"Pray observe," continued Dr. Barlow, "that I am not speaking of avowed profligates, but of decent characters; men who, while they are pursuing with keen intenseness the great objects of their attachment, do not deride or even totally neglect religious observances, yet think they do much and well, by affording some odd scraps of refuse time to a few weary prayers, and sleepy thoughts, from a mind worn down with engagements of pleasure, or projects of accumulation, or schemes of ambition. In all these several pursuits, there may be nothing which, to the gross perceptions of the world, would appear to be moral turpitude. The pleasure may not be profligacy, the wealth so cherished may not have been fraudulently obtained, the ambition, in human estimation, may not be dishonorable; but an alienation from God, an indifference to eternal things, a spirit incompatible with the spirit of the gospel, will be found at the bottom of all these restless pursuits." "I am entirely of your opinion, Doctor," said Mr. Stanley; "it is taking up with something short of real Christianity; it is an apostacy from the doctrines of the Bible; it is the substitution of a spurious and popular religion for that which was revealed from heaven; it is a departure from the faith once delivered to the saints, that has so fatally sunk our morality; and given countenance to that low standard of practical virtue which prevails. If we lower the principle, if we obscure the light, if we reject the influence, if we sully the purity, if we abridge the strictness of the divine law, there will remain no ascending power in the soul, no stirring spirit, no quickening aspiration after perfection, no stretching forward after that holiness to which the beatific vision is specifically promised. It is vain to expect that the practice will rise higher than the principle which inspires it; that the habits will be superior to the motives which govern them." "Selfishness, security, and sensuality," said the Doctor, "are predicted by our Saviour, as the character of the last times. In alluding to the antediluvian world, and the cause of its destruction, eating, drinking, and marrying could not be named in the gospel as things censurable in themselves, they being necessary to the very existence of that world which the abuse of them was tending to destroy. Our Saviour does not describe criminality by the excess, but by the spirit of the act. He speaks of eating, not gluttony; of drinking, not intoxication; of marriage, not licentious intercourse. This seems a plain intimation, that carrying on the transactions of the world in the spirit of the world, and that habitual deadness to the concerns of eternity, in beings so alive to the pleasures or the interests of the present moment, do not indicate a state of safety, even where gross acts of vice may be rare."