Nor is it only in insulated cases, among ministers of religion, that such mournful truths are pressed upon our attention. In times of religious declension, such sad demonstrations of the insufficiency of all but grace and truth to tame the passions of men, may be seen almost upon a national scale. There is a man, for example, whom the grace of God has arrested amid a life of waywardness and guilt, and rendered a signal monument of mercy. In terms of his own confession, there was scarcely a sin which he had not committed, and as a fiery duellist, he was, in the eyes of God, a murderer. But the truth was at last felt in the conscience, and that man once so bold in iniquity, sought the society of those from whom he expected help on his way; with what result his biographer shall tell: "Other proofs," we read, "of the degraded state of the dominant party in the Church (of Scotland) might be mentioned, particularly a Presbytery dinner to which Mr. James Haldane was invited in Edinburgh, upon a special occasion, and to which he had gone, hoping for useful, perhaps spiritual, or at least rational conversation, on the topics in which he was now chiefly interested. Instead of this, the company were treated to bacchanalian songs, the folly of which was aggravated into something approaching to wickedness, by an admixture of ridiculous, if not profane allusions to their own sacred calling and functions. The burden of one song was the prescription of 'a bumper of Nottingham Ale' in the pulpit, at the different stages of a Presbyterian discourse. If, in the hey-day of youth and folly, while God was not in all his thoughts, he had been disposed to turn away from the convivial excesses of his associates at sea, how was he likely now to appreciate such approaches to the same intemperance, in connection with eternal realities, amongst the professed heralds of the Cross, whose duty it was to warn men to flee from the wrath to come?"[37][*13] SPIRITUAL DEATH.