one thing without which it could not exist, or if existing must soon come to an end, is marriage, under whatever law or with whatever rites it may be celebrated, considered as the union of sexes for the purpose of rearing up offspring, and continuing the race. This is the common centre of human affections, and in close connexion with it, derived from it, and tending towards it, are all the other ties that bind the race together. Without this there would be none of the dear relations of parental and filial love, none of the deep affection of brotherhood, and none of the genial warmth of other degrees of consanguinity, lessening indeed as they become more widely severed, but still affording a claim for kindness and an assurance of regard, that otherwise would not exist, and therefore ill exchanged for total separation.

Friendship, where it is warm, stable, and disinterested, may be indeed as close a bond of union as any but the most intimate of these ties of kindred; but these it can never equal, much less supersede. Even in the glowing language of eulogy, the highest praise that can be bestowed upon the truest friendship, is found in comparing it to the affection of some of these near relations. To love one like a brother, to be dear as one's own son, or as a father, are expressions thus used, and in this very use of them the superiority of the affection thus employed for bestowing the highest commendation is fully though tacitly recognised.

This indeed must be the case; for there is in the mind a strong though mysterious association mingled with these ties, that no attachment of mere friendship can ever possess. However great and sincere this last may be, still upon reflection we cannot but perceive, that it is in some measure fortuitous, the result of the accidents of the world bringing kindred minds together, that other accidents might equally well have kept separate. And connected with this there is something, however vague and feeble, of a feeling, that what passing events have done, they may likewise undo;

and that the fabric they have reared, however fair and solid it may seem, may by the same agency be crumbled into dust, and scattered to the winds. In the affection of near kindred, on the contrary, there is something superior to this work of time and opportunity. The thought that to one we owe our being, that another derives his being from us, that in the veins of yet another flows the same mingled tide of life that warms our own heart, and lends its impulse to all our feelings, presents us with something permanent and substantial; a thing that cannot be otherwise, however the world around us may change. The immediate agency of the Divinity seems to be present to these ties, and to give to the affections thence resulting a sacred purity and strength, that can belong to no production of the world.

The tie of marriage is more sacred and more intimate than these, more full of the energies of life and the warmth of feeling. The language of praise has never prostituted the love belonging to this union to express the affection belonging to any less intimate connexion. We may indeed hear of loving a friend like a father, a brother, or a son, but never of loving one like a husband or a wife. This love belongs exclusively to its own state, and is the highest that God has given to the intercourse of his creatures. "For this shall a man leave father and mother, and cleave unto his wife, and they two shall become one flesh."

One who voluntarily leads a life of celibacy rejects this most important and blissful of all the connexions man can form in society, and also the one next to it in tenderness and durability, that which binds a parent to his children; and to say that such a one can enjoy as much happiness, other circumstances being equal, as one who forms these connexions, is no less a solecism, than it would be, in mathematics, to affirm that a part might be equal to the whole.

In single life, a man may enjoy the other affections of kindred and the pleasures of friendship; but for these he is

indebted to that connexion in others, which he rejects for himself; and in thus deriving these enjoyments, and even his capacity to enjoy them, without doing his part to perpetuate society, and bestow upon others in its course that which it has afforded to him, he appears like a recreant ingrate, one willing to receive favours, and ever dependent upon them, but not willing to repay them, or confer them upon others. This argues a selfishness, which may well lead us to doubt, whether he indeed draws from those relations which he does possess, the full measure of satisfaction they are capable of affording; whether there is not in him a callousness of heart, a want of kindly sensibility, or else an excess of the love of mere bodily ease or sensual indulgence, that place him, in point of capacity for high and refined happiness, below the level of the race.

If the former be the case; if his heart be cold and his breast sterile in producing the passions and affections of his kind, it is idle to talk of his enjoying an equality of happiness with those more highly gifted in these respects. He may be tranquil and content; he may escape some of the harrassing cares and anxieties occasionally felt by spirits of finer mould, who enter upon the full career of their duties, and thus he may be negatively happy; but till it can be proved, that not to be is better than to be, it cannot be maintained that one thus constituted can reach that amount of happiness to be attained by a man of more lively sensibility.

If the latter be the case; if a love of personal ease, and gratifications incompatible with the cares and provisions of a family, be the motive of celibacy, the selfishness cannot be doubted; and that the pleasures of sense are inferior to the pleasures of the mind, will not be denied by those who would not put man on a level with the brute creation; and that the participation of those we love in that which pleases us, enhances our gratification, is equally well established by the voice of mankind. This enhancement, too, is greater in pro

portion to the love we bear to those who partake of the pleasure, and consequently is greatest of all when it is shared with those to whom nature most closely unites us in affection.

It is true, indeed, that domestic relations, as they have joys to which celibacy cannot reach, may also be sometimes attended with ills and sorrows to which that state is not exposed. The hand of death may sever the closest union of hearts, or by its untimely stroke may violate the seeming order of nature, bowing the young head to the dust, and sparing the silver hairs of age, so that the once happy husband and father may in his age, as to all external relations, be apparently left as lonely and desolate as he whose heart never responded to those holy names. The anguish of such a separation and bereavement may and must be keenly felt, from the very dearness of those thus taken away, being at the same time both the consequence and the proof of the happiness they bestowed; but fortunately our nature is so constituted, that consolation springs up out of sorrow, pleasure may often be found even in the causes of wo. "The luxury of grief" is no sentimental or unmeaning phrase, though often most inappropriately applied. When we mourn over the grave of those we have loved, and the mind seems ready to sink under the pressure of the loss, there mingles with the consciousness of it a deep-felt sense of their worth and of their tenderness; we feel our love for them, and find a melancholy joy in the thought that the love was returned, and that the departed spirit, in leaving the fair field of earth, felt, among the pangs that attended on its dissolution from the body, the breaking of those ties of affection that bound its being to our own. Here is the germ of hope, the well-spring of future solace, and when the first natural burst of grief is over, and the mind in calmer mood can look back upon the scenes of the past, there is a soothing relief in dwelling upon those things. Secluded from the bustle and ntercourse of the world, these thoughts lie deep in the re

cesses of the heart; and in the hours of solitude and silence, the daily cares of the world pass away, and it turns to the contemplation of these with a hallowed delight, and broods over them with a chastened pleasure, that, like the subjects whence it springs, belongs not to earth, for the hopes and fears of mortality mingle not therein. We "have been blessed," is the pervading feeling, and the holy nature of that bliss, outliving the mortal existence of it, reflects a mild and mellowed light from the past upon the present. Those who do not know sorrow merely because they have not known joy, might well envy feelings like these, compared with the monotony of a state like their own.

In this view too we have merely alluded to the feelings of man considered as a being of this world; but to those who live with a "Christian's hope" of life and happiness hereafter, even the most utter bereavement presents sources of consolation, nay more, of pleasure peculiarly its own, in the thought that immortal spirits, owing to us their being and their glory, shall be our companions in the blessed regions of eternal life, and that those we most loved upon earth we shall meet again in heaven.

A darker picture by far is, when children tenderly beloved, as they mix with the world, turn from the paths of virtue to those of sin and shame. For in this thing there is no consolation even to those parents that have most faithfully discharged their duty, save the consciousness that they have so done, or have endeavoured so to do. This event is not, however, a thing of frequent occurence where parents have indeed thus done their duty, and is but one of those hazards of life that in some shape or other must always be encountered, and the remote chance of which is by no means to be put in balance against the voice of nature and duty, as to forming the connexion from which such an evil may possibly result, but without which the highest happiness and great worldly end of our being is sure to be foregone.