for its audacity, as confidently teach failure in what its error has lain. Oh! excellent, wise world, that equally well understands how to censure both triumph and defeat—triumph as it offends pride, and defeat as it furnishes provocation to vanity.

GUILT.

The guilt that feels not its own shame is wholly incurable. It was the redeeming promise in the fault of Adam, that, with the commission of his crime, came the sense of his nakedness.

VIRTUE.

How sublime is the virtue that still plants without any expectation that it shall ever reap. He most emulates the Deity who plants for future generations.

FATE.

The same people who appeal to Fortune every day, would suppose their religion monstrously outraged, if you should insist also upon a Fate. Yet Fortune, to be of any use to the supplicant, must be Fate also. It is a very common infirmity among men, to confound both of these with the Deity.

EXTRAVAGANCE OF HUMAN EXPECTATIONS.

The extravagance of our demands is continually mocked by our necessities. How absurd that he who lacks even his daily bread, and is at no time sure of it for three days together, will yet indulge in dreams of quails showered from the heavens !— and yet, the very virtue of Hope, is to be found in this very sort of illusion; and poverty is solaced, feeding upon a dream, in the absence of any more solid viands.

MORALS AND PASSION.

No man writes, or feels, good morals who has not had wicked thoughts. It is only by a knowledge of the evil, that we can understand or appreciate the good. Vice is the natural antagonist of Virtue, through which she achieves her own superiority. Were there no vice there would be no virtue; and a mere eulogy upon virtue in any volume, would be excessively tedious. You must show the two in contrast and opposition, if you would illustrate justly the beauties of the one and the deformities of the other. That inane existence, which has no secret consciousness of evil-which never suffers

from temptation-never suffers from any goadings. of the secret adversary in our nature-is perfectly incapable of conceiving the high nature and the necessities of virtue. Such persons only escape sin from their deficient impulses of every sort. They are persons who stagnate, rather than forbearwith whom apathy is the sole security against passion. Their serenity is not in the superiority of their virtue, but in the sluggishness of their blood. It is in the absence of animation, not in the triumph of conscience, that they find repose. Stagnation is never purity; and it is a sad blindness of heart that fancies, because of the sterility of its passions, that its chastity is positive.