is conscientious in regard to all his minor duties, and less important promises and engagements. "His lips still speak the thing they mean; he swears to his own hurt and changes not." His intercourse with his fellow-men is marked by unbending rectitude, by exact propriety, by undeviating adherence to the rule of the Saviour, of doing to others as he would have others do to him. A material defect in these points is inconsistent with eminent piety. Such is the connection between moral and mental rectitude, that good habits in the former will have an immediate and strong tendency to produce good habits in respect to the latter.

Eminent piety will furnish the most powerful motives to intellectual effort. One of these motives is the utility of every talent and attainment. In proportion to the depth of a man's religion, will be his conviction that he has no superfluous means for doing good-that he has not a particle of power which may be squandered. As he sees the openings on every side of him for active exertion, he will deeply regret that he has no more resources. The great fact of his lamentable deficiency, will be ever pressing upon him. His intimate acquaintance with the providence of God, and his habit of seizing upon all occasions for benefitting his fellow-men, will compel him to add as much as possible to his mental resources, and to subject the use of them all to the rules of a rigid economy. Another motive of commanding weight, is the belief that he is not only accountable for all his actual power, but for all possible attainments; not only for what he is, but for what he can be. He knows that he is to render account for slighted opportunity as well as for perverted talent. Some of the darkest pages, which the light of the final day will disclose, will belong to the history of those who have buried their talents in the earth. They had minds, but they let them run to waste. They had the principle of immortal life, which they might have girded with strength, and made fair as the garden of the Lord, but they neglected to do it. Now the enlightened and consistent Christian, is distinguished from all other men by his deep and habitual acknowledgment of the providence of God. He presses on in the path of intellectual existence, because to retrace is guilt, to stand still is guilt. He does not allow the claims of a false modesty to deter him from his purpose. He makes the most unremitted effort to develope and expand the faculties which have been given to him. Another motive of great urgency is a desire to secure the approbation of his Maker. He has placed the securing of his favor, as a definite and most delightful object before him. He knows that he cannot worthily celebrate that name to which he owes all his blessings, but he wishes to render to it the homage of the highest excellence which he can command. He feels a noble desire to serve God in the most vigorous exercise of the understanding of which he is capable. He learns to live as in the divine presence. There is always a commanding object before him-the same in sickness and health, in despondency and in joy, in the solemn hour of midnight reflection, in the bustle of active scenes, in life and in death. The more he contem plates this great motive, the more inspiring and ennobling does it become. It is not like the fire of ambition, which blazes for a moment, and is either consumed, or consumes its wretched victim. That yields no support in the day of adversity, this gathers strength in the fire and in the flames; that cannot bear the solemn scrutiny of conscience, this acquires vigor from the most severe self-examination; that shrinks from the glance of the omniscient eye, this rejoices in the notice of Him whose favor is life.

The eminently pious man, in attending first to his moral character and relations to God, is in the path of obedience to the divine admonition,

Seek first the kingdom of God. The necessary things which will be added thereunto, doubtless include intellectual as well as material blessings. The pious man does not look so much from nature up to nature's God, as from God to nature. He studies the great original before he gazes upon his works. He is first baptized with the fire of the Holy Ghost, before he contemplates these material heavens. He thus obtains an excellent preparation of mind and of heart to understand and fully to relish those sciences, which describe portions of his work, or combinations of those elements which he has formed. It is beyond all question the best course for an individual to study Revelation primarily and thoroughly. A heathen has only the book of natural theology to study, and must reach the Creator, if at all, by comparatively slow and toilsome steps. But those persons who, in a land enjoying the light of revealed truth, endeavor to study the works of God, without resorting to the Bible, in order to come to a practical belief of his existence, will probably rest in a religion of poetry and sensibility.

It is a serious mistake to suppose that the time of a scholar is lost by the faithful discharge of his religious duties. Some students imagine it to be a great burden that they are required by their Maker to pray, to keep the Sabbath holy, and to read the Bible seriously and constantly. But it may be safely affirmed, that he who observes the Sabbath day with the most delight, other things being equal, will be the most successful student during the following week. The maxim of Luther, that to pray well is to study well, is true in more senses than one. In addition to the blessing of God, which it secures, it has a necessary and direct connection with intellectual attainment. The commands of God are adapted to the constitution of man; to sin against them, is to sin against our own mind and body as well as soul. There is reason to believe that in the most flourishing period of religion yet to be, the human mind will be developed and cultivated in a far higher degree than has ever been witnessed on earth. There will be a millennium of taste and genius, not preceding, but following and resulting from a millennium of religion. There will be that humility and purity of heart which are consequent from piety, and which will powerfully aid all intellectual researches, and which will strengthen every intellectual faculty. There will be more thoughtful walkers, like Newton, on the margin of the great ocean of truth. God will be worshipped by myriads of cultivated as well as holy worshippers. It will be seen by all intelligent creatures that atheism is folly, that religious indifference is folly, that want of eminent piety is folly, and that a good understanding have all they who keep God's commandments.

