such tom-fooleries to steal away our precious, our invaluable time; even if we knew that we should live to the age of Methuselah, we could not afford such a waste.

Again, there are many books which must be pronounced thievish; books that neither inform the understanding nor improve the heart; books that are not simply negative in their character, but positively injurious to the reader's morals, utterly poisonous to his soul; books full of voluptuousness, ribaldry, and filth; books that may be pronounced the very carrion of literaturecarrion which multitudes with vulturous appetites devour, in preference to intellectual food of a wholesome character. An Italian proverb teaches us that there is no worse robber than a bad book. It destroys our taste for useful reading, it steals from us our moral principles, it instils the love of vice, it inflames the passions, and leads us straight to hell. I know that I am speaking to some who feel that what I say is true, whose moral nature has suffered and is suffering still from the perusal of such works; works which they would be ashamed to confess that they have ever read; and I say to them, Stop these thieves, and commit them to the flames. From nasty literature a man may shrink with disgust, having no appetite for carrion and garbage, and yet he may allow light literature to come the thief over him. Novels and romances are the rage; they constitute the main element of circulating libraries, and many minds live upon them, and upon nothing else. Do not suppose that I take upon myself to condemn such publications, although, so far as I have tried to read them, they have proved to me, for the most part, excessively dull; they

have their use, I suppose, in the intellectual economy of our nature; but like a friend whom you are very glad to see occasionally, but whose oft repeated visits you would regard as a robbery upon your time, so the novel and romance may be very well now and then, but their encroachments should be guarded against, lest they rob us not only of time, but also of intellectual vigor, and perseverance in the pursuit of knowledge, and the prosecution of that education which is to fit us for the earnest struggles of life.

Further, and finally, there is a group of thieves to which every man's attention ought to be carefully directed. There is a group of thieves who can do us far more injury than professed swindlers or knavish tradesmen, there is a group of thieves in every man's heart. For every evil passion and propensity of our nature is a thief, who would rob us of that which is of all things most precious-our soul's salvation. Envy, for example, is a thief, that steals from us all comfort and peace; anger is a thief, that robs us of our self-possession and control; lust is a thief, and fearful are its depredations; it steals away all genuine love, all pity, all respect for innocence, all regard for the welfare of others, for our own character, and for the law of God. It robs a man of his health, weakens him in body, degrades him in mind, makes him an object of insufferable disgust, converts him into something worse than a beast, brings him down to the grave, and sends him to a well-merited damnation. Avarice also is a thief, that deludes its victim by heaping up stores of wealth, while it steals away his soul; a thief that, under the plausible pretence of prudence and of thrift, induces

that hardness of heart, that love of the world, that dishonest disposition, that forgetfulness of God, that earthbound condition of the affections, which are utterly incompatible with the Christian character and the salvation of the soul. Yes; the heart, which is pronounced by the highest authority to be "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," is often little else than a den of thieves, and of most subtle, cunning thievesthieves within, that are in league with a thousand thievish temptations without, and open the door for their admission, and thus the soul is plundered, wounded, and destroyed. Against these let us watch, against these strive, against these pray, lest all our hopes of a glorious immortality, all our desires for a glorious immortality, and all our capability of enjoying a glorious immortality be stolen from us; and may God's almighty grace slay these thieves, otherwise they will slay us. The thief against whom it is most needful that every man should stand upon his guard is himself. And, in fact, all sin is theft, when we consider it aright; for whenever we do wrong, we rob God of that obedience which we owe to him as our Creator and our King; and when he says, "Thou shalt not steal," he means not only "Thou shalt not steal from thy neighbor, thou shalt not steal from thy master, thou shalt not steal from thy family, thou shalt not steal from thyself," but his commandment has also this further and deeper meaning, "Thou shalt not steal from ME."

LECTURE XXI.

THE DEVIL'S MEAL IS ALL BRAN.

THIS is a wise and weighty old saying, founded on the experience of ages, and confirmed by facts of every-day occurrence; true from the beginning, true now, true for evermore; true on a small scale, true on a great; nations as well as individuals bearing testimony to its correctness, and proving that the wisdom of our ancestors was never less at fault than when it delivered this homely sentence-"The devil's meal is all bran." I believe the saying is French, and there are two versions of it; "The devil's meal is all bran," and "The devil's meal is half bran." Believing the former to be much nearer the truth than the latter, I have adopted it as my motto on this occasion. Half bran! what, the other half good, satisfying, nutritious food? Not at all; to say that the devil's meal is only half bran, is to give it too good a character; it is so very nearly all bran, that I feel it right to take the stronger version of the proverb. Do you ask for illustrations ?-illustrations abound. Here is e, furnished by the very earliest age of human his

c

tory. When the subtle serpent tempted Eve, and Eve

tempted Adam, to eat

*

*

*

* the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world with all our woe,

to their cost, and to the cost of the whole human race, it was proved that "the devil's meal is all bran." Illustrations! here's another; when King Solomon, the wisest of mortals, turned himself into a fool, surrounding himself with seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and revelling in all manner of voluptuous excess, he soon found that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. The devil's meal-had not he a lot of it?— no man ever possessed a larger stock, but it proved to be all bran. This man, whom God had fed with "the finest of the wheat," in his miserable infatuation bartered it for the devil's bran, and he lived to rue his bargain. When Judas betrayed his Master, he got somewhere about £3 10s. for the transaction; there was the money, good solid silver, but on looking at it more closely, he saw that it was in reality "the devil's meal, all bran," and he went and hanged himself. And if we seek for illustrations of this maxim on a large scale, we find one in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, brought about in a great measure by the licentiousness of the Roman people; and another in the fact that the gold and silver which the Spaniards obtained by so much cruel extortion, instead of making Spain prosperous, seem to have had quite the opposite effect; those treasures were the devil's meal, proving to be nothing but bran,