We have ministers of religion who do not hesitate to hold up to ridicule and contempt the essential doctrines and self-denying precepts of their own faith; and attempt, as far as the influence of their example can extend, to banish all serious and devout piety from the social circle. They see no harm in customs which the spirit and even the letter of the Scriptures condemn; and sanction by their presence those scenes of human folly and gaiety which have captivated and ruined thousands, who were once the ornaments of their fathers' house. Such ministers not only sanction the customs of the world, but they discountenance all serious piety, and declaim against their evangelical brethren as disturbers of the peace of the church. If Christianity be a cunningly devised fable--if the life of faith and of practical devotedness of the soul to God be mere fancies--if heaven and hell be the conceptions of romance, brought into the pulpit to terrify the credulous and please the sanguine--I should not hesitate to pronounce a heavy censure on those ministers who bring forward these subjects so often, and who enforce attention to them with so much ardent and impassioned eloquence. But if Christianity be true--if the final happiness or misery of the human soul depend on faith in Christ--if the glories of heaven and the terrors of hell are realities which exceed the power of man to describe--then even the most sceptical must admit that the ministers of religion ought, with great boldness and impassioned earnestness, to rouse their hearers to a serious and immediate attention to these great, these awful subjects; and ought they not to teach by example, as well as by precept? and by the purity of their morals--by their religious habits and style of conversation--give strong and unequivocal proofs that they preach what they believe, and believe what they preach? But let no Christian, whatever rank he may hold in social life, or whatever degree of reputation he may have attained for intelligence, or good sense, or for amiability of temper, presume to hope that he will ever be able to make a scriptural profession of religion (after he has felt the power of it) without exciting the displeasure, if not the opposition, of his irreligious relatives and friends. They will not object to the religion of forms and ceremonies; to the religion which is confined to the temple, or to the bed of sickness; to the religion which allows of a conformity to the gaieties and the follies of the world, and which frowns from its presence all references to death, to judgment, to heaven, and to hell; but the religion which consists in the moral renovation of the soul, which identifies man with a living Saviour, and which raises his anticipations to the glories of the invisible world, they despise, and cast it from them as a strange thing, and then ridicule it as contemptible. THE DARK VALE ILLUMINED.