verdict of innocent, but not proven, and when they find at verdict of guilty, it may or may not, as it happens, be a guilty act in the eye of conscience and of God. They aim at nothing but the advancement of the common weal; all the hold, which they have any right to take of their subjects, is by their private weal, which they can amerce or advantage; and all the guardianship they can have over them is but as far as the eye of their officers can discern actions, their ear hear words and their shrewdness infer actions from circumstantial evidence. A man may be clear before God, whom nevertheless law hath sentenced to the utmost ignominy and loss; of which all martyrs for religion's sake, all sufferers for conscience sake, are examples. But while we. confine the observation of law to outward uttered acts, and its power to physical deprivations, we do not deny, that it so happens in all well regulated states, both that immorality is present, and ignominy follows the breach of law in the generality of cases. But this is an accidental not a necessary connection. It arises from the connection there is between moral purity and the common weal, between right conduct and real advantage, which connection the jurisconsult alluded to above, hath made the basis of all positive law; where he is right; and he hath also made it the basis of all intercourse between man and man, and of all judgments. which the mind passes upon itself, in which he is not only wrong in making the effect stand before the cause, but by which he would overthrow, through the corruption of the individual, that very common-weal, which through the body corporate his works are so well fitted to sustain.

Seeing then that the laws of the state do reach no farther than to observed acts, and do not necessarily bring self-accusation in their train, (which might also be shown of the laws of the family, of friendship, of social intercourse, and of every other responsibility of which the eye of man is the guardian,) we ask, Where is the instrument for keeping in check the evil parts of human nature within the breast, which, after a period of hidden incubation there, hatch plots and perpetrations? Where is the instrument for guiding a man to the good and ill of affection, of desire, of ambition, of knowledge, of temper; which verily are the masters over the tongue that speaks, and the hand that performs? Where is the reward for good conduct, the punishment for evil, conduct, in the little republic within the breast? There are no such provisions in any of the institutions over which the king and the judge preside; for, long ere human nature comes

under their cognizance, while we are scions growing around our parents, not yet come under the cognizance of those inspecting eyes which range abroad to distinguish the good from the evil, even already is the texture of the future man weaving the weaknesses, the diseases of the spirit engendering-its strength, its beauty and its fruitfulness, becoming inplanted. If education mean any thing, it is to train a man for fulfilling the condition of child, friend, parent, spouse, master, servant and citizen. Now, I ask, how is that education to proceed? Are we to bring, lumbering into the school, the statutes at large, those musty volumes which no living wight did ever master? There must be something more manageable, something that can speak to intellect as it grows, that can touch feeling, that can curb passion, that can minister a present reward to benevolence, to piety and tenderness of heart. Would that jurisconsult, to whom we have alluded, begin at that time to use calculations of ultimate utility to one whose hopes and fears do not range much further than to-morrow or the present day?

Now the christian code sketched above is suited to this case precisely. It addresses itself to states of feeling, and directs the mind inward to observe them. It points the conscience to them the moment they rise, and therefore suits with earliest life, which cares for little but the present. It makes us familiar with the fountains of evil within, whence issue the great streams of wickedness. It is a grammar of conduct; the ideal of perfection; which being contemplated from the earliest age, will bring one familiar with the knowledge of good and ill in every relation of human life; and, if practised from earliest age, will induce an indelible approbation of the one and disapprobation of the other. Whereas if, without such discipline and such application of the great maxims of purity and justice, you allow youth to grow at random, it will turn out as difficult to bring it under the regulation of the positive laws of society, as it would be to introduce at once into the equestrian's exercise of the circus, the wild horse of the Arabian desert, which snuffeth up the east wind in the pride of its boundless freedom.

Next, as to their sublime and inaccessible reach of virtue, I hold this to be one of the chief points in which the adaptation of the divine laws to human nature is revealed. Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, their application to human nature is in nothing more revealed than in their celestial and ideal perfection. For it is the nature of man, especially of youth, which determineth the cast of future manhood, to

