But they meet us with cases of men who have laughed, and danced, and sung, and committed all manner of levities upon the scaffold. There may have been a few, a very few, such cases. But what do they prove? If it be supposed that men of ordinary mental habits will be led, in reflecting upon such a scene, to say to themselves: "Well, if a course of iniquity can so revolutionize all the natural and moral elements of a man's mind, rendering him so conscience-seared, desperate, and demoralized, that, all reeking with the guilt of murder, he can come to enact such a scene upon the very scaffold; then I see no great objection to entering upon a course of crime which will probably lead to the commission of murder, and to just such a fearless, hopeless, happy gallows-death;"-if an ordinary man could be supposed to reason thus, then such a case might be | urged against our present position; otherwise not. We think he must be already an almost hopelessly hardened wretch who could harbour for a moment such a course of reflections. And, according to our notions and feelings, no case of execution could read to the community generally a more awful and effectual lesson for inspiring an habitual horror of murder, and of that course of criminal passions and practices which leads to its commission, than just such an execution as the objector has described.

But it is commonly said, and urged with great vehemence by the abolitionists, that, "by the execu tion of the murderer, the civil government sets public example of the commission of the very crime it punishes, cheapens human life, and brutalizes the moral sense of the community.' All this may seem very plausible to the consciousness of the abolitionist himself, who holds, or professes to hold, that capital punishment is legalized murder; but we shall not by any means allow him to take that point for granted. And unless that be granted, we really see no great force in the objection here, simply because it ceases to have any claims to truth. As to brutalizing the moral sense of the community; this, like many other things now very emphatically repeated by the abolitionists, is a mere echo of a phrase and a sentiment which were very appropriate to the habit which once existed in England of inflicting capital punishment for almost every and any trivial offence. But when that punishment is inflicted only for murder, how that can be said to be a brutalizing of the moral sense of the community, which is, in fact, the most public, emphatic, and solemn expression of the detestation and horror which the community feel for the crime of murder, surpasses the acuteness of our vision and the limits of our comprehension to perceive. We will not at present allude to what irreverent, if not blasphemous, conclusions this objection would lead, as applied to the divinely ordained Mosaic code. We may say, however, that, on this theory of moral influences, it is hard to understand how, with the almost universal infliction of capital punishment for murder, the world has ever reached its present refined state-a state so refined that on this very ground some have been led to think that it might afford now to dispense with capital punishment altogether.

It is said, in corroboration of the force of the objection above urged, that murders and other crimes are sometimes committed in sight of the gallows, and that villains consider public executions as their great holydays. We think there is much truth in this which deserves consideration; but nothing

which properly militates at all against our position. Great popular gatherings always furnish opportunities and occasions for thefts and acts of violence. The sort of people who are most likely to be drawn together at a public execution are the very people most likely to intend or be tempted to commit those crimes. Those people who desire to witness a public execution are precisely the people whom such a spectacle cannot profit. Let executions, then, be comparatively private. To say that thus we give up the whole principle of their preventive, deterring power, is entirely to mistake the mode in which this or any other punishment operates to deter from crime. The existence of the law, its known existence as a stern, practical fact, must instil, as nothing else in the way of punishment could so effectually do, an habitual, pervading horror of the crime for which such a dreadful punishment is inflicted. The fear of death is by no means ordinarily increased, by being brought close to us. The contrary is the merciful ordination of Providence. The imagination is vastly more efficient here than vision. Does imprisonment lose its preventive efficacy because the prison walls are made of stone, and not of glass?

But although the abolitionists, in discussing the question of right, are wont to descant upon the tremendous severity of the penalty of death-so great and dreadful, they say, as to transcend the sphere of human justice and all the rights of civil society-though they charge it as cruel, savage, barbarous beyond measure; if not as absolutely unjust, at least as utterly inhuman and unchristian, inconsistent with the spirit of forbearance, forgiveness, and compassion which characterize the gospel; yet, when they come to the question of expediency, to consider the influence of punishment as deterring others from the commission of crime, they take great pains to set forth the horrors of that imprisonment which they propose as a most efficient substitute; they depict it in the most gloomy colours, as being incalculably more severe, awful, frightful, than death itself-and doubtless, it needs all their powers of painting and rhetoric to make men believe it; in short, they seem perfectly willing to harrow up a Christian's heart to the very core by the imagination of the appalling sufferings they would have inflicted on the convict.

