and civil concerns which are not only permitted, but in a great measure enjoined by Almighty God. 2. At the same time exercising acts of religious duties, observance, and veneration, by perpetuated, or at least frequently reiterated, though short acts of devotion to him. And this is the great art of Christian chemistry, to convert those acts that are materially natural or civil, into acts truly and formally religious; whereby the whole course of this life is both truly and interpretatively a service to Almighty God, and an uninterrupted state of religion; which is the best and noblest, and most universal redemption of his time."* These extracts, even as here abridged, are not recommended by a neat or concise style; they were the extemporaneous unrevised writing of a man of business, published not only without his knowledge, but against his wish. While valuable for their piety and wisdom, they are more than doubly so as exhibiting what must be supposed in a great measure the writer's habits and rules of life. Admonitions, in a work designed for public use, may occasion a far too favourable estimate of their author's moral attainments; of which, (as a probable consequence,) this volume is a humbling proof to myself. If, on the other *Contemplations, p. 217.

hand, there be any case in which we may conclude a substantial and steadfast practice to have been the basis of excellent rules, it is that of a character so firm and regular as Judge Hale, sketching a plan of religious life, not for the public eye, but only for that of his children and intimate connexions.

The temper of mind which these eminent persons have described, should by no means be conceived of as adverse to a well-regulated cheerfulness and freedom of spirit. Fenelon warns his correspondents against constrained, austere, and absent manners. A fund of genuine cheerfulness should be created in the mind, by the heartfelt consecration of ordinary acts and circumstances to God's will and service; the habitual reference of all our customary pursuits to his good pleasure, is sufficient to adorn and dignify them all. This truth cannot perhaps be better impressed on memory than by the quaint lines of the excellent Herbert, where he speaks of the “elixir” of piety, as decorating, and even transmuting, the lowliest employ.

"All may of Thee partake:

Nothing can be so mean,

Which with this tincture,-for thy sake,

Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine;

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,

Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone

That turneth all to gold:

For that which God doth touch and own,

Cannot for less be told."

XXIV.

ON THE

PREVALENT UNBELIEF WHICH FRUSTRATES PRAYER, AND THE IMPERFECT FAITH WHICH MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY IMAGINED TO DO SO.

It is evident that the Founder of our religion and his inspired followers have treated faith and unbelief in divine revelation as qualities or acts of a moral kind, the one acceptable to God, the other criminal in his sight. This statement has been cavilled at by rejecters of the gospel, who have plausibly argued, that our viewing a narrative or a proposition as true or untrue, is an act merely intellectual and in no respect moral. But even if it were not observable, in contradiction to this, how greatly the wills and passions of men influence their intellectual acts and habits, yet might those reasonings be sufficiently refuted by consi

dering the natural and proximate effects of such unbelief. If a chemist shew me a vase of apparently clear water or pure air, and say,—On strictly analyzing this, I can detect no deleterious ingredient,―great as may be his skill, and unable as I may be to confute him scientifically, yet if I find my own health, and that of others, impaired by tasting or inhaling the fluid, I shall rather trust in experience than in the most subtle analysis. This comparison might serve if we could only ascertain some latent connexion between unbelief and moral evil, without being able to discover a reason of that connexion. But the reason is easily discerned. Unbelief of divine truths is. a destitution of the only efficient principles by which the moral and spiritual life can be sustained. The experimentalist may display a vessel from which air has been more or less exhausted, and may tell us there is nothing pernicious in it; but if we discover a deficiency of support for animal and vegetable life, we shall charge him with a poor equivocation. An exclusion of those truths which are supereminently moral, such as the perfect holiness or rectitude of God, and the destination of man to glorify and enjoy him, (truths which revelation alone demonstrates,) is an exclusion of the only sufficient aliment of true virtue.