feet, there is not one of you who would not prove how strong are the relentings of nature at a spectacle so hideous as death. There are some of you who would be haunted for whole days by the image of horror you had witnessed, -who would feel the weight of a most oppressive sensation upon your heart, which nothing but time could wear away,-who would be pursued by it as to be unfit for business or for enjoyment,-who would think of it through the day, and it would spread a gloomy disquietude over your waking moments,-who would dream of it at night, and it would turn that bed which you courted as a retreat from the torments of an ever-meddling memory into a scene of restlessness.

But generally the death of violence is not instantaneous, and there is often a sad and dreary interval between its final consummation and the infliction of the blow which causes it. The winged messenger of destruction has not found its direct avenue to that spot where the principle of life is situated; and the soul, finding obstacles to its immediate egress, has to struggle for hours ere it can make its dreary way through the winding avenues of that tenement which has been torn open by a brother's hand. Oh, my brethren if there be something appalling in the suddenness of death, think not that, when gradual in its advances, you will alleviate the horrors of this sickening contemplation by viewing it in a milder form. Oh, tell me, if there be any relenting of pity in your bosom, how could you endure to behold the agonies of the dying man, as, goaded by pain, he grasps the cold ground in convulsive energy, or, faint with the loss of blood, his pulse ebbs low, and the gathering paleness spreads itself over his countenance,-or wrapping himself round in despair, he can only mark, by a few feeble quiverings, that

life still lurks and lingers in his lacerated body,—or, lifting up a faded eye, he casts on you a look of imploring helplessness, for that succour which no sympathy can yield him? It may be painful to dwell on such a representation,—but this is the way in which the cause of humanity is served. The eye of the sentimentalist turns away from its sufferings, and he passes by on the other side, lest he hear that pleading voice which is armed with a tone of remonstrance so vigorous as to disturb him. He cannot bear thus to pause, in imagination, on the distressing picture of one individual; but multiply it ten thousand times,—say, how much of all this distress has been heaped together on a single field,-give us the arithmetic of this accumulated wretchedness, and lay it before us with all the accuracy of an official computation,—and, strange to tell, not one sigh is lifted up among the crowd of eager listeners, as they stand on tiptoe, and catch every syllable of utterance which is read to them out of the registers of death. Oh say, what mystic spell is that which so blinds us to the sufferings of our brethren,-which deafens to our ear the voice of bleeding humanity, when it is aggravated by the shriek of dying thousands, which makes the very magnitude of the slaughter throw a softer disguise over its cruelties and its horrors,-which causes us to eye with indifference the field that is crowded with the most revolting abominations, and arrests that sigh which each individual would singly have drawn from us by the report of the many who have fallen, and breathed their last in agony, along with him?

I have no time, and assuredly as little taste, for expatiating on a topic so melancholy; nor can I afford at present to set before you a vivid picture of the other miseries which war carries in its train,-how it desolates every

country through which it rolls, and spreads violation and alarm among its villages,-how, at its approach, every home pours forth its trembling fugitives,-how all the rights of property, and all the provisions of justice, must give way before its devouring exactions,-how, when Sabbath comes, no Sabbath charm comes along with it,— and for the sound of a church-bell, which wont to spread its music over some fine landscape of nature, and summon rustic worshippers to the house of prayer, nothing is heard but the deathful volleys of the battle and the maddening outcry of infuriated men,-how, as the fruit of victory, an unprincipled licentiousness, which no discipline can restrain, is suffered to walk at large among the people,and all that is pure, and reverend, and holy in the virtue of families, is cruelly trampled on, and held in the bitterest derision. Oh, my brethren, were we to pursue those details, which no man ever attempts and no chronicle perpetuates, we should be tempted to ask, what is that which civilisation has done for the character of the species? It has thrown a few paltry embellishments over the surface of human affairs; and for the order of society it has reared the defence of law around the rights and the property of the individuals who compose it.

But let war, legalise it as you may, and usher it into the field with all its parade of forms and manifestoes-let this war only have its season, and be suffered to overlook those artificial defences, and you will soon see how much of the security of the commonwealth is due to positive restriction, and how little of it is due to the natural sense of justice among men. I know well that the plausibilities of human character, which abound in every modern and enlightened society, have been mustered up to oppose the

doctrine of the Bible on the woeful depravity of our race. But out of the history of war I can gather for this doctrine the evidence of experiment. It tells me that man, when left to himself, and let loose among his fellows, to walk after the council of his own heart, and in the sight of his own eyes, will soon discover how thin that tinsel is which the boasted hand of civilisation has thrown over him. DR THOMAS CHALMERS.

PERSONAL OPERATIONS OF THE SPIRIT OF GOD, CONTRASTED WITH POPULAR FALLACIES AND VULGAR SUPERSTITIONS.

"Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."-JOHN iii. 7, 8.

IN not a few minds there is a certain shrinking from the supernatural, which renders such doctrines as that of the text peculiarly distasteful and difficult of reception. If, for the ignorant and superstitious, the invisible world possesses a strange attraction, disposing the mind often to ascribe natural events to supernatural agencies, and to callin, on the most common occasions, the interposition of unseen and mysterious powers, there is an opposite class of minds in which the tendency is equally strong to explain everything by natural causes, and to exclude as much as possible the thought of any other than known and familiar agents. Ignorance may indeed be the mother of a spurious devotion, but there is a practical scepticism more to be deprecated, of which self-sufficient knowledge is often the parent. It may be the tendency of the religion of an

unenlightened age to translate every unexplained fact or phenomenon into the immediate interposition of the Deity : the poor savage hears a wrathful voice in every storm, and trembles as at the presence of a retributive Power, when the portentous shadow crosses the sun's disc, or the white lightning quivers athwart the heavens. The ignorant mind creates out of its own terrors, in dreams, and impressions, and fluctuating moods, direct intimations of the Divine presence and will. But as society advances in knowledge, and as many of those events, formerly attributed to supernatural agency, are discovered to be the result of natural causes, it too often happens that, with the superstitious recognition, all practical acknowledgment of the Divine presence and agency is lost. Accustomed to the observation of natural causes at work around them, men cease to think of any other. The tendency becomes habitual to refer everything to laws of nature, and to imagine that, when we have specified the outward and physical causes of any phenomenon, we have completely accounted for it. The voice of God is no longer heard in the thunder when the laws of electricity begin to be known. In the darkened luminary there is no shadow of the Almighty's wing to the observer who can calmly sit down and calculate the period and duration of the solar eclipse. The region of marvels is thus driven further and further back, but the territory lost to Superstition is seldom won for Religion. The old gods of heathenism have long vanished from the woods and meadows and fountains; but it is not that the one living and true God,-but only gravitation, light, heat, magnetism,-may be recognised as reigning in their forsaken haunts. And we carry the same tendency into the moral world. The outward agents in moral and spiritual changes are those on which we chiefly dwell.