They may be sincere in all this. But if so, they must give up their claims to superlative kindness and compassion for the criminal; they must abandon their high-flown phrases about the meekness and benevolence of the gospel. Diderot, who believes with them in the superior efficacy of imprisonment (or slavery) as a punishment, honestly confesses this. In commenting upon Beccaria's picture of the horrors of imprisonment, he holds the following language: "So I think, and one cannot fail to be struck with the author's reasons. But I observe that he renounces, and rightly, his favourite principle of gentleness and humanity towards the criminal. Despair terminates not his woes amidst chains and stripes and iron gates, but only begins them. This picture is more terrible than that of the wheel, and the punishment which it portrays is in substance more cruel than the most barbarous death." (Note 54 to Beccaria.)

"An eloquent writer," quoted with approbation by anti-capital punishment authors, makes a similar confession. "Indeed we make no doubt," says he," that the ennui, the repining at imprisonment in a solitary cell, would prove torture more exquisite than all the

But the trouble is, you cannot make men, bad men, believe it. The less of conscience, the less of thought, the less of human sympathies a man has, the less will be to him the horrors of such an imprisonment. Yet such are the men who are to be restrained by it. To say that men, bad men, fear imprisonment of any kind (unless connected with severe bodily torture, and we do not understand this to be recommended) more than death, is simply false. One swallow does not make a summer; an exception does not disprove a rule. That an ignominious death is the most fearful of all punishments to any and every class of men, is a fact too notorious to allow us to waste time in proving it.

But suppose the fact were otherwise, and suppose you could make men generally believe in all that is said of the transcendent horrors of imprisonment; what would then become of the application of another of the pet principles of the abolitionists, viz., that the efficiency of penalties depends more on their certainty than on their severity, and that their certainty is practically in the inverse ratio of their severity? If the great practical objection to capital punishment now is that juries are unwilling to find a man guilty, even with the clearest evidence,' because of the dreadful severity of the punishment, will they be more ready to bring in such a verdict when you have fairly convinced them that the punishment you have substituted is incomparably more severe and terrific? The truth is, you cannot convince them of it; you cannot make commonsense men believe it, and you know you cannot.

But, say the abolitionists, "When the law regards and treats the substitution of perpetual laborious imprisonment as a merciful commutation of the higher penalty of death, the public will generally do the same [undoubtedly, and so they would, let the law do as it might]; while the former, if standing at the head of the scale of punishments, as the highest and worst, would strike a great and real terror, and operate as a more powerful preventive restraint, than the latter." We suppose we ought to be convinced by reasoning so cogent; but we cannot help asking, What would be the effect on public opinion, if, imprisonment being declared by law the highest penalty, death were declared a subordinate punishment, and inflicted for inferior crimes? Would men come to think it to be really so? Opinion and imagination doubtless have great influence over us; but there are some things too hard for them. But, imprisonment being really the severer punishment of the two, how happens it that it never occurred to any people, to any legislator, or jurist, or man of common sense, to adjust a scale of punishments, in which imprisonment should hold the highest and death a subordinate place? If, on the other hand, the penalty of death be not introduced into the scale at all, and imprisonment is made the highest penalty, what will

If it be said that it is not the external restraint, privation, toil, or suffering, which is insisted on as constituting the terrors of imprisonment, but the internal anguish, the upbraidings of the mind, the corrodings of remorse and conscious guilt; we answer that this last is a sort of punishment-most awful indeed-but which you can neither inflict nor remit, however much you may desire it, whether in this world or the world to come. You need not imprison the murderer in order to bring this punishment upon him in full measure. He must infallibly meet it some time or other. If this is your only ground for imprisonment, therefore, you will not stand on it long. You will soon propose to leave murderers to be punished by God and their own consciences in the natural way, without any presumptuous interference of human lawsand penalties.

you have as the next below it?-and the next?-and next? Why, imprisonment, forsooth: and so the argument tumbles down on the other side. What new principle of determent, pray, do you introduce into your scale by this ingenious device? Have we not imprisonment as a penalty now, with all its horrors, be they more or less, perpetual imprisonment imprisonment at hard labour? How do you propose to make it a higher punishment than it is? By simply cutting off all that is above it? That is like making a man taller by cutting off his head. What would be the effect of cutting him down still more? Would the same rule hold?

