emn trifling with oaths of office which is so prevalent. How many and how lamentable are the delinquencies which every day stare us in the face, especially with regard to profane swearing, drunkenness, tavern-haunting, and violations of the Sabbath. The fact that presentments are so rare, is not for want of informing officers-nor is it because few viola

tious of the law come to their knowledge-nor yet because their oath does not bind them to present transgressors. It is owing to a laxness of principle in the community, which connives at habitual delinquency; and still more, (we grieve to say it,) to the voice of public opinion, which frowns upon the man who ventures to be faithful to his trust.

Illustrations and arguments thicken upon us as we advance. What mental reservations, what high colouring of facts, what self-coutradictions, and what jesuitical evasions are observable in courts of justice, in despite of all the guards that can be placed around the witnesses' bench, by public interest and legal penalties. What shocking examples of fraud and perjury might be collected by scores and hundreds from the records of bankruptcy in our own country, and what barefaced swindling in the traffic of a depreciated currenсу.

Now what does all this go to prove? The existence of something certainly, as different from the boasted innate rectitude of man, as light is from darkness. What is it that renders one oath more sacred than another? In the eye of God there is no difference between taking him to record in the custom-house, and the sanctuary of justice; or between an entry of goods, and the presentment of a Sabbath breaker, or the disclosures of a bankrupt, or the oath of a coroner's panel. If then it is a fact, (and who can deny it,) that the most solemn oaths, which human ingenuity has been able to devise, are insufficient to bind the conscience in cases where adhering to them becomes unpopu

lar, or when present interest seems strongly to demand the violation of them; in what light does this present our fallen nature? Verily the whole head is sick and the whole heart faint!

But we must return to Dr. C. with an apology for having detained the reader even for a short time, with our own speculations. The last example by which he undertakes to show, that it may be nothing better than mere selfishness which links human beings together in society, is brought forward in the following extract, and is, in our view, peculiarly apposite :

"This may be seen, in all its perfection, among the leagued and sworn banditti of the highway; who, while execrated by society at large for the compact of iniqui ty into which they have entered, can

maintain the most heroic fidelity to the virtues of their own brotherhood-and be, in every way, as lofty and as chivalric with their points of honour, as we are with ours; and elevate as indignant a voice against the worthlessness of him who could betray the secrets of their association, or break up any of the securities by which it was held together. And, in like manner, may we be the members of a wider combination, yet brought together by the tie of reciprocal interest; and all the virtues essential to the existence, or to the good of such a combination, may come to be idolized amongst us; and the breath of human applause may fan them into a lustre of splendid estimation; and yet the good man of society on earth be, in common with all his fellows, an utter outcast from the society of heaven-with his heart altogether bereft of that allegiance to God which forms the reigning principle of his unfallen creation and in a state of entire destitution either as to that love of the Supreme Being, or as to that disinterested love of those around us. which form the graces and the virtue of eternity."-pp. 72, 73.

We know of nothing more solemn or better calculated to fasten conviction upon the consciences of men, who have been accustomed to estimate their characters in the sight of God, by the variable standard of human society, than the closing appeal of this powerful discourse. But we can only find room for a few sentences :

"How wide is the operation of selfishness on the one hand,and how limited is the

operation of abstract principle on the other, it were difficult to determine; and such a labyrinth to man is his owe heart, that he may be utterly unable, from his own consciousness, to answer this question. But your consciousness may perhaps inform you distinctly enough, how little a share the will of God has in the way of influence, on any of your doings. Your own sense and memory of what passes within you, may charge you with the truth of this monstrous indictment-that you live without God in the world; that self is the

divinity you have all along worshipped, and your very virtues are so many offer ings of reverence at her shrine. If such be in fact, the nakedness of your spiritual condition, is it not high time, we ask, that you should awaken out of this delusion and shake the lying spirit of deep and beavy slumber away from you?"

"This then, is the terminating object of all the experience, that we have tried to set before you. We want it to be a school master to bring you unto Christ. We want you to turn your eyes inwardly upon yourselves; and there to bebold a character without one trace or lineament of godliness

-there to behold how worthless in their substance, are even those virtues, which look so imposing in their semblance and their display, and draw around them here, a popularity and an applause, which will all be dissipated into nothing, when hereafter they are brought up for examination to the judgment seat."-pp. 73, 74, 75.

