speculations, the idea of improving the individual man, as the means of improving the body of which he is a member, seems never to have come across the minds of unbelievers. They demand radical changes, but seem to have no suspicion that there can be no radical changes in society, or if there can, that none are desirable, any farther than they may be rendered necessary by radical changes in individual character. In France, the unbeliever, for a time, had an open field and fair play. He began by overturning the whole fabric of society, and then reürganized it according to his own mind. As he had modelled his new institutions after the principles of his ideal perfection, he was surprised to find that they did not produce the results he had predicted. It did not, at first, occur to him, that his new institutions and the character of the individuals for whom he had provided them were not in harmony; and when he did learn this, he believed the shortest way to remove the discrepancy was to destroy nearly all the then existing generation. Hence, his reform became a reign of terror, and his efforts in behalf of free institutions have retarded the march of liberty for centuries. All this evil would have been avoided, had he perceived that his work should begin with the individual, that he should first raise the individual and develope the powers of the individual mind. Had he done this, he would have elevated the standard of morality, and produced a discrepancy between individual character and not his new institutions - but the old, and this would have inevitably involved their destruction, and have necessarily introduced new ones, as perfect as the new standard of individual excellence would admit. The notion, that government and social institutions can produce and preserve any given description of individual character, would never have been entertained, and tyrants would not have been furnished with another plea for despotism, to save society from the horrors of anarchy.

In this country, we established a free government, not because we had reasoned ourselves into a belief of its superiority to all others, not because we believed it would produce and preserve the virtues of individual character, but because such were already the virtues and the intelligence of our citizens as individuals, that none other than a free government would have been in harmony with their character. That even a free government and comparatively perfect social institutions do not necessarily preserve a corresponding excellence in individual character, is obvious from what we are daily wit

nessing among ourselves. Our people, as individuals, in the high uncompromising moral virtues, are very little, if at all, in advance of what they were at the commencement of our glorious struggle for freedom and national independence. We have thus far depended too much upon a free government and enlightened institutions, and have vainly thought to legislate people into high-toned moral beings. The better informed among us are daily perceiving the necessity of paying more and more attention to the culture of the individual mind. They are daily becoming better and better convinced that the only way to set the mass of our citizens forward in the career of virtuous improvement, is, to develope the capabilities of the individual man; to induce him to employ all his faculties in the accomplishment of just ends, and to exert all his energies to the perfecting of his own mind and heart.

Nothing, it should be added, will reform the individual, that does not appeal to his whole nature, and give full employment to all, especially his higher faculties. This infidelity cannot do. It addresses us as animals, not as men. It has no concern with the soul. It recognises no spirit in man, and, consequently, can appeal only to the body, to bodily appetites and bodily powers. It can give us no high and stirring views of our nature, no inducement to pure and elevated virtue, by assuring us that we are related to a Being who is infinitely great and supremely good, that we are kindred spirits and may attain to a kindred excellence with the everlasting God. In one word, it can make no appeal to the religious sentiment, can furnish nothing on which the religious affections can lay hold, and from which they may derive purity, strength, and delight. In this it leaves out a part, and that the noblest part, of our nature.

It is not necessary to prove that the religious sentiment is a part of our nature. We see this, we feel and know it. All ages, all countries, and nearly all individuals have the sentiment, and manifest it in combination with some form of religion. True, some few of our race have not always felt the inward workings of the religious sentiment, but to infer from this, that it is not natural to man, would be as absurd as to pretend that hunger and thirst are not natural, because, in certain morbid states of the stomach, there is felt no appetite for food or drink. Take away God and religion from the soul, its moral life dies, as quickly as does the body when deprived of wholesome nutriment. The soul hungers and thirsts for religion. Religion is its meat and drink; its bread

of life; and is as strongly craved, as much needed for its growth and healthy action, as is food or drink for the body. How, then, can we hope to find the individual man morally strong and healthy, when deprived of this nutriment of the soul? Without this he must inevitably pine away, wither into a mere animal, to vegetate, propagate its species, and die. Yet of this would infidelity deprive us, and to this wretched fate would it abandon us.

No change, which does not tend to give free and full scope for the just exercise of all our faculties, can be a real reform. The only error of the present state of things is, that it infringes right action, supplies motives to wrong, and prevents the full development of the individual mind. What we want, are such changes, such improvements, as will develope, employ, task to their fullest extent, and rightly direct, all the faculties of our common nature. But such, infidelity cannot effect. Denying the religious sentiment, it can assign no place for its developement; discarding all the pious affections, it can afford them no employment in its new-modelled society, and shape nothing to their wants; contemplating only the human animal, it can make provision only for animal wants; and having no use for the spiritual nature, it must do all it can to break and destroy its power. Let any man ascertain accurately how large a portion of his nature finds employment only in that which belongs to religion, or is in some way dependant on the religious sentiment, and he may easily satisfy himself, whether infidelity would be likely to reörganize society, so as to give full scope for the free, vigorous and healthy exercise of our whole nature.

