Mr. Allston, who for some ten years had presided over the single church in a place which had fortunately escaped the curse of sectarianism, was a man as remarkable in character as he was peculiar in habit. A close and unwearied student, ascetic in his daily life, and an enthusiast in his profession, he was almost idolized by his people, who regarded him as a being of the most saint-like character. Indeed, if self-denial could afford a title to canonization, he was fully competent to sustain the claim; but such is the inconsistency of human judgment, that Mr. Allston owed his high reputation to a belief in his stoical indifference to earthly temptations, and much of his influence would have been diminished if it had been suspected that resistance to evil ever cost him a single effort. The truth was that nature had made Allston a voluptuary, but religion had transformed him into an ascetic. He had set out in life with an eager thirst after all its pleasures, but he had been stayed in the very outset of his career by the reproaches of an awakened conscience. Violent in all his impulses, and ever in extremes, he had devoted himself to the gospel ministry because the keen goadings of repentance urged him to offer the greatest sacrifice in his power as atonement for past sins. But he had experienced all the trials which await those who, when gathering the manna from heaven, still remember the savory fleshpots of Egypt. His life was a perpetual conflict between passion and principle, and though his earthly nature rarely obtained the mastery, yet the necessity for such unwearied watchfulness had given a peculiar tone of severity to his manners. Like many persons of similar zeal, Allston had committed the error of confounding the _affections_ with the _passions_ of human nature, and believing all earthly ties to be but fetters on the wings of the soul, he carefully avoided all temptation to assume such bonds. His religion was one of fear rather than of love, and forgetting that He who placed man in a world of beauty and delight has said, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice,” he made existence only a protracted scene of self-devotion and privation. A superstitious dread of yielding even to the most innocent impulses had induced him to suppress every feeling of his ardent and excitable nature. He had turned from the face of beauty and the voice of love with the same dread as would have induced him to eschew the temptation of the gaming-table and the wine-cup, and his thirtieth summer found him still a solitary student by the fireside of his widowed mother. His fine talents as a preacher, his powers of persuasion, his thrilling eloquence, aided by the example of his own habits of life, had produced a great effect in the community where he had been called to minister in holy things. The church was in a most flourishing condition; numbers had been united to it, and the influence of the pastor over the minds of