of recovery an easy task? Shall it take a long time for vice to grow and gain the mastery? and shall less be required for rescue from it, and for virtue to gain the ascendency? Shall the sin that has obtained a place and an abode within us only by long solicitation-shall it be expelled in a moment ? Is the work of care briefer than the work of neglect? Is self-denial more easily or more quickly to be accomplished than self-indulgence? Do we account it a slighter task to extirpate an evil passion than it was to form it? No, it may take but a moment to receive the touch of contagious moral disease, but if that disease shall be suffered to fix itself, if it be not instantly counteracted, it shall require long and wearisome hours and days to heal it! One assault, one blow of temptation, may cause the feeble virtue of man to waver, and eventually to fall; but hard shall be the effort to collect his prostrate powers, and slowly shall he rise from that deep degradation!

Take an instance, any instance. You are an irritable person. And the sin of anger you must put away from you, before you can be permanently happy, in this world, or in any other. Can you conquer it in a day? Can you do it in a month? Can you do it in a year? How short and hasty is the period of life in which you have to do this work! If you had but this single sin to struggle with, every moment of your coming life in which you could pray and strive against it, might not be too much to accomplish the task of self-government; alas! it might be all too short. But it is not one sin only; it is a host that you have to encounter. You are worldly, or vain, or envious, or sensual; and you may be all these. And, in addition to all this, you may be undevout; and never have learned to take hold of the strength of prayer, and to put on the armour of God. Your foe is legion, and dwelleth among the rocks and fastnesses of habit; and this host of evil tempers and passions, warring against your happiness, and for ever to war against it, till conquered—this host there is no miracle to dispossess or overcome. Or shall I say that reflection, and effort, and self-denial, and watchfulness, and prayer, are the miracles that are to do it? Yes, they are miracles, too seldom seen; and when they are seen, and when they put forth all their strength, they are of no sudden operation; they must do their work slowly."-p. 174-176.

In the Discourse on Religion as the great Sentiment of Life,' we are sorry to observe the fabrication of a text, the change of a scripture from its own meaning to one directly the opposite, in order to adapt it as a motto to a Sermon. St. Paul writes, "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable,"-meaning, that if here we suffer and die for Christ, but are not to live with him hereafter, if the religious sentiment conducts only to annihilation,-where is our rejoicing? Dr. Dewey alters the text after this fashion, "If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable,”—meaning, that if we have no religious sentiment at all, if the world is our only trust, we are miserable men. St. Paul's supposition was

that of men who had all the responsibilities, trusts, and constraints of Religion without belief in their own Immortality,— our Author's is that of men who have no Religion, whose principles, as well as their life, belong to this world only. Nor is this the only case in which our Author takes unaccountable liberties with his text. We have Romans viii. 20. thus given: "For the creature-that is man-was made subject to vanitythat is to suffering-not willingly, but by reason of Him—or at the will of Him-who hath subjected the same in hope." Now there could have been no difficulty in finding passages of Scripture that, without alteration, speak of 'the miseries of life,' and of what it is to 'live without God in the world.'

We must close these extracts abruptly, for there is no natural close, unless we choose to extract the whole book. On looking again to its spiritual significance, its eloquence, its lofty wisdom, its touching appeals, we feel as if our criticisms at the commencement of this Article were not worthy to be named,—as if we were receiving a great and good gift in a little and unworthy spirit. Let them stand, however, as the expression of a feeling which exists to some extent in relation to Dr. Dewey's writings. If there is any truth in them, he will give them their due weight, and put them to their proper use. If not, he will accept our affectionate sympathy, and grateful admiration, and dispose of the reservations by extending to them that principle of toleration for the eccentricities of our friends which is in such daily demand, "de gustibus nil disputandum."

Great, however, as are the merits of these Discourses, they leave the religious consideration of Human Life, the natural history of a Christian soul on earth, its stages of growth, its successive modifications from the various conditions and relations of our being, a work still to be accomplished. The only other work bearing the same general title, with which we are acquainted, is a volume of Sermons by Dr. Arnold, whose death the country is now lamenting, who found 'Life too short for Art,' but whose unfinished works are the kind of monument which every man who dies in his prime should leave behind him. They are still further however from presenting a systematic view of their subject than Dr. Dewey's volume. Here then is a subject for the ambition of Divines. To treat it worthily, would be a higher service to God and man than to establish the Apostolical Succession; or to fix the time of the Millenium; or to persecute a brother's conscience, to malign his life, and speak evil of his faith.

ART. VI.—THE LAW OF OF CONSCIENCE, IN ITS ACTION ON NATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS. A Sermon preached before the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 1842. By CHARLES WICKSTEED, B.A. Unitarian Association Office, 31, St. Swithin's Lane; John Green, 121, Newgate Street, London. 8vo. pp. 35.

To make the Title of this clear and forcible Sermon co-extensive with its subject, there ought to have been added to it the words "in relation to Religious Opinion," for this is the only part of the action of Conscience on Nations and Individuals which the Discourse considers.

