passion, when it is consigned with terrible promptitude, as far as the will of the swearer is concerned, to perdition, for the value of a shoelatchet or the expression of a word. In such a family, of which there are many thousands in this country, how miraculous would be a young man's preservation! How natural in such scenes for conscience to doze, and for the vices, quick and rank by nature, to overgrow the slow and tender virtues that may have been watered by a father's first and last tears. Almost every village in England presents such youth: shall their claims on the religious be still unregarded? How many young men return home annually, after their sojourn in a distant house, to learn its art or trade, moral malformations; while their domesticated sisters, saved from the wreck of character, have been soothing the cares and nourishing the hopes of the fancy-comforted parent, whose heart is now to pass through every crucible of suffering, and to consume itself to ashes in the smothered flame of grief. In addition, the timidity of youth, its self-distrust and deference to others, its natural good nature and the weakness of the moral sense when opposed by the appetites; the want of moral courage, the feebleness of uncongenial instructions, the original want of love to purity; the multitude of superiors who often practise the vice to which the young man is tempted; the imperceptible manner in which temptation operates; the fear of ridicule; the self-made vow that he will yield no more all seduce the young man to concede to temptations, the first of which is the mouth of the snare-that once entered, soon closes on him for life. Are these facts? Where then is the justice or benevolence of the moral, and especially of the religious? Oh, they are gone to crusade the ends of the earth to spread their peculiarities, while the fundamental charities of their system are inoperative at home, where above eleven thousand premature graves close every year over the young, many of whom will this month drag their diseased bodies from the haunt of vice to their death-bed, or go from the bacchanal's route unwashen into the presence' where the cherubim veil.

Yet perhaps the natural character of young men furnishes the noblest specimens of humanity which it ever exhibits. In childhood humanity is the packed plant where all but infinite powers are stowed into the compass of boy: the juvenile hero that will hereafter move the battalions of war to victory with a word; or the more peaceful patriot who, by the time he has trebled his present age, will have written his name among the great dead, is not now discernible from the incipient plough-boy or the untried apprentice. The aged are outworn, and however fitly they once wreathed the oak-bough in their escutcheon, they have now too aptly changed their symbol to the reed shaken by the wind.' Whatever they may have been, they have now almost absorbed life into memory and hope, and live but on the lees of their former being. Whatever prizes are to be won, they can race no more. However heavily the state-storms may gather, the aged can brave no danger, but join the multitude who seek for the hiding-place. And besides, both the children and the aged have little connexion with the vigorous part of young men: the first are to take

our place, but may fall as untimely fruit, or we may never live to see their maturity; while the second are descending the stairs of life to the 'sepulchre of their fathers.' Young men are the national stamina, and are covered with seeds of hope, and are now ready to labour. The eyes of the church and the mart are on them. The eagle of war fixes her blood-fed gaze on them. The power-wheel of commerce must move from them, and the hearth and fire-side affections look to them for protection and life. Hospitals and thrones, agriculture and the arts, all turn to them. They are the trustees who convey the benefits of ancestors to posterity, and transfuse the discoveries and plans, the rights and trades of the present age, to the generations following.

The natural morals of youth, with all their evident defects, are the foundation of many serious claims both on the incoming and outgoing sections of the human race. We have to look towards the junior branches of mankind with hope; towards the aged with patience and gratitude; but towards young men we join both feelings, for they are our present conservators and actual benefactors. From their natural frankness they sooner forget injuries, and from their consciousness of the power to acquire, they are more generous in the distribution of their property. They have not been disgusted with mankind, and therefore indulge not the spleen which too frequently settles in age into habits of dictatorial censure or cold-hearted querulousness. The sympathies of young men are more alive to the miseries of others, and sooner aroused to the vindication of their wrongs, while their capability of enduring suffering, and their constitutional zeal, makes them more persevering in the public service. Not yet having seen the end of all perfection,' their nature has not ossified into selfishness; and not having thoroughly learnt the vain show' in which all men walk,' they have not contracted the suspicion which too often leers from the eyes of age, even when friendship approaches. The natural virtues in young men may have been trampled on, but they will rise again;' for they are yet in the blossom of their being, and after the shower, will send forth many a wave of sweetest fragrance to refresh the everfainting soul of society.

