government may be traced throughout, and its clearest voice will be, that cruel and revengeful punishments have increased crime and insubordination; while mild and merciful chastisements, tempered according to the criminality of offenders, and manifesting an attempt to produce moral health in them, have decreased crime and encouraged obedience and good order. Cruel punishments, aiming at no other end than the infliction of pain, kindness unequivocally condemns. But those punishments whose object is to reform sinners, repress crime, encourage virtue, preserve good order, and protect society, kindness unequivocally approves-for kindness is an enemy to lawlessness and a friend to all righteousness. These propositions are in perfect accordance with the instructions of the Saviour, who, while he taught his people to love their enemies, also declared* that he who was worthy of many stripes, should receive them, and he who was deserving of few stripes, should receive few stripes.

kindness in the pupil, his very nature seemed transformed.Old impulses died. A new creation of motives supplied their place. Never was there a more diligent, obedient and successful pupil. Now, said the reverend gentleman, in concluding his narrative-that boy is the Chief Justice of a neighboring State. The relator of this story-though he modestly kept back the fact-was himself the actor. If the Romans justly bestowed a civic crown upon a soldier, who had saved the life of a fellow soldier in battle, what honors are too great for a teacher who has thus rescued a child from ruin?'"`

Such then are our views of kindness when considered in reference to punishment. And while it is as foreign from lawlessness as light is from darkness, how different would be the aspect and prospects of the world, if it was entirely governed by the law, "overcome evil with good." What seas of blood would remain ́unshed-what unholy deeds of persecution and bigotry would remain in oblivion-what a tide of revengeful feelings would have no existence -what numberless oppressions of the widow and the orphan would remain unpracticed-and what cruel tyranny would remain without execution. How beautifully the moral world would bloom with the brightest flowers of mercy, and goodness, and affection. The halls of litigation would be emptied, the would be unvisited, and would become useless. ends of the earth, the universal language of Christianity, the kindness of brotherhood, would be acknowledged and practiced. The sword would become a ploughshare and the spear a pruning hook, nation would hold communion with nation, and the natives of one kingdom would visit those of any other kingdom with perfect assurance of safety. The Gospel would then practically become "good news of glad tidings to all people ;" and on earth, peace,

bench of the judge the staff of the officer From the rivers to the

good will towards men."

The whole earth

would echo with songs of salvation; the isles would be glad, and the continents would rejoice, while the oceans and rivers would echo back the glorious theme, until all men, enlightened with truth and purified with virtue, subscribed to the great fact, GOD IS the universal Father of all, Messiah is THE UNIVERSAl SaVIOUR OF ALL, MAN IS THE BROTHER OF MAN, and his rule of action towards his brethren should be, in all the fulness of holiness, "OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD;" until the all-pervading principle of goodness should pour the waters of love upon every spark of discord and revenge. How well did the poet say :

"I've thought, at gentle and ungentle hour,
Of many an act and giant shape of power;
Of the old kings, with high enacting looks,
Sceptred and globed; of eagles on their rocks,
With straining feet, and that fierce mouth and drear,
Answering the strain with downward drag austere;
Of the rich-headed lion, whose huge frown,
All his great nature, gathering seems to crown;
Then of cathedral, with its priestly height,
Seen from below at superstitious night;
Of ghastly castle that eternally

Holds its blind visage out to the lone sea;
And of all sunless subterranean deeps

The creature makes who listens while he sleeps,
Avarice; and then of those old earthly cques,
That stride, they say, over heroic bones;

And those stone-heaps Egyptian, whose small doors
Look like low dens under precipitous shores;

And him, great Memnon, that long sitting by,
In seeming idleness, with stony eye,

Sang at the morning's touch, like poetry;
And then of all the fierce and bitter fruit
Of the proud planting of a tyrannous foot,
Of bruised rights, and flourishing bad men,
And virtue wasting heavenwards from a den:
Brute force, and fury, and the devilish drougth
Of the foul cannon's ever-gaping mouth;

And the bride-widowing sword; and the harsh bray
The sneering trumpet sends across the fray;
And all which lights the people-thinning star
That selfishness invokes--the horsed war,
Panting along with many a bloody mane.

I've thought of all this pride, and all this pain,
And all the insolent plenitudes of power,
And I declare, by this most quiet hour,
Which holds in different tasks by the fire-light
Me and my friends here, this delightful night,
That Power itself has not one-half the might
Of Gentleness. 'Tis want to all true wealth;
The uneasy madman's force to the wise health;
Blind downward beating, to the eyes that see;
Noise to persuasion, doubt to certainty;
The consciousness of strength in enemies,
Who must be strained upon, or else they rise;
The battle to the moon, who all the while,
High out of hearing, passes with her smile;
The tempest, trampling in his scanty run,
To the whole globe that basks about the sun;
Or as all shrieks and clangs, with which a sphere,
Undone and fired, could rake the midnight ear,
Compared with that vast dumbness nature keeps
Throughout her starry deeps,

Most old, and mild, and awful, and unbroken,

Which tells a tale of peace beyond whate'er was spoken."*

Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, p. 172-Lond. Ed., 1832. L

These thoughts are worthy of the sublime subject-they speak its grandeur-and vividly contrast its mild and constant energy with terrific force and violence. It is a subject of which nothing too sublime and grand can be uttered. For kindness not only deals with the finite; it is also the essence of infinity itself. It burns in its purity in the human soul; and it is the majestic influence which forms the vast truth that "GOD IS LOVE."