What compassionate mind can help deploring the immoralities of populous towns and crowded cities! What an illustration of human depravity does it afford, that wherever mankind resort in great multitudes, vice is proportionably varied in its nature, atrocious in its character, and barefaced in its practice--as if it were thought that the numbers who perpetrated wickedness, tended to conceal from the view of Omniscience individual delinquency! It is common to acquire boldness by association; and society, which ought rather to purify the mind, is often the means of its pollution. The facilities for secrecy in sin which exist in considerable places, the incalculable variety of forms in which temptation appears, the force of example operating upon an extensive scale, and enhanced by a thousand tributary streams that pour into the tide of transgression flowing down the streets, concur to involve the inhabitants of populous vicinities in circumstances of great moral danger. Apart from all persuasion or direct influence, the very sight of immoralities is liable to injure that delicate sensibility to wrong which it is of the utmost importance to preserve in a pure and uncontaminated state. The nicely polished mind is susceptible of the breath of impurity; and when it once becomes dim and obscure in its perceptions, it is difficult to restore it. Many have on this account withdrawn into retirement, supposing that they should be able to secure that leisure for devotional exercises which they have believed conducive to religious eminence. But they have forgotten that the human heart is sown with unholy principles, which will spring up in solitude as well as in society; that in avoiding dissipation, they are liable to be narrowed into selfishness; and that the honourable and heroic part which Christianity requires, is not to fly from difficulties, but, "in the grace that is in Christ Jesus," to contend with, and conquer them. In the woman whose brief but instructive history is to be reviewed, we see indications of a "repentance that needeth not to be repented of." It is to be traced, in the first place, in the _posture_ she assumed, and the _tears_ she shed. When she found that Jesus was dining in the house of Simon, she went and "stood at his feet behind him weeping." She who had known no shame, but whose unblushing impudence and obtrusive familiarities had so often scandalized the city, now avoids a look, shrinks even from respectful notice, and is overwhelmed with a consciousness of guilt.