are known to us all before we enter upon the service. We accept the appointment with a knowledge of the difficulties it presents. We receive the mission to those whom the schoolmaster and the preacher have failed to influence to good; and we are to thank God for even the small returns from our laborious gleanings, rather than to arraign his providence or dishonor our pursuit by complaining of small returns. Charities have their grades, and they are entitled to commendation not always for the amount of benefit they have conferred, or the number that they have assisted, but rather from a consideration of the difficulties they encounter, and the spirit in which they are conducted. Colleges and schools have received and instructed the sound minded at all times, and the asylums for the insane and the orphan have been working wonderful good among the mentally afflicted and the fatherless children; but it was left for the present age to see men of character and science stooping to the wants of the idiot, and by painful, protracted labor and unheard of patience, irritate into some kind of life, the low faculties of the mentally infirm, and call into usefulness and love, those who had been condemned, by universal judgment, to helpless idiocy. And if this is going on in our midst,—if the wretched, drivelling child, whose mind and body seems to be given over to utter helplessness, can be and is called into profitable exercise and lofty accountability, shall we hesitate to dedicate some portion of our time to the reformation and right direction of those whose physical powers are all that vice has left them, or whose sense of responsibility to God and man is only clouded by the indulgence of vicious appetites, or deadened by a repetition of those enormities which make a sense of responsibility a curse? It is most true, as is often asserted by those who have some experience of the faithlessness of a prisoner’s promises, that few who seem to listen with respect to moral instruction at the doors of their cells, ever carry into execution their solemn promises. The state which made them contemplate and promise reformation is changed, and they seem to feel released from their pledges. They have before them a sense of the degradation to which their vices have reduced them, and they shrink from a contemplation of a perpetuation of that degradation. They feel that they stand in the presence of those whose superior moral or social position is only the result of superior virtue, and they think it easy to check the appetites whose indulgence is vice, when the reward is near. They promise, and they go forth into a world that remembers only their follies or their crimes. The means of gratifying their appetites are available, virtue is difficult, because the rewards are postponed; and while they are in probation with their best friends, and under condemnation among the many, they have fewer present inducements to virtue than they had thought, and so they fall