beam of divine knowledge, and obscured every ray of intellectual truth. Look at Jacob's heritage of milk, and honey, "destroyed by the wickedness of them that dwell therein"--the most beautiful of lands, the very garden of God, by ignorance and barbarism turned into a sterile waste and delivered up to the tenantry of noisome and noxious creatures. Look at the exiled children of Abraham, a vagabond race, roaming everywhere, and nowhere finding rest; the curse of their rejection branded on every brow, and reprobation written in every feature of an unmistakable physiognomy; their synagogues little better than Mohammedan mosques and pagan temples, their worship an empty and abrogated ceremonial, and Mammon substituted for the Messiah. Look at the villanous impostures of the Vatican, and the notorious corruptions of faith and worship wherever the Roman mystagogue holds sway; the habitual invocation of saints and martyrs; the adoration of images, pictures, and relics; the monstrous abuses and manifold abominations of the confessional; the doctrines of indulgence, purgatory, and human merit; the blasphemous dogmas of papal supremacy and infallibility, and the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin; with the legitimate and lamentable fruits--an abject and atheistic priesthood, and a thriftless and degraded people. Look at your own country, Christian though it is called--your own city, highly as it is favored of heaven; and see how far the masses lie from the living God; how his name is profaned, his altars abandoned, while every place of amusement is thronged with merry votaries of pleasure, and drunken men reel athwart the path of church-going people, and the house of her whose steps take hold on hell stands in the very shadow of the sanctuary, and libidinous songs and blasphemous oaths form the horrible counterpart to your sacred psalmody; on all sides temples of Bacchus and Beelzebub, with scenes of revelry and riot, debauchery and blood, where dissipation discards all disguise, impurity all shame, and impiety all fear. Look at your Western States and Territories--fields demanding a hundred missionaries where you have one; a numerous and constantly increasing population scattered over a vast extent of country, with only here and there a church and a school, like solitary torches a thousand miles apart struggling to dispel the deeper than Egyptian darkness of half a world; while Rome is rearing her temples and convents everywhere, everywhere establishing her brotherhoods and sisterhoods, founding orphan-asylums and educational institutes, exercising a powerful influence over the development of the youthful mind, and poisoning the wells whence the people are to draw the water of their salvation; and heresy and schism are setting up their tabernacles, and agnostic infidelity is travelling _pari passu_ with population, and myriads of redeemed immortals are perishing for lack of knowledge. Look at your