forsake his vices?-the position is not to be allowed. No; his vices have forsaken him. Does a pure virgin fear God and say her prayers? She is in her climacteric.

and with so dirty a colouring, that Candour and Courtesy will sit in torture as they look at it. Gentle and virtuous spirits! ye who know not what it is to be rigid interpreters but of your own failings,-to you I address myself, the unhired advocates for the conduct of the mis

Thus do we rob heroes of the best part of their glory-their virtue. Take away the motive of the act, you take away all that is worth having in it; wrest it to ungenerous ends, you load the virtuous man who did it with infamy. Undo it all, I beseech you give him back his honour, restore the jewel you have taken from him,replace him in the eye of the world: it is too late!

It is painful to utter the reproaches which should come in here. I will trust them with yourselves; in coming from that quarter, they will more naturally produce such fruits as will not set your teeth on edge; for they will be the fruits of love and good-will, to the praise of God and the happiness of the world! which I wish.

XVIII. —THE LEVITE AND HIS CONCUBINE.

'And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite sojourning on the side of Mount Ephraim, who took unto him a concubine.'-JUDGES XIX. 1, 2, 3.

A CONCUBINE!-but the text accounts for it; 'for in those days there was no king in Israel ;' and the Levite, you will say, like every other man in it, did what was right in his own eyes; and so, you may add, did his concubine too, for she played the whore against him and went away.'

Then shame and grief go with her; and whereever she seeks a shelter, may the hand of justice shut the door against her!

Not so; for she went unto her father's house in Bethlehem-judah, and was with him four whole months! Blessed interval for meditation upon the fickleness and vanity of this world and its pleasures! I see the holy man upon his knees, with hands compressed to his bosom, and with uplifted eyes thanking Heaven that the object which had so long shared his affections was fled !

The text gives a different picture of his situation: For he rose and went after her, to speak friendly to her, and to bring her back again, having his servant with him, and a couple of asses; and she brought him unto her father's house; and when the father of the damsel saw him, he rejoiced to meet him.'

more jealous of your office? How often must ye repeat it, 'That such an one's doing so or so' is not sufficient evidence by itself to overthrow the accused! that our actions stand surrounded with a thousand circumstances which do not present themselves at first sight! that the first springs and motives which impelled the unfortunate lie deeper still! and that, of the millions which every hour are arraigned, thousands of them may have erred merely from the head, and been actually outwitted into evil! and even when from the heart, that the difficulties and temptations under which they acted, the force of the passions, the suitableness of the object, and the many struggles of Virtue before she fell, may be so many appeals from Justice to the judgment-seat of Pity?

Here then let us stop a moment, and give the story of the Levite and his concubine a second hearing. Like all others, much of it depends upon the telling; and as the Scripture has left us no kind of comment upon it, 'tis a story on which the heart cannot be at a loss for what to say, or the imagination for what to suppose: the danger is,. humanity may say too much.

'And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that a certain Levite, sojourning on the side of Mount Ephraim, took unto himself a concubine.'

O Abraham, thou father of the faithful! if this was wrong, why didst thou set so ensnaring an example before the eyes of thy descendant? and why did the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and Jacob, bless so often the seed of such intercourses, and promise to multiply and make princes come out of them?

God can dispense with his own laws; and accordingly we find the holiest of the patriarchs and others in Scripture, whose hearts cleaved most unto God, accommodating themselves as well as they could to the dispensation; that Abraham had Hagar; that Jacob, besides his two wives Rachel and Leah, took also unto him Zilpah and Bilhah, from whom many of the tribes descended; that David had seven wives and ten concubines; Rehoboam, sixty; and that, in whatever cases it became reproachable, it seemed not so much the thing itself as the abuse of it which made it so. This was remarkable in that of Solomon, whose excess became an insult upon the privileges of mankind; for by the same plan of luxury, which made it necessary to have forty thousand stalls of horses, he had unfortu

