tenance of good order, and for the ends of righteousness and truth. These two maxims, which compose the whole criminal code of Christ, if obeyed, would put a stop to the inflicting and resenting of injuries from the greatest even to the least. They would abolish all hasty, heady quarrels, reconcile all cherished grudges and projected retaliations, and convert all differences and suits at law into a cool, quiet examination of the right and just, making all questions subservient to the ends of peace and good order. In the third place, comes the intercourse between man and woman, where, as before, his rule is to oppose the mischief in the beginning. An impure word, an unchaste look, a lustful desire, he makes of equal die with adultery complete; and he honours marriage as the holy threshold and sacred temple of these affections, which being once joined, is not, save on one account, to be dissolved, without incurring the guilt of infidelity in its most atrocious form. All antecedent life he covers with a robe of vestal purity-all subsequent he binds in a chain of duty dissolvable by nothing but the last act of criminality. After these laws upon injury and chastity, come truthfulness and sincerity in our speech; concerning which men are wont to make a distinction, sometimes vowing with a vow, and confirming with an oath, sometimes not. Perceiving that the effect of this distinction was to cast into a secondary place the ordinary every-day inter course of speech, upon which mainly dependeth the good condition of life, he abrogates it alto

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gether, and appoints that the simplest form of assent and denial-yea and nay-should be strong and binding as the most solemn imprecation.

Having thus restrained insincerity and indecency and injustice, in the very germ, he goes on to legislate for the unexpressed, unsignified movements of the inward man, which all former lawgivers had thought to be beside their office. Hatred and malevolence he prohibits in the very last condition of misery, to which we can be reduced by the malice of others; for a curse ordering a blessing in return; for contempt, tenderness; for persecution, welldoing according to the pattern of God, who showers his blessings upon the evil no less than upon the good. Ostentation and vanity, whether in our religious duties or in our natural gifts, he prohibits; and enjoins the last degree of secrecy in prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and other such religious avocations. Avarice, or the spirit of accumulation, he denounces as the services of mammon, who is the antagonist of God; anticipation and foresight of the evil day he guards us against, lest they should destroy a due respect unto the providence of God, which feedeth the raven and clothes the lilies of the field. And to busy ourselves with the affairs of our neighbours, or scan a brother's failings, he sets down as the sign of greater failings in ourselves, which he commands us to redress; giving, as the sum of all, this golden rule, That whatsoever we would that men should do unto us, we should do unto them.

Then, to confirm and sanction all the preceding

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laws, and others in the same strain, he allows of no religion, or worship, which hath not these practices and sentiments within its bosom. One nourishing a grudge against his brother, he prohibits from depositing a gift upon the altar of God; one disobeying his commandments in the least iota, and teaching men to do so, he accounts least in the kingdom of heaven; and one who heareth them and doeth them not, confiding withal in the future approbation of God, he likens to a man building his house upon sand, which fell in the hour of trial, and carried him away in its ruins.

Now these laws do differ from all others, not only in the originality of their principles, and in the altitude to which these principles arise, and in the pervading extent of purity through which they range; but, in this, above all, that not resting the offence in the degree but in the spirit, they establish it not by evidence of fact, but by evidence of conscience anterior to fact. The state of passionateness in the soul, not the thousand passionate acts; the state of vindictiveness in the soul, not the thousand vindictive acts; the state of wantonness in the soul, not the thousand impure acts; the state of insincerity in the soul, not the thousand breaches of covenant;-in these first conceptions of evil, which are, as it were, each the root of a wide-branching tree, the lawgiver of Christians finds the criminality to consist. As if the mind were a soil into which, if these seeds be admitted, they must necessarily grow and bear fruit and propagate their kind to an indefinite extent. See

ing, then, that into the secret place of the heart nothing penetrates but conscience and the eye of God; these two alone can arbitrate the matter. Evidence, therefore, on which all conviction in human institutions ought alone to proceed, is here clean out of the question. The crime is perpetrated long ere it proclaims itself to the eye of the most alert observer, or to the discernment of the nicest judge. The law is addressed to the spirit of man, from which nothing is hid of its own designs or transactions, of which designs and transactions not the thousandth part do see the light. So that Christ's laws, though a thousand times less numerous, apply to a thousand times more cases than the laws of man.

But a jurisconsult would object to this as their greatest possible imperfection. He would say at once, To what serveth this their saintly purity, if so be that you cannot discern the offence, or bring up the offender to the bar; or if you had him there, could bring nothing home, unless a window should be opened into his breast to reveal the lights and shadows of his mind, or birds of the air should come and testify to his secret works? What availeth this your canopy of perfection, extended so far above the head of all performance, as hardly in any point to approximate it? Why confound the thought or even the design with the completed act? Why drive men distracted with the crimination of what they daily and hourly commit? These your Christian laws are, in truth,

properly speaking, no laws, but the abstract sentiment and disembodied spirit of law, the justice and the purity, by the steadiness of which law steers its course, but which, like the two poles of the earth, are for ever defended against all approach. They cannot be applied by any judge, or watched over by any police, or executed by any power. Evidence cannot be had, conviction cannot be brought home, and therefore no issue can follow. You might set up a court of conscience, but courts of conscience have uniformly become courts of injustice and oppression.

Now as these peculiarities, by which the Christian is essentially distinguished from every other code, do manifest that it was not meant for being adopted into the courts of men; it becomes necessary to examine, of what service it is, seeing it cannot be enforced, where its proper field of operation lies, and how it bears upon those institutions which hold society together. From which inquiry it will appear, that its appeal to conscience, and its sublime purity, are the two very qualities by which it is fitted to gain ascendency and awaken enthusiasm in the heart; to become the parent of moral feeling, and of good character in the individual; and in the general to patronize enlightened obedience to every wise social institution. In order to establish this justification and praise, it becomes necessary to enter a little into the nature of human laws, that by discovering their limited operation, we may perceive the ne