It is high time to commence a reform in the conduct of professors; and no where is this reform more needed than in the principle of the text. I will not stop to argue this point, for no one dares deny it. Look abroad, christians, and see the characters specified in the verse read at the commencement of this discourse, roving up and down the earth. How are they treated? How do _you_ treat them? Who wipes their tears? who gives them a shelter from the rude storms of winter? who gives them a kind look or a civil word? who leads them into the vineyard in the morning and gives them a penny at night? Rather who does not shun them?--insult them?--spurn them from his door?--force them to die in innocence or live by crime? Who dares confront these charges? You that kneel at the altar of Jesus, and commemorate his dying love, are you innocent? Ministers of the everlasting gospel, are your garments clean? Missionary, Tract, Bible and Prison Discipline Societies, how stands your accounts? Christians of every rank and denomination, when have you fed, clothed, ministered to, and visited your hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned Jesus in the person of his followers? In the name of Jesus Christ, then, and for the honor of his cause, I pray you, in behalf of repentant criminals, to REFORM. In concluding this Essay, which has cost me many a painful hour, I cannot help remarking the vast difference that exists between the conduct of God and of his creatures, in relation to repentant sinners. He not only pardons, he also forgets; but men do neither. My experience on this subject leads me to results very different from those which the sanguine professions of christians led me to anticipate. Such is the gloomy fact, and I must endure it. From man, even the man of the _altar_ and the _desk_, I have nothing to hope for. Within the limits of the wide world, and beneath the heavens, my prospects are as dark as the "noon of night;" despair has hung her dreadful curtains round all things, and in its chilling, stiffening shade, the frost of endless blight is fast gathering upon me. I meet at every turn the scorn of every eye, and I have only to bury myself in some distant clime, till my race on earth shall close. "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!" But though all earth is dark, and mankind will be my enemies for ever, there is a God who will never desert any that trust in him; and conscious that he loves me, and will defend me, I will endure without a murmur all the evils of life, and wait all the days of my appointed time till my change come; in the humble hope, that, in the grave, I shall not hear the voice of the oppressors, and that the reproaches and scorn of mankind, which is too much for me to bear on earth, will not follow me into the world to come. Fly swift, ye intervening days, Lord, send the summons down; The hand that strikes me to the earth, Shall raise me to a crown. THE CONNEXION BETWEEN INTEMPERANCE AND CRIME, AS VISIBLE IN PRISON.