IMPORTANCE OF A CHRISTIAN LITERATURE.

THERE are many considerations which show the importance of the cultivation, in this country, of an elevated Christian Literature. In the first place, there will be a great number of human beings to be affected by it. It would be of, comparatively, little importance to have a Christian literature in Holland. The Dutch language will never be widely diffused,

The population of the country is nearly stationary. But here the case is very different. Our population is spreading its roots to the river, and its branches to the sea. A few generations hence, many millions, on the American continent, will speak the English language. Let a man estimate, if he can, the influence of a single publication, or a single able work, when there shall be fifty millions of adult, intelligent readers, when books shall issue from the press, in number and in rapidity, of which we can have now little conception.

In the second place, the number of educated men in this country is rapidly increasing. There are about fourteen thousand alumni of our colleges living. Not far from thirty-eight hundred are members of the colleges. About fifty collegiate institutions are in operation. At the present rate of increase there will be, in twenty years more, one hundred. Four new ones will be soon established in the single State of New York; and when this is accomplished, there will be portions of that State one hundred and fifty miles from either of the eight colleges. In a few years hence, the State of Ohio will need as many colleges as the whole of New England, if education is to keep pace at all with the growth of population. She has now six or seven chartered colleges, while the oldest has been in existence less than thirty years, and all but one, less than ten years.

Look forward, therefore, to the year 1850-one hundred colleges in this country-all advancing gradually in the career of improvement, all drawing around them preparatory schools, and opening their doors to the higher seminaries; all collecting together ten thousand scholars, with seven hundred instructors, having access, in the aggregate, to one million of volumes of books; and ten thousand families, in nearly as many towns, connected with these colleges, in the most near and important relationship. In view of these facts, how important it is, that there should be a Christian literature. Christianity, pure as it came from heaven, should pervade and sweetly blend and mingle with all the rays of human genius.

In the third place, men of taste and talent, in greater and greater numbers, are coming under the dominion of their Sovereign and Redeemer. Shall they be brought into contact with rude and uncultivated taste? Shall a wish to return to their previous opinions and habits ever enter into their hearts? Shall they not find the ways of wisdom to be ways of enlarged thought, and of elevated sentiment; that the cross of Christ is no cramping iron on the human faculties, that Christianity opens to its possessors boundless fields of knowledge, and is adapted to the intellect of man, in its highest developments?

In the fourth place, our population is ready to be acted upon; it is ready to be moulded by a vigorous Christian literature. We were not prepared for it in our colonial state. We were not prepared for it in our revolutionary period, nor in the years immediately subsequent. We were employed in laying the foundations of our civil government.

There is a period, or there are periods, in the history of every nation, when the great currents of thought receive their direction, when the organs of intellectual life begin to move. Of what immense benefit had it been to England, in all subsequent ages, if her Elizabethan era had been a Christian era; if the great men who then toiled in the fields of knowledge, had been Boyles and Miltons. How different would have been the destiny of France, if her literary men of the age of Louis XIV. had been Pascals and Fenelons; if that gorgeous constellation of intellect had been tempered

with the mild beams of Christianity. How bright might have been the pages of her now blood-stained history! The traveller on the fields of Flanders, might not have been compelled to stop, and inquire the cause of those rank tufts of corn, and those luxuriant patches of grass, which now meet his eye. Hell would not then have opened her mouth, without measure, under ill-fated France. It was learning without religion, that did the horrible work. It was the negative, or the infidel, or the licentious literature of antecedent years. It was because that in the age of Louis XIV., the forming age of France, men thought, and wrote, and reasoned, irrespective of the Bible.

The great lesson which these facts teach us, is, to be on our guardto seize the favorable moment-to pre-occupy the ground. Our state of probation in this respect is not past. We have not left it on record, to our disgrace, that we could be satisfied with powerful intellectual resources disconnected from moral obligation. With a few exceptions, we have no permanent literature now. We have written no Analogy, no Principia, no Pilgrim's Progress, no Paradise Lost. We have nothing which can be called a national literature. It is only indulging a useless vanity, and placeing an obstacle in the way of our future success, to think that we have. Our literature is yet to be created. Those great controlling influences, which lift themselves into the upper firmament of thought, which are to be like the polar light, always visible and always to be regarded, are yet to be collected together. Light is here. There are scattered rays every where. But they have not been concentrated into reigning and radiant orbs. The fourth day is not come.

