with no peculiar charge, you have, in common with all your brethren, been called to work out your own salvation-to watch over and keep with all diligence your own heart. Henceforth it is to be the one great business of your life, to work out the salvation, not of your own soul alone, but of all to whom you may be sent with the messages of life-to save both yourselves and those that hear you. You are to kindle and cherish the sacred fire of holy love on the altar not of your own heart merely, but of all over whom you may be placed in the Lord. You are seldom to sit under the droppings of the sanctuary, and to receive from godly counselors impulses of holy love; but you are yourselves to give tone to the piety of whole churches and communities of worship

ers.

You can no more sit together in heavenly places as you have delighted to sit, but must seek out other and separate abodes. You can no more be what you have been. This day closes, in a sense deeply affecting, the period of your novitiate. From this hour, you enter upon new scenes, new duties, new trials; you assume new connexions, new engagements, new responsibilities.

In order, therefore, to the culture of your own heart, in the midst of all these cares and labors for others, in order to the keeping of your own vineyard, you will need to be doubly diligent and watchful. The proportion of time hitherto devoted to yourselves, it will not be in your power hereafter to appropriate. You will be in great danger of neglecting your own souls, and of losing that fervor which prompted you to seek an entrance into the holy ministry. Called out, as you will be, so frequently, to be a spectacle unto the world, to be gazed at, and spoken of, you will be exposed to a class of temptations, of which as yet you have known but little. New allurements will assail you-new enemies seek your downfall. The ardor of your devotions will be nearly quenched with the waters of strife, and the smooth surface of your love be ruffled and tossed with the vanities of the world. has been our experience, and will be yours. You cannot, then, give too much heed to our earnest entreaties. You cannot be too earnest yourselves in cultivating your own hearts, in seeking the utmost holiness of heart and purity of life.

Such

In this impressive hour, we can speak of nothing else. We charge you, dear brethren, to give yourselves up from this hour to be wholly the Lord's. Let this, the last day of your union on earth, bear witness, that henceforth you are to be more than ever united to the Lord of your hearts.

You stand here together, for the last time. You part this evening, to meet no more on earth-no more until the last trump shall wake the dead. One of your number is already far advanced, in the floating Catalpa, on his way to the land of the ancient Medes and

Persians. Others will soon, in like manner, be speeding their way across the ocean, to bear the gospel far hence to the Gentiles. While not a few, we trust, will be directing their steps to the land of the setting sun, to seek out the scattered sheep of the house of Israel, and to build up the waste places of our own land.

The moment of your separation draws nigh. You go, not like the eight-and-thirty, who have just left the Military School on the other bank of the noble Hudson, to carry arrows, firebrands and death into the midst of a peaceful and unoffending community, but to rescue them that are ready to perish ;-not to destroy men's lives, but to save them. When next you meet, may you have to tell of bloodless battles, peaceful conquests, and crowns of life. And as you then gather together around the throne, may a great multitude from the East and the West, from the North and the South, rise up and call you "the blessed of the Lord."

Then said Micah, Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest.-JUDGES 17: 13.

A VERY unimportant chapter of biography is here preserved to us-save that if we take the subject as an exponent of his times, we shall find a serious and momentous truth illustrated in his conduct. He lives in the time of the Judges, that is, in the emigrant age of Israel. It is the time, when his nation are passing through the struggles incident to a new settlement, a time therefore of decline towards barbarism. Public security is gone. The people have run wild. Superstition has dislodged the clear sovereignty of reason. Forms are more sacred than duties, and a costly church furniture is taken as synonymous with a godly life. It is at just such times that we are to look for the union of great crimes and scrupulous acts of devotion. The villain and the saint coalesce, without difficulty, in one and the same character; and superstition, which delights in absurdities, hides the imposture from him who suffers it. Thus Micah enters on the stage of history as a thief, having stolen eleven hundred shekels of silver from his mother; but before the scene closes, he becomes, at least in his own view, quite a saint; and that too, if we may judge, without any great detriment to his former character.

The following discourse was prepared on behalf of the American Home Missionary Society, and delivered in New York, Boston, and other places, in May and June, 1847.