place before him the highest patterns in that kind of excellence at which he aimeth. Human nature thirsteth for the highest and the best, not the most easily attained. The faculty of hope is ever conjuring into being some bright estate, far surpassing present possession-the faculty of fancy ever wingeth aloft into regions of ethereal beauty and romantic fiction, far beyond the boundaries of truth. There is a refined nature in man, which the world satisfieth not: it calls for poetry, to mix up happier combinations for its use-it magnifies, it beautifies, it sublimes every form of creation, and every condition of existence. Oh, heavens! how the soul of man is restless and unbound-how it lusteth after greatness-how it revolveth around the sphere of perfection, but cannot enter in-how it compasseth round the seraphguarded verge of Eden, but cannot enter in. That wo-begone and self-tormented, wretched man, our poet, hath so feigned it of Cain; but it is not a wicked murderer's part thus upwards to soar, and sigh that he can go no higher: but it is the part of every noble faculty of the soul, which God hath endowed with purity and strength above its peers. For the world is but an average product of the minds that make it up; its laws are for all those that dwell therein, not for the gifted few; its customs are covenants for the use of the many; and when it pleaseth God to create a master spirit in any kind, a Bacon in philosophy, a Shakespeare in fancy, a Milton in poetry, a Newton in science, a Locke in sincerity and truth-they must either address their wondrous faculties to elevate that average which they find established, and so bless the generations that are to follow after; or, like that much-to-be-pitied master of present poetry, and many other mighty spirits of this licentious day, they must rage and fret against the world; which world will dash them off, as the prominent rocks do the feeble bark which braves them, leaving them to after ages monuments of wreckless folly. That same world will dash them off, which, if they had come with honest kind intentions, would have taken them into its bosom even as other rocks of the ocean, which throw their everlasting arms abroad, and take within their peaceful bays thousands of the tallest ships which sail upon the bosom of the deep. It is, I say, the nature of every faculty of the mind created greater than ordinary, to dress out a feast for that same faculty in other men, to lift up the limits of enjoyment in that direction, and plant them a little further into the regions of unreclaimed thought. And so it came to pass, God, who possesseth every faculty in per

fection, when he put his hand to the work, brought forth this perfect institution of moral conduct, in order to perfect as far as could be the moral condition and consequent enjoyment of man.

Let the mind, from its first dawning, be fed on matters of fact alone, limited to the desire of the needful, and to the hope of the attainable, never imaginative, never speculative; it will become as the physical condition of those people who are living upon the very edge of necessity becomes, little elevated above the brutes that perish. It is illimitable knowledge still sought after, though unbounded; it is high ambition. still longed after, though never within reach; and soaring fancy, dwelling with things unseen, that go to produce the noble specimen of the natural man. And it is the very same faculties employed upon things revealed that go to produce the foremost specimen of the renewed man. David, and Paul, and Isaiah, such three pillars of the church of the living God, are not to be named; and how noble, how heroical, how majestical were they! I am well aware, painfully aware, that the unwise and excessive culture of these faculties, when divorced from nature instead of resting on nature, when misinterpreting revelation instead of believing revelation, will produce the sentimental enthusiast in nature and the fanatic in religion. But, being rested on nature and experience, such discursive ranges beyond things presently practicable; such longings after these ultimate powers and attainments of manhood are necessary, in order that the mind may grow to stature and strength in any department.

It is the best prognostic of a youth to be found so occupying himself with thoughts beyond his present power and above his present place. The young aspirant after military renown reads the campaigns of the greastest conquerors the world hath produced. The patriot hath Hampden and Russell and Sydney ever in his eye. The poet consumes the silent hours of night over the works of masters in every tongue, though himself hath hardly turned a rhyme. The noble-minded churchman (of whom alas! there are but few) doats on the Hookers and the Gilpins and the Knoxes of past times. And the stern unyielding non-conformist talks to you of Luther and Baxter, and the two thousand self-devoted priests (proud days these for England!) And the artist fills his study with casts from the antique, and drains both health and means to their very dregs in pilgrimages to the shrined pictures of the masters.

And in moral purity alone shall we be condemned to

drudge at every day's performance. In the noblest of all the walks of men, generosity, forgiveness, vestal chastity, matrimonial fidelity, incorrupt truthfulness and faith, shall we have no tablets of perfection to hang before the people, out of which they may form their idea of a perfect undefiled man, and after which they may be constantly upon the stretch? Here alone shall we have no room for desire to range beyond present attainment, no hope to embody in the distant future-nothing to sigh after, or pray for-nothing to contemplate, but the bloated pictures of life, the dwarfish specimens of character we behold around us? This were most fatal to those departments of excellence, upon which the happiness of man turns more than upon all the rest. But it is such a state of things as never can exist. Here also the human mind would have displayed her plastic powers, and created specimens far above the demands of law or the customary measures of life. If God had not interfered, man would himself have asserted his own superiority to drudging daily rules, and here also struck out examples worthy to be imitated, and glorious to be surpassed. And these would have become the models after which to rear the youth covetous of moral grandeur. But God, pitying the small success which human nature had in producing such specimens of moral excellence; and perceiving how men were lost for want of these high examples and perfect rules which they enjoyed in other departments; gave forth these tablets of practical holiness; which are not surely the worse that they have come from the bosom of God, and are plainly written in brief compass, than that they should have dropped from the fallible wit of man, and been scattered piece-meal over the writings of different ages and of distant lands. Then, because man loveth not only the precept but the example, and kindleth into love and emulation, and other ardent sympathies, when he beholds that thing exemplified which he himself would wish to be, God hath also given Christ in whom these perfections are concentrated, and from whose history we can study these beauties in example and in life. And thus, with book in hand, and model under our eye, we can study the perfection of the mind of man, as the artist, with descriptions in his hand and the models before his eye, studies the exact proportion, and accustoms his eye to the beauties of external form.

These divine laws, which are fitted by their simplicity for being ingrafted upon the very first rudiments of our being; and by their elevated purity to excite an enthusiasm after