for example, that the governor has thought it necessary to call the attention of the legislature to the subject. "The practice," he says, " of employing persons to attend the polls for compensation, of placing large sums in the hands of others to entertain the electors, and the various other devices by which the existing laws are invaded, the cupidity of the electors strongly tempted, their principles undermined, and the elective franchise, the most valuable of all our temporal privileges, brought into disrepute, is too well known to need description. I cannot refrain from pressing the existence of these practices upon your consideration, as an evil of the greatest magnitude."

The governor intimates an opinion that the practices alluded to are not confined to any one political party. Whether they are at present or not, they will soon cease to be so. Parties are not slow to turn upon their adversaries their own weapons. Calumny will be answered to calumny, and money be employed against money. And, however, the good of all parties may lament and condemn the injurious practices, such practices will not consult their counsels. Nor will they long af fect concealment. Corruption, born in stealth, comes abroad by degrees, grows familiar with the light, and soon loses, to a degree which is surprising, its disgraceful character in the popular esteem.

It is a circumstance which augurs little for the moderation of our Presidential elections in future, that they are likely to draw into their wake subjects not necessarily connected with them. Powerful interests, perhaps still more powerful jealousies, will enter into them and contend with ardor for the possession of executive influence and the direction of administrative policy. The Missouri question had much to do with the election that followed it. And it was owing as much perhaps to the source as to the impolicy of the late tariff,viewed as an administrative measure, that it occasioned so much loud talk in certain quarters, of the dissolution of the Union.

The more extensive these interests become, the greater will be the aggregate of discontents produced by an election. If ever we are to arrive at the desperate crisis just alluded to, the presentiment of the wisest men associates it with our presidential elections.

Now whither do these things tend? We might repeat our question to those statesmen who manifest so much alarm for the State from the influences of religion, What is the source of your hope that we shall escape these so great and various dan gers? By what lights of philosophy or history do you think to

guide us through the dark and stormy seas which seem already to be heaving and swelling beneath us?

In another century, at our present rate, we shall have become 200,000,000. Admit the supposition that we shall have made a corresponding advance in opulence, luxury, and general immorality; that our cities shall swarm with a venal and lawless populace; that the press shall be sold to faction; that the polls shall be deserted of good men and the suffrages of the bad be bought at auction; that the prejudices of parties and sections of country shall have grown into settled antipathies; that great opposing interests contending for governmental favor shall have become too clamorous to be compromised; that the jealousies of State sovereignties shall have circumscribed the powers of the Federal Government till it is too weak for the purposes for which it was instituted; and finally that unprincipled and desperate men shall fill our public councils, and discharge the offices of legislative and executive trust. What efficacy can you suppose to exist in your merely civil institutions to keep in harmony the elements of such a State? By means of what influence would you hope to control the passions and interests of the thousands of depraved and reckless men which would exist in such a community of two hundred millions of people; and by what system of checks and balances in your political machinery would you curb or keep down all the dangerous spirits which would seek to ride on the waves of popular commotion?

Do we forbode impossible events,

And tremble at vain dreams? Heaven grant we may !

But these are not dreams. They are the natural effect of causes which are now in operation. They are what, with your views, you ought to expect. They are at least possible events for which your wisdom rejects the only remedy. "What has religion to do with the State?" you ask. In the form of ecclesiastical alliances, nothing; but in its operation as a controlling, purifying power in the consciences of the people, we answer, it has every thing to do, it is the last hope of republics; and let it be remembered, if ever our ruin shall come, that the questions which agitate, the factions which distract, the convulsions which dissolve, will be but secondary causes. true evil will lie back of these, in the moral debasement of the people; and no excellence of political institutions, no sagaeity of human wisdom, which did not, like that of our Puritan fathers, begin and end with religion, could have averted the calamity.

The

But, we bless God, we have better hopes for our country; and having viewed it in its gloomier features, we would turn now and contemplate it in those brighter aspects which it exhibits through the medium of the gospel. But the field which here opens upon us is too wide even for a rapid view on the present occasion.

The history of this land, from the beginning, is eminently blended with religious associations. Religion planted its infant colonies; modelled its institutions; breathed over it its invincible spirit of freedom; and with unexampled wisdom, laid the foundations of its moral and social happiness. The same spirit is active still in carrrying forward what was thus begun; multiplying churches, colleges, and schools, and executing a thousand schemes of liberality to meet the moral wants of our spreading population.

In its Sunday schools, it is imbuing thousands of young minds with the purest sentiments of virtue, and shielding them with heavenly truth against the corrupting influences of the world, thus training them up to be good men and good citizens.

By its Domestic Missionary Societies, it is sending hundreds of ministers of righteousness to the settlements of the West, blessing the destitute with the means of religious improvement, and turning the moral wilderness, simultaneously with the natural, into a fruitful field.

