If a church, knowing all these facts, or wilfully ignorant of them, allows a member to nestle in the security of the sanctuary; then the act of this robber, and the connivance of the church, are but the two parts of one crime. 6. BANKRUPTCY, although a branch of debt, deserves a separate mention. It sometimes crushes a man's spirit, and sometimes exasperates it. The poignancy of the evil depends much upon the disposition of the creditors; and as much upon the disposition of the victim. Should _they_ act with the lenity of Christian men, and _he_ with manly honesty, promptly rendering up whatever satisfaction of debt he has,--he may visit the lowest places of human adversity, and find there the light of good men's esteem, the support of conscience, and the sustenance of religion. A bankrupt may fall into the hands of men whose tender-mercies are cruel; or his dishonest equivocations may exasperate their temper and provoke every thorn and brier of the law. When men's passions are let loose, especially their avarice whetted by real or imaginary wrong; when there is a rivalry among creditors, lest any one should feast upon the victim more than his share; and they all rush upon him like wolves upon a wounded deer, dragging him down, ripping him open, breast and flank, plunging deep their bloody muzzles to reach the heart and taste blood at the very fountain;--is it strange that resistance is desperate and unscrupulous? At length the sufferer drags his mutilated carcass aside, every nerve and muscle wrung with pain, and his whole body an instrument of agony. He curses the whole inhuman crew with envenomed imprecations; and thenceforth, a brooding misanthrope, he pays back to society, by studied villanies, the legal wrongs which the relentless justice of a few, or his own knavery, have brought upon him. 7. There is a circle of moral dishonesties practised because the LAW allows them. The very anxiety of law to reach the devices of cunning, so perplexes its statutes with exceptions, limitations, and supplements, that like a castle gradually enlarged for centuries, it has its crevices, dark corners, secret holes and winding passages--an endless harbor for rats and vermin, where no trap can catch them. We are villanously infested with legal rats and rascals, who are able to commit the most flagrant dishonesties with impunity. They can do all of wrong which is profitable, without that part which is actionable. The very ingenuity of these miscreants excites such admiration of their skill, that their life is gilded with a specious respectability. Men profess little esteem for blunt, necessitous thieves, who rob and run away; but for a gentleman who can break the whole of God's law so adroitly, as to leave man's law unbroken; who can indulge in such conservative stealing that his fellow-men award him a rank among honest men for the excessive skill of his dishonesty--for such a one, I fear, there is almost universal sympathy.