journey, not on a road, but on a map. Difficulties are unseen, or are kept in the back-ground. Impossibilities are smothered, or rather, they are not suffered to be born. Nothing is felt but the ardor of enterprise; nothing is seen but the certainty of success. Whereas, if difficulties grow out of sober experiment, the disappointments attending them generate humility; the failures inseparable from the best concerted human undertakings, serve at once to multiply resources, and to excite self-distrust; while ideal projectors, and actual demolishers, are the most conceited of mortals. It never occurs to them that those defects of old institutions, on which they frame their objections, are equally palpable to all other men. It never occurs to them, that phrensy can demolish faster than wisdom can build; that pulling down the strongest edifice is far more easy than the reconstruction of the meanest; that the most ignorant laborer is competent to the one, while for the other, the skill of the architect, and the patient industry of the workman, must unite; that a sound judgment will profit by the errors of our predecessors, as well as by their excellencies; that there is a retrospective wisdom, to which much of our prospective wisdom owes its birth; and that, after all, neither the perfection pretended to, nor the pride which accompanies the pretension, "is made for man." It is the same overruling vanity which operates in their politics and in their religion, which makes Kersaint * boast of carrying his destructive projects from the Tagus to the Brazils, and from Mexico to the shores of the Ganges; which makes him menace to outstrip the enterprises of the most extravagant hero of romance, and almost undertake, with the marvellous celerity of the nimble-footed Puck, It is the same vanity, still the master-passion in the bosom of a Frenchman, which leads Dupont and Manuel to undertake, in their orations, to abolish the Sabbath, to exterminate the priesthood, to erect a pantheon for the world, to restore the Peripatetic philosophy; and, in short, to revive every thing of ancient Greece, except the pure taste, the profound wis *See his speech enumerating their intended projects.—[Armand Gui Simon, Count de Kersaint, was a commander in the French navy. He was at first a violent revolutionist, but afterwards became more moderate, and suffered on the scaffold, in December, 1793.-ED.] dom, the love of virtue, the veneration of the laws, and that high degree of reverence which even virtuous pagans professed for the Deity. It is the same spirit of novelty, and the same hostility to established opinions, which dictated the preposterous and impious doctrine, that death is an eternal sleep. The prophets and apostles assert the contrary. David expressly says, "When I awake up after thy likeness, I shall be satisfied; implying, that our true life will begin at our departure out of this world. The destruction or dissolution of the body will be the revival, not the death, of the soul. It is to the living the apostle says, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the DEAD, and Christ shall give thee light." It is surely to be charged to the inadequate and wretched hands into which the work of reformation fell, and not to the impossibility of amending the civil and religious institutions of France, that all has succeeded so ill. It cannot be denied, perhaps, that a reforming spirit was wanted in that country; their government was not more despotic than their church was superstitious and corrupt. But though this is readily granted, and though it may be unfair to blame those who, in the first outset of the French revolution, rejoiced even on religious motives, yet it is astonishing, how any pious person, even with all the blinding power of prejudice, can think without horror of the present state of France. It is no less wonderful, how any rational man could, even in the beginning of the revolution, transfer that reasoning, however just it might be, when applied to France, to the case of England. For what can be more unreasonable than to draw from different, and even opposite premises, the same conclusion? Must a revolution be equally necessary in the case of two sorts of government, and two sorts of religion, which are the very reverse of each other; opposite in their genius, unlike in their fundamental principles, and completely different in each of their component parts? That despotism, priestcraft, intolerance, and superstition, are terrible evils, no candid Christian, it is presumed, will deny; but, blessed be God, though these mischiefs are not yet entirely banished from the face of the earth, they have scarcely any existence in this happy country. To guard against a real danger, and to cure actual abuses, of which the existence has been first plainly proved, by the application of a suitable remedy, requires diligence as well as courage; observation as well as genius; patience and temperance as well as zeal and spirit. It requires the union of that clear head and sound heart, which constitute the true patriot. But to conjure up fancied evils, or even greatly to aggravate real ones, and then to exhaust our labor in combating them, is the characteristic of a distempered imagination and an ill-governed spirit.. Romantic crusades, the ordeal trial, drowning of witches, the torture, and the inquisition, have been justly reprobated as the foulest stains of the respective periods in which, to the disgrace of human reason, they existed; but would any man be rationally employed, who should now stand up gravely to declaim against these as the predominating mischiefs of the present century? Even the whimsical knight of La Mancha himself would not fight windmills that were pulled down; yet I will venture to say, that the above-named evils are at present little more chimerical than some of those now so bitterly complained of among us. It is not, as Dryden said, when one of his works was unmercifully abused, that the piece has not faults enough in it, but the critics have not had the wit to fix upon the right ones. It is allowed that, as a nation, we do not want faults; but our political critics err in the objects of their censure. They say little of those