We are far from representing the moral and religious instruction of convicts as an easy task. It requires much patience, simplicity, tact and earnestness, a rare knowledge of human nature, and a combination of adjunct influences which are not always at command. We only mean to affirm that whatever force lies in the argument against efforts for the moral reformation of convicts, may be used against such efforts for any other class of men. It would be a happy thing for our prisons, if the spirit of Christian benevolence were sufficiently awakened and active to ensure the needful measure of sympathy, instruction and moral culture from voluntary and unpaid service. But necessity seems to be laid upon us to provide a more permanent and reliable system of agencies and influences. One or more officers appointed to this specific work of giving instruction to the ignorant, and presenting motives and encouragements to a better life to those who are accustomed to do evil, seems to be indispensable to secure any thing like a proper attention to this important department. Hence the call for a chaplain or moral instructor. In looking at the condition of our two Philadelphia prisons in respect to the provision for moral instruction, we are constrained to say, that it is not such either in efficiency or success, as we think desirable, attainable, and indeed absolutely necessary. Instead of bringing to view, however, what some of us might regard as grave defects in the present incumbents of the moral instructor's office, we will suggest what we cannot but regard as indispensable requisites in such a functionary, and leave those who have the appointing and removing power to exercise it at their discretion. I. _A moral instructor should exemplify in the minutest particulars the moral principles he inculcates._--Any obvious neglect or evasion of duty, any appearance of hypocrisy or inconsistency, any sallies of ill-humour or fretfulness, any impatience of contradiction and unteachableness in his pupils, the most trivial breach of promise, or in a word, any departure from an upright, open and ingenuous deportment, will detract sensibly from his power to do good. II. _He should possess the faculty of adapting himself to the various characters and temperaments of convicts._--We do not mean by this that he should have any other faculty than such as shrewd men of common sense ordinarily possess, and on which they depend for much of their success in business. But it is by no means a rare thing to find a prison chaplain, or moral instructor peculiarly deficient in this point, and there is nothing which is likely to strike the class of people with whom he has to deal more quickly or more unhappily than a weakness of this kind, especially in one who is set to be their teacher and guide.