are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those, who by stealth, and at midnight, labour in this work of hell, foul and dark, as may become the arti'ficers of such instru ments of misery and torture. Let that spot be purified, or let it cease to be of New-England. Let it be purified, or let it be set aside from the christian world; let it be put out of the circle of human sympathies and human regards; and let civilized man henceforth have no communion with it.

I would invoke those who fill the seats of justice, and all who minister at her altar, that they execute the wholesome and necessary severity of the law. I invoke the ministers of our religion that they proclaim its denunciation of these crimes, and add its solemn sanctions to the authority of human laws. If the pulpit be silent, whenever, or wherever there may be a sinner, bloody with this guilt, within the hearing of its voice, the pulpit is false to its trust.

I call on the fair merchant, who has reaped his harvest upon the seas, that he assist in scourging from those seas the worst pirates that ever infested them. That ocean which seems to wave with a gentle magnificence, to waft the burdens of an honest commerce, and to roll its treasures with a conscious pride; that ocean which hardy industry regards, even when the winds have ruffled its surface, as a field of grateful toil; what is it to the victim of this oppression when he is brought to its shores, and looks forth upon it for the first time, from beneath chains, and bleeding with stripes?-What is it to him, but a wide spread prospect of suffering, anguish, and death-Nor do the skies smile longer; nor is the air fragrant to him. The sun is cast down from heaven. An inhuman and cursed traffick has cut him off in his manhood, or in his youth, from every enjoyment belonging to his being, and every blessing which his Creator intended for him.

LESSON LXXIX.

Report of an adjudged case, not to be found in any of the books. -COWPER.

BETWEEN Nose and Eyes a strange contest arose;
The spectacles set them unhappily wrong;
The point in dispute was, as all the world knows,
To which the said spectacles ought to belong.

So Tongue was the lawyer, and argued the cause,
With a great deal of skill, and a wig full of learning,
While chief baron Ear sat to balance the laws,

So famed for his talent in nicely discerning.

"In behalf of the Nose, it will quickly appear,

And your lordship" he said "will undoubtedly find, That the Nose has had spectacles always to wear, Which amounts to possession time out of mind.”

Then holding the spectacles up to the court

"Your lordship observes they are made with a straddle, As wide as the ridge of the Nose is! in short, Designed to sit close to it, just like a saddle. "Again, would your worship a moment suppose ("Tis a case that has happened, and may be again) That the visage or countenance had not a Nose Pray, who would, or who could, wear spectacles then?

On the whole it appears, and my argument shows With a reasoning the court will never condemn, That the spectacles plainly were made for the Nose, And the Nose was as plainly intended for them." Then, shifting his side, (as a lawyer knows how) He pleaded again in behalf of the Eyes: But what were his arguments few people know, For the court did not think they were equally wise.

So his lordship decreed, with a grave, solemn tone,
Decisive and clear, without one if or but
That whenever the Nose put his spectacles on,
By day-light or candle-light,-Eyes should be shut!

LESSON LXXX.

Song of Rebecca, the Jewess.-AUTHOR OF IVANHOE.

When Israel, of the Lord beloved,
Out from the land of bondage came,
Her father's God before her moved,
An awful guide in smoke and flame.

By day, along the astonished lands,
The cloudy pillar glided slow;
By night, Arabia's crimsoned sands
Returned the fiery column's glow.

There rose the choral hymn of praise,
And trump and timbrel answered keen;
And Zion's daughters poured their lays,
With Priest's and Warriour's voice between.
No portents now our foes amaze,
Forsaken Israel wanders lone;
Our fathers would not know thy ways,
And thou hast left them to their own.

But present still, though not unseen!
When brightly shines the prosperous day,
Be thoughts of Thee a cloudy screen
To temper the deceitful ray:

And, oh! where stoops on Judah's path
In shade and storm the frequent night,
Be thou long-suffering, slow to wrath,
A burning and a shining light!

Our harps we left by Babel's streams,
The tyrant's jest, the Gentile's scorn;
No censer round our altar beams,
And mute are timbrel, trump, and horn.
But Thou hast said, the blood of goat,
The flesh of rams I will not prize,
A contrite heart, an humble thought,
Are mine accepted sacrifice.