teal and pressing evils resulting from our own corruption; of that depravity which constitutes the actual miseries of life; while they gloomily speculate upon a thousand imaginary political grievances, and fancy that the reformation of our rulers and our legislators is all that is wanting to make us a happy people. Alas! How small, of all that human hearts endure, The principles of just and equitable government were, perhaps, never more fully established, nor was public justice ever more exactly administered. Pure and undefiled religion was never laid more open to all, than at this day. I wish I could say we were a religious people; but this at least may be safely asserted, that the great truths of religion were never better understood; that Christianity was never more completely stripped from all its encumbrances and disguises, or more thoroughly purged from human infusions, and from whatever is debasing in human institutions, than it is at this day, in this country. In vain we look around us to discover the ravages of reli gious tyranny, or the triumphs of priestcraft or superstition. Who attempts to impose any yoke upon our reason? Who seeks to put any blind on the eyes of the most illiterate? Who fetters the judgment, or enslaves the conscience, of the meanest of our Protestant brethren? Nay, such is the power of pure Christianity, that genuine Christianity which is exhibited in our liturgy, to enlighten the understanding, as well as to reform the heart, and such are the advantages which the most abject in this country possess for enjoying its privileges, that the poorest peasant among us, if he be as religious as multitudes of his station really are, has clearer ideas of God and his own soul, purer notions of that true liberty wherewith Christ has made him free, than the mere disputer of this world, though he possess every splendid advantage which education, wisdom, and genius can bestow. I am not speaking either of a perfect form of government, or a perfect church establishment, because I am speaking of institutions which are human; and the very idea of their being human, involves also the idea of imperfection. But I am speaking of the best constituted government, and the best constituted national church, with which the history of mankind is yet acquainted. Time, that silent instructer, and experience, that great rectifier of the judgment, will more and more discover to us what is wanting to the perfection of both. And, if we may trust to the active genius of Christian liberty, and to that liberal and candid spirit which is the characteristic of the age we live in, there is little doubt but that a temperate and well-regulated zeal will, at a convenient season, correct whatsoever sound policy shall suggest as wise and expedient to be corrected. If there are errors in the church,—and it does not, perhaps, require the sharp-sightedness of a keen opposer to discover that there are, there is, at least, nothing like fierce intolerance, or spiritual usurpation. A fiery zeal, and an uncharitable bigotry, might have furnished matter for a well-deserved ecclesiastical philippic in other times; but thanks to the temper of the present day, unless we conjure up a spirit of religious chivalry, and sally forth in quest of imaginary evils, we shall not apprehend any danger from persecution or enthusiasm. If grievances there are, they do not appear to be those which result from polemic pride and rigid bigotry, but are of a kind far different. If the warm sun of prosperity has unhappily produced its too common effect, in relaxing the vigor of religious exertion; if, in too many instances, security has engendered sloth, and affluence produced dissipation; let us implore the divine grace, that the present alarming crisis may rouse the careless, and quicken the supine; that our pastors may be convinced, that the church has less to fear from external violence than from internal decay; nay, that even the violence of attack is often really beneficial, by exciting that activity which enables us to repel danger; and that increase of diligence is the truest accession of strength. May they be convinced, that the love of power, with which their enemies, perhaps unjustly, accuse them, is not more fatal than the love of pleasure; that no stoutness of orthodoxy in opinion can atone for a too close assimilation with the manners of the world; that heresy without is less to be dreaded than indifference from within; that the most regular clerical education, the most scrupulous attention to forms, and even the strictest conformity to the established discipline and opinions of the church, will avail but little to the enlargement of Christ's kingdom, without a strict spirit of personal watchfulness, habitual self-denial, and laborious exertion. Though it is not here intended to animadvert on any political complaint which is not in some sort connected with religion, yet it is presumed it may not be thought quite foreign to the present purpose to remark, that among the reigning complaints against our civil administration, the most plausible seems to be that excited by the supposed danger of an invasion on the liberty of the press. Were this apprehension well founded, we should indeed be threatened by one of the most grievous misfortunes that can befall a free country. The liberty of the press is not only a most noble privilege itself, but the guardian of all our other liberties and privileges, and, notwithstanding the abuse which has lately been made of this valuable possession, yet every man of a sound, unprejudiced mind is well aware that true liberty of every kind is scarcely inferior in importance to any object for which human activity can contend. Nay, the very abuse of a good, often makes us more sensible of the value of the good itself. Fair and wellproportioned Freedom will ever retain all her native beauty to a judicious eye, nor will the genuine loveliness of her form be the less prized for our having lately contemplated the distorted features and false coloring of her caricature, as presented to us by the daubing hand of Gallic patriots. But highly as the freedom of the press ought to be valued, would it really be so very heavy a misfortune, if corrupt and |