or deacons, or heads of the parish, but are compelled to go home in the returning throng of men, women, and children, and pass their thresholds in quietness, and sit down to their Bibles in silence, and, if possible, with humility. This will not do at all; there is no relish, no savour, in it; nothing to lift up the hearts of little men, or satisfy the greedy self consequence of bustling and insignificant women. But at a conference meeting, a prayer meeting, or an inquiry meeting, held by a select number, at an unusual season, or in an unusual place, the scene is reversed, and they can make themselves of some importance. The spell of silence is taken off, and they can display their acquirements and their acuteness, and can handle the most knotty points of divinity without the least symptom of fear or modesty, and can measure their spiritual growth with much apparent meekness, and confess the vileness of their nature, and the enormity of their sins, with much real pride, and while they are calling themselves worms, mean all the time that they are the chosen of God's creatures. "In the multitude of dreams, and many wofds," says the wise man, "there are also divers vanities." It is no small thing for those, who could never have hoped for distinction in any other way, to be accounted in their neighbourhood cunning expounders of Scripture, or astonishingly gifted in prayer, or fearful wrestlers with Satan. And even if they do not happen to possess any great flow of words, or store of superficial knowledge, they can at least be gratified by the personal attentions of the minister, and gain considerable credit for unusual piety, and remarkable absorption in heavenly things. Now in the common concerns of life vanity is bad enough, but

what shall we say of those who introduce it into their religion, and before the presence of God? And are there not many such?

Another motive with a number of these constant frequenters of religious meetings, is a love of excitement, change, novelty, and gossiping. That same restlessness of temperament, which is the root of all dissipation, is also the origin of its religious variety; for what is the spirit and essence of dissipation of any kind, but a perpetual desire of finding that pleasure abroad, which cannot be found, or which cannot be felt, at home? And where is the mighty difference between the dissipation of the church, or the conventicle, and the dissipation of the ball room, the theatre, or the tea table? I confess that I see very little. Many of those who now run after every preacher, and are profuse of their presence at every prayer meeting, are the very people, who, engaged by objects of another class, would be seen at every dance, raree show, and assembly, the foremost of the forward, and the giddiest of the giddy; or else, perhaps, wasting the precious time of their more sober and domestic acquaintance, in endless details and disquisitions of fashion, dress, amusements, parties, faces, furniture, politics, and scandal. For my own part I prefer the latter kind of dissipation to the former. I would much rather hear flippancy discussing frippery, than quoting scripture. I would listen with infinitely more complacency and patience to a knot of triflers criticising the gesture and pronunciation of a play actor, than to a knot of more solemn triflers engaged with the tones and text of a preacher. I think ignorance appears to greater advantage in settling a point of etiquette, than in enforcing a point of

Calvinism; and that vanity is more appropriately employed in arranging a party to a watering place, than in appointing a mission to the Indies. But folly would hardly be folly, if it always kept within its own proper department; and therefore, among the rest of its excursions, it has intruded into the domains of religion; and there it walks about with a demure gait and a lengthened face,-which are circumstances, by the bye, that prove it to be a stranger-but still with the same heart, and the same disposition, and the same spirit, with which it danced among the vanities in the haunts of worldly pleasure, and joined its voice to the wild chorus of merriment and riot.

A third motive is the idea which many entertain, that there is a positive merit in attending religious meetings, apart from the instruction which they may afford. They imagine that this scrupulous and incessant attendance will atone for other negligences, and fill up some ugly blanks in their moral deportment; and that therefore it is a prudent thing for them to compound for duties with ceremonies, and divert the scrutiny of conscience and of Heaven from the substance to the shadow of piety. And they sit hour after hour, and join in the various exercises of devotion, in the hope of divesting themselves of a burthen of anxiety which in spite of themselves lies heavily on their minds, and of compromising a question between holiness and the forms of holiness, which in truth, admits of no compromise. They cherish a deception, and a selfdeception; and they will not be undeceived, because their prejudices oppose all rational views of the real objects of worship, and because their hopes urge them

to pursue a routine of observances, which so cheaply satisfies their fears.

Some people are always going to church, lecture, and conference, because they have nothing else to dothat is to say, because there is nothing else that they will do-for if we were disposed to do all our duty, we should never lack employment. They feel their time lying like a weight upon them, and they go and throw it off in a meeting house, because they can get rid of it there, not only without reproach, but with some credit. They roam from a prayer-meeting to an inquiry meeting, and from one pulpit to another, to wear away the hours, and bring about sleeping-time. They are spiritual idlers, who, to be sure, may as well be at church as lolling at home or sauntering in the streets, but who are by no means to be particularly commended for making religion a pretence for their laziness.

Such are some of the motives which give rise to outside devotion. No person of observation will deny their existence and influence; and no person of good sense will claim for them any desert. But I have allowed that others are actuated by purer motives. I am sure that very many of those who so assiduously wait on the various assemblies and exercises connected with religion, do so from the persuasion that they are engaged in a high and actual duty, and are performing what is well pleasing in the sight of God. However much I may respect the feelings of such persons-and I do most sincerely respect them-I cannot but lament their erroneous views, and I cannot give up my conviction that their conduct proceeds from mistaken impressions.

They entertain the idea, as it seems to me, that they cannot be properly religious, nor perform the proper acts of religion, except when they are attending on its stated ministrations. They are not aware that religion loves the fire-side as well as the altar, and leads us to the latter, principally that we may be taught to estímate the joys and discharge the duties of the former. They divorce religion from morality, and devotion from holiness, without considering that they are only beautiful in union. They see not that by giving too much time to the means of grace, they may neglect their end, and sin against God in the house of God. The eye of Heaven rests as complacently on the family circle, as on the congregation of worshippers; and the congregation have worshipped in vain, if they do not return better fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, than they went; and worse than in vain, if while joining in prayer, or listening to an exhortation, their domestic arrangements have been disturbed, and the beings who depended on their care have suffered for the want of it. The duties which are nearest to us, are those which are to be first discharged; the persons who are immediately connected with us have the earliest and the strongest claims on our attention, for if we do not attend to them, who will? and why did God place them under our protection, or give them a right to our service, if he did not mean that we should protect and serve them? There is one day in seven set apart for public worship. Is it not enough? Who shall ask Him who appointed the Sabbath, why he did not ordain its more frequent recurrence? It is enough. It is enough for public instruction and social devotion. Let family or private