attack or the enticement of every vice; and yielding unresistingly to those dark and mysterious impulses which lead, almost unconsciously, from errors to crimes; from almost venial faults, to degrees of guilt for which there is no hope of pardon from men, nor prospect of aught but justice from God. Want of occupation (said Spinola) is enough to kill the ablest general of us all." Idleness has much the same deadly effect upon every one who stoops to drink of her poisoned cup. Through the enervated body, she strangles the enervated and listless mind; and deadens the perceptions of evil. The idle man sees neither ill nor good with the eyes of him whose moments belong to healthy activity; his car heeds not the pleasant sounds of virtue, and he even follows those of vice more in the deaf sleep of listlessness, than awake with the spirit of consciousness and resistance. Idleness is not merely the parent of all other evil habits, but the mother, too, of many miseries. She is alike the progenitor of crimes, and the cause of misfortunes; she is, at the same moment, the creator of guilty action and avenging sorrow; in her train follows every vice, and in her company lingers every wretchedness. There is no slave so thoroughly degraded as he who is chained to her immovable car; no wretch so stricken as he who hopelessly acknowledges the irresistibility of her sway. To him there is nothing beautiful in creation, nothing attractive in intellect; the works of master minds, and the golden lines of inspired poets, are to him unintelligible. He has no conception that literature, or the cultivation of any intellectual pursuit, can possess gratifications worth the trouble of seeking after; his delights are all sensual, his friendships all follies. If he ever exert himself, it is to sneer at his superiors in wisdom; he does not live at all; he vegetates selfishly, without a thought, or an affection, or an attachment to bestow on aught around him. Everything connected with him seems smitten with a blight that exhales from his own pores; he is in no respect superior to swine; but he is quite as offensive, and never half so useful. Age brings no lessons of profit to such a man, nor experience any light from the past to guide him in the future; he stands in society, and among his brother men, like the plant named by the French Le Mauvais Voisin, in whose neighbourhood nothing will grow that is fair, nothing flourish that has scent. Like that bad herb, he rears a conceited head; he is even fool enough to take pride in the solitariness to which he is condemned; till his existence, burdensome to himself, and wearying to others, may at length be vegetably described as like the cacalia ficoides, which are sour in the morning, tasteless at noon, and bitter in the evening.

The one evil habit of idleness exposes him, who is the unhappy subject of it, to become the victim of every other evil habit which is the offspring of so foul a mother. With men of weak minds habit of any sort stands for reason; they have no other guide but custom; it is their whole law and entire prophets; and by the indulgence of such habits as weak and inactive men generally affect, their moral strength is poisoned by an Upas, for which bane there is no antidote but through self-exertion. These men sit with their hands in their bosom, and wonder that prosperity does not fall in their way. They look for fortune, as the ancients used to look for silk, growing on the leaves of

trees; but fortunes and silk are the produce of the honest worm called industry, and are not to be had for the mere looking after.

Yes, show me a man of evil habits, and I know at once that that man is thoroughly indolent by nature; he has put on that which he cannot throw off as he can his dress, when it is no longer creditable nor dignified to wear it. Habit is not merely the reason of fools, but their tyrant also, and is never more imperious than when it assumes a shape of evil. It impels its victims to pursuits which are no longer productive of pleasure; if neglected, it brings down upon its object a load of misery and anxiety, a yearning after old vices, with desire, perhaps, to avoid them, and bitterness of spirit engendered by weakness of capacity. If pursued, and its powerful attractions followed, a moral scourge chastises him who has not the courage to close his eyes against false blandishments, nor sense to feel that his pleasures are only paths to retributive punishment. Mentally, as well as corporeally, can its fatal effects be traced; for it destroys the mind, as well as defaces the temple, in which the mind has its tabernacle. Habits become passions, and evil passions corrode without ceasing; they never slumber, nor are slow to act. Their influence is around and about us, like the atmosphere of some evil spirit; and even when we least think of them, their effects are working within us to a deadly end. There was a lady in the court of Queen Elizabeth, on whose nervous system a rose had such strange antipathetical influence, that one laid on her cheek when sleeping would raise a blister there. With our evil passions the consequences are often of a scarcely dissimilar nature; for they are active while we sleep, and if we do but dream of them they will blister our minds. Lord Chesterfield, who was the general Mephistophiles to all the unhappy youth of his age, and the influence of whose teaching, even upon society of the present day, is in a great degree more powerful than any of us are ready to allow, denies the effects of a vicious carcer upon the mind of him who is abandoned to it. He thinks a man may drain Circe's deepest cup, and remain unchanged by the potency of the draught. Self-possession, and a cold, stony, hypocritical heart, form a mantle triple-piled which shall defend, or at least screen him form the searching eyes of the world. Enfolded in this, he maintains that a man may be gentlemanlike even in his vices. In one sense he may; he may be less coarse than some of his less cultivated comrades in iniquity, but he is not on that account a less vicious person; he drinks large draughts of vice out of a golden cup, and looks with a sensation of shocked delicacy on less costly offenders. For our own parts, we have no predilection for poison, because it is presented to us in a chased goblet.

