diffipated life, preached at the Magdalen Chapel, from the text-She that liveth in pleasure is dead while the liveth.'

• You, alas! the daughters of penitence and forrow, whọ have taken fhelter in this favourable retirement, can bear witness to the affertion of the apoftle. We may appeal to your experience for the truth of it. Betrayed by the allurements of fenfe, and the deceitfulness of fin, you have been tempted to defert the path of virtue, and to give yourfelves up to what is called a life of pleasure:-but is it really a life of pleafure? Can you say that you have been happy in it? Have the highest scenes of licentiousness communicated any folid comfort? Hath not every indulgence been allayed by the mixture of some disagreeable circumstance, and much imbittered by fome dreadful effects?

When you were first drawn afide by the allurements of pleafure, how little did you fufpect whither her light and chearful guidance would lead you!-How little did you apprehend that the paths fo -thickly ftrewed with rofes, would quickly terminate in a wilderness of horrors! But if you were now honestly to speak out your own feelings, would you not condemn the folly of facrificing the pure joys of virtue, for the low indulgences of vice? Have you not often looked back with regret upon the lovely scenes of childhood and early youth, when your minds were untainted by any criminal defires? Have you not often fighed deeply at the thoughts of what you loft, when you loft your innocence, and ardently wifhed to recall thofe happy times, when all was peace and harmony within? And in what did all your enjoyments terminate, but in a vaft variety of accumulated wretchednefs?-in the certainty of temporal fhame, contempt, and flavery; and in the direful apprehenfion of eternal punishment and mifery?

In thefe deplorable circumstances you verified the words of the text; while you were living in pleafure you were dead :-your minds became an uncultivated wafte, having neither power nor inclination for the acquirements of knowledge, and the exalted exercifes of reafon: you were forfaken of every incentive to virtue ;-strangers to the pure glow of devout afpirations ;-no fingle impulse of facred paffions circulated within you; and your hearts ceafed to beat towards God. You retained indeed the life of fenfitive creatures, but the fpirit originally breathed into you was dead.

How many tender applications were made in the mean time for your recovery! but in vain. The calamity of your father, and the heaviness of your mother; the tears and entreaties of your friends; the admonitions and alarms of conscience!-Alas! all proved ineffectual. Indeed when perfons are thus abfurdly infatuated, they will not awake;-though we thunder in their ears the denunciations of divine wrath, they will not hear ;--and though we extend to them the bleflings of pardon and reconciliation, they will not put forth their hand, and make them their own.

C. R. N. ARR. (XI.) May, 1794.

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At length, however, the happy moment arrived for your recovery to life. Some affliction, or fome feasonable converfation, or fome fudden internal conviction, directed by Providence, and accompanied with divine grace, roused you from the deep fleep of fin, and stirred up fome ferious reflections ;-you began to think of your heavenly Father, whofe laws you had violated, and whofe gifts you had abufed; and you began too to dread the just vengeance of an offended God.-What am I doing?-Where are my expectations of advantage from fuch a conduct?-Where is the time I have fquandered?-Where are the talents for which I am accountable?—Where,—Oh! where are my hopes of everlasting felicity ?"

