than in the character of him who deduced these two principles from all the law and the prophets. With these two principles, and all the subordinate ones which are derived from them, are connected sanctions from above, which attest their origin and secure their adoption. By an irreversible decree of Him who founded nature and vouchsafed a revelation, certain states of enjoyment and suffering are connected with the practical adoption or rejection of the principles of duty, not by way of arbitrary appointment, but of natural consequence. The relations of holiness and happiness, of guilt and misery, are unalterable; shown to be so by the teachings of nature and experience, by the explicit declarations of Scripture, and by every species of evidence which the mind of man is capable of receiving. Though the chief object of the Christian revelation was to make this relation more evident than it had ever been before, many who received the Gospel imagine that it discovers to them a means by which the relation may be suspended or destroyed. This misapprehension we hold to be more fatal in its moral consequences than any other which human prejudice has originated. By what appears to us a strange perversion of Scripture language, and by the gradual increase of some subordinate errors, it began to be imagined, some centuries ago, that, though misery is necessarily connected with guilt, yet that the guilt may be perpetrated by one person, and the consequent misery endured by another; and this belief has subsisted in almost every Christian church till this day. It is well that it has been confined to the churches, and that its application has been limited, by all but Catholics, to one very peculiar case; for if it had become the common doctrine of our schools, and colleges, and homes, if it had been enforced by parents and moral philosophers and professors as a general truth, as it is by divines with reference to a particular case, the very foundations of virtue would have been overthrown, and the force of its sanctions not only wasted but fatally perverted.