The slave of evil habits, whose moral strength is injured or lost by the indulgence of his favourite passion, or by yielding to his besetting sin, may yet be desirous of bursting asunder the ignoble bonds by which he is held captive here, and his immortal soul placed in danger hereafter. His spirit, perhaps, lies crushed under the weight of fetters which he has himself assumed, but which he cannot strike off at will he is oppressed by a burden which he voluntarily raised, but which he cannot cast down. The old man of the mountain rides upon his neck,

and he, like another Sinbad, feels his tyrant, but is ignorant how to get rid of him. Yet is there a way of escape, and a harbour of refuge -a means of fleeing, and a defence from pursuit; and all comprised under the words-God's all-sufficient grace. This grace, though con-stantly offered, must however be purchased, and its attainment may be had at no greater cost than courage, humility, determination, activity, watchfulness, and prayer-qualities and duties which may be expressed by the single term sincerity, and whose virtue rests upon repentance and faith. It is not sufficient merely to desire this grace; God requires that you should seek it. If the salvation of man lay merely in the wishing for it, the sacrifice of the cross had never been needed by a guilty world. He who would play upon the flute must do something more than breathe idly through its mouth-piece; he must move his fingers before he will succeed in producing harmony, and move them, too, according to the laws of music, if he would not have the result in discord rather than in the agreement of sweet sounds.

For a man to obtain a knowledge of his besetting sin is a matter of no great difficulty; the difficulty lies rather in his reluctance to acknowledge, than in his means of discovery. The heart of man is said to be like water, and will reflect the counterfeit resemblance of him who gazes into its depths. Through this we may observe all our own faults in others; certain of this, that if those faults appear to have less of vitality or activity in ourselves than in those whose measure of human error we are computing, the reason is to be found in no selfexcellence nor righteousness of our own, but in the absence of the peculiar temptation whose poisonous warmth is alone wanting to raise the bad seed into rankness of growth, and a flowering of evil. If he have, indeed, doubts as to the sin which most nearly threatens to slay him, and which he hardly can have, let him acknowledge that he has broken the whole law of God; for sin is of that overwhelming and damning nature, that there is scarcely one that can be named, but in which, if a man transgress, he breaketh both tables of the law. It seems, perhaps, paradoxical to say that the infraction of one commandment is the breaking of all, and yet nothing is more susceptible of convincing proof. The man who sins in one, sins in the total. He is guilty of idolatry, for he has other gods than the true God, and worships an image of evil set up in his own heart. He uses the Lord's name vainly, and the desecration of His Sabbath is nothing to him, who disregards any other portion of the commandments which he is enjoined to observe. He dishonours his parents by neglecting the lessons of virtue which they have taught him. His sin is a violation of faith; it is, whatever its nature, committed for the sake of some gain or advantage, and he therefore takes that, over which he has no right of proprietorship. Through its commission he beareth false witness against his neighbour; for his crime causeth even the righteous man to be regarded with distrust. And, finally, he who has committed a sin in pursuit of an advantage to the possession of which he had no claim, has already coveted what was at least not his own, and thus he completes the infringement of the whole law, by transgressing only in one of its portions.

Sin, once known and acknowledged, is an open enemy, with whom to contend is always to defeat. It is not, however, an angel with whom we may be permitted to come in contact, and vanquish by grasping. It is to be subdued by flight, as the youngest of the Horatii gained his triumph over his mighty Alban foes: he fled, and when he looked back it was to strike, and again to resume his flight, not to admire his enemy, and be conquered while he gazed. So should we avoid sin— shun not its aspect only, but its very locality; yet be armed, watchful, and prepared, keeping it at a distance, and striking it dead at our feet when it comes within arm's length, and range of our weapon.

