Christians should be affected by it. Probation. Debt and credit. "There is no fear in love," they will say; "perfect love casteth out fear." So it does, but it must be perfect love; and when a church has attained to this,—when sin is banished from every soul,- and the world is finally abandoned, and God reigns, in supreme, and unquestioned, and uninterrupted sway, and every heart is a temple of perfect purity and holiness,—then may its members cease to think of the danger of God's displeasure. Then; but not till then. The great foundation of the almost universal unbelief which prevails, in respect to the consequences of sin, rests in the heart. Man is unwilling to believe what condemns and threatens himself. But while the origin is in the heart, the intellect assists in maintaining the delusion, and this chiefly through. the mistake of considering moral obligation as of the nature of debt and credit, instead of regarding God's government as it really is, a system of probation. The meaning of probation is understood well enough in reference to this world. Young men are led to see that there are certain crises in their lives, when immense and irretrievable consequences depend upon the action of an hour. This is well known;- the principle is interwoven into all the providential arrangements of life. Men do not complain of it; they see practically its fitness. But when they come to look at the attitude in which they stand towards God, the idea of probation gives way to that of debt and credit, and they go to estimating their sins, and to calculating the time they have spent in committing them, and they bring on their offsets of good deeds,— and then consider what amount of suffering is necessary to close the account. In order to show how momentous are the consequences which often depend upon a very brief period of trial, let us take a very common case. A boy of twelve years old, brought up by christian parents in some quiet vil The young man. Leaving home. Allurements of sin. lage, is sent at last to the metropolis, into a commercial establishment, where he is to commence the duties of active life. As his mother gives him her last charge, and with forced smiles, but with a bursting heart, bids him good-by, he thinks he cannot yield to any temptations, which can beset him. For many days, and perhaps weeks, he is strong. He is alone, though in a crowded city; his heart, solitary and sad, roams back to his native hills, and recalls a thousand incidents of childhood; conscience, foreseeing the struggles that are to come, is busy in his heart, retouching every faint and fading moral impression, which years gone by had made there. He looks upon the diseased and abandoned profligates around him with horror, and shrinks instinctively back from the very idea of vice. Every night he reads a passage in the beautiful Bible, which was packed by stealth in his trunk, with his father's and mother's names upon the blank page; and he prays God for strength and help, to enable him to be faithful in duty, and grateful to them. In the course of a few weeks, the world is somewhat changed to him. He does not love his parents, and his early home the less, perhaps, but he thinks of new scenes and new employments a little more. He forms acquaintances, and hears sentiments and language which he must, in heart, condemn, though he does it more and. more faintly, at each successive repetition. He engag es with his new comrades in plans of enjoyment which he feels are questionable. Either they are positively wrong, or else his previous notions have been too strict; he cannot exactly decide which, and he accordingly tries them more and more, occasionally reasoning with himself in regard to their character, but coming to no absolute decision. He does not think of home so much as he did;- somehow or other there are melancholy thoughts connected with it, and he finds it less easy The Crisis. The sore temptation and the struggle. Results depending. and pleasant to write to his parents. He used to have a letter, well filled, always ready for any private opportunity which accident might furnish; but now, he writes seldom, though he apologizes very freely for his seeming neglect, and expects every week to have more time. At last, some Saturday afternoon, the proposal comes up among his companions, to go off on the morrow on a party of pleasure. It is not made directly to him, but it is in his hearing, and he knows that he is included in the plan, and must decide in favor or against it. A party of pleasure, of innocent recreation, they call it. He knows it is a party of dissipation and vice,— and formed too for that sacred day, which God commands him to keep holy. He says nothing, and from his silent and almost indifferent look, while they loudly and eagerly discuss the plan, you would suppose that he was an unconcerned spectator. But no; look at him more attentively. Is not his cheek a little pale? Is there not a slight quiver upon his lip? And a slight tremor in his limbs, as he leans upon a chair, as if his strength failed him a little? These external indications are very slight, but they are the indications of a sinking of the spirit within, as he feels that the moral forces are taking sides, and marshalling themselves in array for the struggle which must come on. Conscience does not speak; but he knows, he feels, how she will speak, before this question is decided. Inclinations, which are beginning to grow powerful by indulgence, do not yet draw, but he knows how they will draw; and the blood falls back upon his heart, and strength fails from his limbs, as he foresees the contest. It seems as if the combatants were drawing up their forces in gloomy silence, waiting, by common consent, till the time shall arrive, and the signal be given, for their deadly struggle. The armistice continues, with slight interruptions, until he leaves his companions, and having closed the busi ness of the day, walks towards his home. Nature of it. But there are within him the elements of war, and as soon as he retires to his solitary room, and the stimulus and excitement of external objects are removed, the contest is begun. I need not describe it; I can have no reader who does not understand the bitterness of the struggle which ensues, when duty, and conscience, and the command of God, endeavor to maintain their stand against the onset of sore temptation. Human beings have occasion to know what this is, full well. Besides, it is not to the circumstances of the contest in such a case, that I wish to turn the attention of the reader, but to this fact: that very probably, on the event of this single struggle, the whole character and happiness of the young man, for life, depend. He may not see it so at the time, but it is so. If duty gains the victory. here, her next conquest will be achieved more easily. There is a double advantage gained, for the strength of moral principle is increased, and the pressure of subsequent attacks is diminished. The opposing forces which such a young man must encounter, in taking the right stand, are far more powerful than those which tend to drive him from it, when once it is taken. On the other hand, if he yields here, he yields probably for ever. Conscience stands rebuked and silenced; guilty passions become tumultuous for future gratification; impure and unholy thoughts pollute his mind; and though remorse may, probably, for a long time to come, at intervals more and more distant, and in tones more and more faint, utter reproaches and warnings, he will, in all probability, go rapidly down the broad road of vice and sin. All this is not fancy, but fact. It is the sober history of hundreds of young men, who go down every year to ruin, in precisely this way. They have their time of trial; the time when they are put to the test; a crisis, which, in many, many cases, is over in a few hours, but whose awful Sin perpetuates itself. Its worst effects. Wandering from God. consequences extend through a life of misery, and are not stopped, even by the grave. Perhaps it may be supposed, that all the miseries of a life of vice, ought not to be charged upon the hour when the first step was taken, but should be considered as the consequences of the repeated acts of transgression which the individual goes on to commit. We have no objection to this at all, but it does not relieve the hour of the first transgression from any portion of its responsibility; for this very disposition to go on in sin, is the direct result of the first transgression; and it is the very worst result of it. If the first sin left the heart in a right state, the conscience tender, and guilty passions subdued; and if nothing was to follow from it but simple suffering, even if it were suffering for years, it would be comparatively nothing. The greatest, the most terrible of all the evils which result from the first indulgence of sin, is that it leads almost inevitably, to a second and a third. tyrant takes advantage of his momentary power, to rivet his fetters, and to secure his victim in hopeless slavery. So that if a young man spends one night in sin, the great evil is not, that he must suffer the next day, but that he will go on sinning the next day. He brings heart, and conscience, and ungodly passions into such a relative condition, that he will go on. There is not half as much to stop him, as there was to prevent his setting out, so that the first transgression has for its consequences, not only its own peculiar miseries, but all the succeeding steps in the declivity of sin, together with the attendant suffering, which, to the end of time, follow in their train. The All this is true, though not universally, in respect to he vices and crimes of human life. I say not universally, for the wanderer does, sometimes, of his own accord, stop and return. But it is true universally, and without exception, of the broad way of sin against God, from which the wanderer, if he once enters it, will never, |