If the influence of State politics is thus baneful, we need not say how much more disastrous must be the intrusion of Church politics. We deeply regret the attempt which, we understand, has been made in some quarters to excite religious prejudices against these valuable institutions for the reformation of youthful vagrants. A volume has recently been published in one of our northern cities, (under a fictitious title,) for the obvious purpose of engendering such prejudices, and we have understood, from a source entitled to some confidence, that any youth of the particular religious denomination, (whose interests the author espouses) who reads the book, will be likely to give trouble to the master who takes him under indenture! Now, as American citizens, we are surely all alike concerned in giving every child a good education, and in correcting as soon and as effectually as possible every vicious habit and propensity. Hence our common schools are public property, and should be not only out of sight, but out of hearing of the din of political strife or the roll of the “drum ecclesiastic.” Our institutions for the correction, reformation and punishment of those who from neglect, perverseness or incorrigible depravity become present or prospective pests of society, should be elevated above all political or sectarian connections. We cannot have a school, a refuge, or a prison for each of the legion of parties in Church and State, and hence the impolicy and unreasonableness of making existing institutions subservient to any political or sectarian end. Away with all such suicidal schemes! The ground these institutions occupy, or ought to occupy, is too sacred to be entered by such unhallowed feet. With these views we cannot but deplore the intermingling of political interests or considerations, with the subject of prisons and prison-discipline. The only effect of their introduction is to endanger all the benevolent, public and permanent interests that ought to be regarded, and to advance those that are purely selfish and temporary. There is something utterly revolting to every human sympathy, in the idea that a hospital for poor lunatics must be delayed till some political party has strength enough to venture on the expense, or that the adoption of a system of prison-discipline, or the establishment of a House of Refuge for juvenile offenders and vagrants, should be governed by so narrow a consideration, as its tendency to promote or defeat a transient political end! Concerning all public men who entertain such views, we say, “Oh my soul! come not thou into their secret. Unto their assembly, mine honor! be not thou united.” ART. V.--UNCERTAINTY OF CONVICTION AND PUNISHMENT.