Finding that his mother has invoked a solemn curse upon the thief, whoever he may be, that has stolen her money; and also, which is more frightful still, that she had actually dedicated the money, before it was stolen, to a religious use, even to make a molten image for himself, the superstitious fancy of the barbarian begins to worry his peace. To have stolen the money was nothing specially dreadful, but to have a parent's curse hanging over his head, and sacred money hid in his house-both considered to involve the certainty of some impending mischief that is fatal-is more than he has courage to support. Moved, of course, by no ingenuous and dignified spirit of repentance, but only by a drivelling superstition, he goes to his mother and chokes out his confession, saying: "The silver is with me, I took it!" And what a beautiful evidence of piety, thinks the glad mother, that her Micah was afraid to keep the sacred money! So she pours out her dear blessing upon him: "Blessed be thou of the Lord, my son!" Then she takes the silver and from it has a molten image cast for her worthy and hopeful son, which he sets up in "the house of his gods," among the teraphim and other trumpery there collected. And as Micah is now growing religious, he must also have a priest. First, he consecrates his own son but his son not being a Levite, it was difficult for so pious a man to be satisfied.. Fortunately, a young Levite a strolling mendicant probably-comes that way, and he promptly engages the youth to remain and act the padre for him, saying: "Dwell with me and be a father unto me." Having thus got up a religion, the thief is content, and his mental troubles are quieted. Becoming a Romanist before Rome is founded, he says: "Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest." That it would do him any good to be a better man, does not appear to have occurred to him. Religion, to him, consisted rather in a fine silver apparatus of gods, and a priest in regular succession!

Set now the picture in its frame, the man in connexion with his times, and you have in exhibition a great practical truth, which demands your earnest study. Nothing is more certain, as you may see in this example of Micah and his times, than that emigration, or a new settlement of the social state, involves a tendency to social decline. There must, in every such case, be a relapse towards barbarism, more or less protracted, more or less complete. Commonly, nothing but extraordinary efforts in behalf of education and religion, will suffice to prevent a fatal lapse of social order. Apart from this great truth, clearly seen as enveloped in the practical struggles of our American history, no one can understand its real import, the problem it involves, or the position at which we have now arrived. Least of all can he understand the sublime relation of home missions, and other like enterprises, to the unknown future of our great nation. He must know that we are a

people trying out the perils incident to a new settlement of the social state; he must behold religion passing out into the wilds of nature with us, to fortify law, industry, and good manners, and bear up our otherwise declining fortunes, till we become an established and fully cultivated people. Just here, hang all the struggles of our history for the two centuries now passed, and for at least another century yet to come.

We shall also discover, in pursuing our subject, in what manner we are to apprehend danger from the spread of Romanism. If you seem to struggle, in this matter of Romanism, with contrary convictions; to see reason in the alarms urged upon you so frequently, and yet feel it to be the greatest unreason to fear the prevalence here of a religion so distinctively opposite to our character and institutions; if you waver between a feeling of panic and a feeling of derision; if you are half frightened by the cry of Romanism, and half scorn it as a bugbear; you will be able to settle yourself into a sober and fixed opinion of the subject, when you perceive that we are in danger, first, of something far worse than Romanism, and through that of Romanism itself. OUR FIRST DANGER IS BARBARISM-Romanism next; for before we can think it a religion to have a Levite to our priest, we must bring back the times of the Judges. Let us empty ourselves of our character, let us fall into superstition, through the ignorance, wildness, and social confusion incident to a migratory habit and a rapid succession of new settlements, and Romanism will find us just where character leaves us. The real danger is the prior. Taking care of that we are safe. Sleeping over that, nothing ought to save us; for if we must have a wild race of nomads roaming on the vast western territories of our land—a race without education, law, manners, or religion-we need not trouble ourselves further on account of Romanism; for to such a people, Romanism, bad as it is, will come as a blessing.

I shall recur to this question of Romanism again. I only name it here as a preliminary, that it may assist you to apprehend the true import of my subject. Let us now proceed to the question itself, How far emigration and a continual re-settlement, as in this country, involve a tendency to moral and social disorganization? In the discussion of this question, I shall draw principally on the facts of history; I only suggest here, as a preparative and key to the facts that may be cited, a few of the reasons why such a decline is likely to appear.

First of all, the society transplanted, in a case of emigration, cannot carry its roots with it; for society is a vital creature, having roots of antiquity, which inhere in the very soil-in the spots consecrated by valor, by genius, and by religion. Transplanted to a new field, the emigrant race lose, of necessity, a considerable portion of that vital force which is the organific and conserving