its increase in power was not impeded by any of the hindrances that are common to fallen man. It suffered nothing from disease, nor from pain nor languor, the consequences of disease. Indolence, that great foe to increase of mental vigour, he was a stranger to; its enervating influence never came upon him. No debasing superstition ever enthralled his spirit; no prejudice ever obscured its vision; no proud, or sensual, or angry passion, ever disturbed its exercise; all was light, calmness, and order, and, according to its capacity, it expatiated through the regions of holy and heavenly knowledge, at pleasure, and without a chain. The power of abstracting the mind from whatever is trivial, impertinent, or vain, of fixing it intently on high and worthy objects, and of pursuing its search or its contemplations, free from the wanderings of foolish desire and from the incursions of a vagrant or polluting fancy-a power so necessary to any great increase of intellectual strength and elevation-he doubtless possessed in the fullest measure. And these endowments he possessed

as man.

How painfully affecting is the contrast between this exalted state of intellect, and that

of all other human beings! Does not he feel it, the studious youth, athirst after higher attainments in knowledge, and grieved to find himself so often and so powerfully impeded? How difficult, and frequently impossible, he finds it, to collect his scattered thoughts, and to fix them, and keep them fixed, on the objects of his study! What wild and capricious rovings of imagination! What strange and sudden intrusions of foolish, distracting, or even defiling images! What unwelcome recollections of low, frivolous, sensual, unholy ideas of things past, that memory would fain discard, will force admission! What unprofitable speculations, and visionary dreams of things to come! And these distractions will come upon the spirit, not only when the objects of study are truly important, and worthy of its most fixed and ardent application, but even in spite of the most powerful efforts to shake them off and to be free. Can any proof of the fallen state of man be more complete than is afforded by this impotency of mind, this want of command over its own faculties, this miserable tyrannising of its inferior powers over those by which it was designed that they should be controlled and regulated? Let the

after useful knowledge is confessedly so noble, and so worthy of much sacrifice of time and labour, that, even when sometimes conscious of its wasting influence on the body, he seems almost, if not wholly, justified to himself in pursuing it with unrelaxing efforts. How hardly, then, shall such an one be persuaded! Besides, the decays of strength and the approaches of disease are so gradual, so imperceptible, so insidious, that he becomes a victim almost unawares. Who that passes to-day by the margin of the brightly glistening and rapid stream, and marks the green bank so gay with flowers and apparently so firm, would suspect that the waters are secretly sapping its foundation, and that when he returns to-morrow he shall find that it has sunk, with all its beauty, into the tide, and left in its place a sightless ruin!

But, in these days, the voice of warning needs to be powerfully addressed to those young persons also who are likely to suffer from the prevailing mode of female education. Time was when for them, that instruction was deemed the best which formed them to be adepts in domestic economy; active, thrifty, and notable housewives; when literary

pursuits and elegant accomplishments were regarded as unsuitable to their province, and as having a direct tendency to disqualify them for the discharge of their proper duties. But though the notions then entertained on the subject of female education are now generally allowed to have been too contracted and illiberal, yet the prejudices of what, on some accounts, still deserve to be called the good old times, made a valuable provision for training up a race of healthful and active, as well as useful women. Who can contemplate, without alarm for the consequences, the inordinate time and pains that, in the present day, are bestowed on the acquisition of light accomplishments, the continued hours spent in sedentary occupation, and commonly in a confined and unwholesome atmosphere? To what cause so probable can be ascribed the increase of some prevalent disorders, as to this method of education, which leaves so little opportunity for the cultivation of bodily strength and activity, by the free and plentiful use of exercise in the fresh, enlivening, and invigorating air? Alas for the next generation of husbands and children, if they are to be tended and nursed by sickly wives and mothers! The

want of healthful cheerful activity in household and maternal duties, will be poorly compensated by the sight of faded drawings, or the sound of half-forgotten French phrases, and, now and then, of an ill-played tune on a neglected instrument. But even if considerable proficiency be made in accomplishments, and real ability and skill be acquired, what will they all profit if health be lost?

It can never be too often inculcated, nor too deeply impressed on the minds of young persons, that, while "one thing is needful" in the highest and most absolute sense; while "wisdom," or true religion, "is the principal thing;" the next in importance is health. Without it even religion loses much of its value, in so far as it almost wholly terminates in the benefit of the possessor, who lives in melancholy inability, a stranger to the blessedness of going about doing good. Ask the missionary the value of health, who, sinking under the power of some consuming malady, sees the wretched multitude dying in their sins around him, and can no more warn nor intreat them, nor point to Him who is the way, the truth, and the life. He shall tell you how willingly he would forego all wealth, and learning, and repu