You had been looking for happinefs in the gratifications of sense, but all your hopes were miferably disappointed :-instead of wealth and honour, you found poverty and difgrace ;-inftead of peace and liberty, anxiety and flavery-instead of health and safety, disorder, fickness, and death. Where then must you search for the attainment of true pleasure, and where is the fource of pure and permament joy?--In God:-in the contemplation of the fulness of his glory;-in meditation on the riches of his manifold mercies ;-in unfeigned gratitude for the grand fcheme of redemption :-you must feek it in a cordial acceptance of the gracious terms of the Gospel; in the full exercise of its impartial justice, diffufive benevolence, ftrict temperance, chastity, and holiness. There you will find a plan proposed, by which your degeneracy may be corrected. These your defires are taught to run in their proper channel, and fuch motives are offered, to controul and regulate your conduct, as are adapted to immortal and accountable creatures. You will find the Supreme Being there reprefented as the Father and Friend of the human race;—as the Father who fympathizes in the distresses of his children;-as the Friend, whofe attachment is infinitely stronger than that of a brother. What is his language in every part of his word? Are you helplefs? I am your protector. Are you afflicted? I bow down mine ear from heaven to hear the groans of the prifonAre you depreffed in your circumftances? The ravens are fupplied by my bounty; the lillies of the field are arrayed by my hand; and fhall I not much more cloath you, O ye of little faith? Are you afraid that your iniquities being repeated and aggravated, have rendered the Deity inexorable? Behold, fays the Saviour of mankind, I have offered myself a facrifice for you; and I continue to be your advocate at the right hand of my Father. Are you diffident and distrustful of your felves? My grace fhall be fufficient for you. Are you afraid of relapfing into your former tranfgreffions? My Arength fhall be perfected in your weakness. Are you, in short, deititute of human aid? The fpirit of the Moft High is promifed, to apply your exingencies, to relieve your afflictions, to fupport your drooping hearts, and to restore you to regeneration and gladnei.'

ers.

It concerns us all indeed to restrain the inclination to fenfual pleasure; to be jealous of every degree of afcendancy it may gain over us; and guard strictly against the arts of an infidious enemy, by which many strong men have been flain. It concerns us all to keep close the eye, the ear, every inlet to the imagination, that no impurity may enter;-to confute fancied wants;-to fly, as from a peftilence, every occafion of evil, every circumftance that may raise an undue warmth of paffion, and to establish ourselves in the exercise of every duty, in the practice of every good word and work: thus fhall no wickedness have dominion over us; and thus fhall we experience happiness as real as it is durable.

Efpecially let parents, guardians, and masters of families, watch over their respective charges, and employ the earliest care to check their tendency to licentiousness. It is a care which cannot be too ftrictly exercised, when places of pleasure are opened all around us, difpofing youth to foftnefs and indolence, vitiating their taste, and corrupting their manners: but it is a care that feldom enters into the plan of modern education :-leave them not to the rude instincts of fenfe; to the arbitrary dominion of appetite; to be toffed on the billows of life, as every gale of paffion impels: but awaken and ftimulate their powers of reafon; inftil into their minds the principles of religion; affift them in forming juft fentiments of human nature; discover to them the latent dangers of pleasure; warn them of the rocks, on which thousands have made fhipwreck of a good confcience and imprefs upon their hearts the important inftruction which this houfe affords.

• This school of repentance gives a leffon to the tender mind, more striking and more affecting, than all the pages of philofophy, and the learned precepts of the most able masters: bring them therefore to this fchool. Here let them fee the ravages of fin; the blighted hopes of parental fondnefs; the amiable qualities of youth extinguished by irregular exceffes; and furely they will learn from hence to ftop their ears againft the fyren fongs of pleafure;-they will avert with horror from such a scene of devaftation, and apply their utmost induftry to the cultivation of fuch things as will yield to their laudable ambition a rich and plentiful harveft.'

* Permit me to draw the rays of this admirable inftitution into a point, and to prefent to your imagination a fcene that would fur nifh an interefting fubject for the pencil of a great master. Behold a group of afflicted females ruined by perfidious companions;-their faces pale with fick nefs;-their bodies emaciated with diftemper;their very fouls depressed by sadness and despair;-abandoned by their betrayers, rejected by their relations, finking under the aggravated weight of poverty, difeafe, and guilt, without a fingle friend to pour a drop of comfort into their bleeding wounds :-behold them, as beings formed for rational pleafures, and the lives of angels, yet

