It is questionable, how far they could lay claim to be the real friends of humanity, who would reason away this last, best solace of human wretchedness, even were it proved an illusion. But man is just as certainly and necessarily a religious being, as he is a being constituted with appetites and passions. Grant, that there are people, who seem wholly destitute of the religious sentiment. Such are the real Atheists from internal conviction; for observe, there are many, who assume to be such, to pass for free and independent thinkers, and who are most likely, in their dying moments, to require absolution and extreme unction. But if there are men thus monstrously constituted, so are there individuals apparently as destitute of the common appetites and passions. We take no account of such exceptions, in indicating a general rule; and say, that man is constituted a religious being, and possessed of certain appetites and passions; although there may be selected a few individuals, who seem entirely without either. Religion is the key stone of the arch of the moral universe. It is the fountain of endearing friendship; and on it are founded those sublime relations, which exist between the visible and the invisible world; those, who still sojourn here, and those who have become citizens of the country beyond us. It is the poesy of existence, the basis of all high thought and virtuous feeling; of charities and morals; and the very tie of social existence. Let no person claim to be good, while laying an unhallowed hand upon this ark of the covenant of the Eternal with the children of sorrow and death. Note 54, page 154. Treatises upon the evidences of religion may be useful for theological students; and I have heard people affirm, that they have been rescued by such works from the gloom of unbelief. But, believing, as I do, that we were constituted religious animals, if such a term may be admitted, and that the religious sentiment is a part of our organization, I have quite as much confidence in the arguments of the heart, as of the head. I undertake not to pronounce, whether M. de Chateaubriand were a good christian, or not. But I affirm, that I have nowhere seen my own views of the process, by which the original endowment of the religious sentiment is called into action, so eloquently described, as in the following extract from that writer.