To pass over the throng from whose minds Religion is altogether excluded by the business or the vanities of life, how is it with the more decent and moral? To what criterion shall we appeal? Are their hearts really filled with these things, and warmed by the love which they are adapted to inspire? Then surely their minds are apt to stray to them almost unseasonably; or at least to hasten back to them with eagerness, when escaped from the estrangment imposed by the necessary cares and business of life. He was a masterly describer of human nature, who thus pourtrayed the characters of an undissembled affection; "Unstaid and fickle in all other things, Save in the constant image of the object, That is beloved." "And how," it may be perhaps replied, "do you know, but that the minds of these people are thus occupied? Can you look into the bosoms of men?" Let us appeal to a test to which we resorted in a former instance. "Out of the abundance of the heart," it has been pronounced, "the mouth speaketh."--Take these persons then in some well selected hour, and lead the conversation to the subject of Religion. The utmost which can be effected is, to bring them to talk of things in the gross. They appear lost in generalities; there is nothing precise and determinate, nothing which implies a mind used to the contemplation of its object. In vain you strive to bring them to speak on that topic, which one might expect to be ever uppermost in the hearts of redeemed sinners. They elude all your endeavours; and if you make mention of it yourself, it is received with no very cordial welcome at least, if not with unequivocal disgust; it is at the best a forced and formal discussion. The excellence of our Saviour's moral precepts, the kindness and simplicity, and self-denial and unblemished purity of his life, his patience and meekness in the hour of death, cannot indeed be spoken of but with admiration, when spoken of at all, as they have often extorted unwilling praise from the most daring and malignant infidels. But are not these mentioned as qualities in the abstract, rather than as the perfections and lineaments of our patron and benefactor and friend, "who loved us, and gave himself for us;" of him "who died for _our_ offences, and rose again for _our_ justification;" who is even now at the "right hand of God, making intercession for _us_?" Who would think that the kindness and humanity, and self-denial, and patience in suffering, which we so drily commend, had been exerted towards _ourselves_, in acts of more than finite benevolence of which _we_ were to derive the benefit, in condescensions and labours submitted to for _our_ sakes, in pain and ignominy, endured for _our_ deliverance?