We confess that, for ourselves, we had been accustomed to suppose, not that men feared death most of all punishments, because, by a fortuitous concurrence of accidents, human laws had almost universally assigned it as their highest sanction; but rather that wise and prudent legislators had selected it as the highest sanction of human laws, because mankind naturally dreaded it most. But suppose imprisonment can be made, in reality, a severer punishment than death; the abolitionists insist upon it, and we are ready freely and fully to admit it; still we utterly deny that the generality of mankind can be made to fear it more than death. The natural instincts of the human mind are too strong for the refinements of pretended philosophy. Here is the precise point where the argument pinches. Imprisonment (such as the abolitionists have proposed) is the more cruel but less terrible punishment; death is the more terrible but less cruel. If, then, the design of penal laws is, not to take vengeance or inflict wanton cruelty on the offender, but to deter others from offending; which of the two should be inflicted? Will you exact the severer penalty, which will deter men less; or the milder penalty, which will deter them more? We do not ask here, Which is the more merciful and Christian? but, Which is the wiser and more expedient course? Let the abolitionists be consistent, and adhere to something throughout. We protest against that Protean style of argumentation, by which, when the question of right is under discussion, they declaim against the "death-penalty" for its vindictive and unchristian cruelty; and again, when the question of expediency is under discussion, they cry it down because it is not half so severe or cruel as another punishment which they propose as its more efficient substitute.

They say further, "We have perpetual imprisonment in our statute book, indeed, but it is rarely if ever inflicted;" and they propose to secure its perpetuity in this case by a constitutional provision.

One

But public opinion would not sustain such a punishment as is proposed. Convicts imprisoned for life, would still be, as they always have been, enlarged, on an average, in about six or eight years. generation will not consent to be the jailers and executioners for their predecessors. They will not consent to inflict or even to witness punishment"horrible" punishment, intense suffering; when the crime has long since been forgotten. Their humane sympathies must and will operate without any

check.

You may pretend that imprisonment is as terrific a punishment as you please; men who are tempted to commit crime well know all the contingencies, above referred to, and many others still more obvious, tending to show it to be highly improbable that they would have to spend a very long life in prison; they

will count upon these contingencies; and you cannot help it.

We shall despatch in few words our second head of argument in defence of the expediency of capital punishment-the fact, namely, that it is the best security against the exercise of private revenge.

We take it for granted that capital punishment is not shown to be wrong; if private revenge is not wrong under the gospel, it is at least inexpedient in well-regulated society. As a matter of expediency, it cannot be questioned that the calm, cautious, impartial, inflexible, the stern yet merciful, infliction of public justice, is vastly to be preferred to the precipitate, reckless, cruel, often misguided executions of individual vengeance.

Political institutions must be conformed to the actual state of society; they must deal with men as they are, not as they ought to be. Now there is a great deal of hardness of heart yet in the world. There is no people on earth who are all perfect Christians. There never has been, and is not likely soon to be, such a people. No Utopias or Platonic republics have yet been realized. And those laws are unwise, to say the least, which are based on an assumed perfect state of society, which nowhere exists. When that state is reached, we will agree to abolish not only capital but all other punishments.

The abolitionists appeal to public opinion, to the conscientious scruples of jurors, to show that capital punishment is inexpedient. We appeal to public opinion, to the settled conviction and feeling of the great mass of mankind, and of our own community,that death is the appropriate, and only appropriate, penalty for outrageous murder,to show that that penalty is expedient. Abolish it, and sooner or later you will have the ancient Göel re-established, with all his vindictive violence, with all his rights and with all their abuse. Abolish it, and though the face of society may now be calm and unruffled, the time is not distant when some atrocious assassination will call forth an uncontrollable burst of popular fury, there will be a tumultuous resort "to Lynch law," and it would not be surprising if some of our tender-hearted reformers, who now make such a fuss about the hangman, should be among the foremost in executing the violent behests of the mob. The case of Merton of Philadelphia shows what evil consequences naturally ensue when the law leaves an outrage without any (or, what is the same thing in principle and in practice, without any adequate) punishment. A man of Merton's spirit, when wronged, will take the vengeance into his own hands; and, what is worse, will be sustained in so doing by the acclamations of a sympathizing community.

[We have not space at present to enter on a full statement of facts as to our third branch of defence, viz., the good effects of the penalty as shown by the results of statistical comparison. The subject is a tempting one, as it would afford opportunity for an exposure of the singularly reckless and unjustifiable mode in which our opponents make up the statistics on which they profess to rest their case so confidently. We may take another opportunity of doing this, but meantime think it better to occupy the short space which remains with answers to some of the more Popular and plausible objections which are urged against us on this question.]

