How many preachers of this school have won their ephemeral reputations solely by awakening the terrors of their auditors, and have been esteemed great in proportion to their ability to produce fainting, convulsions, tears and groans, among women and children! The perverted vision of such men rests on no image of nature, except such as they can distort to symbolize some imaginary dreadful attribute in the God of their theology. He is clothed by them in storms and clouds, as the heathen Jove was depicted grasping in his hand a sheaf of thunderbolts. From their portraiture every gleam of light is excluded,--it is a murky and repulsive mass of shadows. The gentle and fragrant flowers, the sweet perfumes and rainbow colors with which the face of nature is so prodigally decked, claim no word or thought of theirs; they cannot employ these images in their illustrations, they cannot reconcile them with their gloomy theories,--their very existence is unaccountable to their perverse vision. "That gloomy, heart-dejecting something," says Mr. Ballou, "which has been maintained in our world at an incalculable expense of treasure, of comfort, peace and joy,--at the expense, also, of the tender charities of the heart, and the benevolent sentiments of the soul,--though called religion, is all counterfeit. It has drawn a sable curtain over the mildly radiant countenance of our Father in heaven, and in room of leading the mind to contemplate the Divine Being with pleasure and delight, it has attached a horror to the sacred name, which gives a stupefying chill to the heart, repels the mind, and forces it to seek relief in the contemplation of visible and sensible objects; and after becoming the author of this horror and disgust in the soul, it artfully takes the advantage of the deception, to inculcate a belief that the reason of these feelings is the natural depravity of the human heart! Such are the views which youth are led to entertain of religion, that they contemplate it as something calculated to deprive them of their present comforts, and only useful as it relates to a state of existence hereafter, where, as a recompense for sacrifices which they make of happiness in this world, they are to receive extensive and lasting blessings. With such reflections, it is natural to delay the concerns of religion as long as possible, with an intention to submit to its unpleasant requirements in season to win the prize. This is evidently the reason why youth are so little inclined to employ their thoughts on divine things, and to prefer amusements and trifling vanities to the acquisition of Christian knowledge.