the manner, and want of purity in the motive."

"In Stanley's family," replied he, in a more serious tone, "I have met with a complete refutation of that favorite maxim in the world, that religion is a dull thing itself, and makes its professors gloomy and morose. Charles! I have often frequented houses where pleasure was the avowed object of idolatry. But to see the votaries of the 'reeling goddess,' after successive nights passed in her temples! to see the languor, the listlessness, the discontent—you would rather have taken them for her victims than her worshipers. So little mental vivacity, so little gayety of heart! In short, after no careless observations, I am compelled to declare, that I never saw two forms less alike than those of Pleasure and Happiness."

"Your testimony, Sir John," said I, "is of great weight in a case of which you are so experienced a judge. What a different scene do we now contemplate! Mr. Stanley seems to have diffused his own spirit through the whole family. What makes his example of such efficacy is, that he considers the Christian temper as so considerable a part of Christianity. This temper seems to imbue his whole soul, pervade his whole conduct, and influence his whole conversation. I see every day some fresh occasion to admire his candor, his humility, his constant reference, not as a topic of discourse, but as a principle of conduct, to the gospel as the standard by which actions are to be weighed. His conscientious strictness of speech, his serious reproof of calumnies, his charitable construction of every case which has two sides; 'his simplicity and godly sincerity;' his rule of referring all events to providential direction, and his invariable habit of vindicating the divine goodness under dispensations apparently the most unfavorable."

Here Sir John left me, and I could not forbear pursuing the subject in soliloquy as I proceeded in my walk. I reflected with admiration that Mr. Stanley, in his religious conversation, rendered himself so useful, because instead of the uniform nostrum of the drop and the pill, he applied a different class of arguments, as the case required, to objectors to the different parts of Christianity; to ill informed persons who adopted a partial gospel without understanding it as a scheme, or embracing it as a whole; to those who allow its truth merely on the same ground of evidence that establishes the truth of any other well authenticated history, and who, satisfied with this external evidence, not only do not feel its power