These funereal and yet eloquent paintings, traced with the enthusiasm of melancholy, must have had the effect to increase the number of men of atrabilious temperament, weary of the world, and tired of themselves. Were it true that the christian religion inspired an insatiate craving for funereal reveries, far from considering it as I do, divine, I should estimate it anti-social.--The true friends of the christian religion always paint it as it is, more powerful than even human misery; giving clothing to the naked, bread to the hungry, an asylum to the sick, a peaceful home to the returning prodigal, and a mother to the orphan; wiping away the tears of innocence with a celestial hand, and filling the eyes of the culpable and contrite with tears of consolation. Let pious thankfulness and a calm courage, which even death cannot shake, environ its modest heroes. Let its martyrs be those of charity and toleration;--the protestant opening an asylum to catholic, falling under the fanatical fury of his brethren; and when bloody and impious mandates order the massacre of protestants, the catholic sheltering them in his mansion. Such was the spirit of Erasmus; such, of the divine Fenelon; such, of William Penn, and a few tolerant lights that have gleamed through ages of persecution and darkness. Such are the men whose disciples we desire to multiply. Let us cease to incorporate melancholy errors and gloomy follies with the religion of peace, confidence and hope. Eloquence was imparted for a nobler use. LETTER XXII. RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS. The philosophy of happiness must find its ultimate requisite in the hopes of religion. Man must be persuaded that his present life has relation to a never ending future, and that an eternal providence watches over the universe, before he will abandon himself with a tranquil confidence to those irresistible laws by which he is borne along. He then marches towards the future, as he would confidently follow a guide of tried prudence and fidelity in a dark path.[54]