of being reputed saints among those who make a merit of "voluntary humility;" or who parade vices to which they are strangers for the sake of being thought men of ton and spirit? To punish these by compelling them to act the vices they dissemble would, I fear, be no punishment at all: the "saint" would soon qualify himself thus to be a "sinner;" and the rake do his best, at all events, to justify his boast of profligacy. It is hard to say how these are to be treated on any such plan. Perhaps the best way would be to get the world to resolve, that when the things hypocritically assumed are considered discreditable in themselves, those who assumed them for the enhancement of humility, shall always find themselves believed, and pass for true-spoken, not self-traducers; those who do so to gain credit among "the men about town," shall be accounted liars; thus will the "saint" get credit for his "sins," and the rake no credit for his "spirit."

How little men would like, in the former case, to be supposed to speak the truth, we have a notable example in that old story of the monk who heard the confessions of a certain cardinal. "I am the chief of sinners," said the cardinal. "It is too true," said the monk. "I have been guilty of every kind of sin," sighed the cardinal. "It is a solemn fact, my son," said the monk. “I have indulged in pride, ambition, malice, and revenge," pursued his Eminence. The provoking confessor assented without one pitying word of doubt or protest. "Why, you fool!" at last said the exasperated cardinal, “ 'you don't imagine I mean all this to the letter?" "Ho, ho!" said the monk, 66 so you have been a liar too, have you?"

Yours faithfully, and "without hypocrisy,"

R. E. H. G.

P. S. If you have an opportunity, please to take an exact measure of J. S's face. If I mistake not, you will find it at least one inch and three quarters shorter than it used to be.

LETTER XXXII.

To the Same.

May, 1844.

My dear Friend,

When a

. . . A youth of whom you knew something, though little good, young B -, has finished a short career of vice and folly by going to sea, and left his widowed mother, after all her passionate love and sacrifices, with a broken heart. What a dance the young rascal has led his guardian angel, if indeed he ever had any; though I fancy he has given up his charge long ago in despair. The mother, it seems, has not; but then a mother surely is more than angel. A strange mystery of love that parental instinct! How it outlives the worth of its object, and sets prudence, and calculation, and reason itself, all at defiance. child is cast off by all the rest of the world, there is one fond heart that still throbs and is breaking for him door is closed, there is still one left ajar. of his reeling steps at midnight, as he comes from his drunken orgies, is often watched and listened for with intense agony. Such have often been the vigils, passed amidst tears and terror, of this broken-hearted widow. Beautiful, no doubt, most beautiful, is this instinct of parental love and yet strangely akin to folly; necessary, I suppose, in this evil world, to give effect to the Divine compassion which "wills not that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance;" yet, in itself, hardly reconcilable

with reason.

and when every other There the foot-fall even

Nevertheless a time must come, I suppose, when even this instinct would be wearied out, if fathers and mothers were immortal upon earth, though not, perhaps, till the full tale of the "seventy times seven " had been duly told. Still, the time would come at last when even parental love would tire of the task, "never ending, still beginning," of witnessing alternate disobedience and

repentance; when even a father must say to the ungrateful child

"The experiment is over; never more will I be to thee a father; never more shalt thou be to me a son." Reason revolts at the absurdity of an eternal series of offences and forgivenesses.

Must it not also be so with the incorrigible children of the Father of all, who exercises a like long-suffering? However men may dispute about how the experiment is to end, — whether in ultimate annihilation, or hopeless exile from the all-cheering Presence, the spectacle of a responsible being permitted eternally to transgress and eternally to repent, is an absurdity which the intellect and the moral sense alike rebel against.

But in this world, at all events, parental love is almost never extinguished. I have met with men whom insulted patience, accompanied with severe self-control, and a sensibility feeble by nature or subdued by habit, has armed, to all visible appearance at least, with power to cast off a worthless child. I say to all visible appearance; for we cannot be quite sure. Sometimes we see that a sudden gush of reviving tenderness sweeps away as with a flood all the barriers which a stoical pride had erected, and shows us that the fountain had been dammed up, not dry. But, however it be with men, I have never yet seen a woman, - not herself criminal, who has utterly suppressed the yearning love for a child however worthless.

