The moping sentimentalism which so often takes the place of Christian motives is to be avoided, not merely because it holds up piety to the view of the world under a deplorable disguise; nor merely because it deprives its victims of their comfort; but chiefly because it ordinarily produces inattention to the substantial matters of common morality. The mind occupied from dawn of day till midnight with its own multifarious ailments, and busied in studying its pathologies, utterly forgets, or remissly discharges, the duties of social life: or the temper, oppressed by vague solicitudes, falls into a state which makes it a nuisance in the house. Or, while the rising and falling temperature of the spirit is watched and recorded, the common principles of honor and integrity are so completely lost sight of, that, without explicit ill-intention, grievous delinquencies are fallen into, which fail not to bring a deluge of reproach upon religion. These melancholy perversions of Christian piety might seem not to belong, with strict propriety, to our subject; but, in fact, religious despondency is the child of religious enthusiasm. Exhaustion and dejection succeed to excitement, just as debility follows fever. Yesterday the unballasted vessel was seen hanging out all the gayety of its colors, and spreading wide its indiscretion before a breeze; but the night came, the breeze strengthened, and to-day the hapless bark rolls dismasted, without help or hope, over the billows. Amid the various topics touched upon by Paul, Peter, John, and James, we scarcely find an allusion to those questions of spiritual nosology which, in later periods, and especially since the days of Augustine,[1] and very much in our own times, have filled a large space in religious writings. The Apostles believed, with unclouded confidence, the revelation committed to them, of judgment to come, of redemption from wrath by Jesus Christ, and of eternal glory:—these great facts filled their hearts, and governed their lives, and, in conjunction with the precepts of morality, were the exclusive themes of their preaching and writing. Evidently they found neither time nor occasion for entering upon nice analyses of motives; or for indulging fine musings and personal melancholies; nor did they ever think of resting the all-important question of their own sincerity, and of their claim to a part in the hope of the gospel, upon the abstruse dialectics which have since been thought indispensable to the definition of a saving faith. Assuredly the Christians of the first age did not suppose that volumes of metaphysical distinctions must be written and read before the genuineness of religious professions could be ascertained. The want, in modern times, of a vivid conviction of the truth of Christianity, is probably the occasional source of many of these idle and disheartening subtleties; and it may be believed that a sudden enhancement of