such compliances with the spirit and maxims of the world, as will certainly weaken, if not wholly suppress, the exercise of vital religion. In whatever degree the love of the world prevails, the health of the soul will proportionably decline.

Many other causes might be enumerated, but most of them may be reduced to the heads I have already mentioned. The practice of a single sin, or the omission of a single duty, if allowed against the light of conscience, and, if habitual, will be sufficient to keep the soul weak, unfruitful, and uncomfortable, and lay it open to the impression of every surrounding temptation. Sometimes unfaithfuluess to light already received, perverts the judgment, and then errors which seem to afford some countenance or plea for a sin which the heart will not give up, are readily embraced, to evade the remonstrances of conscience. At other times errors, incautiously admitted, imperceptibly weaken the sense of duty, and by degrees spread their influences over the whole conduct. Faith and a good conscience are frequently mentioned together by the apostle, for they are inseparable; to part with one is to part with both. They who hold the mystery of faith in a pure conscience, shall be preserved in a thriving frame of spirit; they shall grow in grace, go on from strength to strength, shall walk honourably and comfortably. But so far as the doctrines or the rules of the Gospel are neglected, a wasting sickness will prey upon the vitals of religion, a sickness in its nature mortal, and from which none recover but those on whom God mercifully bestows the grace of repentance unto life.

The symptoms of such a sickness are very numerous and diversified, as tempers and situations vary. A few of those which are more generally apparent, and sure indications of a decline in religion, are the following.

Bodily sickness is usually attended with loss of appetite, inactivity, and restlessness; so the sickness of the soul deprives it of rest and peace, causes a dulness and indolence in the service of God, and an indisposition to the means of grace, to secret waiting upon God, and to the public ordinances. These appointments, so necessary to preserve spiritual health, are either gradually neg lected and given up, or the attendance upon them dwindles into a mere formal round, without relish and without benefit. To the healthy man, plain food is savoury, but the palate, when vitiated by sickness, becomes nice and fastidious and bankers after varieties and delicacies, when the sincere milk of the Gospel, plain truth, delivered in plain words, is no longer pleasing, but a person requires curious speculations, or the frothy eloquence of man's wisdom, to engage his attention, it is a bad sign. For these are suited to nourish, not the constitution, but the disease.

From slighting or trifling with those means which God has provided to satisfy the soul, the next step usually is to seek relief from a compliance with the spirit, customs, and amusements of the world. And these compliances, when once allowed, will soon be defended; and they who cannot approve or imitate such conformity, will be represented as under the influence of a narrow, legal, or pharisaical spirit. The sick professor is in a delirium, which prevents him from feeling his disease, and he rather supposes the alteration in his conduct is owing to an increase of wisdom, light, and liberty. He considers the time when he was more strict and circumspect, as a time of ignorance; will smile at the recollection of what he now deems his childish scruples, and congratulates himself that he has happily outgrown them, and now finds that the services of God and the world are not so incompatible as he once thought them to be.

Yet while he thus relaxes the rule of his own conduct, he is a critically severe observer of the behaviour of others. He sharply censures the miscarriages, and even the mistakes of ministers and professors, if an occasion offers, and speaks of these things, not weeping, as the apostle did, but with pleasure, and labours to persuade himself that the strictness so much talked of, is either a cloke of hypocrisy, or the fruit of superstition, and that because some do deviate from this acknowledged rule of duty, therefore at the bottom, and if they could be detected, they would be found to be nearly all alike. True Christians seldom meet with more uncandid misconstruction, or undeserved reproach, than from those who having been once their companions, afterwards desert them.

When the disorder is at this height, it is truly dangerous, and, indeed, as to any human help, desperate. But power belongeth to God. May it please him to remember in mercy those who are near unto death, to restore them to their right minds, and to recover them to himself. Otherwise, "it had been better for thein not to have known the way of righteousness, than after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them." OMICRON.

ON DREAMING.

DEAR MADAM,

I THANK you for your obliging letter, and would be thankful to the Lord, that you and all your family are well.

Surely never dog dreamed so opportunely and a-propos as your Chloe. I should be half angry with her, if I believed she

knew your intentious of writing upon the subject, and wilfully dropt asleep in the very nick of time, out of mere spite to my hypothesis, and purposely to furnish you with the most plausible objection against it. I admit the probability of Chloe dreaming; nay, I allow it to be possible that she might dream of pursuing a hare; for though I suppose such an amusement never entered into the head of a dog of her breed when awake, yet as I find my own powers and capacities, when sleeping, much more enlarged and diversified than at other times, (so that I can then fill up the characters of a prime minister, or a general, or twenty other great offices, with no small propriety; for which, except when dreaming, I am more unfit than Chloe is to catch a hare,) her faculties may perhaps be equally heightened in her way, by foreign assistance, as I conceive my own to be. But you beg the question, if you determine that Chloe's dreams are produced by mere animal nature. Perhaps you think it impossible that invisible agents should stoop so low as to influence the imagination of a dog. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the laws and ranks of being, in that world, fully to remove the difficulty. But allow it possible for a moment, that there are several such agents, and then suppose that one of them, to gratify a king of Prussia's ambition, causes him to dream that he has over-run Bohemia, desolated Austria, and laid Vienna in ashes, and that another should, on the same night, condescened to treat Chloe with the chase, and a bare at the end of it, do not you think the latter would be as well and as honourably employed as the former?