-

And so this poor widow sits and weeps over the cruel flight of this detestable cub, who has robbed her, ruined her, and brought down "her grey hairs with sorrow to the grave; as if his making off were not the very best thing that could befall her! She still persists in calling the young scamp's misdeeds" errors," not "crimes," and talks of his faults being rather those of his head than his heart—as if the young brute ever had a heart! But who can contradict her, or set his ruthless logic against the fallacies of maternal love?

For myself, if I were his father, I think I should bless the hour of his departure, and devoutly pray that he might get what it is likely he will get, – a round dozen before he has been a week on shipboard. I think I should feel so, I say, but I know not.

As

it is, I thank Heaven I am not his father, and so I will ease my indignation by wishing him not only the round dozen aforesaid, but a weekly repetition of the dose till he comes to a true repent

ance.

And perhaps it may be so. God often suffers vice thus to choose its own hard school, and then at length teaches it wisdom. When the schooling of boyhood is over, He has a second school for a multitude of young fools, and there, by bitter experience, enforces the lessons which milder discipline besought them to con in vain. No university for your young prodigal like that in which " swine ” are the fellow-commoners, and "famine" spreads the cloth, and the "husks," and those grudged, are the dainty fare. "The way of transgressors is hard," says the great book, and so it obviously must be if the transgressor is ever to be reclaimed at all. Having, in obedience to intense selfishness, defied all the allurements of love, it must be first taught, by a salutary severity, the unprofitableness of selfishness.

-

When I think of such cases as that of this graceless lad, whose graduation in vice, for the last four years, has been recklessly prosecuted in sight of the all-unutterable sorrows he has inflicted;

when I think that every step in his career has been deliberately taken, though every step sent a pang to his mother's heart — chasing sleep from her couch, and making her grey before the time, - I know not whether to laugh or be indignant at the cant of that pseudo-philanthropy which persists in regarding hardened crime and fixed vice as still quite amenable to the law of kindness, and pleads for such a relaxation of penal discipline as in fact would render all penal discipline a mockery. All needless and unprofitable severity, who would not wish, on all grounds, to avoid? But as to indulgence and kindness, can any system of penal discipline afford to show the thousandth part of the longsuffering which a hardened criminal has generally set at defiance ? A likely matter, that honeyed words and nursery expostulations will operate on those who have, a thousand times, wrung the fibres of a mother's heart, and set at naught her tears of anguish ; trampled under foot all the sanctities of home, and slept sound,

and laughed, and sung, and drunk, spite of the haunting spectacle of the comprehensive ruin they have spread around them! This is to imagine that the ice which would not relent to the sun, will melt in the beams of the aurora borealis. Nothing but the "furnace" of affliction, seven times heated, can usually perform the first part of the process by which the adamant of a selfish heart is to be softened; and that is the method God's providence generally takes. After that, the "law of kindness"

understood.

may be

Hardships at sea, wreck, pinching want, captivity, sickness on a foreign shore, and, together with one or other of these, the biting memories of that love he has wronged, and that home he has lost, may be the appointed "rod and ferula" to bring this poor lad, as they have thousands more, to himself.

That the writer of the note you have inclosed should talk of the "dry repellant character " of the discussions involved in the question of the truth of Christianity, and say that they are more likely to make infidels than to reclaim them, is not wonderful; for he is evidently almost an infidel already, at least inclined to be one; - and I never knew any young gentlemen so inclined, that could not, like most people whose wills have bribed their understandings, find arguments to suit them. But that you should seem to give any countenance to the nonsense that is talked on the subject in the present day, does, I confess, surprise me. You fear, you say, that so much "thorny" argument as to the “evi