go,

with a modifying action, it cannot be a matter of indifference whether it do go or not; for nothing on which its application would have this effect, would be equally right as so modified and as not so modified. That which is made precisely correct by this qualified condition, must therefore, separately from it, be incorrect. He who has sent a revelation to declare the theory of sacred truth, and to order the relations of all moral sentiment with that truth, cannot give his sanction at once to this final constitution, and to that which refuses to be conformed to it. He therefore disowns that which disowns the religion of Christ. And what he disowns he condemns; thus placing all moral sentiments in the same predicament with regard to the christian economy, in which Jesus Christ placed his contemporaries, "He that is not with me is against me."-The order of ideas dissentient from the christian system, presumes the existence, or attempts the creation, of some other economy.

Now, in casting a recollective glance over our elegant literature, as far as I am acquainted with it, I cannot help thinking that much the greater part falls under this condemnation. After a comparatively small number of names and books are excepted, what are called the British Classics, with the addition of very many works of great literary merit that have not quite attained that rank, present an immense vacancy of christianized sentiment. The authors do not give signs of having ever deeply studied christianity, or of having been aware that any such thing is a duty. Whatever has strongly occupied a man's attention, affected his feelings, and filled his mind with ideas, will even unintentionally show itself in the train and cast of his discourse; these writers do not in this manner betray that their faculties have been occupied and interested by the special views unfolded

in the evangelic dispensation. Of their coming from the contemplation of these views you discover no notices analogous, for instance, to those which appear in the writing or discourse of a man, who has been passing some time amidst the wonders of Rome or Egypt, and who shows you, by almost unconscious allusions and images occurring in his language even on other subjects, how profoundly he has been interested in beholding triumphal arches, temples, pyramids, and cemeteries. Their minds are not naturalized, if I may so speak, to the images and scenery of the kingdom of Christ, or to that kind of light which the gospel throws on all objects. They are somewhat like the inhabitants of those towns within the vast salt mines of Poland, who, seeing every object in their region by the light of lamps and candles only, have in their conversation hardly any expressions describing things in such aspects as never appear but under the lights of heaven. You might observe, the

next time that you open one of these works, how far you may read, without meeting with an idea of such a nature, or so expressed, as could not have been unless Jesus Christ had come into the world;* though the subject in hand may be one of those which he came in a special manner to illuminate, and to enforce on the mind by new and most cogent arguments. And where so little of the light and rectifying influence of these communications has been admitted into the habits of thought, there will be very few cordially reverential and animated references to the great Instructor himself. These will perhaps occur not oftener than a traveller in some parts of Africa, or Arabia, comes to a spot of green vegetation in the desert. You might have read

• Except perhaps in respect to humanity and benevolence, on which subject his instructions have improved the sentiments of infidels themselves, in spite of the rejection of their divine authority.

a considerable number of volumes, without becoming clearly apprised of the existence of the dispensation, or that such a sublime Minister of it had ever appeared among men. And you might have diligently read, for several years, and through several hundred volumes without discovering its nature or importance, or that the writers, when alluding to it, acknowledged any peculiar and essential importance as belonging to it. You would only have conjectured it to be a scheme of opinions and discipline which had appeared, in its day, as many others had appeared, and left us, as the others have left us, to follow our speculations very much in our own way, taking from those schemes, indifferently, any notions that we may approve, and facts or fictions that admire.

we may

You would have supposed that these writers had heard of one Jesus Christ, as they had heard of one Confucius, as a teacher whose instructions are admitted to contain many excellent things, and to whose system a liberal mind will occasionally advert, well pleased to see China, Greece, and Judea, as well as England, producing their philosophers, of various degrees and modes of illumination, for the honour of their respective countries and periods, and for the concurrent promotion of human intelligence. All the information which they would have supplied to your understanding, and all the conjectures to which they might have excited your curiosity, would have left you, if not instructed from other sources, to meet the real religion itself, when at length disclosed to you, as a thing of which you had but slight recognition, further than its name; as a wonderful novelty. How little you would have expected, from their literary and ethical glimpses, to had the case to be, that the system so insignificantly and carelessly acknowledged in the course of their fine sentiments, is

the actual and sole economy by the provisions of which their happiness can be secured, by the laws of which they will be judged, which has declared the relations of man with his Creator, and specified the exclusive ground of acceptance; which is therefore of infinite consequence to you, and to them, and to all their readers, as fixing the entire theory of the condition and destinies of man on the final principles, to which all theories and sentiments are solemnly required to be "brought into obedience."

Now, if the fine spirits, who have thus preserved an ample, rich, diversified, crowded province of our literature, clear of evangelical intrusion, are really the chief instructors of persons of taste, and form, from early life, their habits of feeling and thought, the natural result must be a state of mind very uncongenial with the gospel. Views habitually presented to the mind in its most susceptible periods, and during the prolonged course of its improvements, in the varied forms and lights of sublimity and beauty, with every fascination of the taste, ingenuity, and eloquence, which it has admired still more each year as its faculties have expanded, will have become the settled order of its ideas. And it will feel the same complacency in this intellectual order, that we feel, as inhabitants of the material world, in the great arrangement of nature, in the green blooming earth, and the splendid hemisphere of heaven.

LETTER VIII.

Ir will be proper to specify, somewhat more distinctly, several of the particulars in which I consider the majority of our fine writers as at variance with the tenour of the christian revelation, and therefore

beguiling their readers into a complacency in an order of sentiments that sometimes virtually, and sometimes directly, disowns it.

One thing extremely obvious to remark is, that the good man, the man of virtue, who is necessarily coming often in view in the volumes of these writers, is not a christian. His character could have been formed though the christian revelation had never been opened on the earth, or though the New Testament had perished ages since, and it might have been a fine spectacle, but of no striking peculiarity. It has no such complexion and aspect as would have appeared foreign and unaccountable in the absence of the christian truth, and have excited wonder what it should bear relation to, and on what model, or in what school, such a conformation of principles and feelings could have taken its consistence. Let it only be said, that this man of virtue had been conversant whole years with such oracles and examples as Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, and Seneca, selecting what in any of them appeared the wisest or best, and all would be explained; there would be nothing to suggest the question, "But if so, with whom has he conversed since, to lose so strangely the proper character of his school, under the broad impression of some other mightier influence ?"

The good man of our polite literature never talks with affectionate devotion of Christ, as the great High Priest of his profession, as the exalted friend and lord, whose injunctions are the laws of his virtues, whose work and sacrifice are the basis of his hopes, whose doctrines guide and awe his reasonings, and whose example is the pattern which he is earnestly aspiring to resemble. The last intellectual and moral designations in the world by which it would occur to you to describe him, would be those by which the apostles so much