But as I have not time to write a long letter, I send you a book, in which you will find a scheme, not very unlike my own, illustrated and defended with much learning and ingenuity. I hope the Greek and Latin quotations will not discourage you from reading it. Your brother will tell you the meaning of them, if you have not made those languages a part of your acquisitions. I have some hope of making you a convert to my sentiments; for though I own they are liable to objection, yet I think you must have surmounted greater difficulties, before you thought so far vourably of the sympathetic attraction between the spirits of distant friends. Perhaps distance may be necessary to give scope to the force of the attraction; and therefore to object that this sympathy is not perceived between friends in the same house, or in the same room, may be nothing to the purpose.

I seldom fill up so much of a letter in a ludicrous way. I cannot call it a ludicrous subject, for to me it appears very striking and solemn. The agency of spirits is real, though mysterious; and were our eyes open to perceive it, I believe we should hardly be able to attend to any thing else, but it is wisely and mercifully

hidden from us. This we know, that they are all under the direction and control of him who was crucified for us; his name is a strong tower, and under the shadow of his wings we have nothing to fear. I hope in those hours when you find most liberty with him, you sometimes think of me and mine. I am &c. OMICRON.

DEAR MADAM,

ON READING THE BIBLE.

I AM further to thank you for your letter of the 23d of last month. The subject of my former, to which it principally relates, needs no further prosecution, as you express yourself satisfied with what I offered in answer to your question. I would therefore now offer something a little different. But the points of experimental religion are so nearly related, and so readily run into each other, that I cannot promise, at this distance of time, to avoid all repetition. Indeed, the truths essential to the peace of our souls are so simple, and may be reduced to so few heads, that while each of them singly may furnish a volume drawn out at length, they may all be comprised in a small compass. Books and letters written in a proper spirit, may, if the Lord is pleased to smile upon them, have their use; but an awakened mind that thirsts after the Saviour, and seeks wisdom by reading and praying over the Scripture, has little occasion for a library of human writings. The Bible is the fountain from whence every stream that deserves our notice is drawn; and though we may occasionally pay some attention to the streams, we have personally an equal right with others to apply immediately to the fountain-head, and draw the water of life for ourselves. The purest streams are not wholly freed from the gout de terroir-a tang of the soil through which they run a mixture of human infirmity is inseparable from the best human composition; but in the fountain the truth is unmixed.

Again, men teach us by many words; and if they would give us their full views of a subject, require us to read a whole volume, the life and substance of which is perhaps expressed with greater force and greater advantage in the Scripture by a single sentence, which is rather diluted than explained by our feeble expositions. A volume may be easily written upon the grace of humility, and to show the evil and folly of a self-seeking spirit. But if the author should introduce his subject with our Saviour's words, "Even the Son of man came not into the world to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for VOL. IV.

59

many;" whoever was duly impressed with that short introduction, would have no great occasion to read the rest of the book.

The preaching of the gospel being an instituted means of grace, ought to be thankfully and frequently improved. And books that have a savour and unction, may likewise be helpful, provided we read them with caution, compare them with Scripture; and do not give ourselves implicitly to the rules or decisions of any man or set of men, but remember that one is our Master and infallible Teacher, even Christ. But the chief and grand means of edification, without which all other helps will disappoint us, and prove like clouds without water, are the Bible and prayer, the word of grace and the throne of grace. A frequent perusal of the Bible will give us an enlarged and comprehensive view of the whole of religion, its origin, nature, genius, and tendency; and preserve us from an over-attachment to any system of man's compilation. The fault of the several systems, under which, as under so many banners, the different denominations of Christians are ranged, is, that there is usually something left out which ought to have been taken in, and something admitted, of supposed advantage, not authorized by the Scriptural standard. A Bible-christian, therefore, will see much to approve in a variety of forms and parties; the providence of God may lead or fix him in a more immediate connexion with some one of them, but his spirit and affection will not be confined within these narrow enclosures. He insensibly borrows and unites that which is excellent in each, perhaps without knowing how far he agrees with them, because he finds all in the written word.

I know not a better rule of reading the Scripture than to read it through from beginning to end; and when we have finished it once, to begin it again. We shall meet with many passages which we can make little improvement of, but not so many in the second reading as in the first, and fewer in the third than in the second: provided we pray to him who has the keys to open our understandings, and to anoint our eyes with his spiritual ointment. The course of reading to-day will prepare some lights for what we shall read to-morrow, and throw a further light upon what we read yesterday. Experience only can prove the advantage of this method, if steadily persevered in. To make a few efforts and then give over, is like making a few steps and then standing still, which would do little towards completing a long journey. But though a person walked slowly, and but a little way in a day, if he walked every day, and with his face always in the same direction, year after year, he might, in time, encompass the globe. By thus travelling patiently and steadily through the Scripture, and repeating our progress, we should increase in knowledge to the end of life. The Old and New Testament, the doctrines, precepts, and promi