trade upon the broken stock of other people's failings, perhaps their misfortunes: so much good may it do them with what honour they can get, the furthest extent of which, I think, is to be praised, as we do some sauces, with tears in our eyes. It is a commerce most illiberal, and, as it requires no vast capital, too many embark in it; and so long as there are bad passions to be gratified, and bad heads to judge, with such it may pass for wit, or at least, like some vile relation whom all the family is ashamed of, claim kindred with it, even in better companies. Whatever be the degree of its affinity, it has helped to give wit a bad name; as if the main essence of it was satire. Certainly there is a difference between bitterness and saltness-that is, between the malignity and the festivity of wit: the one is a mere quickness of apprehension, void of humanity, and is a talent of the devil; the other comes from the Father of spirits, so pure and abstracted from persons, that willingly it hurts no man; or, if it touches upon an indecorum, 'tis with that dexterity of true genius which enables him rather to give a new colour to the absurdity, and let it pass. He may smile at the shape of the obelisk raised to another's fame; but the malignant wit will level it at once with the ground, and build his own upon the ruins of it.

What then, ye rash censurers of the world! have ye no mansions for your credit but those whence ye have extruded the right owners? Are there no regions for you to shine in, that ye descend for it into the low caverns of abuse and crimination? Have ye no seats but those of the scornful to sit down in? If honour has mistook his road, or the Virtues, in their excesses, have approached too near the confines of Vice, are they therefore to be cast down the precipice? Must beauty for ever be trampled upon in the dirt for one-one false step? And shall no one virtue or good quality, out of the thousand the fair penitent may have left,-shall not one of them be suffered to stand by her? Just God of heaven and earth!

But thou art merciful, loving, and righteous, and lookest down with pity upon these wrongs thy servants do unto each other. Pardon us, we beseech thee, for them, and all our transgressions! let it not be remembered that we were brethren of the same flesh, the same feelings and infirmities! O, my God! write it not down in thy book that thou madest us merciful after thy own image! that thou hast given us a religion so courteous, so good-tempered,— that every precept of it carries a balm along with it to heal the soreness of our natures, and sweeten our spirits, that we might live with such kind intercourse in this world as will fit us to exist together in a better.

XIX.-FELIX'S BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS PAUL EXAMINED.

'IIe hoped also that money should have been given him of Paul, that he might loose him.'-ACTS XXIV. 26. A NOBLE object, to take up the consideration of the Roman governor!

'He hoped that money should have been given him;' for what end? To enable him to judge betwixt right and wrong?-and whence was it to be wrung? From the poor scrip of a disciple of the carpenter's son, who left nothing to his followers but poverty and sufferings !

And was this Felix? the great, the noble Felix.

Felix the happy! the gallant Felix, who kept Drusilla! Could he do this? Base passion, what canst thou not make us do!

Let us consider the whole transaction.

Paul, in the beginning of this chapter, had been accused before Felix by Tertullus of very grievous crimes; of being a pestilent fellow, a mover of seditions, and a profaner of the temple, etc. To which accusations, the Apostle having liberty from Felix to reply, he makes his defence from the 10th to the 22d verse, to this purport. He shows him, first, that the whole charge was destitute of all proof; which he openly challenges them to produce against him, if they had it: that, on the contrary, he was so far from being the man Tertullus had represented, that the very principles of the religion with which he then stood charged, and which they called heresy, led him to be the most unexceptionable in his conduct, by the continual exercise which it demanded of him of having a conscience void of offence, at all times, both towards God and man: that, consistently with this, his adversaries had neither found him in the temple disputing with any man, neither raising up the people, either in the synagogue or in the city; for this he appeals to themselves: that it was but twelve days since he came up to Jerusalem to worship: that during that time, when he purified in the temple, he did it as became him, without noise, without tumult; this he calls upon the Jews who came from Asia, and were eye-witnesses of his behaviour, to attest: and, in a word, he urges the whole defence before Felix in so strong a manner, and with such plain and natural arguments of his innocence, as to leave no colour for his adversaries to reply.

There was, however, still one adversary in this court, though silent, yet not satisfied.

Spare thy eloquence, Tertullus! roll up the charge: a more notable orator than thyself is risen up-'tis Avarice; and that, too, in the most fatal place for the prisoner it could have taken possession of; 'tis in the heart of the man who judges him.

