ADDRESS.

I AM not a politician, nor do I belong to any political party: my own station is a country parish, and I seldom pass its boundaries. However, in the Periodical Work I am now publishing, I would go forth through the land on a mission of high importance, holding up the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ as the great remedy of Social Evils. I hope to be admitted into many a household circle, and to be allowed at least a hearing. My mission relates not only to the happiness of "the life that now is," but to the highest interests of man, to the life and death of the immortal spirit; and I do not come as a trifler, but as one bearing and showing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God.

I do not meddle with the question, whether the Gospel is, or is not, the remedy for evils in the organization of society; but I do assert, that it will introduce a new spirit even into a badly organized society, and thus make it superior to the most admirable organization without that spirit.

As it is with the human body, so it is with the body politic. It is not the province or proper office of religion to restore to symmetry and to beauty the deformed figure, but to introduce the graces of a renewed spirit within that deformed figure, and thus to impart even to the unshapen, and the coarse featured, a charm for which we may vainly search, where the proportions of the form are in exquisite symmetry, and the features beautiful, if that spirit is not present.

It is not my proper office, as a Pastor of Christ's flock, to point out the faults and the remedy in the organization of the body politic. Perhaps I am not blinder than others to those faults, and, perhaps, many others, no better fitted than myself for