chief in the world, and has been a greater bar to general improvement, and the interests of civilization, than the inroads of all the barbarians ever heard of. The art of printing itself and all the vast capabilities of steam were once considered impossible and impracticable under the benumbing influence of this wretched maxim. Let us hear no more then of opposition grounded npon the speculative or assumed impracticability of the substitution proposed by Mr. Trevelyan, and supported by Alpha," who has amply and satisfactorily demonstrated its perfect practicability and expediency. This being the case, we require no more words, no more minutes -we want acts, and it is for the Government now to do its duty, and forthwith direct the organization of a plan for carrying into effect, a measure that will work better for the solid good of the people of India, than any adopted within the memory of man, and prove a mighty engine of conversion to a purer faith.-India

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Gazette.

V.-The Impropriety and Sinfulness of the practice of exclud ing Visitors by saying," Not at home."

Amid all the looseness of polite morality we know not whether any practice is tolerated that merits more severe reprehension than that of excluding visitors by a deliberate utterance of the assertion, "Not at home." As opposed to truth, it is disingenuous-it is false as opposed to the manliness of virtue, it is mean-it is cowardly as opposed to the sympathy of genuine benevolence, it is unkind-it is cruel: as opposed to the purity of the God of holiness, it is vile-it is loathsome. So utterly abhorrent, indeed, is the practice to the whole spirit and genius of Christianity, that the wonder is, how any one bearing the Christian name could help feeling the violence of contradiction to his profession which it implies. We had hoped that it should never have been exported to a heathen land, there to blazen forth our hypocrisy and our shame. But it seems that the practice has obtained a sort of sanction in high places, if not a temporary asylum. It is time, therefore, that the voice of every honest man should be raised against it, and denounce it, as it deserves. To supply those who manfully resist whatever is opposed to the tenor of divine truth,and to the real happiness and true dignity of man, with aggressive and defensive weapons, we shall furnish a few extracts fraught with just sentiment and powerful expression. Our first is from Godwin's Political Justice.

Let us, first, according to the well known axiom of morality, put ourselves in the place of the person whom this answer excludes. It seldom happens but that he is able, if he be in possession of any discernment, to discover with tolerable accuracy, whether the answer he receives be true or false. But let us suppose only, that we vehemently suspect the truth. It is not intended to keep us in ignorance of the existence of such a practice. He that adopts it, is willing to avow, in general terms, that such is his system, or he makes out a case for himself, much less favourable than I was making out for him. The visitor, then, who receives this answer, feels, in spite of himself, a contempt for the prevarication of the person he visits. I appeal to the feelings of every man in the situation I have described, and I have no doubt that he

well feel this to be their true state in the first instance; however, he may have a set of sophistical reasonings at hand, by which he may in a few minutes reason down the first movements of indignation. He feels that the trouble he has taken, and the civility he intended, entitled him at least to truth in return.

Having put ourselves in the place of the visitor, let us next put ourselves in the place of the poor despised servant. Let us suppose that we are ourselves destined, as sons or husbands, to give this answer, that our father or our wife is not at home, when he or she is really in the house. Should we not feel our tongues contaminated with the base plebeian lie? Would it be a sufficient opiate to our consciences to say, " Such is the practice, and it is well understood?" It never can be understood; its very intention is not to be understood. We say that "we have certain arguments." Surely we ought best to be able to understand our own arguments, and yet we shrink with abhorrence from the idea of personally acting upon them. Whatever sophistry we may have to excuse our error, nothing is more certain, than that our servants understand the lesson, we teach them, to be a lie. It is accompanied by all the retinue of falsehood. Before it can be gracefully practised, the servant must be no mean proficient in the mysteries of hypocrisy. By the easy impudence with which it is uttered, he best answers the purpose of his master, or, in other words, the purpose of deceit. By the easy impudence with which it is uttered, he best stifles the upbraidings of his own mind, and conceals from others the shame imposed upon him by his despotic task-master. Before this can be sufficiently done, he must have discarded the ingenuous frankness, by means of which the thoughts find easy commerce with the tongue, and the clear and undisguised counte nance, which ought to be the faithful mirror of the mind. Do you think, when he has learned this degenerate lesson in one instance, that it will pro duce no unfavourable effects upon his general conduct? Surely, if we will practise vice, we ought at least to have the magnanimity to practise it in person: not, coward-like, corrupt the principles of another, and oblige him to do that, which we have not the honesty to dare to do for ourselves. But it is said, that this lie is necessary, and that the intercourse of human society cannot be carried on without it. What! is it not as easy to say, "I am engaged," or " indisposed," or as the case may happen, as I am not at home?" Are these answers more insulting, than the universally sus pected answer, the notorious hypocrisy, of " I am not at home?" The purpose, indeed, for which this answer is usually employed, is a deceit of another kind. Every man has, in the catalogue of his acquaintance, some that he particularly loves, and others to whom he is indifferent, or perhaps worse than indifferent. This answer leaves the latter to suppose, if they please, that they are in the class of the former. And what is the benefit to result from this indiscriminate, undistinguishing manner of treating our neighbours? Whatever benefit it be, it no doubt exists in considerable vigour in the present state of polished society, where forms perpetually intrude to cut off all intercourse between the feelings of mankind; and I can scarcely tell a man on the one hand, that "I esteem his character, and honour his virtues," or, on the other, that he is fallen into an error, which will be of prejudicial con sequence to him, without trampling upon all the barriers of politeness. But is all this right? Is not the esteem or the disapprobation of others among the most powerful incentives to virtue and vice? Shall we act half so well as we otherwise should, if we be unacquainted with the feelings of our neighbours respecting us? If there be in the list of our acquaintance any person whom we particularly dislike, it usually happens, that it is for some moral fault that we perceive in him. Why should he be kept in ignorance of our opinion respecting him, and prevented from the opportunity either of amendment or vindication? If he be too wise or too foolish, too virtuous or too vicious for

