There are few more valuable chapters in Locke than the one in which he traces some of the gravest errors that infest human life to a false association of ideas. But of all his illustrations, employed to exhibit in the true light this copious source of error, there is not one half so striking as that furnished by the false association which connects the holiness that can alone attach to the living and the immortal, with earth, mortar, and stone, pieces of mouldering serge, and bits of rotten wood. Nearly one half of the errors with which Popery has darkened and overlaid the religion of the Cross, have originated in this particular species of false association. The superstition of pilgrimages, with all its long catalogue of crime and suffering, inclusive of bloody wars, protracted for ages,--- 'When men strayed far to seek In Golgotha Him dead who lives in heaven,'-- the idolatry of relics, so strangely revived on the Continent in our own times,--the allegorical will-worship embodied in stone and lime, which Puseyism is at present so busy in introducing into the Church of England, and which renders every ecclesiastical building a sort of apocryphal temple, full, like the apocryphal books, of all manner of error and nonsense,--a thousand other absurdities and heterodoxies besides,--have all originated in this cause. True, such association is most natural to man, and, when of a purely secular character, harmless; nay, there are cases in which it may be even laudably indulged. 'When I find Tully confessing of himself,' says Johnson, 'that he could not forbear at Athens to visit the walks and houses which the old philosophers had frequented or inhabited, and recollect the reverence which every nation, civil and barbarous, has paid to the ground where merit has been buried, I am afraid to declare against the general voice of mankind, and am inclined to believe that this regard which we involuntarily pay to the meanest relique of a man great and illustrious, is intended as an incitement to labour, and an encouragement to expect the same renown if it be sought by the same virtues.' We find nearly the same sentiment eloquently expounded in the Doctor's famous passage on Iona. But there exists a grand distinction between natural feelings proper in their own place, and natural feelings permitted to enter the religious field, and vitiate the integrity of revelation. It is from the natural alone in such cases that danger is to be apprehended; seeing that what is not according to the mental constitution of man, is of necessity at once unproductive and shortlived. Let due weight be given to the associative feeling, in its proper sphere,--let it dispose us to invest with a quiet decency our places of worship,--let us, at all events, not convert them into secular counting-rooms or twopenny show-boxes; but let us also remember that natural association is not divine truth--that there attaches no holiness to slated roofs or stone