Now as infidelity does not propose to do this, has never done it, and never can do it, it can produce no salutary reform. The institutions it would introduce would always be opposed to the developement of much of our nature, and to individual improvement; consequently, they would be mischievous. They would place the social and the individual man in a state of perpetual war; the spiritual and the animal nature in an eternal struggle. The bosom would be torn by contending factions; government would be one thing to-day, and another to-morrow, and nothing would be fixed but anarchy and confusion.

That infidelity and the spirit of reform have sometimes been found in alliance, is not denied; but this alliance is unnatural, and has never produced anything worth preserving. Reformers have sometimes erred. Animated by a strong

desire for human improvement, feeling an undying love for man, they have freely devoted themselves to his emancipation, and to the promotion of his endless progress towards perfection; but they have not always had clear conceptions of what would be an improvement, of the good attainable, nor of the practicable means of attaining it. Their zeal may have flowed from pure hearts, but it has not always been guided by just knowledge. They have often excited needless alarm, waged needless war, declaimed when they should have reasoned, censured when they should have pitied and consoled, awakened resentment when they should have gained confidence and attracted love. The consequence is, that they have been opposed by their natural friends, and this has obliged them to league with their natural enemies.

In the contest, the reformer has excited the alarms of the religious and armed against himself the guardians of the faith. He has met the minister of the church commanding him in the name of God to desist, and assuring him, that if he take another step forward, he does it at the peril of his soul's salvation. When the French reformer rose against the mischievous remains of the feudal system and the severe exactions of a superannuated tyranny, he found the church leagued with the abuses he would correct. Those who lived upon her revenues bade him retire. The anathema met his advance and repelled his attacks; and he was induced to believe there was no place whereon to erect the palace of liberty and social order, but the ruins of the temple.

It

Yet his cause was most eminently a religious cause. was not that the spirit of reform was an infidel spirit, that it was opposed by the professed friends of religion. All reforms come from the lower classes, who are always the sufferers; and they are usually opposed by the higher classes, who live by those very abuses, or who are the higher classes in consequence of those very abuses which the reformer would redress. These classes, whether hereditary, elective, or fortuitous, whether composed of the same individuals or of different ones, have always the same spirit, and the same interests. The old order of things is that which elevates them; and that order of things they, of course, must feel it their interest to maintain. Hence it is, that the upper classes of society, all who are under the direct influence of those classes, and all who hope one day to make a part of them, are almost always opposed to all radical changes, and consequently to all real reform. In most countries, the ministers of

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religion, especially the higher orders of the hierarchy, make up a part of the higher and privileged classes, and hence the reason why they oppose the reformer, and force him into the ranks of the unbeliever. They, from their position, feel no need of a reform in the moral and social institutions of the community, and hope nothing from a change; and, as they are supposed to be like other men, they can but oppose it; they always have done so, and they always will do so, till they are made sensible that they must lose all their influence, and their means of benefiting themselves or others by continuing their opposition.

It is because the ministers of religion have, in most countries and in most ages of the world, formed one of the higher classes, or constituted one of the privileged orders, that we have so uniformly found them, in past times at least, advocates of the stationary principle. Where a man's treasure is, there will be his heart; and they had their treasure, they always have their treasure, in the existing order of things. This were no subject of complaint, were the existing order always the best order; were not progress a law of our nature and an inevitable condition of human society; were we able at any given time to reach the perfect, instead of being destined to be eternally approaching it. But such is not the fact. Man's course is onward. No state of society is perfect. No form of religion has ever yet been extensively embraced but it had its imperfections. Christianity has been everywhere presented under forms which ever have been and ever will be opposed, as mind advances and there is felt the want of something more liberal and more refined. Admit that the spirit of Christianity is always the same, yet its forms may be changed to suit the changes of individuals and of societies, and were this done no difficulty would occur. But its ministers and its professed friends declare religion to be identified with forms which have become revolting, and thus the reformer is driven from their company to that of the infidel.

It is never religion itself that the reformer opposes. He finds the gospel adulterated; he finds a foul and unnatural mixture presented him in the place of pure religion, and it is always those parts which are foreign to religion, but which are presented with it, that excite his hostility. Yet, in opposing the mixture, he may sometimes, innocently, because unintentionally, oppose the pure; in attacking the abuse, he may sometimes inadvertently strike the thing abused; in warring against the wrong-headed advocate, he may war