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us, why should he not be ingenuously told of his mistake, in his intended kindness to us, rather than be suffered to find it out by six months' inquiry from our servants?

This leads to yet one more argument in favour of this disingenuous practice. We are told "there is no other way by which we can rid ourselves of disagreeable acquaintance." How long shall this be one of the effects of polished society, to persuade us that we are incapable of doing the most trivial offices for ourselves? You may as well tell me "that it is a matter of indispensable necessity to have a valet to put on my stockings." In reality, the existence of these troublesome visitors, is owing to the hypocrisy of politeness. It is, that we wear the same indiscriminate smile, the same appearance of cordiality and complacence to all our acquaintance. Ought we to do this? Are virtue and excellence entitled to no distinctions? For the trouble of these impertinent visits, we may thank ourselves.—If we practised no deceit, if we assumed no atom of cordiality and esteem we did not feel, we should be little pestered with these buzzing intruders. But one species of falsehood, involves us in another; and he that pleads for these lying answers to visitors, in reality pleads the cause of a cowardice that dares not deny to vice the distinction and kindness, that are exclusive. ly due to virtue.

The man, who acted upon this system, would be very far removed from a cynic. The conduct of men, formed upon the fashionable system, is a perpetual contradiction. At one moment, they fawn upon us with a servility that dishonours the dignity of man; and, at another, treat us with a neglect, a sarcastic insolence, and a supercilious disdain, that are felt as the severest cruelty by him who has not the firmness to regard them with neglect. The conduct of the genuine moralist is equable and uniform. He loves all mankind, he desires the benefit of all; and this love, and this desire, are legible in his conduct. Does he remind us of our faults? It is with no mixture of asperity, of selfish disdain, and insolent superiority; of consequence, it is scarcely possible he should wound. Few, indeed, are those effeminate valetudinarians, who recoil from the advice, when they distinguish the motive. But were it otherwise, the injury is nothing. Those who feel themselves incapable of suffering the most benevolent plain dealing, would derive least benefit from the prescription, and they avoid the physician.

Thus is he delivered, without harshness, hypocrisy, and deceit, from those whose intercourse he had least reason to desire; and, the more his character is understood, the more his acquaintance will be select, his company being chiefly sought by the ingenuous, the well-disposed, and those who are desirous of improvement.

Our next extract shall be from the Commercial Discourses of Dr. Chalmers perhaps the most practical and useful of all the discourses of that truly eloquent divine. It is more applicable we allow, to the state of things at home, than to the domestic habits of India. But the general principles which it unfolds are universally applicable.

After some introductory remarks, in which he describes the saying in question to be a lie put into the mouth of a dependant, and that, for the purpose of protecting one's time from such an encroachment as one would not feel to be convenient or agreeable an offence, arising it may be, from a certain false delicacy of temperament, in virtue of which one cannot give another plainly to understand that he counts his company to be an interruption :— he thus proceeds :

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"Look to the little account that is here made of a brother's or of a sister's eternity; behold the guilty task that is thus unmercifully laid upon one who is shortly to appear before the judgment seat of Christ; think of the entanglement which is thus made to beset the path of a creature who is unperishable. That, at the shrine of Mammon, such a bloody sacrifice should be rendered by some of his unrelenting votaries is not to be wondered at; but that the shrine of elegance and fashion should be bathed in bloodthat her soft and sentimental ladyship should put forth her hand to such an enormity-that she who can sigh so gently, and shed her graceful tears over the sufferings of others, should thus be accessary to the second and more awful death of her own domestics-that one who looks the mildest and the loveliest of human beings, should exact obedience to a mandate which car.. ries wrath, and tribulation, and anguish, in its train-O! how it should confirm every Christian in his defiance to the authority of fashion, and lead him to spurn at all its folly, and at all its worthlessness.