The fourth discourse in the present series, is entitled The guilt of dishonesty not to be estimated by the gain of it. From Luke xvi. 10: He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least, is unjust also in much." After some very striking general observations upon the proneness of our nature, to estimate the enormity of injustice, by the degree of actual suffering which it causes, rather than by the rule which our Lord has here given us, Dr. C. proposes first, to elucidate the principle of the text, and then to consider its practical results. The great principle, he observes, is this:-" that 'he who has sinned, though to a small amount, in respect of the fruit of his transgression-provided he has done so by passing over a forbidden limit, which was distinctly known to him, has, in the act of doing so, incurred a full condemnation in respect of the

fruit of his transgression." "That eternal line which separates the right from the wrong, is just as effectually broken over by a small act of injustice, as by a large one." Nothing can be more unscriptural than to make criminality an affair of product rather than principle, and thus to weigh the morality of a character in the same arithmetical balance, with number and with magnitude. It is in crossing the line, and not in the act of going onward, that the contest in the transgressor's bosom between right and wrong is decided. When a man has once overleaped the bounds rier to obstruct his progress. Beof rectitude, justice has no other bartween a fraud of a few cents and one of a thousand dollars, there may intervene severe compunctions of conscience, or humanity may recoil, or the dread of exposure may hold the transgressor in check; but all this is within the enemies' lines. None of these things constitute the limits "with which a man's truth, or honesty has to do;" for in the case supposed, they have already been given ples the moment he passed over, and up. The man forfeited his princithough he may hover all his days in the neighbourhood of that line, he is in the eye of God a great transgressor; for it is not with justice as with The man who, other circumstances generosity and some other virtues. being equal, gives away an hundred pounds in charity, may be reckoned bour, who gives but fifty; but when doubly more generous than his neigh

we come to measure the demerit of ply. It cannot be said, that he who injustice, the same rule will not apdefrauds his neighbour to the amount of fifty pounds, is only half as criminal as another who cheats him out of an hundred.

"As it respects the materiel of injustice, the question resolves itself into a mere the morale of injustice, the computation is computation of quantity. As it respects upon other principles. It is upon the latter that our Saviour pronounces himself. And he gives us to understand, that a very humble degree of the former may indicate

the latter in all its atrocity. He stands on the breach between lawful and unlawful;

and he tells us, that the man who enters by a single footstep on the forbidden ground, immediately gathers upon his person the full hue and character of guilti ness. He admits uo extenuation of the lesser acts of dishonesty. He does not make right pass into wrong, by a gradual melting of the one into the other. He does not thus obliterate the distinctions of morality. There is no shading off at the margin of guilt, but a clear and vigorous delineation. It is not by a gentle transition that a man steps over from honesty to dishonesty. There is between them a wall rising up unto heaven; and the high authority of heaven must be stormed ere one inch of entrance can be made into the

region of iniquity. The morality of the Saviour never leads him to gloss over the beginnings of crime. His object ever is, as in the text before us, to fortify the limit, to cast a rampart of exclusion around the whole territory of guilt, and to rear it before the eye of man in such characters of strength and sacredness, as should make them feel that it is impregnable."—pp. 88,

89.

There is great discrimination, as well as force and eloquence in this short extract, and we have rarely met with any thing, which we think more worthy of being remembered by those who are concerned in the education of children. Prone as children are, from a very early age, to think that there cannot be much harm in a trifling theft, or in a falsehood that injures nobody; they should be brought to see as soon as possible, that guilt is not to be measured by any such rule; but that it lies in any, even the least deviation from perfect rectitude. It is impossible to estimate the amount of crimes aud sufferings, which have resulted, from a disregard to this great principle, in families and schools.

But to proceed with our analysis: another reason suggested by Dr. C. why he who is unfaithful in the least, incurs a similar condemnation with one who is unfaithful in much-is this, that the smallness of the gain, so far from diminishing the guilt, is in fact a circumstance of aggravation. The less the advantage, the weaker the temptation, and of course, the smaller the price, for which a man barters away his conscience; the very

But we must hasten to the practical results of the general principle laid down by our author in this discourse. There cannot, he well observes, be a stronger possible illustration, than the very first act of retribution in the history of our species. What was it that invested the simple eating of an apple, with such mighty consequences? Whether we can answer all the questions that naturally grow out of this one, or not, we may learn at least, how dangerous a thing it is, to tamper with any of God's requirements, or prohibitions. By eating of the tree of good and evil, a plain command of Jehovah was broken; and if the act itself was a trifle, how aggravated was the guilt, when for such a trifle, the high authority of Heaven was despised and trampled under foot? "The attribute of truth likewise, stood pledged for the fulfilment of the threatening; and the very insignificancy of the deed which provoked the execution of it, gives a sublimer character to the certainty of the fulfilment.”

