every visitant from above-every impression from beyond the grave-every admonition from the word of God. The heart has not been touched and transformed by regenerative grace, nor quickened by divine life, nor taken possession of by the Holy Spirit. There may be much that is genial, generous, and candid, but these are the straggling rays of a departed glory, not the direct beams of the Sun of Righteousness. The best and noblest of human kind must be born again before he can see, much less inherit, the kingdom of God. "Without natural affection." Those relationships in life which constitute the foundations of society they regard as necessities or expediencies to be formed by interest, not by unselfish and pure affection. The marriage tie is accepted because it seems the nearest way to a fortune. The woman chosen must be one who has a fortune with her, not one whose whole fortune is in her; and so persons are married whom God never joined, and unions created in Church which cannot have been originated in heaven. Brothers and sisters by blood live in estrangement or hostility in the world. Aged relatives if poor and dependant are regarded as burdens, and rich relatives are thought too long-lived. The truth is, there cannot be reciprocated in the world a pure and lasting affection unless it has first been consecrated by true religion. Where the Spirit of God does not dwell there may be courtesy, or passion, or interest, but there cannot be, or long last, that pure, persistent, and transforming love which receives its baptism from God, and finds its brother and sister, husband and wife, father and mother on earth. Law is not love; mechanical compression is not lasting; sensual passions evaporate, and there are none of the deep-struck roots in heart or conscience that endure, and blossom, and bear fruit in sunshine and in storm. Society suffers; divorce courts are busy; scenes in the newspapers are frequent. Of all springs of disloyalty, degeneracy, and social calamities, the fullest and the most successful are, "hearts without natural affection," homes without the air or sunshine of heaven, and families bound together by the accident of birth, but not the cohesion of mutual affection, sympathy, and true religion. It is only by heavenly inspirations that society is purified and strong. The exhaustion or absence of these is the extinction of his best and most hallowed bands and ties. The home is the contributory of the nation, and as it is the other must be. “Truce breakers." These are men whose word and oath are equally unreliable. Inconvenience and inexpediency dissolve by their touch the most solemn compacts. They accept the compact only to have the power of breaking it; or, entering into it sincerely, and meeting with difficulties in the execution of it, they get rid of the difficulties by throwing the compact to the winds. The most sacred European treaties long regarded as the great resistant obstructions to war, and acknowledged to be binding on empires, nations, and communities, have been torn in pieces during the last seven years. Inconvenience is urged as the weightiest of reasons. Territorial aggrandizement is pleaded as an irresistible excuse for aggressive war, and the anchors of Europe are lifted, and peoples are ceaselessly drifting against each other, and "rumours of have become the normal voices of mankind. Men accept preferment and office in a Church the laws and doctrines of which they labour to undermine; or enter into commercial treaties they do not mean to keep; or take shares in schemes in order to sell out at a premium, and leave the honest and unsuspecting to ruin. war There is less and less of the character the Pagan poet delineates : "Justum et tenacem propositi virum Mente quatit solidâ.” "False accusers. "" Our courts of law present too many proofs of the existence of these. The innocent are charged by the depraved with crime, in order to induce them to buy off exposure by bribing the false accuser. Mercenary motives and ends are attributed to public men actuated by pure and disinterested and beneficent designs. Wives chaste and good are charged with offences against the relation in which they stand, for the sole Partners in business, in injustice, assail the cha object of being got rid of. order to protect their own racter of their copartners, as if blackening them would vindicate themselves. Writers who handle an unpopular subject of thought, or a subject distasteful to portions of the press, are themselves hated by the corrupt for their faithfulness in rebuking error and evil, or are held up as teachers of what they never taught, and believers in what they have often repelled; in order to set the world on a wrong scent, and to weaken the influence and arrest the spread of truths too plainly and conclusively argued to be met with calm and dispassionate discussion. ness; Religion is denounced as the disturber of peace; its upholders as bigots; its doctrines as uncharitableand its precepts as impossible in this world of ours. Is a preacher faithful? he is intolerant. Is he affectionate and persuasive? he is self-seeking. Is he laborious? he is well paid for it. Does he give himself wholly to his work? it is his business. But it is not the high-minded men of the world who thus talk. In this respect they are courteous and considerate. They are gentlemen at least. It is the small and needy aspirants and parasites about them that so talk. Those who are busy apparently in schemes of philanthropy and goodness, really in schemes of self-aggrandizement, and yet ever ready to talk as disinterested, broad, and catholic, and cosmopolitan in all they do. "Incontinent." Passion without restraint; indulgence uninfluenced by the fear of God, or of man; the ascendency of lust that spurns self-denial, and the gratification of appetite at any price and in spite of all remonstrance, these are the elements of incontinence. There is no doubt that such incontinence abounds in our great cities, and in the populous centres of our national life population. They forget, or do not care to remember, that passions in themselves originally good are no longer left unregulated and unrestrained, than they break out into destructive forces; that other passions like strange fires have been kindled in the heart of man since its estrangement from God, that demand not regulation and restraint, but extirpation and excision; and that the will is weakened, and requires one higher than we to work in us to will and do of His good pleasure. Society would resolve itself into chaos, were every one to gratify his unregulated and unrestrained propensities and passions; and ties the most divine, and relationships the most sacred, and duties imposed on mankind as useful as elevating, would all be parched and withered in such a pandemonium as universal incontinency would kindle upon earth. But we must leave every reader of the daily press, the records of our courts of justice, the causes celebres that excite the world, the history of the bad and the lamentations of the good, to decide whether or not this sad feature of the last times be recogniza L |