INSCRIPTION ON A CLOCK IN CHEAPSIDE. WHAT now thou do'st, or art about to do, When wav'ring o'er the dot this hand shall tell RATIONALISM IS NOT REASON. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. An awful text! Now because vengeance is most wisely and lovingly forbidden to us, hence we have by degrees, under false generalizations and puny sensibilities, taken up the notion that vengeance is no where. In short, the abuse of figurative interpretation is endless;-instead of being applied, as it ought to be, to those things which are the most comprehensible, that is, sensuous, and which therefore are the parts likely to be figurative, because such language is a condescension to our weakness,—it is applied to rot away the very pillars, yea, to fret away and dissolve the very corner stones of the temple of religion. O, holy Paul! O, beloved John! full of light and love, whose books are full of intuitions, as those of Paul are books of energies, the one uttering to sympathizing angels what the other toils to convey to weak-sighted yet docile men :Luther! Calvin! Fox, with Penn and Barclay! O Zinzendorf! and ye too, whose outward garments only have been singed and dishonoured in the heathenish furnace of Roman apostacy, Francis of Sales, Fenelon ;yea, even Aquinas and Scotus!-With what astoundment would ye, if ye were alive with your merely human perfections, listen to the creed of our, so called, rational religionists! Rational! They, who in the very outset deny all reason, and leave us nothing but degrees to distinguish us from brutes;-a greater degree of memory, dearly purchased by the greater solicitudes of fear which convert that memory into foresight. O! place before your eyes the island of Britain in the reign of Alfred, its unpierced woods, its wide morasses and dreary heaths, its blood-stained and desolated shores, its untaught and scanty population; behold the monarch listening now to Bede, and now to John Erigena; and then see the same realm, a mighty empire, full of motion, full of books, where the cotter's son, twelve years old, has read more than archbishops of yore, and possesses the opportunity of reading more than our Alfred himself;-and then finally behold this mighty nation, its rulers and its wise men listening to -- Paley and to Malthus! It is mournful, mournful. INCONSISTENCY. How strange and sad is the laxity with which men in these days suffer the most inconsistent opinions to lie jumbled lazily together in their minds,-holding the antimoralism of Paley and the hypophysics of Locke, and yet gravely, and with a mock faith, talking of God as a pure spirit, of passing out of time into eternity, of a peace which passes all understanding, of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and God above all, and so forth!-Blank contradictions!-What are these men's minds but a huge lumberroom of bully, that is, of incompatible notions brought together by a feeling without a sense of connection? HOPE IN HUMANITY. CONSIDER the state of a rich man perfectly Adam Smithed, yet with a naturally good heart;—then suppose him suddenly convinced, vitally convinced, of the truth of the blessed system of hope and confidence in reason and humanity! Contrast his new and old views and reflections, the feelings with which he would begin to receive his rents, and to contemplate his increase of power by wealth, the study to relieve the labour of man from all 1 mere annoy and disgust, the preclusion in his own mind of all cooling down from the experience of individual ingratitude, and his conviction that the true cause of all his disappointments was, that his plans were too narrow, too short, too selfish! Wenn das Elend viel ist auf der Erde, so beruhet der grund davon, nach Abzug des theils erträglichen, theils verbesserlichen, theils eingebildeten Uebels der Naturwelt, ganz allein in den moralischen Handlungen der Menschen.* O my God! What a great, inspiriting, heroic thought! Were only a hundred men to combine even my clearness of conviction of this, with a Clarkson and Bell's perseverance, what might not be done! How awful a duty does not hope become! What a nurse, yea, mother of all other the fairest virtues! We despair of others' goodness, and thence are ourselves bad. O! let me live to show the errors of the most of those who have hitherto attempted this work, how they have too often put the intellectual and the moral, yea, the moral and the religious, faculties at strife with each other, and how they ought to act with an equal eye to all, to feel that all is involved in the perfection of each! This is the fundamental position. ** Although the misery on the earth is great indeed, yet the foundation of it rests, after deduction of the partly bearable, partly removable, and partly imaginary, evil of the natural world, entirely and alone on the moral dealings of men. Ed. SELF-LOVE IN RELIGION. THE unselfishness of self-love in the hopes and fears of religion consists;-first,-in the previous necessity of a moral energy, in order so far to subjugate the sensual, which is indeed and properly the selfish, part of our nature, as to believe in a state after death, on the grounds of the Christian religion:-secondly,-in the abstract and, as it were, unindividual nature of the idea, self, or soul, when conceived apart from our present living body and the world of the senses. In my religious meditations of hope and fear, the reflection that this course of action will purchase heaven for me, for my soul, involves a thought of and for all men who pursue the same course. In worldly blessings, such as those promised in the Old Law, each man might make up to himself his own favourite scheme of happiness. "I will be strictly just, and observe all the laws and ceremonies of my religion, that God may grant me such a woman for my wife, or wealth and honour, with which I will purchase such and such an estate," &c. But the reward of heaven admits no day-dreams; its hopes and its fears are too vast to endure an outline. "I will endeavour to abstain from vice, and force myself to do such and such acts of duty, in order that I may make myself capable of that freedom of moral |