The Sermon is founded upon the defence of St. Paul before the council of his nation, when, though an Apostate in the eye of the Jews, and the murderer of the proto-martyr in the eye of the Christian, he felt himself justified in adopting the lofty apology, "Men and Brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day." From this is deduced by the preacher the dictate of individual Conscience, as the only law of action, and basis of belief, "a basis, without which the performance of absolute right, and the confession of absolute truth, are worthy of no approbation, and with which the performance of what may in itself be unwise, and the profession of what may in itself be incorrect, shall entail upon the agent no moral guilt."

The application of this principle as a universal Rule of faith and practice, leads necessarily to the distinction between what the Author calls "logical truth" and "ethical truth,”—meaning by the first, absolute Truth and Rectitude, as God sees it,—and by the second, what appears true and righteous to the individual Mind after it has used its best means of Knowledge, and purged itself of every misleading bias of interest and passion. A man may be intellectually wrong when conscientiously right,—or he may be ethically wrong when doing or professing that which is right in itself, but of which his own convictions are not assured. Absolute Truth a man ought to desire and labour for, but Ethical Truth, "truth in the inward parts," he can always command. The one is a matter only indirectly within the reach of the will, the other absolutely under its control.

Though logically or absolutely wrong at one period of his public career, St. Paul was ethically right through the whole of it; and therefore, though he stood there, the very man, who to the Christians had

been Saul bound with letters from the High Priest to Damascus, and to the Jews, was now Paul, invested with the commission of Jesus Christ, he could yet say with truth, in the face of all,—' Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day.'

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The necessary consequence, then, of the application of this law to men of different temperaments, different capacities and positions, and different degrees of information, (that is, in truth, to mankind,) is, that a great variety of opinions should arise on important, just as much as upon unimportant matters, and that at the very moment that truth in its logical existence is one, truth in its ethical existence is manifold."p. 8.

According to the liberty which the State allows to the working of individual conscience, there will be a nominal and hollow Uniformity, or a freely developed Sectarianism. The one is the unnatural and forced result of outward Constraint, the other the genuine outward Expression of inward life, and the free action of God's Laws.

The Author having traced this free development of individual diversities of religious faith to the natural action of God's Laws, proceeds rather to confound, as it appears to us, this natural and salutary variety of opinion, which may be referred to God, with that bitter and bad Sectarianism, which has a malign element of exclusiveness and rancorous bigotry with which the natural workings of God's Laws are not chargeable. He speaks of the Unitarian, in his desponding and worldly moments, sighing over that Sectarianism which he has just shown is in agreement with a Law of God; and then, after accounting for this Unitarian antipathy to Sectarianism, on the ground that "his devoted head is selected as the common centre whereon all parties unite to outpour the vials of their wrath, that he is in fact the theological scapegoat of the world, on whom all other sects fasten their several animosities and sins, and then send into the wilderness," he undertakes "to point out the characteristic good of this decried Sectarianism, resulting as it does from the free operation of the law of conscience on our mind as a nation." The Sectarianism that is here spoken of does not result from any Law of God, and it cannot be shown to have any characteristic good. Freedom and variety of religious opinion do indeed proceed from God, and furnish to imperfect minds some of the elements of that many-sided Truth which no single eye can at once take in,—but the moment this Diversity becomes Sectarianism, and includes bigotry, strife, uncharitableness, it loses all connections with a Divine Appointment, and is "earthly, sensual, devilish." This natural and healthy Diversity ought not, we think, to have been called by the name

of Sectarianism, and the Sectarianism of this country, including the virtual assumption of infallibility, and leading to the religious vices and evils, cannot well be defended as containing any good, or having any countenance from God. They are no more the necessary fruit of his Laws, than "hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness." With this explanation, however, and which indeed the spirit of the Discourse does not require, that the Sectarianism which the Author refers to God is the infinite variety of individual Thought, and that the Sectarianism in which he finds a characteristic good is not the Exclusive spirit of rival Creeds, but the freely manifested form of personal Conviction, the doctrine of the Sermon is admirable in itself, and admirably maintained. The Author himself, indeed, distinctly lays down the principle which we have suggested, as requiring some modification in the mere form of his state

ments.

"But before I pass away from these evils, not to allude to them again, allow me to say, that though they accompany, they do not by any means principally arise from our differences or divisions into sects. Want of charity does not necessarily ensue from want of unity. It is not our differences on the doctrine of the Trinity, or on that of Original Sin, or even on that of the Atonement, which cause, as such, the evils of our Sectarianism. They spring from man's presumptuous attachment to these differences of eternal salvation or eternal woe." [Presumptuous attachment of eternal salvation or eternal woe to these differences.]p. 11.

The beneficial tendencies of our religious Diversity are then traced in the following directions: first, to bring home to each mind the important fact, that religion is an individual, personal interest; secondly, in the free bursting out of every element of religious influence that may exist among a people, the unconstrained variety of religious address and appeal, and the suitability which thence ensues to every diversity of the religious character; thirdly, in the demand for true and tested Charity, which cannot exist where no external differences are permitted; and lastly, in the elevation and extension of the spirit of Liberty which arises from a sense of obeying Conscience, and being pledged to truth, in the highest and most solemn interests of the soul.

The first of these tendencies is illustrated in a very interesting

manner:

The beneficial tendency of Sectarianism, as such, is in the first place, then, to bring home to men's minds this all-important fact, that religion