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have been well described as the apotheosis of prostitution, and comedies and farces which make light of virtue, turn innocence into ridicule, and laugh modesty to scorn; in singing saloons, songs are sung which can only have the effect of fanning the flames of lawless lust; and there are exhibitions in the ball-room, which stare decency out of countenance, and the sole object and sole result of which is to allure men to the brothel. Let no apologist for such amusements tell me that it is not so. The dances in such places are often of a most lascivious character, and men engage in them in order to have their languid and exhausted passions excited. If you are fond of these amusements, or any others which encourage evil thoughts, and under a very thin veil of decency, badly conceal the grossest and most filthy licentiousness, such amusements are in your case the right eye and right hand which cause you to offend. I tell you, and your conscience bears me witness, that while you are anticipating such pleasures, while you are enjoying them, while you are reflecting on them, you are breaking the seventh commandment; you are committing adultery in your heart. Cast such amusements from you; there are others of a healthful and highly moral tone; but it were better to have no recreation at all than that the theatre, the singing saloon, and the hop, should be the portal by which we go down quick into hell. There are companions who may cause us to offend. It is amazing to see the fascination which a bad man, if he be a man of some genius and some wit, exercises over others. Perhaps he has a good voice, and can sing a song well; he can keep the table in a roar; he has a

large fund of anecdotes and stories, varying in their character from the sickly sentimental to the beastly. He lives fast, knows the town, is up to all the dodges of licentious villainy, rolls all the vile and sensual gossip under his tongue; perhaps he is an infidel; or his theology is that of the merry monarch-God won't damn a man for enjoying a bit of pleasure. He takes a fiendish delight in undermining the principles, and ridiculing the scruples of the uninitiated; he is an unpaid servant of the devil, and yet more active and more zealous than many a salaried servant of the Christian church; he leads his victims like a flock of sheep, and he glories in the triumph of his infernal skill. If any of you, my younger friends, have been inveigled thus, and form a portion of some fast-living circle, some group of reckless libertines, your companionships are, in your case, the right eye and the right hand which cause you to offend. Cut them off, cast them from you; forsake that tavern, give up that club, frequent no longer that convivial meeting, which breaks up in the middle of the night, and the members of which, inflamed with strong drink and licentious songs, go madly to seek the gratification of their fevered and raging lusts; "come out from among them, and be separate;" it is better that you should go companionless to heaven, than that, with those sons of Belial, you should be cast into hell.

Now, I have spoken freely on this subject, and if it is not freely and boldly spoken of, it had better not be referred to at all; but it must be referred to; the violation of the seventh commandment, in its letter and its spirit, is one of the sorest plague-spots that afflict the world.

I am deeply anxious that our young men and young women, yea all of us, whether young or not young, should keep ourselves pure, should, by God's grace, be kept from every violation of this great commandment; and as often as we hear it, as often as we think of it, let this be our prayer, "Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law."

LECTURE XVIII.

THE STREET.-PART I.

THE man who lives in a large town has always at command a source of instruction and entertainment, of counsel and of warning. If he have no books, let him sally forth into the streets, and he will find the whole town a large volume, richly stored with information, and open day and night for his perusal. If he cannot afford to pay for sight-seeing, he will find in the streets exhibitions more instructive, perhaps, than the wonders of Sydenham, or the treasures of art recently displayed at Manchester.

Pictures! do you ask for pictures? there are plenty of pictures in the street-some of them very ugly, I admit, but like so many of Hogarth's, true to the life, and very deeply interesting, ugly though they be. If you are in search of pleasure, perhaps you had best go to the country; if you are in quest of instruction, study the town. I have said that a large town may be likened to a large book. Every street of it is a page. I intend to turn over a few of these pages this afternoon, in the hope that we may gather from them some information that may be profitable.

Regarding the streets as pages, there are many of them which, like many pages in many books, are not worth looking at. There are the dull, decent, solemn, and highly respectable streets, which would be excessively indignant if a shop ventured to open its vulgar windows anywhere along their line. Occasionally a carriage rolls along, and now and then a butcher's or baker's cart pulls up at one of the sombre doors; but generally you might fire a thirty-two-pounder from end to end without the slightest danger of inflicting damage on man or beast! These streets I think we may pass by, they are very grand and very gloomy, very comfortable and very stupid.

But still I am unwilling to pass them by without making one or two observations:-in the first place, it is encouraging to know that the comfort and wealth of those streets are the reward of industry; for the most part of the people who inhabit them are men who have risen from the ranks. Perhaps they would not like to acknowledge it, but in many cases their fathers were working joiners, working bricklayers, and their mothers. were originally cooks, housemaids, and washerwomen. There's a grand house, owned and inhabited by a worthy man, whose parents keep a greengrocer's shop, somewhere near the docks; and there's another, the occupant of which used himself to stand at a stall in the market, selling Cheshire cheese and Irish bacon; and there's another, don't you see the carriage at the door, and three young ladies getting into it, to take their morning drive? Their father, now an elderly gentleman, sometimes afflicted with a touch of the gout, began life with

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