"We know how much this trait, in the dealings of God with man, has been the jeer of infidelity. But in all this ridicule, there is truly nothing else than the grossness of materialism. Had Adam, instead of plucking one single apple from the forbidden tree, been armed with the power

of a malignant spicit, and spread a wanton havoc over the face of paradise, and spoiled the garden of its loveliness, and been able to mar and to deform the whole of that terrestrial creation over which God had so

recently rejoiced-the punishment he sustained would have looked, to these arithmeticial moralists, a more adequate return for the offence of which he had been guilty. They cannot see how the moral lesson rises in greatness, just in proportion to the bumility of the material

accompaniments-and how it wraps a sublimer glory around the holiness of the Godhend and how from the transaction, such as it is, the conclusion cometh forth more nakedly, and, therefore, more impressively, that it is an evil and a bitter thing to sin against the Lawgiver.”—pp. 96, 97.

Now if a single offence by our first parents, exiled them immediately from paradise, and brought in such a deluge of woe upon the countless millions of their posterity, what ought eyery sinner to think of his own danger, when his whole life has been one continued act of disobedience?

"There is in the history of the first transgression, a great and universal moral. It tells us that no sin is small."

"It holds out a most alarming disclosure of the charge that is against us; and makes it manifest to the conscience of him who is awakened thereby, that, unless God himself point out a way of escape, we are indeed most hopelessly sunk in condemnation. And seeing that such wrath went out from the sanctuary of this unchangeable God, on the one offence of our first parents, it irresistably follows,

that if we, manifold in guilt, take not ourselves to his appointed way of reconciliation-if we refuse the overtures of Him, who then so visited the one offence through which all are dead, but is now laying before us all that free gift, which is of many offences unto justification-in other words, if we will not enter into peace through the offered Mediator, how much greater must be the wrath that abideth on us?"-p. 100.

The closing pages of this discourse are highly practical and evangelical. They are worthy of being imprinted upon the memory and the heart of every christian; and no one, we conceive, can deserve the name of a christian, who disregards the limits between right and wrong even in little things, or who is unjust even in that which is least.

"But without religion among the people, justice will never be in extensive operation as a moral principle. A vast proportion of the species will be as unjust as the vigilance and the severities of law allow them to be. A thousand petty dishon. esties, which never will, and never can be

brought within the cognizance of any of our courts of administration, will still continue Vol. 4.-No. I.

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England; and concludes with two or three sections on the means now in operation for dissipating this ignorance, together with some general considerations connected with the maiu subject of the Essay. These form the great outline of the work; but it is every where interspersed with valuable remarks on various collateral topics. Indeed the author appears to have intended this Essay, as a deposit for his reflections on whatever relates in any way to the present intellectual state of mankind; and he seems to have followed the current of his thoughts without much regard to order, and without having taken any great pains to prune and to shape his sentiments so as to bear exactly upon the individual point before him, and upon nothing else. He usually throws together such a multitude of important considerations, as are sure to produce an overwhelming conviction of the justness of his conclusion ; while the impression left on the mind, of the exact manner in which you have arrived at this conclusion, is commonly not very distinct, certainly much less so than that which remains after reading a chapter in a writer like Paley.

It is not our aim to give a minute account of this Essay. So full is it of valuable matter, and so peculiarly is it put together, that a condensed and yet complete analysis of it would be next to impossible. Those only who read (perhaps we might better say, study) the volume through, will be able to appreciate its excellence. In our extracts therefore, we expect to do little more than to give specimens of his manner, and awaken attention to a few of the important ideas.

In the part of the Essay devoted to a historical view of Popular Ignorance, great prominence is every where given to the idea that the intellectual elevation of a few individuals is no evidence of an improved state of the great mass of the population; and that in this particular many are deplorably deceived. While speaking