If there is any class of people who need to repent for misspent time, and for leading false and foolish lives, it is the colporteurs who travel over the country distributing pious tracts, containing doleful accounts of death-bed repentance, which, whether right or wrong, prove nothing. Such cases of repentance as are reported do not appertain to the moral conduct, but to the religious belief, of the sinner. It is the abandonment and condemnation of his past creeds, and not of his past conduct, which makes the tract so valuable. Such a case contains no moral instruction whatever. If his early education was Mahomedan, his repentance will establish that religion again in his mind; but, if Mormonism was the religion of his childhood, he would again have full faith in that religion. What nonsense! Who ever knew repentance to divorce or emancipate a man from all or any of the religious errors of his past life, and plant in his soul a better and more rational religion, or lead him to advocate any religion only that in which he had been educated? Such repentance is worth nothing, and absolutely foolish. Let us assume that the numerous cases of death-bed repentance published in religious tracts are all true; and what would it prove? Why, simply this: that the converts had all been educated to believe in Christianity, and had gone back to that religion. Had Budhism or Mahomedanism been their early religion, they would have returned to that. It is merely old errors and old truths revived and re-established in the mind. But many facts afterwards gathered by honest investigation, appertaining to some of these cases, show that they have either been manufactured or greatly exaggerated. As for example, the case of Thomas Paine is proved to be without foundation. His close was calm and peaceful. Many times has it been declared, in the pulpit and elsewhere, that "Tom Paine repented, and died a miserable death." And yet we have the testimony of those Christian professors who were present with him almost constantly during his last illness, that he never manifested the least compunction of conscience, or the least disposition to condemn any thing he had said or written in opposition to Christianity or the Bible. Take, for example, the testimony of Willet Hicks, a reliable Quaker preacher. On being interrogated by a neighbor of the author of this work as to the truth of the statement that he repented, he replied, "I was with Paine every day during the latter part of his sickness, and can affirm that he did not express any regret for having written 'The Age of Reason,' as has been reported, nor for any thing he had said or written in opposition to the Bible, nor ask forgiveness of God. He died as easy as any one I ever saw die; and I have seen a great many die." And yet this Mr. Hicks was in hopes he would repent. Other similar testimony might be adduced; but this is sufficient. The story of Ethan Allen's daughter calling upon her