Miserable men! the Christian mourns over the wilful blindness which, in the full blaze of the meridian sun, continues in darkness, a state which is but a faint emblem of “the blackness of darkness for ever.” Most guilty men! the Christian burns with holy indignation against their perverted and wicked zeal for proselytism, of whom it may be said, “Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.” {126} If the infidel reflects, what must be his state of mind, when he remembers, how often, whilst feeling the utter wretchedness of his dark and cheerless creed, he has sought with artful sophistry to bewilder the understandings of the ignorant, and, with cold heartlessness, to blast the hopes of the virtuous! He who openly stabs or secretly poisons an associate, incurs a less load of moral guilt than he who inflicts a wound or instils a poison, which, rankling, causes misery in this life, and in the next, anguish unutterable and interminable. Fatal, however, as such a creed must be to the best interests of society, wherever its influence prevails, it assumes a still more alarming aspect as inculcated by those infidel teachers, who, disseminating their pestilent doctrines amongst our working population, not only seek to destroy all the hopes and fears of an hereafter, but to stimulate their evil passions, and to produce a contempt not less for human than Divine laws. If once principles so subversive of the civil and religious obligations of man, as a member of a Christian community, were allowed gradually to leaven the great mass of the population; not only would the cause of religion and morals be deeply injured, but eventually the altars of God would be overthrown, the bonds of civil society broken, and anarchy, spoliation, and bloodshed, reign through the land. With the great bulk of mankind, the sense of responsibility, present and future, is the great restraint upon their evil inclinations. Philosophers may talk of the eternal fitness of things, the beauty of virtue, the value of the distinctions of rank, of unequal divisions of property, and the necessity of order, subordination, and industry, for the well-being of society: but once remove from the minds of the lower classes their fear of punishment,—by destroying all belief in a future state of retribution, and all dread of the laws of the land, the execution of which they overawe, defeat, or defy, by their numbers,—and there will be confusion, aggression, outrage, and a general attack upon property. Constituted as man is by nature, and constituted as society is by law and custom, in a Christian country, as soon as Revelation is rejected by the great bulk of the people, the work of disorder and disorganization must be rapidly carried on, until the whole frame-work of society be broken up.