Considered as the subjects of religious instruction, what advantages also the young men present to the skilful teacher! The aged-who have outlived their imaginative powers, for imagination may only be an apparatus to make up for the defective senses of man in this life, in order to procure knowledge, and generally to assist in the education of the human mind-the aged, we say, are incapable of entering into the lengthened addresses of the pulpit, and chiefly live on the repetition of those spiritual apophthegms which suit their condition, and which occur occasionally in the illustration of more recondite topics. memory is feeble, and feels a sentence a burden or a simile a load. Their attention partakes of the general weariness, restless as an eagle's eye without its penetrating fire. So that preachers generally find the aged and children the least attentive portions of their flock. But for the young men, their studies would be discouraged, their appeals

Their

would be as uninfluential as the apostrophes of the traveller to the tombs of the dead, and the proof of their principles would be lost. Young men, if properly taught, however, have a marvellous power of attention. Truth and eloquence will often increase their charms, till such auditors become unconscious of time; and, while they are listening to the responses of the oracle, its spirit is often graving on the leaves of memory the preacher's illustrations, and even his very words, so deeply, that they will be recollected at the distance of a life, and often outlive both the memory that gave them being, and the person to whom it belonged.

Memory, which is the foundation of mind, and indeed of character in general, thus becomes a substitute for the preacher in effect, prolongs his instructions for ever, and divides him among his auditors. In age, the natural tenderness is gone, or the passages to it become choked with the care of other things. But in young men we commonly find it accessible to the religious teacher. Pathos is the key of the human heart. It is the spirit of Christianity, for it is a radiation from Divine love, which is the moral essence of God. It should, therefore, be the soul of the Christian orator, and when, as in the cases of Whitefield, Grosvenor, Rogers, Howe, and Bishop Taylor, it has been the transcendant power of the pulpit, wondrous have been its triumphs; for the heart of man is as much subject to the law of affinities as the chemical world. In young men, too, the comparative accuracy of the moral taste is an auxiliary to the preacher. We are aware that we verge doubly debateable ground. Taste depends, for its character, on the standard by which it has been formed. If, whatever is true and beautiful be the standard, then taste may be as various as any other of the qualities of mind, and yet be genuine; but if, as it has too commonly been thought in this country, taste must bear the classical mintmark, and can never be counted genuine except it endures the ordeal of Pagan literature, it will mostly commend the style which wants emphasis, an error that has prevailed in England to a remarkable extent. The moral writings of the heathens, however beautiful, as poems, philosophy, or histories, are greatly deficient in true emphasis. Eternal truths are described in the feeble language which is suitable to a fabulous theogony, because their writers did not know that they were eternal, nor were they certain that they ever uttered moral truth at all; consequently, they could never speak as definitely of a duty as they did of a battle, and were always condemned to the lighter strokes of the pen, when it touched upon the chapter of morals. It is not by such canons, therefore, that we should test the moral taste, nor do we consider that the mental taste of one class ought to be forced on another, any more than one animal appetite should rule the national table. The moral taste of age that has not been modified by religion, is corrupted with habits of vice, and with the usages of society. Its conceptions of right and wrong are enfeebled, and the feelings of indignation or approval are correspondently faint. The sensibility of conscience departed with the bloom of the countenance, and the feelings of natural honour are worn below the quick. But in the heart of

the young man, the moral sense is yet stern; virtue and vice are distinct; the soul yet retains its natural aversion to evil, and its approbation of good; conscience feels their claims as abundant; witnesses on either side the judgment will award the sentence; fear is awake to warning, and hope to reward, while imagination foretypes the doomsday; and though the youth runs with the multitude, he weeps apart and promises to return, for he still admires whatever is lovely and of good report. This is probably the state of the moral taste in the bulk of young men who are auditors of Christian teachers, and who possess, in some one or other of the infinitesimal degrees in which it may exist, this valuable precession to ministerial success.

