Still less is the minister of the true religion to refuse to afford words of encouragement and advice to the unfortunate being who is struggling in the toils of sin. To such an one his mission is absolutely imperative; he must wrestle with the perturbed and darkened spirit, he must aid the awakening conscience, struggling to throw off the burthen of evil passions, he must point to the undying love of God to man, and bid the tears of the sinner be dried up in the effulgent smile of Omnipotence. If, therefore, sinners crowded to hear the discourses of Mr. Ballou, it was a tribute of which a preacher of the gospel might well be proud. "To comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those who fall," is essentially the province of the conscientious preacher; and no one, however hardened his heart, could have listened to the sincere and earnest words of the subject of these pages, without deriving some hope, some consolation, and some strength, from the glorious doctrine he preached so eloquently; and that there were very many who were thus ransomed from the thraldom of sin and consequent misery, there can be no reasonable doubt. Was it true that "sinners flocked to hear him," as has been said so often by his opponents in the way of reproach against his doctrine, as being conducive to the pleasure of such persons? Let us pause for one moment, and review what he used to say that was particularly pleasing to this class of hearers. The following, for instance, will suffice us,--it is from his own pen:--"The vile affections of sin will burn to the destruction of the sweetest harmonies of nature; the whitest robes of innocence are stained with its indelible crimson; the soul is drowned in the black waters of iniquity, and the whole mind, with every faculty, is plunged into the hell of moral death. Yet, listen to the worst of torments, in consequence of sin. 'A wounded conscience who can bear?' A fire that burns all the day long, a sword that continually pierceth the soul, a sting that cannot exhaust its poison, a fever that never turns till the patient dies. 'A dart struck through his liver.' What ails the sinner?--why his hand on his breast? There gnaws the worm that never dies,--there burns the fire that is never quenched. A consciousness of guilt destroys all the expected comforts and pleasures of sin. How strange it is that, after a thousand disappointments in succession, men are not discouraged! O sin! how you paint your face! how you flatter us, poor mortals, on to death! You never appear to the sinner in your true character; you make us fair promises, but you never fulfilled one; your tongue is smoother than oil, but the poison of asps is under your lips; you have impregnated all our passions with the venom of your poison; you have spread gloomy darkness over the whole region of the soul; you have endeavored, with your stupefactive poison, to blunt the sword in the hands of the cherubim, which, for your sake, keeps us from the tree of