sick, but for his own fee, which was of infinitely greater importance. Many a one, thought Peter, is rendering service to the devil, even at the very time that we may think him engaged in works of superior excellence. Easy Peter now lost sight of the physician, but his place was filled by a straight, slender, and serious looking individual, who was holding forth in a magnificent building, which had evidently been erected with a due regard to lodging accommodations. It required nothing beyond what he saw to inform him that this was a preacher in his fashionable temple. Peter had seen few men, notwithstanding his extensive intercourse with the world, who had the faculty of assuming so saintly an appearance as this one, and he therefore determined to follow him home. The holy man had scarcely descended from the pulpit before Peter saw an illustration of how much easier it was to preach humility than to practice it, and felt how few, even of the priesthood, really understood the saying of the essayist, that “the souls of kings and cobblers were cast in the same mould.” To show obeisance to the one, however guilty and degraded by vice he may be, is easy, and honorable, and an imitation of Jesus: to shake hands with the other, and seek to reclaim him by magnanimous and friendly fellowship, is countenancing and encouraging “publicans and sinners.” To greet with the pleasant social smile, and the exhibition of generous solicitude, the poor and ragged parishioner, is changing religion into levity, and “walking in the counsel of the ungodly, and standing in the way of sinners:” to fawn upon and court the favor and association of the more fortunate worshipper, who seldom ever rises from his knees until he has planned some new scheme to play the villain towards his fellow, is “exhorting one another daily, while it is called to-day,” or taking “sweet counsel together, and walking unto the house of God in company.” Peter was not a little surprised, upon reaching the residence of the minister, to discover how much better he was fitted to declaim upon the beauties of charity than to practice magnanimity and forbearance in his own house. This, thought he, is not the only one who, to obtain skill in lecturing the public, exercises himself at the expense of his family’s comfort and happiness.