1. Capital punishment is wrong, because the innocent are sometimes executed.

If innocent men have been recklessly executed,

whenever and wherever it may have been done, we shall be the last to say one word in extenuation of the deed. The wilful execution or procurement of an unrighteous sentence of death, knowing it to be such, we hold, of course, to be murder, and murder of the most atrocious die. It adds to the common enormity of the crime the character of a treacherous and nefarious attempt against the moral basis on which the whole fabric of human society reposes. Hence the Jews are properly stigmatized in the New Testament as the murderers of our Lord; although his crucifixion took place according to all the forms of law.

Further, we maintain that all possible precaution⚫ against error ought to be taken in capital cases; and a capital sentence never passed or executed so long as there is any reasonable doubt of the guilt of the accused.

All cases of unjust executions whose occasion falls under these two heads, viz., false testimony, or want of due caution in weighing the evidence, are cases of abuse. They proving nothing at all in regard to the right, except that, like all other rights, it may be abused. Other cases, if there are any, which do not fall under either of these two heads, are to be ascribed to the necessary fallibility of human judgments; and, if they prove that, therefore, there is no right to inflict capital punishment upon the murderer, they prove that there is no right to inflict any punishment, or in any way to administer legal remedies, until human justice can be raised above all liability to human error. It cannot be denied that more caution, as a matter of fact, is taken in capital cases, than in any other, whether civil or criminal; so much so, that the exceeding difficulty of obtaining a conviction for murder is constantly urged against the expediency of capital punishment by its assailants. Let them agree upon their indictment. They have busied themselves of late most strenuously in making up all the cases that can be discovered or surmised of unjust executions for whatever crime, and arising from whatever cause, and are apparently endeavouring to make the world believe it the ordinary rule that no sooner does a capital trial come on than, by some inexplicable fatality, both judges and jury are seized with such a headlong desire to hang somebody, anybody but the right man, that they always convict the innocent and acquit the guilty.*

The cases of injustice which they allege are depicted in the most glowing colours, and form a great part of the staple of most of their essays on this subject, interspersed here and there as the spice and spirit of the whole. But such things are addressed to men's feelings and imagination much more than to their reason; and would be appropriately answered by frequent pictures of horrible murders and massacres. Let them sift their cases, and see how many of them are cases of real, unavoidable error; and then let them show that a liability to error in this case invalidates the right any more than in all other departments of the administration of human justice. Here they meet us with another objection, as a sort of clencher to the first.

2. Capital punishment is the only punishment which is remediless.

We deny it utterly. All unjust punishment is * We have heard a good woman urge it as a personal objection to capital punishment, that she lived in bodily fear of being one day hung in her innocence. People commonly think it more important to be protected from being murdered, as the greater danger of the two.

in one sense remediless. Done is done. Besides, it is practically remediless, for rarely, if ever, is any effort made to remedy it so far even as a remedy is possible. This is not all. When a man, after having been imprisoned for a crime, one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, or thirty years, dies; and is then found to have been innocent; how will you remedy it? Any man may die at any time; are you not, then, afraid to imprison him, lest you should do him remediless wrong? It is said to have been ascertained that some hundreds of persons have been buried alive; must we, therefore, keep all dead bodies above ground until the air is tainted with the putrefaction? Is no sexton allowed to throw a clod of earth upon a coffin, is no man allowed to have anything to do, directly or indirectly, with a burial, until he has assured himself to a perfect certainty, by the evidence of his own senses, that death has actually taken place? In short, will the consciences of good men one day grow so tender that they will not dare to move to the right hand or the left, without first stopping for & demonstration ?

3. Capital punishment violates the sacro-sanctity of human life.

The great motive of capital punishment, the only proper motive, is, the protection of human life from violation. It is wonderful to observe by what jug. glery its opposers are endeavouring to engross all the credit of this motive to themselves. We profess to have at least as much regard for the sanctity of human life as they; and we retort that it is they who would expose it to violation. They are not distinguished from us by any greater regard for the sanctity of human life, but only for the sacro-sanctity" of murderers. The Roman tribunes were held to possess this attribute of "sacro-sanctity," so that whatever they might do while in office, it was sacrilege to offer them any violence. These men would have the privileges of such a character attach to all murderers. They would have every mur. derer possessed of a charmed existence. And this they call a superlative regard for the sacro-sanctity" of human life! They might as well deny the right of the magistrate (as indeed some of them do) to seize the property of the thief; and then take to themselves the credit of a superlative regard for the rights of property.