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wholly

wholly devoted to fenfual and brutal gratifications:-appointed to an immortal existence, yet without a hope, without a thought beyond. the grave :-not only polluted and defiled with fin themfelves, but deluding the innocence of the fimple and unwary, and spreading the deadly contagion all around :—and behold too, where fweet charity appears to difpel the gloom, to take them by the hand, and conduct them to this happy manfion of wisdom, goodness, and peace, where fhe delights to dwell;-where the inftructs the ignorant, ftrengthens the weak, comforts the dejected, and gives reft to the weary and heavy laden. On the other fide of the picture, obferve the aftonifhing change in the fame objects as they go back into the. world; the roses of health bloom on their cheek ;-the restoration to virtue fparkles in their eye;-the ferenity of content irradiates their countenance. See them reinftated in all the privileges of their nature; the adherents of reason,--the pupils of intellect, the fubjects of confcience, and the heirs of falvation. See them acquiring, ftrength and steadinefs in the practice of holinefs;-as dutiful children. reftored to their afflicted parents;-as ufeful members reunited to fociety;--and as converted finners, reconciled to their Redeemer, and to their God. See them, in fhort, lately dead in trefpaffes and fins, but now living unto goodness, and righteousness and faith.'

In conclufion, we think it only juftice to obferve, that though there are many volumes of fermons in the English language more distinguished for learned difquifition; for originality of remark; and for correctnefs of compofition; yet we queftion whether any are better calculated for general inftruction, or for the ufeful purpose of family fermons, than Mr. Sellon's..

Elementary Dialogues, for the Improvement of Youth. By J. H. Campe. Tranflated by Mr. Seymour. Illuftrated with fix35. Boards. Hookham and teen Copper-plates. 8vo. Carpenter. 1792.

THIS

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"HIS is a tranflation from the German of Mr. Campe, author of the New Robinfon Crufoe, and other books for children. The prefent is an attempt to teach the metaphyfics of the mind by dialogues, with familiar illuftrations, adapted. to the capacities of children of eight or ten years old. begins with giving fome of the general qualities of fpirit, and. then proceeds to inveftigate the various inftincts, affections, and paffions, of the human foul. His method is Socratic, but his execution is not attic. On the contrary, there is such a peculiar clumfinefs and courfenefs in the manner, that we fhould not need to be told it was tranflated from the German ;. for though that language abounds in works of the highest genius, the difference apparent in les petites mœurs, and per

haps

haps the difficulty in adopting idioms which do not easily run into each other, generally give fomething of an uncouthness, at least to their lighter works, when turned literally into English. An English or French author would not, for instance, have chofen the following elegant illuftration of cause and -effect:

(The tutor comes in the next day, with a knotted handkerchief in his hand; and, without speaking, ftrikes each of the boys with it.) All. Heigh! Heigh! Heigh

Tutor. What's the matter?

• All. It hurts us.

Futor. I am glad of that.

All. Why fo, fir?

Tutor. Becaufe this has made you acquainted with another property of the foul.

John. What is that?

Tutor. Did you not feel a small degree of pain?

• All. Yes.

Tutor. And know the occasion of it?

< All. Yes.

Tutor. The handkerchief was the caufe; and the pain the effect.

All. Yes.

"Tutor. So that your foul can perceive the cause of an effect, and the effect of a caufe?

George. What is the meaning of cause and effect?

• Tutor. What occafions another thing is called a cause, and what is produced by any thing is called an effect. The handkerchief, or rather my arm which directed it, gave you pain; it was therefore the cause of it; and the pain was occafioned by the handkerchief directed by my arm; the pain therefore was an effect. Do you understand this?'

The ideas are further illuftrated by plates, which, however? require fome illuftration. After all, we fear the book will be found a dull one by meré children, and for those of more advanced age it is too fuperficial-In comparing our powers with thofe of brutes, the author afferts that the latter have no memory, and that when a bird flies into a cage to eat of feed which he has eaten of before, he eats from inftinct, as much as if he had never feen it. We imagine nothing can be more, contrary to fact. He allows, indeed, brutes have a fort of memory, but fays they are not able to distinguish the ideas refulting from it from the original impreffions. Probably if we could get at the metaphyfics of the Hounyhymns we should have a different account of this matter. At prefent it is the man drawing the lion. MONTH

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