that there is a conscience in him. But he will have the desired gratification; and to obtain it, he sets his foot upon that conscience, and crushes it down to dishonour and agony, worse than death. Ah! my

brethren, we who sit in our closets talk about vice, and dishonesty, and bloody crime, and draw dark pictures of them,-cold and lifeless, though dark pic ́tures; but we little know, perhaps, of what we speak. The heart, all conscious and alive to the truth, would smile in bitterness and derision at the feebleness of our description. And could the heart speak-could "the bosom black as death" send forth its voice of living agony in our holy places, it would rend the vaulted arches of every sanctuary with the cry of a pierced, and wounded, and wronged, and ruined nature!

Finally, sin does a wrong to the affections. How does it mar even that image of the affections, that mysterious shrine from which their revealings flash forth,

the human face divine;" bereaving the world of more than half its beauty! Can you ever behold sullenness clouding the clear fair brow of childhood,-or the flushed cheek of anger, or the averted and writhen features of envy, or the dim and sunken eye and haggard aspect of vice, or the red signals of bloated excess hung out on every feature, proclaiming the fire that is consuming within,-without feeling that sin is the despoiler of all that the affections make most hallowed and beautiful?

But these are only indications of the wrong that is done, and the ruin that is wrought in the heart. Nature has made our affections to be full of tenderness, to be sensitive and alive to every touch, to cling to their cherished objects with a grasp from which

nothing but cruel violence can sever them. We hear much, I know, of the coldness of the world, but I cannot believe much that I hear; nor is it perhaps meant in any sense that denies to man naturally the most powerful affections-affections that demand the most gentle and considerate treatment. Human love -I am ready to exclaim-how strong is it! What yearnings are there of parental fondness, of filial gratitude, of social kindness everywhere! What impatient asking of ten thousand hearts for the love of others; not for their gold, not for their praise, but for their love!

But sin enters into this world of the affections, and spreads around the death-like coldness of distrust; the word of anger falls like a blow upon the heart, or avarice hardens the heart against every finer feeling; or the insane merriment, or the sullen stupor of the inebriate man falls like a thunderbolt amidst the circle of kindred and children. Oh! the hearts where sin is to do its work should be harder than the nether millstone; yet it enters in among affections, all warm, all sensitive, all gushing forth in tenderness; and, deaf to all their pleadings, it does its work as if it were some demon of wrath that knew no pity, and heard no groans, and felt no relenting.

But I must not leave this subject to be regarded as if it were only a matter for abstract or curious speculation. It goes beyond reasoning; it goes to the conscience, and demands penitence and humiliation.

For of what, in this view, is the sensualist guilty? He is guilty, not merely of indulging the appetites of his body, but of sacrificing to that body a soul !— I speak literally-of sacrificing to that body a soul!

uses.

yes, of sacrificing all the transcendant and boundless creation of God in his nature to one single nerve of his perishing frame. The brightest emanation of God, a flame from the everlasting altar burns within him; and he voluntarily spreads over it a fleshly veil-a veil of appetites-a veil of thick darkness; and if from its awful folds one beam of the holy and insufferable light within breaks forth, he closes his eyes, and quickly spreads another covering of wilful delusion over it, and utterly refuses to see that light, though it flashes upon him from the shrine of the Divinity. 'There is, indeed, a peculiarity in the sensuality of a man, distinguishing it from the sensual gratification of which an animal is capable, and which many men are exalted above the brutes only to turn to the basest The sensual pleasures of a human being derive a quality from the mind. They are probably more intense, through the co-operating action of the mind. The appetite of hunger or thirst, for instance, is doubtless the same in both animal and man, and its gratification the same in kind; but the mind communicates to it a greater intensity. To a certain extent this is unquestionably natural and lawful. But the mind, finding that it has this power, and that by absorption in sense, by gloating over its objects, it can for a time add something to their enjoyment, the mind, I say, surrenders itself to the base and ignoble ministry. The angel in man does homage to the brute in man. Reason toils for sense; the imagination panders for appetite; and even the conscience that no faculty may be left undebased-the divine conscience strives to spread around the loathsome forms of voluptuousness a haze of moral beauty-calling intoxication

enthusiasm, and revelling good fellowship, and dignifying every species of indulgence with some name that is holy.

Of what, again, is the miser, and of what is every inordinately covetous man, guilty? Conversant as he may be with every species of trade and traffic, there is one kind of barter coming yet nearer to his interest, but of which, perchance, he has never thought. He barters virtue for gain. That is the stupendous moral traffic in which he is engaged. The very attributes of the mind are made a part of the stock in the awful trade of avarice. And if its account-book were to state truly the whole of every transaction, it would often stand thus: "Gained, my hundreds or my thousands; lost, the rectitude and peace of my conscience:" "Gained, a great bargain, driven hard; lost, in the same proportion, the generosity and kindness of my affections." "Credit"—and what strife is there for that ultimate item, for that final record!" Credit, by an immense fortune;" but on the opposing page, the last page of that moral, as truly as mercantile, account, I read those words, written not in golden capitals, but in letters of fire-" a lost soul!"

Oh, my brethren! it is a pitiable desecration of such a nature as ours to give it up to the world. Some baser thing might have been given without regret; but to bow down reason and conscience, to bind them to the clods of earth, to contract those faculties that spread themselves out beyond the world, even to infinity to contract them to worldly trifles-it is pitiable; it is something to mourn and to weep over. He who sits down in a dungeon which another has made, has not such cause to bewail himself as he who

sits down in the dungeon which he has thus made for himself. Poverty and destitution are sad things; but there is no such poverty, there is no such destitution as that of a covetous and worldly heart. Poverty is a sad thing; but there is no man so poor as he who is poor in his affections and virtues. Many a house is full, where the mind is unfurnished and the heart is empty; and no hovel of mere penury ever ought to be so sad as that house. Behold, it is left desolate-to the immortal it is left desolate, as the chambers of death. Death is there indeed; and it is the death of the soul!

But not to dwell longer upon particular forms of evil—of what, let us ask, is the man guilty? Who is it that is thus guilty? To say that he is noble in his nature has been sometimes thought a dangerous laxity of doctrine, a proud assumption of merit, "a flattering unction" laid to the soul. But what kind of flattery is it to say to a man, "you were made but little lower than the angels; you might have been rising to the state of angels, and you have made-what have you made yourself? what you are--a slave to the world

a slave to sense -a slave to masters baser than Nature made them-to vitiated sense, and a corrupt and vain world!" Alas! the irony implied in such flattery as this is not needed to add poignancy to conviction. Boundless capacities shrunk to worse than infantile imbecility! immortal faculties made toilers for the vanities of a moment! a glorious nature sunk to a willing fellowship with evil!-alas! it needs no exaggeration, but only simple statement, to make this a sad and afflicting case. Ill enough had it been for us if we had been made a depraved and degraded race; well