functions of life go on just as well as before. It is impossible to convey to you an adequate idea of the bouleversement which has taken place in our religious relations, --even in each man's little sphere. It is as if the religious world were a masquerade, where you cease to feel surprise at finding some familiar acquaintance disguised in the most fantastical costume. There is our old friend W----, rigorously, as you know, educated in his old father's Evangelical notions, ready to be a confessor for the two wax candies, even though unlighted, and to be a martyr for them if but lighted. His cousin in the opposite direction has found even the most meagre naturalism too much for him, and avows himself a Pantheist. L----, the son, you remember, of an independent minister, is ready to go nobly to death in defence of the prerogatives of his "apostolic succession"; and has not the slightest doubts that he can make out his spiritual genealogy, without a broken link, from the first Bishop of Rome, downwards!--though, poor fellow, it would puzzle him to say who was his great-grandfather. E----, you are aware, has long since joined the Church of Rome, and has disclosed such a bottomless abyss of "faith," that whole cart-loads of mediaeval fables, abandoned even by Romanists (who, by the way, stand fairly aghast at his insatiable appetite), have not been able to fill it. All the saints in the Roman Hagiography cannot work miracles as fast as he can credit them. On the other hand, his brother has signalized himself by an equal facility of stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze of transparent "spiritualism," that it makes you both shiver and blush to look at him. Your old acquaintance P----, true to his youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who has the "charity which believeth all, things," though certainly not that which "bareth all things," goes about apologizing for all religious systems, and finding truth in every thing;--our beloved Harrington, on the other hand, bewildered by all this confusion, finds truth--in nothing. Yet you must not imagine that our religious maladies are at present more than sporadic; or that the great bulk of our population are at present affected by them: they still believe the Bible to be the revealed Word God. Should these diseases ever become epidemic, they will soon degenerate into a still worse type. Many apostles of Atheism and Pantheism amongst our classes say (and perhaps truly), that this modern "spiritualism" is but a transition state. In that case, you will have to recall, with a deeper meaning, the song of Byron, which you told me gave you such anguish, as you paced the deck on the evening in which lost sight of Old England,--"My native land, night!"