possible that the congregation might have good time for the sport.--It is on the same principle that the Catholics on the continent, having attended mass in the morning, never think of doubting their license for every frivolity the rest of the day.] And as to those who really did in the course of their attendance acquire something assignable as their creed, our supposed reporters could tell what wretched and delusive notions of religion, or rather instead of religion, they were permitted and authorized, by their appointed spiritual guides, to carry with them to their last hour. At which hour, some ceremonial form was to be a passport to heaven: a little bread and wine, converted into a mysterious object of superstition, by receiving an ecclesiastical name of unknown import, accompanied with some sentences regarded much in the nature of an incantation--and all was safe! The sinner expiring believed so, and the sinners surviving were left to go on in their thoughtless way of life, on a calculation of the same final resource. Thus the past age has left an image of its character in the minds of the generation now themselves grown old, received by immediate tradition from persons who lived in it. Here and there, indeed, there still lingers, so long after the departure of the great company to which he belonged, an ancient who retains a trace of this image immediately from the reality, as having become of an age to look at the world, and take a share in its activities, about the middle of the last century. [Footnote: They are here supposed to be looking back from about the year 1820.] And it might be an employment of considerable though rather melancholy interest, for a person visiting many parts of the land, to put in requisition, in each place, for a day or two, the most faithful of the memories of the most narrative of the oldest people, for materials toward forming an estimate of the mental and moral state of the main body of the inhabitants, of town or country, in the period of which they themselves saw the latter part, and remember it in combination with what their progenitors related of the former. After these few retainers of the original picture from the life shall have left the world, it will be comparatively a faint conception that can be formed of that age from written memorials, which exist but in a very imperfect and scattered state.