeed so, the guilt of unbelief would be very small. But Christ tells us that this is their condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men have chosen darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. It is because they will not come to the light, lest their deeds be reproved.

This then seems to be the truth with respect to human nature, that man is a mixed being, having faculties which connect him with God and eternity, truth and holiness, and having also senses and appetites which bind him to earth. In most men there is a struggle and warfare between these different propositions; sometimes the good light within is strong and clear, and then again there comes a cloud and dimness, and he wanders uncertainly among the mists of earthly pas sion and appetite. In some men the lower propensities have conquered, and the noble mind, the warm heart, the sincere conscience, the spirit capable of heavenly progress, is led captive, bound in fetters of sense and sin, at the car of earthly pleasures. But even here, the Heavenly spark is not wholly quenched, not quite extinguished. No. Dimmed and trampled on though it be, it is still there, and the power of truth. and of love may yet fan it into a flame, and enable it to consume the cords of sinful habit as Sampson snapped the ropes of the Philistines.

Is not this what experience tells of human nature? Is it not true that in the bad man there is some remains of goodness, in the good man some tendency to evil, and that in most men there is a conflict between the spirit and the flesh, the outward and the inner man, the freedom of the will with the bias of instinct, the holy aspiration with the clogging weight

of habit and custom, the dictates of conscience and reason with the despotism of example and the power of circumstances? Is it not this the warfare which Paul describes with so much force in the vii. chapter of Romans? I find a law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, when I would do good. Is not this the account of human nature which Jesus gives when he tells his disciples to watch and pray lest they enter into temptation, because, though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak? Yes! there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty has given him understanding. There is an inward light, which no outward darkness can shroud-a light which lightens every man who cometh into the world. If indeed there is one faith, which more than another belongs to Christianity, it is this, that man is not wholly corrupt. Christianity teaches us to look on men, and see even in the most corrupt, a heavenly soul, capable of holiness, capable of being brought back to God and truth. It teaches us to look through the outward covering and stain and defilement of sin, and see an immortal mind, prisoned, fettered, crushed, and fastened like Laocoon by the writhing serpents of appetite and passion, and those fleshly lusts that war against the soul. Over this captive spirit it weeps-here it pours forth its lamentations. This indeed is what constitutes the great evil of sin-this is the most pitiful consideration connected with it, that it should cramp, deform and defile such a being as man might and ought to be. If man were totally depraved, I should care no more for him than I should for a hyena or a scorpion. But it is exactly because I see such heavenly capacities, such Godlike and Divine energies, such a wealth of tenderness and affection, bowed to the earth, enslaved to the service of sense, this-this might make angels bend to weep from their starry thrones.

To get a true theory of human nature then, we must shut our eyes neither to the good nor the evil which makes up the tangled web of his character. We must see and acknowledge human goodness. It is ruinous to doubt it. It may seem very sagacious to doubt and deny that there is sincerity in human religion, stability in human love, disinterestedness in human generosity, magnanimity in deeds of patriotism and self-sacrifice. But so we shall theorize away all that is true and warm in our own hearts, and leave them cold and desolate, a fit home for all evil thoughts and unhappy feelings. For these acts, performed here and there on the earth, are gleams of light, by which our knowledge of excellence and love for it is kept alive. Disbelieve them, and the heart has no longer any food; it will die of famine.

But equally unphilosophical and unsafe is it to overlook the reality of sin. It will not do to look upon it as a theological figment: it is something which nearly and closely affects each one of us, every individual soul. Sin lurks at every door, like a ravenous beast, waiting for his opprtunity to make his deadly spring. Nothing escapes him. The purest intentions, the most artless innocence, the loveliest affections, are tainted by his polluting breath. There is one place alone where sin dare not enter: that is the place where we are praying in sincerity to God. Could we but only feel deeply, and realize fully, our constant danger from this foul monster, we should never forsake our God.

What then is man, Oh God! that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of man, that thou visitest him? He is a thing to love and to fear: sometimes he seems but a little lower than the Angels, and crowned with glory and honor-and then he performs deeds that degrade him below the level of the browzing cattle. Mad lust, fierce rage, cold selfishness by turns possess a heart which was formed for pure love and truth and all noble affections. When we look at his capacities, he seems almost a God; when we look at his history, he sinks often into a companion of the brutes.

There is but one remark to be made in conclusion, and that is a practical one. No amplification could increase its deep and vital importance: "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. The spirit truly is willing, but the flesh is weak."