LESSON LXXXI.

On the reasonableness of Christian faith.-BUCKMINSTER.

It is a common artifice, of those who wish to depreciate the value of this essential principle of a christian's life, to represent faith as something opposed to reason. So far is this from being true, that faith is, in fact, the most reasonable thing in the world; and, wherever religion is not concerned, the universal practice of mankind evinces, that such a principle is indispensable to the most common exercise of the

understanding, and to the daily conduct of life. Faith is reasonable, because it is the involuntary homage which the mind pays to the preponderance of evidence. Faith, that is not founded on testimony, is no longer faith.

And as it is sufficient evidence only, on which a rational faith can be supported, so if the whole of this evidence is intelligibly presented to a sound understanding, it will not fail to command belief. An eye, not affected by disease, easily distinguishes colours; and we unavoidably believe the existence of the objects within the sphere of its vision. Now the laws of moral probability are just as sure as the laws of vision. That the same exhibition of facts, or the same process of reasoning, does not produce equal conviction on different minds, is not more surprising than that the same glasses will not make objects equally distinct to eyes differently affected. But to conclude, from this variety of effect, that the objects presented do not exist, or that the laws of vision are ill-founded and absurd, would be no more unreasonable than to assume the folly of religious faith, or to doubt the rational conviction of a pious and impartial inquirer, merely because the whole world are not believers.

We cannot wonder, that the evidences, on which our christian faith is built, do not produce universal conviction, when we remember, that this is a religion, which contradicts many of the selfish propensities of the heart, and is at war with all the lusts to which we are habitually enslaved. It is a religion, which condemns many of our habits, and requires us to moderate our growing attachment to a world we cannot bear to leave; a religion, which often opposes our passions, which shows us the folly of our fondest expectations, which alarms our sleeping fears, undervalues the objects of our estimation, requires the surrender of our prejudices, and makes it necessary for us to be in readiness to yield up even our comforts and our life.

Astonishing would it be, indeed, if a. system like this should command universal belief, if prejudice should have nothing to object, captiousness nothing to cavil at, and indifference no excuses. Astonishing, indeed, would it be, if the evidences of such a revelation should be received, with equal facility, by the worldly and the spiritual, the careless and the inquisitive, the proud and the humble, the ambitious and the unaspiring, the man immersed in pleasure and dissipation, and the man who has been long disciplined in the school of disappointment and affliction.

Neither is religious faith unreasonable, because it includes miraculous events, nor because it embraces a series of truths, which no individual reason could have ascertained, or of which it may not, even now, see the necessity. It is on this account, however, that we so often hear faith opposed to reason; but, on the same principle, faith in any extraordinary occurrence would be opposed to reason.

The only objection to the credibility of miracles is, that they are contrary to general experience; for to say, that they are contrary to universal experience, is to assume the very fact in question. Because they are supernatural, no testimony, it is maintained, can make it reasonable to believe them. This would not be just, even if the miracles which religious faith embraces were separate, insulated facts, which had no connexions with any other interesting truths; much less when they make part of a grand system, altogether worthy the interposition of God to establish.

The extraordinary nature of miraculous facts, considered by themselves, is, it is true, a presumption against them, but a presumption, which sufficient testimony ought as fairly to remove, as it does remove the previous improbability of ordinary facts, not supernatural. A man, born and living within the tropicks, who had never seen water congealed, would no doubt think it a very strange story, if a traveller from the north should assure him, that the same substance, which he had always seen liquid, was every year, in other countries, converted into a solid mass capable of sustaining the greatest weights.

What could more decisively contradict all the experience of the tropical inhabitant, and even the experience of those with whom he had always been connected? Yet should we not think it very unreasonable, if he should, in this case, persist in discrediting the testimony even of a single man, whose veracity he had no reason to suspect, and much more, if he should persist in opposition to the concurrent and continually increasing testimony of numbers? Let this be an illustration of the reasonableness of your faith in miracles.

As it respects the credibility of revelation, you have this alternative. Will you believe, that the pure system of christian faith, which appeared eighteen hundred years ago, in one of the obscurest regions of the Roman empire, at the moment of the highest mental cultivation and of the lowest moral degeneracy, which superseded at once all the curious