If Felix believed Paul innocent, and acted

accordingly, that is, released him without reward, this subtle advocate told him he would lose one of the profits of his employment; and if he acknowledged the faith of Christ, which Paul occasionally explained in his defence, it told him he might lose the employment itself. So that, notwithstanding the character of the Apostle appeared (as it was) most spotless, and the faith he professed so very clear, that, as he urged it, the heart gave its consent, yet at the same time the passions rebelled; and so strong an interest was formed thereby against the first impressions in favour of the man and his cause, that both were dismissed,-the one to a more convenient hearing, which never came; the other to the hardships of a prison for two whole years, hoping, as the text informs us, that money should have been given him: and even at the last, when he left the province, willing to do the Jews a pleasure, that is, to serve his interest in another shape,-with all the conviction upon his mind that he had done nothing worthy of bonds, he nevertheless left the holy man bound, and consigned over to the hopeless prospect of ending his days in the same state of confinement in which he had ungenerously left him.

One would imagine, as covetousness is a vice not naturally cruel in itself, that there must certainly have been a mixture of other motives in the governor's breast, to account for a proceeding so contrary to humanity and his own conviction; and could it be of use to raise conjectures upon it, there seems but too probable ground for such a supposition. It seems that Drusilla, whose curiosity, upon a double account, had led her to hear Paul (for she was a daughter of Abraham-as well as of Eve), was a character which might have figured very well even in our own times; for, as Josephus tells us, she had left the Jew her husband, and, without any pretence in their law to justify a divorce, had given herself up without ceremony to Felix; for which cause, though she is here called his wife, she was in reason and justice the wife of another man, and consequently lived in an open state of adultery; so that when Paul, in explaining the faith of Christ, took occasion to argue upon the morality of the gospel,-and urged the eternal laws of justice, the unchangeable obligations to temperance, of which chastity was a branch,-it was scarce possible to frame his discourse so (had he wished to temporize) but that either her interest or her love must have taken offence; and though we do not read, like Felix, that she trembled at the account, 'tis yet natural to imagine she was affected with other passions, of which the Apostle might feel the effects; and 'twas well he suffered no more, if two such violent enemies as lust and avarice were combined against him.

But this by the way; for as the text seems

only to acknowledge one of these motives, it is not our business to assign the other.

It is obscrvable that this same Apostle, speaking, in the Epistle to Timothy, of the ill effects of this same ruling passion, affirms that it is the root of all evil; and I make no doubt but the remembrance of his own sufferings had no small share in the severity of the reflection. Infinite are the examples where the love of money is only a subordinate and ministerial passion, exercised for the support of some other vices; and 'tis generally found, when there is either ambition, prodigality, or lust to be fed by it, that it then rages with the least mercy and discretion; in which cases, strictly speaking, it is not the root of other evils,-but other evils are the root of it.

This forces me to recall what I have said upon covetousness, as a vice not naturally cruel; it is not apt to represent itself to our imaginations, at first sight, under that idea: we consider it only as a mean, worthless turn of mind, incapable of judging or doing what is right; but as it is a vice which does not always set up for itself-to know truly what it is in this respect, we must know what masters it serves: they are many, and of various casts and humours; and each lends it something of its own complexional tint and character.

This, I suppose, may be the cause that there is a greater and more whimsical mystery in the love of money than in the darkest and most nonsensical problem that ever was pored over.

Even at the best, and when the passion seems to scek nothing more than its own amusement, there is little-very little, I fear to be said for its humanity. It may be a sport to the miser; but consider, it must be death and destruction to others. The moment this sordid humour begins to govern, farewell all honest and natural affection! farewell all he owes to parents, to children, to friends! How fast the obligations vanish! see, he is now stripped of all feelings whatever: the shrill cry of Justice, and the low lamentation of humble Distress, are notes equally beyond his compass! Eternal God! see! he passes by one whom thou hast just bruised, without one pensive reflection! he enters the cabin of the widow, whose husband and child thou hast taken to thyself, exacts his bond without a sigh! Heaven! if I am to be tempted, let it be by glory, by ambition, by some generous and manly vice; if I must fall, let it be by some passion which thou hast planted in my nature, which shall not harden my heart, but leave me room at last to retreat and come back to thee!

It would be easy here to add the common arguments which reason offers against this vice; but they are so well understood, both in matter and form-it is needless.

I might cite to you what Seneca says upon it; but the misfortune is, that at the same time he