If evil habits take less of the form of active and open enemies, they are to be met by the exercise of the antagonizing virtue; if they lurk in our thoughts, direct the mind to the contemplation of heavenly things; and a mind thus disciplined will soon be taught to love the occupation. Diligent employment is the best exorciser of the fiends that trouble men in our modern days. No man enjoys better health than he who has not leisure to be ill; and none are safer against the daily and hourly temptations of sin than they who have duties to perform, and who fulfill their allotted tasks in such guise, that the blessing of God follows them as surely as the life-giving light of day succeeds to night. This fact concerns the young, that they should be active; and the old, that they faint not, but be active too, to the end. The latter are sometimes wont to plume themselves upon having abandoned the errors of youth, while they are forgetful that there are such things as the vices of old age. The man who merely exchanges one for the other would clear a dove-cote for owls to roost in.

The author of the book entitled "Moral Strength" will be found a safe guide and adviser to those who are appalled at the multitude of their evil habits, and who know not how to overcome them-men, like the last survivor at Thermopyle, who, bleeding and faint, raised himself to gaze at the numberless might of his foes, and who sank back exclaiming, "There are too many of them!" To such men he appears as the renovator of moral strength, by teaching them the application of religious principles. He shows how divine grace operates in the destruction of evil habits, and how the spirit may be made to triumph over the flesh; how prayer may purchase the influence of the Holy Spirit; and how the latter not only subjugates sin, but cultivates virtues of a contrary character to the prevailing evil of the heart;-thence the happiness arising from the putting away of sin, and the gradual increase of moral strength; and, finally, the important connexion between the subjugation of evil propensities, and the attainment of eternal happiness. None will deny the paramount importance of this subject to none can such a work be without interest; the author of which deserves to rank in a distinguished place among the teachers and benefactors of the world; among the men from whom we inherit our laws, and the women to whom we are indebted for our morals.

J. DORAN.

435

SELF-SUFFICIENCY OF NONCONFORMITY,

DR. WARDLAW'S SOPHISTRIES.

In the examination of the efficiency of the voluntary principle, Dr. Wardlaw avoids as much as possible any appeal to statistics; his desire being, as he professes, to settle maxims and doctrines independently of collateral circumstances. We do not deny that such a course as this is, in a multitude of cases, praiseworthy and justifiable; though we are disposed to question whether it be so here. The great fault in these lectures is the multiplicity of gratuitous assumptions which they contain. It is easy for a person to speak of the voluntary principle, and, at the same time, to attach to it a private interpretation; but, first of all, it is necessary that a person should demonstrate to us that voluntaryism is a principle, and not an idle whim or a theoretical phantom, sounding well in words, but coming to nought when drawn out in fact and practice. We maintain that the lecturer has not made it plain that voluntaryism is a principle, nor will he easily do so, as long as it admits of a variety of meanings.

It is not fair dealing towards Churchmen for the adversaries of their establishment to refuse appeal to statistics, when the former put so much stress upon them-and with good reason, too; for we see not how it is possible to discuss the question of an adequate or inadequate supply of the means and ordinances of the religion of Christ to a given population without this appeal. It cannot be doubted that the system which is sanctioned by divine authority, whatsoever it be, must, when in operation, be fully efficacious to this supply. Still, it is a fair presumption against the divine authority of any system, if we see a system exhibiting an egregious failure in this respect; and the question as to failure or success can be determined by an appeal to statistics alone: and we deem it very prudent that, for their own sakes, Dissenters are slow to admit of this determinator.

The discussion now upon hand is a complete one, rather than a simple. It relates not to one set of means, but to a double set; to one set of means for the furtherance of another set. We apprehend that the lecturer, in common with others of his school, is too apt to confound the two. The means appointed for regenerating, renovating, and saving men, are not wrapped up either in voluntaryism or in establishments, as such. These are but secondary means; means-submeans. Here we have to do with primary means; and these means are the ministry, doctrines, ordinances, and discipline of the Church; in other words, the Church herself. The secondary means we have spoken of are indispensable to impart publicity, efficacy, and extension to the primary ones; at the same time they are no constituent parts thereof, nor do they, necessarily, the one contain the other. The Church may contain in her, or coincide with, either voluntaryism or national establishment; while voluntaryism or national establishment may not contain in it, or coincide with, the Church. If we are directed to the New Testament, we assert, most positively, that the primary means are those that are therein settled, and not the secondary. Sta