There are men among us, capable of furnishing original and fundamental productions. The remark, which is frequently made, that we are attached to a light and superficial literature, and, like children, pleased with excitement, is not entirely true. There is a considerable number of men, who judge of a production according to its intrinsic worth, who in their common reading, are accustomed to analyze and refer to general principles. New England, on this very point, is exerting an influence, which is felt to Detroit and Mobile. Instances of bad taste, which occur in the productions of our western brethren, are explained as demanded in a new country, or as atoned for in the existing circumstances. Boston exerts the same influence on Cincinnati, that London does on Boston. If we are guilty, we fear, whatever we may say to the contrary, the condemnatory voice which is coming over the waters. So our western friends, however much they may despise the little territory east of the Hudson, are extremely sensitive in regard to the opinion which shall be entertained of them here.

A great object, therefore, an ultimate object, which all our colleges, and which every man educated in them, should have in view, now and forever, is the highest possible cultivation of science and literature IN CONNECTION with religion. It is an object great enough for the consecration of every energy, physical and mental and moral, which God has given us. Here may be exhibited a vigor of intellect, a purity of taste, a strength and, fervor of religious feeling-all in delightful combination, such as the old world has never yet seen.

Now is the time. We have separation enough from the other continents. We have sphere enough. We have no need to record our discoveries on columns of stone, to be wearily deciphered by some subsequent age. We may spread them out before a great people. We may record them on ten thousand living and breathing hearts.

The possession of such a literature is consistent with an earnest attention to the Greek and Roman classics.

A strenuous attempt has been made to maintain the position that the classics do not furnish materials of thought-that if they were all cut off in a single night by some Caliph Omar, or General Amrou, there would be little cause for lamentation. Now the reverse of this is undeniably the fact. There are, and there forever will be, in them, materials for thought. In one sense, there is no exhausting the literature of any age. Materials for thinking will be gathered from the past in all the future changes of society. One age is not set over against another age simply. It is set over against all others. Illustrations from the arts and sciences of Greece and Rome can be gathered now, which could not have been suggested two hundred years ago. On the other hand, in some future aspect of society, certain events which transpired long since may give rise to original and important trains of thought. Every age is immortal. Individuals may die and be forgotten, but the collected wisdom, the embodied sense of every generation will live till time shall be no longer. Because William Cowper translated Homer, and William Gifford translated Juvenal, is the inference to be made that we have the whole material of thought which can be furnished by the poet of Scio, or the satirist of Rome? Would the best possible translation of Paradise Lost into French, exhaust that amazing effort of human genius? Rays of thought emanate, in all directions, from an original author; which a score of translators cannot gather up. Suppose an individual is deeply interested in such writers as Plato, Pindar, Thucydides, and Tacitus-having followed their luminous track a certain distance, he feels an unwonted energy in his own mind. He springs from the beaten path, and seizes on some new combination of thought, or views of truth, which never occurred before to a human mind. There are many passages in the classic authors which give the student the power to think. A man who thoroughly understands and relishes an original author, will think well himself. Show me an individual whose favorite book is Chillingworth, or Butler, or Pascal, or John Howe, and I will show you an individual, who can strike out trains of reflection for himself.

To my mind, the objection in regard to the corrupting moral influence of the classics is equally futile. Where is the human production which is not capable of perversion, or that cannot furnish aliment to a depraved heart? We are not to judge of a book, any more than we are to judge of an individual, by a single trait or passage, by a single, or by half a dozen incidents. But we are to inquire what is the general tendency? What are the great principles inculcated? What, on the whole, is the effect on the reader? Now I am willing that the principal classics should be tried by this rule. I am willing that Xenophon's Anabasis, and Tacitus's five books, and Virgil's Georgicks, and the Essay on the Sublime, and the immortal Plato, should be subjected to a most rigid scrutiny. It is saying nothing to the purpose, to aver that there are things which will offend a delicate taste and a Christian heart in Anacreon, and Terence, Ovid, and Aristophanes, and Horace, any more than it is disparaging Addison, and Collins, and Knox, and Johnson, to say that there are such writers in the same language as Congreve, and Shenstone, and Fielding, many of whose works would have disgraced Babylon and Corinth. The fact is worthy of mention, in this place, that the principles of taste, which a few of the best writers of Greece and Rome, adopted, were of such a character as were inconsistent with the lower forms of depravity. By the assistance of a few scattered rays from Revelation, shining on the reason of these men,

VOL. VII.

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