The mottos of its Bible, Tract, and Education Societies, are, "a Bible for every family," "a Tract Society in every village,' and "a minister for every thousand souls."

In its Prison Discipline Societies, it is out-doing laws and penalties in the prevention of crime; and is teaching the law itself, lessons of practical wisdom.

In its Temperance Societies, it is effecting a most surprising change in respect to a vice which was heretofore regarded as at once the most alarming and most hopeless in the land. It is affecting the interests of distilleries to a degree, we trust, in which no miserable tariff policy will be able to repair them.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars are expended through these beneficent institutions for the direct object of making the American people more virtuous and more enlightened. Let wealth flow in upon us, if it shall be employed for purposes like these; there is no danger of its corrupting influence, though it should be like our rivers.

In these philanthropic enterprises, the gospel is producing, directly and indirectly, a great effect on our national morality. But it is through its more ordinary institutions and influences that it exerts its greatest reforming power. In its weekly Sabbaths, it spreads a holy calm over society, which by its

very stillness invites men to elevated reflections; and in the instructions of the sanctuary it brings home to their minds whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, just, pure, and lovely, as pertaining to them as citizens of this world; while in the light of the world to come it shows them the contemptibleness of the sensual, the miserly, and the ambitious ends which are so wont to be pursued after here. The gospel comprises a system of means which, accompanied by the divine Spirit, is adapted to heal all the social evils which afflict humanity. In the same manner that it can transform the character of individuals, it can renew the face of communities and nations. The same heavenly influence which, in revivals of religion, descends on families and villages, converting them, however deformed they might have been before, into scenes of moral beauty, may in like manner, when it shall please him who hath the residue of the Spirit, descend to refresh and beautify a whole land. Faith anticipates that that influence will descend, as universally, perhaps as silently, as the dews of heaven, before the beneficent designs of God shall be fully accomplished in regard to the human race. That it would please him thus to bless even this land, full of wickedness, and ungrateful, though it is, is the fervent prayer of his people. Imbued with that heavenly spirit, as a nation, we shall then furnish a conspicuous example of the civil blessings which the gospel is adapted to confer on mankind. The evils which now threaten us will then be removed. Ambition and calumny will disappear from our elections, the violence of parties will subside, the conflicts of interest will cease, and the whole land, redeemed from its evil lusts and passions, will be peaceful and pure as the heavens which overspread it.

Christianity has often been abused for purposes of State, and has often been discarded altogether by human governments: we would fain hope that its true political value may be exemplified here. It would seem from all God's providence in regard to this land, as if he had great designs in connexion with it: we would fain believe that such an exemplification may be comprehended in those designs; that here, in the happiness of millions, it may be made evident to the nations, that in a political as well as religious sense, the truth shall make them free, and that where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.

ART. VIII.-REVIEW OF STEWART'S JOURNAL IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.

Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, during the Years 1823, 1824, and 1825. By C. S. STEWART, late Missionary at the Sandwich Islands. Second edition, corrected and enlarged; with an Introduction and Notes, by Rev. William Ellis, from the first London edition. New York; John P. Haven; 1828. pp. 320.

THE first edition of this work was respectfully noticed in several of our exclusively literary periodicals, and found its way to many readers who would be more than half ashamed to read the same matter on the leaves of the Missionary Herald, and to whom our commendation of the book, as a picture of heathen degradation and a record of missionary toils and self-denials, would have given it-if they had happened to hear of such a commendation-no favorable introduction. A more interesting book of travels has hardly seen the light in our day. It needs only for the reader to imagine that the author is an Englishman, and a Lord-bishop, instead of being an untitled American presbyterian; and that in his letters to bosom friends, he signs his name Charles Samuel Lahaina, instead of plain Charles Samuel Stewart; and it might not suffer by a comparison in point of literary interest with My Lord Reginald Calcutta's travels in India. We wish that those whose notions of missionaries and of missionary matters, are derived from the masters of English whaling vessels, and the London Quarterly Review, might have this work put into their hands, and might be induced to read it, without knowing whence it came. If their anti-missionary and anti-religious prejudices could be kept asleep, they could not read it without delight. Some such persons, we believe, have read it; and have learned to estimate aright the calumnies which are so sedulously propagated, in our own country as well as in England, against missions generally, and the mission to the Sandwich Islands in particular.

The object which we have in view in this notice, is only to commend the work to the religious public; for notwithstanding its literary merits, it is chiefly valuable to those who know how to value it, as a missionary book. Favorably as the first edition has been received, the work has not been so extensively circulated as it deserves.

We are glad to be informed that an edition, in two small volumes, adapted to Sabbath School libraries, is to be is sued, under the auspices of the American Sunday School Union. It is gratifying to see books of a substantial charac