desire to differ from each other, was a chief cause why they departed so much from the right. But your instances were so unhappily chosen, that they prove nothing against Christianity. The two opposite descriptions of persons who deterred you from religion, and who passed muster in their respective corps, under the generic term of religious, would, I believe, be scarcely acknowledged as such by the soberly and the soundly pious."

"My own subsequent experience," resumed Mr. Carlton, "has confirmed the justness of your remark. When I began, through the gradual change wrought in my views and actions, by the silent, but powerful preaching of Mrs. Carlton's example, to have less interest in believing that Christianity was false, I then applied myself to search for reasons to believe that it was true. But plain, abstract reasoning, though it might catch hold on beings who are all pure intellect, and though it might have given a right bias even to my opinions, would probably never have determined my conduct, unless I saw it clothed, as it were, with a body. I wanted examples which should influence me to act, as well as proofs which should incline me to believe; something which would teach me what to do, as well as what to think. I wanted exemplifications as well as precepts. I doubted of all merely speculative truth. I wanted, from beholding the effect, to refer back to the principle. I wanted arguments more palpable and less theoretic. Surely, said I to myself, if religion be a principle, it must be an operative one, and I would rationally infer that Christianity were true, if the tone of Christian practice were high.

"I began to look clandestinely into Henrietta's Bible. There I indeed found that the spirit of religion was invested with just such a body as I had wished to see; that it exhibited actions as well as sentiments, characters, as well as doctrines; the life portrayed evidently governed by the principle inculcated; the conduct and the doctrine in just correspondence. But if the Bible be true, thought I, may we not reasonably expect that the principles which once produced the exalted practice which that Bible records, will produce similar effects now?

"I put, rashly perhaps, the truth of Christianity on this issue, and sought society of a higher stamp. Fortunately the increasing external decorum of my conduct began to make my reception less difficult among good men than it had been. Hitherto, and that for the sake of my wife, my visits had rather been endured than encouraged