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4. When a murderer is executed, he has either repented, and is prepared to go into another world—and in that case he is certainly fit to remain in this; or he has not repented, and in that case, by taking his life, men send him unprepared into eternity, and consequently consign him to endless torment.

| human justice. So much for the guilty but penitent sufferer. As for society, which is represented as endeavouring to replace the loss of one man, good or bad, as the case may be, by voluntarily throwing away another man confessedly good; we say, on the other hand, that society gains more good from the imperturbable execution of its just laws upon one such offender, than it could derive from the useful lives of many such if they were spared. But we wish to be understood distinctly to repudiate any argument tending to defend capital punishment as proceeding from any motive of benevolence towards the criminal. We do not believe in any such way of showing kindness. The benevolence of the law in this case is not a private but a public benevolence, a love which prefers the lives of the innocent mass to the life of the guilty murderer.

This dilemma seems to be considered by many as conclusive of the question. Now we utterly protest against thus appealing to the retributions of eternity. It is getting entirely out of our depth, and setting ourselves about business which does not belong to us. But if such objections must be made, then we reply to the first horn of the dilemma, that we never heard of a murderer confessing and deploring his crime in Christian penitence, who did not, as the apostle Paul said he would do, consent freely to die. He has magnified the law whose penalty he suffered. Nay, more; men under the influence of repentance, and of the instinctive consciousness of the justice and fitness of capital punishment for murder, have voluntarily confessed their guilt, and surrendered themselves to the hands of

To the other horn of the dilemma, we answer, that by all means a long respite should be given to every convict before his execution. But if, after such respite, he is still unprepared to be launched into eternity, his blood is upon his own head. He has, in reality, destroyed himself. Living under the known laws of God and nature and human society, he committed a crime whose penalty he knew to be death, and he must abide the consequences. It is not so much the hangman that takes his life, as he that kills himself by the hangman's instrumentality. We ought by all means to beware, that we do the murderer no injustice in this world. That is our sphere

that is our business. Let us see well to that. And we need not trouble our heads with any fears that God will do him any injustice in the world to come. Let us leave the retributions of the next world in God's hands. Further, we are not aware that this objection is often made or much felt by those who believe in the eternity of future punishment. It is thrust upon them as an argumentum ad hominem, by those who deny such eternal punishment; and, as thus urged, is fully answered by the argumentum ad hominem, that, according to the creed of those who urge it, capital punishment, so far from being oversevere or cruel, sends the impenitent murderer from this world, where he might do much harm and could enjoy but little good, directly to eternal blessed

ness.

5. The voice of nature, as expressed in the universal, instinctive horror of the hangman and his office, condemns capital punishment.

In

We answer, that this feeling is not directed exclusively against the hangman's office, but the same feeling, though in a less degree, attaches to the office of the police-man and the jailer. deed, it is shared in some degree by all the ulti mate instrumentalities in the infliction of penalty. The more ultimate, the more absolutely necessary any office is, the less honourable it is. Those external functions in our physical economy which are the most indispensable to our existence, are deemed the most base. This is a sufficient answer to those who say, "If you consider the office of hangman so necessary, why not assume it yourself?" For the rest, we auswer in the words of Diderot, who thought capital punishment inexpedient, and whose views may therefore be considered by our opponents the more impartial. "I have before shown," says he, "how natural it seems that the laws should have ordained death as the punishment for murder, and that the public feeling was in harmony with those laws. The horror which is felt for the executioner by no means

proves that the penalty of death is unjust. That | horror arises from the peculiar compassion which man feels for his suffering fellow-man; and which would be the same if he saw him in that state in which despair does not terminate his woes, but only begins them: [terms by which Beccaria had described the horrors of that imprisonment which he proposed to substitute for the penalty of death.] Arm the executioner with chains and scourges; make it his office to render odious the life of the culprit; and the spectacle of the sufferings of which he will be the instrument will make him equally detested; but the penalty he inflicts upon the convict will be none the less just. It is not, therefore, nature that inspires the horror which is felt for the executioner, but this is rather an instinctive emotion, a physical repugnance which one man feels in seeing another suffer, and from which I conclude nothing against the good of the law." (Beccaria De' delitti e delle Pene. Nota 56.) Diderot might have added, that we are probably irritated by the want of feeling which the execu tioner commonly exhibits, and disgusted by the barely mercenary motives which induce him to undertake the office. But surely it will not do to abolish all offices in society which are usually exercised from base motives, or which are repulsive to delicate sensibilities, or by which men of respectable standing would feel degraded. In short, the paradox we meet with here, is of wider application than the abolitionists seem to suppose.* They must find better grounds than this before they can demolish the right of society to inflict capital punishment. We recommend them to make diligent inquisition.

