the busy husbandman pursuing his cheerful toil:Every heart gladdened by the prospect, sure though distant, of that bounteous harvest by which the year shall at length be crowned.

How strange that to many minds this word, so pleasing in every other connection, should not only lose all its charm but become utterly distasteful and offensive when used with reference to religion! By every well constituted mind the revival of an immortal soul, under the power of Divine truth, ought surely to be regarded as an event unspeakably more interesting and delightful than any revival affecting only the temporal estate of man. The body may revive and the gloom of the sick chamber be dispelled, and the saddened countenances of friends be brightened into joy; but a few years have only to run their course in order that the same sick chamber must be anew prepared, and that mourning friends must again be gathered around. The soul, once revived by the Spirit of God, can never die! When Peter presented Dorcas alive, revived by the power of Christ, to the saints and widows who filled the upper chamber at Joppa, weeping over her decease, it is indeed delightful to think of the glad surprise that must suddenly have beamed from every eye and dried up every tear. But that company nevertheless must ere long, in the common course of nature, have reassembled to behold their friend and benefactor, in whose restoration they now rejoiced, finally carried to the cold and silent grave. When, on the other hand, the Lord Jesus standing by the pallet on which lay the man that was brought in before him, sick of the palsy, said unto him, "Son, be of good cheer,

thy sins be forgiven thee," the germ of life eternal was that instant implanted in his soul. His bodily frame might indeed again become powerless under the pressure of a new disease, but his undying spirit had been healed for ever of the deadly disease of sin.

And if this consideration should invest a religious revival with a character of profoundest interest and importance, viewed simply in its bearing on the condition and destiny of an individual soul, much more surely when viewed in its wider bearing on a community, on a country, on the world.

If we look around us on the community in which we live, how many scenes and objects meet the eye fitted to shock the sensibilities and wound the feelings of every benevolent heart. The squalid poverty, the want and nakedness, in which hundreds and thousands of families are dragging out a wretched existence; the crowds of neglected children growing up in ignorance and vice; the domestic misery which embitters so many homes; the drunkenness, the profaneness, the profligacy which so disgracefully abound;-what friend of humanity can survey these things without longing for some means by which they may at least be mitigated if not wholly removed? And no doubt the philanthropists of this world are ready with their schemes of social improvement. One has his proposal for encreasing the means of employment, another thinks the cure will be found in a rise of wages-a third confidently anticipates the same result from a greater diffusion of secular knowledge, while a different class, of sterner and more practical minds, place their reliance on an extended police and a more rigorous exercise of criminal justice.

But who that looks beneath the surface of thingsthat is accustomed to trace up effects to their cause, can fail to perceive that all these devices are but so many vain attempts to daub the wall of the social edifice with untempered mortar,-concealing perhaps for a time but not in the least removing, the rottenness that is hidden within? The physical disorders that so extensively afflict society, together with the whole train of vices by which they are accompanied, flow out of a diseased moral and spiritual condition. "I have been young, said the Psalmist, and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread." "Godliness, said the Apostle, is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life now is," as well as of "that which is to come." It is irreligion which is the pregnant and pernicious source of poverty and profligacy and crime; and nothing but a religious revival can have power to chase those evils from the many wretched lanes of this mighty city, and to bring back industry and comfort, virtue and happiness, to the dark and desolate dwellings which are now tenanted only by misery and vice.

If from the community we give the eye a wider range, and embrace within the sweep of its observation the country at large, how much, on this ampler field, do we daily descry to grieve, and even to alarm, every patriotic mind? Infidelity busily and boldly assailing, not only the evidences of revealed truth but the very first principles of morals; no longer, as in former times, concealing itself amid the folds of subtle speculation, and addressing itself to men of learning and science-but coming forth in its naked de

formity among the lower orders of the people, and proclaiming with unabashed visage the most revolting practical abominations: Popery, seemingly the enemy and the opposite, but in truth the sworn friend and natural ally of infidelity, successfully struggling to recover its ancient and baleful ascendancy, fatal alike to the temporal prosperity and eternal welfare of mankind: While between the two, and extending a friendly hand to each, stands religious liberalism, scornfully indifferent to all diversities of creed, and priding itself in its insane and impious attempt to bind society in harmony and peace, by inducing all to break those bands and cast away those cords by which the Prince of peace has sought to unite them, at once to each other and to their God and Father in heaven. As if when men of all forms of faith had agreed to build one common altar and on that altar to offer up Truth as a sacrifice, that then would be the time, over the ashes of that sacrifice, to swear vows of mutual reconciliation and friendship never again to be broken. And while so many poisonous influences are thus at work upon the public mind, unsettling the religious convictions and perverting or deadening the moral sense of the people, at the same time that nothing at all corresponding to their immensely increased numbers has been done to provide them with the means of sound religious instruction, is it surprising that a spirit of insubordination, breaking out at times into lawless and fearful outrage, should be found extensively diffused and actively at work in so many districts of the land? Politicians, many of them see indeed the fact, and the more reflecting of them, tremble perhaps at the dangers it

involves, but how few of them, of any party, ascribe it to its proper cause, or understand and are prepared to apply the only remedy by which a better order of things can ever be permanently restored. Worldly politicians have no doubt, and that in abundance, their schemes of national improvement. The removal of some tax that presses injuriously on the springs of trade; the opening up of new fields for commercial enterprise; the drawing off of our surplus population to colonize distant regions of the earth; an increase or a diminution of popular influence in our political system; a new law to lower the price of agricultural produce; penitentiaries, mechanics' institutes, useful knowledge' societies,-in a word, schemes as numerous and as various as are the diversities of the human mind itself, are all propounded, and with equal confidence, by their respective advocates; and each is held up as the grand panacea which is to heal the nation's maladies and to ensure that universal contentment and prosperity which all alike profess to be longing to secure. But while worldly politicians are busily contriving, or vehemently demanding the application of their endless and often antagonist specifics, it is forgotten where the true secret of a nation's welfare and a nation's greatness lies. They overlook that fundamental truth recorded in the word of God, that "righteousness alone exalteth a nation," and that there is no other means by which that righteousness can be either produced or preserved, but the means God in his infinite wisdom and goodness has himself ordained, -namely, the lessons and the ordinances of pure and undefiled religion. Can any one for an instant suppose that serious danger to the public peace could