We are abundantly taught, that it matters but little what we believe, if only we are sincere. Believe what you like, and practise accordingly: provided your confidence be entire, it shall advance you to the chief seats in the celestial temple. On this plan, truth has no exclusive advantage attached to it. Error is quite as potent. "Truthfulness" in adhering to error, and following its guidance, is as saving as sincere obedience to truth. If we can be persuaded to adopt with the whole heart any one of the fond schemes of delusion wherewith the world is filled, we are

secure.

According to this theory, there was no need that Saul of Tarsus should cease to be a bloody persecutor of the church; for he was entirely sincere in those proceedings, and verily thought he was doing God service. What an abominable idea he must have had of God! How corrupt must have been the heart which could cherish such an idea! Such sincerity, sincerity in wicked and blasphemous error, can only arise from dreadful depravity. And all sincerity in error springs from the same source of pollution. It was not because he was sincere, that the apostle "obtained mercy; " but, as he says, because he acted "ignorantly in unbelief." Though it was a culpable ignorance and a sinful unbelief, he obtained mercy through the sincerity of his repentance, and not of his error.

This notion about the safety of sincerity obtains in nothing but in the affairs of religion. Let a man beware how he mistakes arsenic for meal, oxalic acid for epsom salts, a serpent for a fish, or a scorpion for an egg. No matter how naturally he may have fallen into the error through misleading circumstances. No matter how undoubting his delusion may be. It is at his peril. If he eat, he will be forced at last to cry out, "There is death in the pot!" All analogy, as well as common sense, is against the weak and silly figment, that error, which is so hurtful in every thing else, is harmless in religion. A man who wanders from the only road will not reach his journey's end all the same, merely because he felt so very sure he was going right. The longer his delusion lasts, the farther will he go astray. God, who has liberally given us the means of obtaining accurate knowledge, requires us to use them properly. We cannot evade responsibility for our opinions. We are twice warned in the Proverbs: "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man; but the end thereof are the ways of death."

The unprincipled teaching that matters of faith are the smallest of all our concerns, if we are only sincere, is the seed which has ripened into an abundant harvest of crime.

Another cause of this sad harvest we are reaping, is false teaching upon the subject of punishment of crime.

There prevails extensively a state of feeling which rejects with scorn all the old-fashioned and scriptural rules on this point. The means of restraint and reformation prescribed by divine wisdom, and designed for all ages, are now remodelled or cast aside. The modern wise men begin in the nursery, of course. They first burn the rod, the sparing of which, as God hath said, spoils the child. You must pity the poor little innocent which means no harm, when it passionately smites you in the face, or stiffly refuses obedience. Be patient. Maturer years, with a proper education and the regenerative influence of moral suasion, will correct all that seems untoward and unseemly.

The sympathy of such philanthropists is not with the injured individual or the injured community, but with the offender; and is but little removed from sympathy with his crime. Crime is regarded by them as a mere moral mistake, for which a badly constructed state of society is responsible, rather than the culprit.

This sickly, deranged sympathy goes from the nursery into the public school, and into public life; and cannot rest until all corporal or capital punishment is for ever abolished. This is some of the fruit which is gathered from the uttermost boughs of that tree, whose thick branches throw into the deepest shade the eternal punishment of the incorrigible sinner. Men fear the penalty of their sin. Conscience intimates, and the Bible abundantly proclaims, a day of judgment and endless retribution. The fears thus aroused lead to theory, to speculation, to doubts, to fallacious hopes, to perversions of truth, and finally to an artificial conviction that men cannot be eternally punished for their sins against an infinite God. The next thing is to ask, If God shall have no capital punishment for capital offences under his government, why should a parent have any such in his, so far as one can answer to the other? And why should there be any in the commonwealth? The tendency of such teaching is plain. This repugnance to all penalty for crime does amazingly detract from the objection to crime itself, till it comes to be regarded as no more than a moral negation, and the young and thoughtless easily become its

perpetrators. It is frightful to see how the world is filling up with moral instruction which has in it this anti-penalty element. Like some of the reptiles which plagued Egypt, it covers the land: it comes into our houses, and into our bed-chambers, and upon our people, and into our ovens, and into our kneading troughs. The criminal is held up as the chief object of our compassion; while violated law, and injured justice, and bleeding innocence, and God's most sacred requisitions, meet with no regard.

This kind of instructión has become common only within the present generation. The fathers of our day were trained in a different school in their childhood. Hence such of them as have adopted the new views, are under an habitual restraint; though, perhaps, scarce conscious of its cords. That early influence happily controls their deportment, so that they go not to all the lengths towards which their new-fangled notions obviously tend. But their own offspring have had the benefit of no such restraint. Hence they act out in practice the theories in which they are trained; and thus it comes that crime is so rampant, at the present time, among the young. In the fashionable literature, they daily read, in effect, that crime is not crime. In the books and newspapers which their fathers buy and bring home for them, they find more said by way of compassion and admiration for the most desperate villain, than for thousands of his innocent victims, or for the public welfare, endangered and bleeding under his atrocities. We say again, the virus takes, and often where it might be least expected.