OUR HOME HEATHEN.

[Tais paper forms the substance of a document read at the meeting of a provincial presbytery, and is published in our pages by request. We bespeak for it the careful perusal of our readers, and especially of those among them who occupy the responsible position of office-bearers in the Church. Some may deem the language it employs as to the state of matters in our large towns too strong and discouraging. But we believe no one will think or say so who is even slightly acquainted with the moral and religious condition of the lower classes in large towns. The misery is, that even after that condition is known and acknowledged and deplored, and after such appeals as the following are perused, little or nothing is done by way of remedy. The Church sleeps on, and thousands go down unwarned to destruction.]

The increase of vice in our large towns has gone on, for many years, with a most alarming celerity; and unless the Church rise up in her moral majesty as the spouse of Christ, to exercise her benevolent

dominion over the souls and consciences of our degraded population, she will soon be so besieged and hemmed in by innumerable bands of enemies, that instead of going forth in the character and spirit of missionary aggression, she will be overborne by the continual pressure from without of an ignorant, an * A petition was some time since got up in one of our cities, as we understand, and numerously signed by the leading abolitionists. praying the Legislature to compel the clergy, who were in favour of capital punishment, to perform the office of executioners. This argument is, of course, irrefragable; it is useless to reason against a practical joke.

It is indispensable for the health of our cities that they should be cleansed of the filth that is liable to be collected on them. Will these gentlemen volunteer their services? or will they condemn the scavenger's business as inhuman and unnatural?

illiterate, and ferocious heathenism, which will soon acknowledge few moral obligations, and at last set all spiritual authority and discipline at defiance. That there may be a regulating and controlling power to direct and govern the capricious energies of these enormous masses of evil, which may some day be confederated for purposes of mischief, it is high time for all Christian ministers, and office-bearers,. and members of every evangelical denomination, to combine, to co-operate, and apply their united lever power in elevating the moral and religious condition of those who are falling away from the wholesome and salutary restraints of Christianity. Much may be done if we are united, if we work together and simultaneously-if, forgetting, or at least foregoing for the time, our sectarian character as Christians, we go forward in this great moral enterprise, in the strength and power and spirit of the Head of the Church. That we may know the magnitude of the evils we have to contend with, let us take a glance at the present aspect of society.

I. Consider the reasons why so many have fallen away from the observance of religious ordinances. The irreligious character of many of our population has, no doubt, arisen from the universal distribution of infidel publications. Periodicals, of an infamous spirit and tendency, are the only literary food of a great body of our working population; and productions of revolting obscenity are insidiously and privately circulated, by which the minds of the young are corrupted and debauched, and prepared for every desperate achievement of immorality. These mischievous productions are working their ruinous inroads in every direction among the masses of our labouring population, who are rapidly falling away, not only from the ordinances of religion, but from the exterior semblance of even personal decency and propriety. Public worship is forsaken, religions duties are neglected, wives and families are left to tinual pressure of a paternal influence that is every shift for themselves, or are degraded under the conday sinking deeper and deeper in the mire of earthly speculations, or of contented profligacy. The bands affection are broken asunder, moral and religious of social life are untwined, the cords of domestic government is subverted, and tens of thousands are restrained or kept down only by the presence of civil or military authority. And all this is going on before the face, and under the inspection of professing Christians, who are no doubt separately, and in fractional detachments, doing what they can to arrest the tide of infidelity, but whose divided efforts are only so many breakwaters, which may soon be broken down under the superincumbent weight of the floods of ungodliness which are continually rising, and which in some dark night of political storm and agitation, may carry away every bulwark, every barrier that now guards our civil and religious liberties.

As a consequence of the general dissemination of infidel publications, infidel opinions and principles are becoming more common. These principles are destroying the common relationship between God and man, and, consequently, tending to the overthrow of all religion, and to the ultimate subversion of all social order.

The fruits of these principles are seen in the increase of immorality. Vice and profligacy are pervading all ranks. The conviction of irresponsi bility to God is preparing the way for man's irresponsibility to man. An aversion to religious authority