"And it is quite in vain to say, that the servant whom you thus employ as the deputy of your falsehood, can possibly execute the commission without the conscience being at all tainted or defiled by it; that a simple cottage maid can so sophisticate the matter, as without any violence to her original principles, to utter the language of what she assuredly knows to be a downright lie; that she, humble and untutored soul, can sustain no injury when thus made to tamper with the plain English of these realms; that she can at all satisfy herself, how by the prescribed utterance of "not at home," she is not pronouncing such words as are substantially untrue, but merely using them in another and perfectly understood meaning-and which, according to their modern translation, denote, that the person of whom she is thus speaking, instead of being away from home, is secretly lurking in one of the most secure and intimate of its receptacles. You may try to darken and transform this piece of casuistry as you will; and work up your own minds into the peaceable conviction that it is all right, and as it should be. But be very certain that where the moral sense of your domestic is not already overthrown, there is at least, one bosom within which you have raised a war of doubts and of difficulties; and where, if the victory be on your side, it will be on the side of him who is the great enemy of righteousness. There is, at least, one person along the line of this conveyance of deceit, who condemneth herself in that which she alloweth; who in the language of Paul, esteeming the practice to be unclean, to her will it be unclean; who will perform her task with the offence of her own conscience, and to whom, therefore, it will indeed be evil; who cannot render obedience in this matter to her earthly superior, but by an act in which she does not stand clear and unconscious of guilt before God; and with whom, therefore, the sad consequence of what we can call nothing else than a bar barous combination against the principles and the prospects of the lower orders, is that as she has not cleaved fully unto the Lord, and has not kept by the service of the one Master, and has not forsaken all at his bidding, she cannot be the disciple of Christ.

"The aphorism, that he who offendeth in one point is guilty of all, tells us something more than of the way in which God adjudges condemnation to the disobedient. It also tells us of the way in which one individual act of sinfulness operates upon our moral nature. It is altogether an erroneous view of the commandments, to look upon them as so many observances to which we are bound by as many distant and independent ties of obligation, insomuch, that the transgression of one of them may be brought about by the dissolution of one separate tie, and may leave all the others with as entire a constraining influence and authority as before. The truth is, that the commandments ought rather to be looked upon as branching out from one great and general tie of obligation; and that there is no such thing as

loosening the hold of one of them upon the conscience, but by the unfastening of that tie which binds them all upon the conscience. So that if one member in the system of practical righteousness be made to suffer, all the other members suffer along with it; and if one decision of the moral sense be thwarted, the organ of the moral sense is permanently impaired, and a leaven of iniquity infused into all its other decisions; and if one suggestion of this inward monitor be stifled, a general shock is given to his authority over the whole man; and if one of the least commandments of the law is left unfulfilled, the law itself is brought down from its rightful ascendency; and thus it is, that one act of disobedience may be the commencement and the token of a systematic universal rebelliousness of the heart against God. It is this which gives such a wide wasting malignity to each of the separate offences on which we have now expatiated. It is this which so multiplies the means and the possibilities of corruption in the world. It is thus that, at every one point in the intercourse of human society, there may be struck out a fountain of poisonous emanation on all who approach it; and think not, therefore, that under each of the examples we have given we were only contending for the preservation of one single feature in the character of him who stands exposed to this world's offences. We felt it, in fact, to be a contest for his eternity; and that the case involved in it his general condition with God; and that he who leads the young into a course of dissipation, or that he who tampers with their impressions of Sabbath sacredness, or that he who either in the walks of business, or in the services of the family makes them the agents of deceitfulness, or that he, in short, who tempts them to transgress in any one thing, has, in fact, poured such a pervading taint into their moral constitution, as to spoil or corrupt them in all things, and that thus, upon one solitary occasion, or by the exhibition of one particular offence, a mischief may be done equivalent to the total destruction of a human soul, or to the blotting out of its prospects for immortality.

"And let us just ask a master or a mistress, who can thus make free with the moral principle of their servants in one instance, how they can look for pure or correct principle from them in other instances? What right have they to complain of unfaithfulness against themselves, who have deliberately seduced another into a habit of unfaithfulness against God? Are they so utterly unskilled in the mysteries of our nature, as not to perceive that if a man gather hardihood enough to break the Sabbath in opposition to his own conscience, this very hardihood will avail him to the breaking of other obligations? that he whom, for their advantage, they so exercised, as to fill his conscience with offence towards his God, will not scruple, for his own advantage, so to exercise himself, as to fill his conscience with offence towards his master? that the servant whom you have taught to lie has gotten such rudiments of education at your hand, as that without any further help, he can now teach himself to purloin ;-and yet nothing more frequent than loud and angry complainings against the treachery of servants; as if, in the general wreck of their other principles, a principle of consideration for the good and interest of their employer, and who, at the same time, has been their seducer, was to serve in all its sensibility. It is just such a retribution as was to be looked for; it is a recoil upon their own heads of the mischief which they themselves have originated. It is the temporal of the punishment which they have to bear for the sin of our text, but not the whole of it; far better for them that both person and property were cast into the sea, than that they should stand the reckoning of that day, when called to give an account of the soul that they have murdered, and the blood of so mighty a destruction is requir ed at their hands."