many furlongs to traverse: he observes whether he meets any of his acquaintance; he inquires respecting their health and their family; he glances his eye, perhaps, at the shops as he passes; he admires, perchance, the fashion of a buckle, and the metal of a tea-urn.

4. If he experience any flights of fancy, they are of a short extent; of the same nature as the flights of a forest bird clipped of his wings, and condemned to pass the rest of his life in a farm-yard.

5. On the other hand, the man of talent gives full scope to his imagination. Unindebted to the suggestions of surrounding objects, his whole soul is employed. He enters into nice calculations; he digests sagacious reasonings. In imagination he declaims, or describes, impressed with the deepest sympathy, or elevated to the loftiest rapture. He makes a thousand new and admirable combinations. He passes through a thousand imaginary scenes, tries his courage, tasks his ingenuity, and thus becomes gradually prepared to meet almost any of the many-coloured events of human life.

6. If he observes the passengers, he reads their countenances, conjectures their past history, and forms a superficial notion of their wisdom or folly, their virtue or vice, their satisfaction or misery. If he observes the scenes that occur, it is with the eye of an artist. Every object is capable of suggesting to him a volume of reflections.

7. The time of these two persons in one respect resembles; it has brought them both to Hyde-park Corner. In every other respect how dissimilar! Probably nothing has contributed so much to generate these opposite habits of mind, as an early taste for reading. Books gratify and excite our curiosity in innumerable ways.

8. They force us to reflect; they present direct ideas of vari ous kinds, and they suggest indirect ones. In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence; and it is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions, without attaining some resemblance of them.-GODWIN.

LESSON CXXX.

Alliance between Religion and Liberty.

1. RELIGION is an ennobling principle. It tells us that we are of a divine origin, and lie in the arms of a universal Provi dence; that we are connected with immortal powers by our dependance, and with an immortal life by our hopes and our destiny. It sets at a far higher elevation than could else be thought of, the dignity of our race, and the worth of the intel ligence that is within us.

2. It inspires the conviction, that we are made for no mean purposes; and that they should not live as slaves on the earth, who are encouraged to expect something beyond its highest distinctions. It gives that moral courage and noble intent, which is the way to the inheritance of the best advantages. How often has it been seen in advance of prevailing opinions and manners, leading them forward.

3. How often has it furnished the first occasion for bold inquiries to go forth, and liberal truths to make themselves felt and recognised! The reply has been well pressed on those, who have wished that the African slaves might be instructed in the Christian faith. You will thus make them im patient of their subjection; you will teach them to be free; you cannot drive and scourge the bodies of a population, after you have emancipated their souls; keep them, if you would keep them at all, in the deepest ignorance, an ignorance as dark as God has made their skin, and as abject as you have made their fate.

4. Religion is an equalising principle. It treats with utter disregard those differences among men, which are produced by necessity, altered by accident, destroyed by time. It tells those in the humblest condition, that they are of one blood with the proudest; and that the common Father, who has made the light to fall as sweet, and the courses of nature to roll as gloriously, round one as another, has appointed a world, in which the only distinction is righteousness.

5. It tells the great, and the most fully prospered, and the most brilliantly endowed, that God looks not on the outward appearance, but searches the heart. It binds all by the same obligations, and invites all to the same blessings. It includes all under sin. It offers the same consolations for troubles, from which the most favoured classes are not exempted.

6. It points to an impartial Sovereign, before whom the high and low, they who govern, and they who serve, stand on the common level of humanity. It maintains just those truths which exalt the poor in spirit, and the depressed in circumstances, and bring down the haughty imaginations of those who would lord it over their fellows. It shows so many respects, in which we are alike and dependant, as to forbid presumption on one side; and, on the other, so many circumstances by which we are alike distinguished, as to raise the lowest above base compliances.

7. It bows us down together in prayer, and who then will boast of his superiority? It assigns us our rest together in the dust, and what then will become of the superiority? It ranges us together before the judgement seat, and how will the oppressor appear there?

8. Religion is a moral principle, essentially and vitally so; and, in this view, its importance to the cause of freedom is incalculable. That it has been refined away into unprofitable subtleties, that its records have been misinterpreted into all abomination, and its services fooled into mummery and a masque, there is no denying.

9. But it is equally undeniable that good sentiments and conduct are the very signs of its life. Its great law is duty. Its crowning glory is moral excellence. In spite of all the corruptions, which ignorance and fraud, ambition and phrensy, have heaped upon it, it has been always accomplishing much in the work of a spiritual regeneration.

10. It has spread itself through the masses of society, like a refiner's fire. That it does no more for the community we may wonder, perhaps; but there is cause of thankfulness that it does so much. It is the most precious auxiliary of liberty, then; for, without moral cultivation, what would that be but lawlessness, a wild state of insecurity and excesses? It is righteousness that makes a people fit to be free, and noble in its freedom.

11. Religion is an independent principle. It ill bears dictation and control. It is jealous of its freedom. It dwells in its own world of thought, and hope, and sensibility, and refuses to yield there to the hand of a master. It sets up its altars and holy usages; and has it not always been one of the most perilous attempts of tyranny to violate or overthrow them? "And, when they saw the sanctuary desolate, and the altar profaned, they blew an alarm with the trumpets, and appealed to heaven."

12. Many of the earliest resistances to oppression sprang from indignation at an abridged liberty here. The rights of

conscience were among the first to be discerned and acted on The maintaining of them long preceded the abstract discussions of political rights, and prepared men for the understanding and defence of those also.

13. The patriot has taken copy of the martyr. The struggle for free thought, has led on the struggle for free government. There is a force in religious conviction and feeling, that is the most expansive of all forces. It cannot be restrained by any arbitrary impositions. It owns obedience to nothing but the truth, and the truth, in both a political and moral sense, makes men free.-FROTHINGHAM.

LESSON CXXXI.

Providence Vindicated in the Present State of Man.

1. HEAVEN from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know;
Or who could suffer being here below?

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.

2. Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
That each may fill the circle marked by heaven;
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall;
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

3. Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher, Death; and God adore.
What future bliss he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always To Be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

4. Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;

His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the Solar Walk or Milky Way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has given,

Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,

Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.

5. TO BE, contents his natural desire;

He asks no angel's wings, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense,
Weigh thy opinion against Providence ;
Call imperfection what thou fanciest such;
Say here he gives too little, there too much.

6. In pride, in reasoning pride, our errour lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes;
Men would be angels, angels would be gods,
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,

Aspiring to be angels, men rebel:

And who but wishes to invert the laws

Of ORDER, Sins against the ETERNAL CAUSE.-POPE.

LESSON CXXXII. '

Speech of a Creek Indian in a Council of his Nation, against the use of Spirituous Liquors.

1. I no not stand up, Oh, countrymen! to propose the plans of war, or to direct the wisdom of this assembly in the regula tion of our alliances. My intention is to open to your view, a subject not less worthy of your deliberate notice.

2. I perceive the eye of this assembly dwells upon me. Oh! may every heart be unveiled from its prejudices, and receive the disinterested, the pious, the filial obedience I owe to my country; when I step forth to be the accuser of my brethren; not of treachery; not of cowardice; not of defi ciency in the noblest of all passions, the love of the publick: these, I glory in boasting, are incompatible with the character of a Creek,