The Hebrew language has lain now for two thousand years mute and incapable of utterance. The "Masoretical punctuation," which professes to supply the vowels, was formed a thousand years after the language had ceased to be spoken, and disagrees in many instances with the Seventy, Origen and other writers.

He knows nothing of man who expects to convince a determined party man.

The wrath that on conviction subsides into mildness, is the wrath of a generous mind.

(From the German of Jean Paul.)

RECOLECTIONS FROM LIFE'S FAIREST HOURS FOR ITS LAST.

"GIVE me," asked Herder of his son, when wearied and parched by sickness, "give me a great thought, to refresh myself with!" But what do we generally hold forth to the poor captives who lie on the gloomy bed of sickness, when before their eyes the dew of life has already become dark and grey? Instead of the cheerful light of stars, nothing but additional images of terror. Strange and cruel it is indeed, that when man is sick unto death, the complainings and heavy emotions which had been hidden from him in the days of his health and strength, should then especially gather round him, and be freely expressed-just as if it were the part of the dying to comfort and sustain the well. I do not bring into account here the now almost obsolete absurdity of the priests, who were wont to extort from men's last hours instantaneous and ineffectual conversions. But my complaint is, that in the stifling sick-chamber there stands not one soul before the pale and powerless face to awaken a serene smile upon it; but confessors, and lawyers, and doctors, all giving their directions, and relatives bewailing all. No mighty spirit, elevated above its own private griefs, stands there to lead back the prostrate and thirsty soul to the old spring-water of cheerful remembrance, and mingle this with the last raptures which in dying men prefigure the approach of another life. But there is the sick bed narrowed to the similitude of a lidless coffin; life is portrayed to him who is just parting from it, as something momentous, by tearful lies about recovery; and the bier is arrayed to the imagination as a scaffold; and into the ears, which still remain alive when the eyes are already dead, the sharp dissonances of life are poured, instead of permitting it to die away, as an echo, into ever deeper but fainter tones. And yet man has naturally this goodness in him, that he more gladly recals and boasts the smallest joy he has imparted to a dying person, than many greater ones which he has bestowed upon those who are well; perhaps for the very reason that only in the latter case can he repeat and redouble his favors-though mortal man should take it home to himself how easily every joy may be rendered or received as a last. Our departure from life would, then, be more painful than our entrance upon it, were it not that kind mother Nature, as

usual, had provided alleviation here,-bearing her children, beguiled with sleep, softly in her cradling arms from one world to the other. For in the hours that approach the last, she causes an icy panoply of indifference towards survivors to congeal around him whom they are so sorely lamenting. And in the very closing hours-as the testimony of men awakened from trance, as well as the looks and tones of many dying persons establish-light waves of bliss float and play around the brain, which resemble nothing on earth so nearly as the pleasant feelings in which the artificially dead by magnetism bathed themselves for their recovery. Nor do we know how high these dying raptures may rise, since we are acquainted with these only through re-animated victims of trance, and therefore not in their fulness, but in their interrupted state. We are ignorant too, whether the increasing raptures and convulsions which wear away the body more than convulsions of pain, may not, in an unknown heaven, sever the immortal life from this familiar life of ours. It is a vast and momentous world-history, that of dying; but its leaves will never be opened to us on this earth.

To the "Recollections from Life's Fairest Hours for its last," which the title of this essay promises, I have only so much of history to prefix as is necessary for the understanding of it: this sketch itself may find a broader space somewhere else.

In the little village of Heim lived Gottrich Hartmann with his father, a clergyman, whom he made happy, although the old man had outlived every object of his former love. Gottrich preached in his stead, not so much to sustain his powers, which had been little affected by age, as for the sake of giving free utterance to his own fiery energies, and thereby affording the old man that peculiar pleasure which is felt when the son edifies the father.

A spirit was just beginning to burst forth and bud in him which wished to bloom poetically. He was not however like most poetical youths, one of those timid plants which bear some flowers of poetry, and, after they have fallen off, conceives under ground gross and unsightly fruits; but he was a tree that crowned its sweet, gay blossoms with a sweet variety of fruit; and these blossoming tendencies were fostered by the warmth of the modern poetic months.

His father had been formed for a poet with similar powers, but not favored by the times. For in the midst of the last century, (18th,) many a soaring, artistical spirit was compelled to stick either to the pulpit, the master's desk, or the bench of justice, because in the days of our forefathers the state thought