It is not strange that the excitement which is created in the mind by the stirring motives presented by religion, should sometimes occasion mental derangement. The struggle which it often awakens against the passions, and propensities, and errors, which have accumulated in amount and force by long indulgence in sin, must render persons of considerable nervous susceptibility liable to this disease. But in such cases religion acts only as the exciting cause, while the predisposing causes have been exerting their influence through a long series of years. And it is to be remembered, that though, even when it is properly taught and enforced, it may occasionally act as the exciting cause of insanity, its general influence tends to remove the predisposing causes to which I have alluded, and its universal prevalence would be attended by their entire removal. It is also to be remembered, that of all those cases which are charged to religion by an indiscriminating public, and by the enemies of Christianity, in very few of them is the insanity produced by the proper presentation of religious truth, while in the great majority of them it owes its origin to the wild vagaries and the rash measures of the errorist, the ultraist, and the fanatic. A fruitful source of insanity is to be found in a general debilitated condition of the system, which may be induced by a great variety of causes. Such a condition is commonly characterized by a morbid nervous irritability, which, with the aid of concurring causes, often produces mental derangement. A very large proportion of the inmates of our Insane Retreats present this condition of system. Their physical and mental energies have both been exhausted by incessant toil, and care, and anxiety from year to year, and long continued ill-health has at length resulted in insanity. I may remark that we see, in the loss of physical vigor as a cause of insanity, the chief reason why there are more females than males among the insane.