In young men, also, the dominion of vice is not fully established. The heart is still the disputed object. The world desires to sift it as wheat; and the Almighty says, 'My son, give me thine heart.' The prize is, lamentably, in most cases, not awarded to its right owner; but, during the suspense of the young man, all eternity calls on him, through the voice of the preacher, with advantage. He is not 'twice dead.' The seeds of parental instruction still swell with promise. Conscience is strong; shame is keen; fear is alive. His character is not irrecoverably gone. Every noble aspiration beats its full pulse over his whole nature while the preacher is 'faithful.' Mammon has not yet digged the pit for his soul; life has not yet raised its forest of cares about the young man. His judgment is not given up to sophistry. His heart is not callous. There is hope, for the tears occasionally fall. Resolution is yet strong; he is yet much in his own power. His sensibilities are not seared. The mercy-seat of his spirit is still accessible. The young man can feel his dignity. He can be roused to emulation of the just spirits made perfect,' and often soliloquizes, Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his. All this, it needs not be urged, is of vast advantage to the Christian teacher, and the source of one of the claims of young

men.

6

A very different claim is furnished on the religious part of the community, from the consideration that the love of pleasure is one of the most influential of the passions of young men. All the younger portions of animal life appear to be distinguished by a strong love of pleasure; and it is especially marked in every class of the animals that wait on man to do his pleasure.'

This quality is pre-eminently possessed by the young of the human species. The fact is characteristic of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator; but the design is evidently to supply a suitable substitute for the labour to which all animal life is subsequently devoted, and the means of preparing for it by the development, through their exercise, of all the faculties. This love of pleasure in young men is not suddenly extinguished when they enter on the graver duties of the world. Nature effects but few of her changes with violence; hence this love, instead of being at once plucked from the heart, serves to relieve it for a time by lubricating its introduction to the heavier cares of a new station; though, from the universal defects of the human character, it

has been converted into one of the antagonist influences to religion itself. Many of its teachers have spoken of this characteristic of youth, as though the love of pleasure were a natural failing, if not a sin, and to be eradicated by all means, and they would caricature juvenility by the sedate and stately airs of experimental gravity. This is impossible; for the juvenile love of pleasure is one of the higher instincts, and not to be neutralized even by the nostrums of good men. Their aim should be to mitigate the force of this passion, by finding it wholesome gratification; by turning it into an instrument for the improvement of the mind, on which it is thought to be a stain, and thus to do more effectual service than by the extirpation of the habitude itself.

In the mean time, it must be admitted that the love of pleasure is a serious obstruction, while the heart continues alien in its feelings to the consideration of religion, which at once proscribes the pleasure and friendship of the world as enmity to God. The love of pleasure is, perhaps, but a depraved modification of the universal desire of wellbeing, which is one of the highest proofs of the Divine origin of man, and of his primitive constitution for happiness. Instead, therefore, of denouncing the propensity as radically wrong, we ought, rather, to lament its perversion, and the invention of the moral section of the community should go to adopt such means, as by supplying them with proper pleasure would refine the taste that demands it, and thus invert that perverted law of our nature, which some thoughtless theologies have censured altogether, into a sentinel keeping the mental field clear for the coming and long-protracted action of life. But the undue love of pleasure must continue to be a fearful combatant with morals, not only by nourishing the dispositions which are instantaneous death to the charities, but by destroying the powers of attention and memory; by carrying the young man beyond the limits of self-control; by a dissolution of all the habits favourable to a studious pursuit of knowledge; by the consumption of irredeemable time; and what is more than all, by the introduction to the mind of antipathies to everything serious, and a craving for frivolous novelties, which will not easily relinquish the mastership of the heart of which they have once taken possession. This inordinate love of pleasure is equally hostile to the rights of domestic life, and to the duties of business; and when it has once diseased itself into an epidemic, as it has in at least three of the European kingdoms, it becomes a national blast, ever breathing on the spirit of improvement, emasculating the mental vigour of the people, and drawing off from the fountains of natural health the supplies which alike impoverish the throne and the cottage.

We might urge the subject indeed with more effect if we had the moral statistics which, though not collected, certainly exist, to show to what degree the undue love of pleasure is hourly desolating every nation. How large a portion of the public evils owe their origin to this misdirected passion! How many of the bankruptcies and failures arise solely from this many-handed combatant! How often is the departure of the dove from private life, referable to the same