filial affection; by the glow of satisfaction unspeakable, resulting from virtue, the accordance of conduct with the dictates of natural action which I have bestowed: by the certain unhappiness, immediate or more remote, accruing from vice, the aberration from my dictates. But moreover, I form you in free agency; a being to be produced by a law implanted and descendible; not endowed at once with perfection of intelligence, but capable of progressive improvement, by due application of those dictates, and incentive powers of action; as a germ to be unfolded, ripened by degrees to the production of fruit seeming good to me. And yet, if you, in consequence of that free agency, elect to surrender these privileges in defiance of better judgment, in dereliction of known causes and effects propounded to your senses, be it so. By so doing you deserve punishment, and incur it: for I decree, that every sin, every abandonment of my revealed law, shall carry its own sting, the barbed arrow of remorse. I commit to Nature, my visible agent, the task to her easy, of vindicating my insulted beneficence; insulted when you in wanton defiance, or in blind abandonment, stray from the paths of reason and conscience, my gifts pre-eminent, above those imparted to the inferior animals, who also

move and live in obedience to my will, though by modes expressed differently from your own. And if at any time, duped by your fellows, you elect to leave me, and cleave to them who have been the dupes of their own imagination in the first instance, by forsaking my laws and inventing systems founded in opposition to them; is it for me to descend on every occasion, petty, or by you deemed important, and breaking the chain stretched from the beginning, linked in order and harmony supreme, to emancipate you from the fetters forged by folly, riveted by obstinacy the climax of folly, that of building crooked on the level foundation which I have laid? I have given you much, and have given you suitable energy to call that much into activity, by which it may be multiplied to an extent I choose not to reveal. I call you into life by one law, I deprive you of it by another; and will you presume to murmur? Shall finite being prescribe terms to Infinity? Shall subjection strive to shake off the Omnipotence which made it such? What ulterior destination awaits you beware of enquiring. Let it suffice to know, that I am good and just: be virtuous, and you will be blessed; submit in cheerful obedience, and fear not the result. I have awarded to your nature the discriminating powers of reflection, of comparison, of taste, and of judgment. If you

elect, in exercise of discretional wisdom, to be virtuous and happy; well. But if to choose the evil and reject the good, by virtue of that same free agency, the distinguishing characteristic between you and inferiority, it must be so: you then only suffer the punishment due to delinquency; accuse not me. How can you dare to demand a special interference from the power who hath made all things well originally, in behalf of your narrow views? Must there be renouncement, or innovation on the propriety of Totality, to gratify at every turn the unauthorized workings of unity; to avert the necessitous consequences of blind or wilful departure from principles established by unerring wisdom? Wisdom acting in the aggregate so sublime and beautiful, that the details flowing therefrom, are strict harmonies with the chord of Universality? Must the harmony of infinity be broken or inverted by the clash of finite understanding its derivative? And if yielding yourselves a prey to duplicity and all sorts of unnatural impressions, however instilled, however imbibed, (I decree to draw no line in this respect) you suffer the dissolution of the Nature, given to you to be imbittered by a pang not its own; to be haunted by phantoms of sick terror, conjured up by the wand of prejudice or superstition; so it must be also: I leave you to misery wantonly provoked.”

LETTER XXVIII.

"My friend," said L in an altered voice, "I think you told me, I am sure you did, that your father had ceased to live. If it be not a theme too painful, favour me with a brief account of the manner of his death; it may be useful to us both, and the living are entitled to draw accurate feeling, to profit by the departure of those who feel no more. Accordingly, I related how my venerable parent, finding his end approach, had said, 'My son, come near, and hear me before I die: I am going to the land where all my fathers are gone, where the wiles of Europeans, of the stranger who hath misused us, will not avail. Where the deer of the Indians browse in the forests interminable, reserved by the Great Spirit for his children who are prudent and good. I shall pass an eternity in hunting,and recounting at the feasts of the warriors, the valorous exploits of my ancestors and myself; in listening to the 'tales of the times of old, the deeds of the days of other years' and so he died, serene."-"To be sure he did," said

L, "that is the very point we are coming to: and why did he so? Because the faith imbibed in his early childhood, bid him believe in the future state of peculiar enjoyment, which he therefore on his death-bed anticipated. But answer me, answer, I conjure you, by your love of truth and hatred of deception; would his wishes, hopes, and faith consummate such his hope, would they alter pre-ordination, if that pre-ordination was contrary to his wish? A man may as well say, 'I will not die, because I wish to live: I am told of the beatitude of futurity, but that at any rate is happiness in expectancy; now I am positively very happy in tenancy of my life, which is actually present; and shall be well contented to abide for ever here, and enjoy this world as I find it now.' So do many of us argue, and "our wish is father to the thought;" but will that wish prevail? Salutary experience tell us that it will not: when our hour is come, we must go; we shall be torn away, cling to life and its relations strongly as we may. Death is a clause inserted in the contract of existence, who can erase it? Whether that contract be renewable on its now, or other terms, I am content to leave in the bosom of superiority; who made, and can unmake, who can dissolve and can renew.