degree of wretchedness. The ages of ancient heroism were filled up with crime and debauchery. They were fruitful in incest and parricide, and all the dark and gloomy events which were necessary to make up the most fearful picture of immorality. The monarchs of Assyria spent their time mainly in debasing crime and voluptuousness. The brightest and best days of Babylon were notorious for lewdness and accomplishment in crime and iniquity; loaded with riches, they spared no pains and withheld no means in the production of all that gratified their lusts and fed their passions. In Babylon there was a certain well known temple in which adultery was legalized by _compulsory law_ for the purpose of increasing the public revenue. The ancient Pagan religions sanctioned and practiced the most detestible licentiousness. Cato commended young men for visiting houses of ill-fame. Such was the very best phase of morals and public manners in the purest state of Roman society. What must have been the worst? The worst! Well, I will give you an idea of it. The Emperor Nero drove through the streets of the capital with his mistress in a state of nudity; and the Emperor Commodus first seduced and then murdered his own sister. Here reason, blinded by lust, was their guide. These people were not troubled with that terrible book called the Bible. Happy (?) state. How would we like to have our homes in the midst of such fellows? Their conscience had no fastenings, how could their doctrines excite to moral virtue? How much better are the principles of modern infidels? Bolingbroke’s morality is all embraced in self-love. Hobbes claims that the only basis of right and wrong is the civil law. Rousseau says all the morality of actions is in the judgement we ourselves form of them. Shaftsbury says, all the obligations to be virtuous arise from the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice. Have such moral principles ever reformed the world? Do they reform their advocates? Did you ever know a man to reform after he became an advocate of such principles? Did you ever know a man to reform after understanding and abandoning the Christian religion? If any such ever reformed their lives after setting themselves on Pagan ground, by opposing Christianity, I have yet to learn the fact. It is the morality of a wicked world that simply asks for the profitable, and not the right; which inquires not for duty, but for self-interest—for the opinions of men; it is a body without a spirit—a whitewashed sepulchre—splendid only in sepulchral greatness.