We have a deplorable proof of the utter disregard for the divine teachings in the infidel schemes for the wholesale regeneration of society. What rhapsodies are uttered about the new plans for herding men, women, and children together, in promiscuous intercourse, severing the holy and beautiful ties which God has formed; and creating in their place relationships of heartlessness, sensuality, and infamy!

Such are some of the abominable nostrums which are vended abroad for the healing of the maladies of sin. Who can wonder, that a community where they are extensively used, should be nothing better, but indefinitely worse?

Oh that parents would consider how virulent is the venom of infidelity; and how dangerous when disguised in sirups and sweetmeats! Can they deem that their children can taste without

detriment? They are not so much in peril from open impiety and vice, as from such as may assume the airs of a sentimental religion and a newly refined morality. Such pernicious reading ought to be banished from our homes, and from the sight of our children. Let us know what comes into our houses; and suffer nothing there which militates against the Word of God, and teaches that any outward graces, or external correctness of demeanor, can render them fit for heaven and acceptable to God, without a heart entirely changed by a new and spiritual birth.

Above all, let the Bible be the chief element in the moral culture of the young. Let it teach them that they are sinners, and tell them how to be saved. Let the Bible be the grand instrument of reform, and the work will be rightly done according to the mind of God.

INDEPENDENCE OF MIND.

THERE be few that do their own thinking. Opinions are taken on trust. The irksome labor of investigation is commonly shuffled off. Stagnation of mind is mistaken for settled conviction, and a sluggish reluctance to struggle for the prize of truth is misnamed a love of peace.

Yet were it not for the great and conflicting differences of opinion on all subjects, society would be a miry marsh, diversified only by standing pools, infecting the air with stupifying and deadly miasma. Personal controversies and party strifes help to break up the dismal level, and dissipate in some degree the pestilent vapors which must be the result of universal agreement on all points. While man is the indolent and self-indulging creature that he is, there can be no greater curse than general unanimity of views. It would cause a general apoplexy of souls, a deadening of all the powers and activities of the human mind.

Still it is to be regretted, that the agitations which sweep the surface and stir up the depths of society, are, for the most part, mere blasts of gregarious feeling. A few noisy trumpeters set on the rest. The mass follows its leaders. The mass, strong and blind, pulls down any pillars, as directed, be they of Dagon's temple or the Lord's. Even when it crushes the Philistines, it performs an unintelligent and infuriate feat of strength, at the

dictation of some demagogue, or the behest of a secret junto. Self-will, whether in one man or in multitudes, is a sorry substitute for mental independence.

There is another delusion on this point. Some vehement spirits, in their zeal to be independent, tangle themselves in knotty paradoxes, and get completely wound up in the meshes of their own metaphysics, where they lie "as a wild bull in a net." They have a dread of agreeing with anybody, especially in matters which have long been considered as settled past all reasonable question. Unless they can strike out something which they think to be original and peculiar to themselves, they are haunted by an uncomfortable fear of not being truly independent. Forgetting that the most necessary truths must be the most obvious, they will cavil at mathematical axioms, and the multiplication table itself, rather than appear to be in the least like other people. This is a most abject and degrading servility, a refinement in cowardice, a miserable counterfeit of true freedom of thought.

The only liberal mind is that which can throw off the shackles of prejudice and the yoke of passion, in pursuing its inquiries for the truth. It is glad to go with the popular current when it can: it is willing to go against the stream when it must. It takes up its sentiments, not because certain men have favored them, nor because certain other men have opposed; but because it sees in them the beauty of truth, and feels in them its power. The free spirit of Christianity, in whatever bosom it abides, is a law unto itself, a perfect law of liberty. The less that spirit is interfered with, the more it is left, untrammelled and unchecked, to act in its own natural and spontaneous way, the more orderly are its workings, and the more peaceful are its fruits.

Such a mind, based

A free, firm mind is a noble spectacle. upon the Bible, and established with grace, has enough of independence for all possible occasions. It can cast off an old prejudice or an antiquated error, without losing its balance, and falling to the opposite extreme. It does not take on a new opinion in such a way as to give the appearance of a huge wen or tumor; but so as to increase in strength and symmetry, as when healthy flesh is acquired. And what is more, it can withstand the wild onsets of innovation, and not be swept from its proper station. New theories and new practices may come in like a flood, as if all the fountains of the great deep were broken up; but here is a barrier which will not