O part them never! If Hope prostrate lie, But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love. Ah, cease thy tears and sobs, my little life! To anger rapid, and as soon appeased For trifles mourning, and by trifles pleased Break friendship's mirror with a tetchy blow, Yet snatch what coals of fire on pleasure's altar glow! O thou that rearest, with celestial aim, The future seraph in my mortal frame, Thrice holy faith! whatever thorns I meet, As on I totter with unpractised feet, Still let me stretch my arms and cling to thee, Meek nurse of souls through their long infancy! Low was our pretty cot: our tallest rose Peep'd at the chamber-window. We could hear At silent noon, and eve, and early morn, When the soul seeks to hear; when all is hush'd But the time, when first, From that low dell, steep up the stony mount I climb'd with perilous toil and reach'd the top, Ah! quiet dell! dear cot! and mount sublime! Sweet is the tear that from some Howard's eye Yet even this, this cold beneficence Praise, praise it, O my soul! oft as thou scann'st Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched, Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies; Yet oft when, after honorable toil, Rests the tired mind, and, waking, loves to dream, Thy jasmin and thy window-peeping rose, IMPORTANCE OF THE CORRECT USE OF TERMS. Felicity, in its proper sense, is but another word for fortunateness, or happiness; and I can see no advantage in the improper use of words, when proper terms are to be found, but, on the contrary, much mischief. For, by familiarizing the mind to equivocal expressions, that is, such as may be taken in two or more different meanings, we introduce confusion of thought, and furnish the sophist with his best and handiest tools. For the juggle of sophistry consists, for the greater part, in using a word in one sense in the premise, and in another sense in the conclusion. We should accustom ourselves to think and reason in precise and steadfast terms, even when custom, or the deficiency or the corruption of the language, will not permit the same strictness in speaking. The mathematician finds this so necessary to the truths which he is seeking, that his science begins with, and is founded on, the definition of his terms. The botanist, the chemist, the anatomist, &c., feel and submit to this necessity at all costs, even at the risk of exposing their several pursuits to the ridicule of the many, by technical terms, hard to be remembered, and alike quarrelsome to the ear and the tongue. In the business of moral and religious reflection, in the acquisition of clear and distinct conceptions of our duties, and of the relations in which we stand to God, our neighbor, and ourselves, no such difficulties occur. At the utmost, we have only to rescue words, already existing and familiar, from the false or vague meanings imposed on them by carelessness, or by the clipping and debasing misusage of the market. And surely happiness, duty, faith, truth, and final blessedness, are matters of deeper and dearer interest for all men than circles to the geometrician, or the characters of plants to the botanist, or the affinities and combining principle of the elements of bodies to the chemist, or even than the mechanism (fearful and wonderful though it be !) of the perishable Tabernacle of the Soul can be to the anatomist. Among the aids to reflection, place the following maxim prominent: Let distinctness in expression advance side by side with distinction in thought. For one useless subtlety in our elder divines and moralists, I will produce ten sophisms of equivocation in the writings of our modern preceptors; and for one error resulting from excess in distinguishing the indifferent, I would show ten mischievous delusions from the habit of confounding the diverse. Aids to Reflection. THE DEPTH OF THE CONSCIENCE.1 How deeply seated the conscience is in the human soul is seen in the effect which sudden calamities produce on guilty men, even when unaided by any determinate notion or fears of punishment after death. The wretched criminal, as one rudely awakened from a long sleep, bewildered with the new light, and half recollecting, half striving to recollect a fearful something, he knows not what, but which he will recognize as soon as he hears the name, already interprets the calamities into judgments, executions of a sentence passed by an invisible judge, as if the vast pyre of the last judgment were already kindled in an unknown distance, and some flashes of it, darting forth at intervals beyond the rest, were flying and lighting upon the face of his soul. The calamity may consist in loss of fortune, or character, or reputation; but you hear no regrets from him. Remorse extinguishes all regret, and remorse is the implicit creed of the guilty. Aids to Reflection. "To set the outward actions right, though with an honest intention, and not so to regard and find out the inward disorder of the heart, whence that in the actions flows, is but to be still putting the index of a clock right with your finger, while it is foul, or out of order within, which is a continual business, and does no good. Oh! but a purified conscience, a soul renewed and refined in its temper and affections, will make things go right without, in all the duties and acts of our callings." Leighton. TRUTH MUST AND WILL PREVAIL. Monsters and madmen canonized, and Galileo blind in a dungeon! It is not so in our times. Heaven be praised that in this respect, at least, we are, if not better, yet better off than our forefathers. But to what, and to whom (under Providence) do we owe the improvement? To any radical change in the moral affections of mankind in general? In order to answer this question in the affirmative, I must forget the infamous empirics whose advertisements pollute and disgrace all our newspapers, and almost paper the walls of our cities; and the vending of whose poisons and poisonous drams (with shame and anguish be it spoken) supports a shop in every market-town! I must forget. that other opprobrium of the nation, that mother vice, the lottery! I must forget that a numerous class plead prudence for keeping their fellow-men ignorant and incapable of intellectual enjoyments, and the revenue for upholding such temptations as men so ignorant will not withstand-yes! that even senators and officers of state hold forth the revenue as a sufficient plea for upholding, at every fiftieth door throughout the kingdom, temptations to the most pernicious vices. No! Let us not deceive ourselves. Like the man who used to pull off his hat with great demonstration of respect whenever he spoke of himself, we are fond of styling our own the enlightened age, though, as Jortin, I think, has wittily remarked, the golden age would be more appropriate. To whom, then, do we owe our ameliorated condition? To the successive few in every age (more, indeed, in one generation than in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind always few), who, by the intensity and permanence of their action, have compensated for the limited sphere within which it is at any one time intelligible, and whose good deeds posterity reverence in their results, though the mode in which we repair the inevitable waste of time, and the style of our additions, too generally furnish a sad proof how little we understand the principles. * * Still, however, there are truths so self-evident, or so immediately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are acknowledged for such, that they are at once intelligible to all men who possess the common advantages of the social state; although by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and impostures of an anti-christian priesthood, joined in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of men may become so darkened, and their consciences so lethargic, |