THE PURITAN. No. 36. How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should Measure for Measure. WE read, in one of the gospels, that our Saviour began his conversation with one of the Jewish teachers, by declaring one of the mystical doctrines of the new religion, in the strongest language, namely, That a man must be born again, to see the kingdom of God. In all ages, men have been led by experience, to appreciate the duties of morality. We go into the city for the purpose of making the purchase of certain articles, necessary or convenient for our use. We are partially ignorant of the nature of the commodity, or the state of the market; and feel ourselves exposed to be a prey to that cunning selfishness, which can take an advantage of our simplicity. What a treasure it is, in such cases, to meet with an honest man, with whom we are confident that the bargain will be just! Or we are thrown by shipwreck on an unknown coast. The night is dark, our goods are scattered; the inhabitants come down with their torches; how comfortable it is to know that we have not fallen into such hands as have sometimes disgraced the shores of Cornwall or New Jersey! Honesty is beautiful; compassion is beautiful; and why need we look farther for true excellence, than external deeds? Jealous of human nature, why need we pry, for true virtue, into its seminal principles in the heart of man? There has been a tendency, ever since the world existed, to depart from the central point of action, and find all goodness in external things; and it is curious to see, that as men's conceptions become grosser, they look for the existence of virtue in positions farther and farther from its real root. As it is in money, or rather the essence of property, it really exists in the things we can use, as the necessaries and comforts of life; but we first transfer it into gold and silver, and then into paper and bank bills, which are but the representation of a representation, until at last, a real miser prizes the shadow more than the substance. So it is with virtue; it really exists in a virtuous disposition; but as that is unseen, men proceed to set it in objects at a greater and greater distance from its source. First it is a good act combined with a good motive; then it is a moral act apart from the motive; then it passes into some rite or ceremony, and at every step there is a fearful recession from the heart; until at last, religion degenerates into superstition; a dress is holiness; blowing an organ is praising God; profession is piety; and kneeling is devotion. Perhaps the greatest departure from the true centre, is among the Tartars, who nail their written prayers to a windmill, and thus send them up to heaven in a gale; or among the Hindoos, whose sins are removed and bodies made holy, by being sprinkled with the mud of the Ganges. So widely can the sensualized mind deviate from its first conceptions! We smile, or (if we are benevolent men) we weep perhaps over these melancholy proofs of human degeneracy. But he must be very inattentive to the courses of his own mind, who does not see in himself the incipient vibrations to the same error. We are always departing from the pure to the incorporated; from the inward to the outward; from the intention to the act; and it is hard to chain the mind, in a materializing world, to first principles. The value of every action depends on the motive. From this maxim no man can escape. If I abstain from any sin without the love of God, or regard to his authority, it is certain, that I am neither a virtuous man nor a saint. Yet this principle we are always losing sight of. In others, external actions are all we see; and we too often make them the sole criterion of judging ourselves. When our Saviour was on earth, these tendencies had gone to their last extreme. As some rivers hide their fountains in remote countries, and are to be explored only by the traveller whose curiosity and enterprise surpass his coequals, so in that age the heart was hid behind a host of externals. We find therefore that it was his object to turn the eye inward, to explore the intention; to make his hearers ferret out the motive; in a word, to make them, in a religious sense, acquainted with themselves. For this purpose, he declares, Blessed are the pure in heart. Whosoever looketh on a woman, to lust after her, hath already committed adultery in his heart. Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause, is a murderer. These are truths hard to be known when the case is our own; and finally, it was for this purpose, to throw our thoughts on the inner man ; to make us enter the central chambers of our own souls, for the source of our sins, and the cure, that he pronounced the words to Nicodemus, so mysterious to those, who have not felt their power, and so consoling to those, who have. The original fault of man is in his principles. He is not the creature of circumstances; for no circumstances can have any influence over us but from some conjunctive cause within. Joseph was chaste in circumstances where frailer virtue would have fallen; and the whole thing that make the circumstances of this world dangerous is, they stand around (circum stantes) a yielding, sinful heart. The fault, then, is found, in all our failures and aberrations, in the last place where we are willing to ee it-in our hearts. They are radically wrong; and need not only amendment but renovation. We have been born into this world of guilt and suffering; and we must be born into the kingdom of purity and peace. "True conversion," says Pascal," consists in annihilating ourselves before the Being whom we have so often offended, and who might justly destroy us at any moment; in acknowledging we have no power without him, and that we merit nothing but disgrace. It consists in knowing that there is an invincible opposition between us and God, and that without a Mediator we can never be reconciled." This definition comes from a member of the Romish church; and shows that true piety, whether among Catholics or Protestants, is precisely the same. Addison, in his theological sentiments, was probably too favorable to human nature. He would talk of man's infantile innocence, and the purity of the heart which is uncorrupted by age or intercourse with the world; yet he has inadvertently left a strong testimony to the corruption of man. In his essay on the pleasures of the imagination, he says,—" there are very few who know how to be idle and innocent; or have a relish of any pleasures that are not criminal: every diversion they take, is at the expense of some one virtue or another; and their first step out of business, is into vice or folly." What is this but saying that |