gazed through the window upon the landscape, and darted a glance into the sky, as if they doubted whether they had ever heard, or seen, or felt, aught of the goodness and power of Him who doeth what He will in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth. The trial was too hard for flesh and blood. The Spirit of God seemed to be withdrawn from his people, or the smallest measure of it only left to preserve them from despair and madness. They were indeed cast down, but not destroyed; they kept the shield of faith, though the sword of the word had been taken out of their hand, while they appeared given up, like Job, to be tempted, afflicted, and buffeted by Satan. The hand trembles while it writes down these sentences, as if it were promulgating things which it is not lawful for a man to utter; and the reader with a tender conscience may feel as the pilgrim did in the valley of the shadow of death, when flitting fiends, amidst the darkness, whispered blasphemies in his ear which so troubled his senses, that he thought they were suggestions of his own mind, and ejaculations of his own lips. It should be so; — both writer and reader ought to shudder here, and, pausing, ask —if the bare idea of such a bereavement be so fearful, what would be the calamity itself, were the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort, in very deed to take his ordinances, his word, and his Spirit away from us? If, in such a case, the righteous could scarcely be saved, where would the ungodly and the sinner stand? Section III. Moke frightful in effect, though less revolting to ordinary feelings, (because the spectacle of the wicked running headlong to destruction, is a million times more familiar, not to imagination only, but to experience, than the hypothesis of the righteous being forsaken,) will be the details of what befel the careless, the profligate, and the proud, in this kingdom; while, for twelve slow months, the slighted but not wholly ineffectual influence of Christianity, was suspended with regard to them, and during all that time neither warning, instruction, nor promise, was sent by ministers of the gospel; but, being given up to a reprobate mind, God was not in all their thoughts. About the middle of the last century there lived, or, in the language of chronology, there flourished a man in this country, who was perfectly convinced that his soul had been annihilated; and though on other subjects he was as rational as his neighbours, on this he was so deplorably deranged, that nothing could persuade him of his mistake. Such an hallucination then had seized the people of England at this crisis, on every question touching religion; they had a confused recollection that there once existed something called Christianity among them, but all that they now knew of it was, that they knew nothing. This being premised, what follows will not only be probable, but, in such a derangement of society, must have been inevitable. The thousands and tens of thousands of good sort of folks, who were accustomed to spend a reasonable number of hours every Sunday within the walls of a place of worship, which helped them off (though rather heavily and mechanically) with just so much of their time, were, at first, put exceedingly out of their way, from having so large a quantity of an unimproveable capital of the most precious commodity thrown upon their hands. Even before this catastrophe, they had often been at their wit's end to devise means of spending, though to waste, that portion of their income in it which fell between the services, and was not occupied by meals; having no other resources than the Sabbath-dissipation of yawning at home, or strolling abroad. These, however, were gradually reconciled to the remittance of what had always been rather a penance than a pleasure, and was encountered not merely for decency's sake, but to appease an occasional disquietude of thought, which would intrude upon the cares and enjoyments of work-day life, to remind them that the world was passintAaway, and that they were doing the same more quickly than the world, which had already outlasted hundreds of generations of occupants like themselves, and might yet wear out hundreds more, whose maxim, like their own, would be, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The notoriously vicious—the swearer, the drunkard, the extortioner, the gambler, the spendthrift, the miser, and the debauchee, —were transported with the welcome intelligence that there was to be no more religion in the world, and consequently that heaven and hell (it was difficult to say which they dreaded most) being both abolished, they might now wallow with an impunity which they had never known before, in every excess of appetite and passion. Heretofore, in their wildest delirium, their deepest abstraction, their most captivating beguilement, in that limbo of vanity which they inhabited, the secret terrors of conscience, the furies of remorse, and, more hated than either, the warnings of mercy, were wont to break in upon their riot or their peace, and turn their fool's paradise into a purgatory,—where they were made to pass, in naked spirit, through flames that would neither purify nor consume, but which gave terrible earnest to flesh and blood of the fire that cannot be quenched, and the blackness of darkness for ever. Thither indeed, by their own sentence, pronounced in horrid imprecations upon themselves, or in wanton defiance of Almighty wrath and vengeance that spared them still, and still delayed to strike, they had been often consigned; but though they braved the judgment, they writhed under the antepast. The degree in which the most desperate transgressors are held in awe by the resisted evidence of the truth, which condemns them, is far beyond what others, unaccustomed to stand in the way of sinners, can readily believe, and is what the latter are unwilling to acknowledge even to themselves;— to the world, of course, they would boldly deny it, from very cowardice. The power that suspends the avalanche by a film more subtle than gossamer is not estimated, till-it leaves the devastating mass to fall; the restraint of Him who "holdeth the winds in His fist," is not perceived, till "He quits his grasp, and gives them all their fury." Oh! what would Britain be, if but for a day the wicked were abandoned without controul from law, conscience, or Providence, to do what they would for the annoyance of their neighbours and their own destruction ! --- - . i . Section IV. •" *~ ' The Consolations and Fears of Scefitics. But it was among infidels, who were wiser in their own esteem than the Author of the universe, that the chief triumph was expressed. "The grand secret" at length was found out, on this side of the grave; and they said in their hearts what the fool hath said in his; nay, they strove to believe what they said, and no small number among the more mercurial, professsed to have actually succeeded in the attempt to impose on their own credulity, — a feat, which they were sincerely of opinion nobody else could |