and from the enjoyments that at first sweetened it. If the mention of our well-deserving can bring but a troubled joy, what can the rehearsal of our ill-deservings awaken in us but an unmingled misery? I suppose that remorse, coupled, as it always must be, with the torment of fear, is the most harrowing grief of which the mind is capable. Here are displayed the features of Divine Judgment. Here is opened the gate of infernal pain. I once heard Dr. Chalmers preach, and the chief aim of his discourse was to show that the anguish of a convict soul at the recollection of its guilt transcends all those descriptions of penal fire which have been chosen to represent it. This truth has been made as impressive by the novels that every one reads, as it could be by the eloquence of the most famous divine. We all admit the warning fact. And as I meditate upon it, I say, If I could ever think of such a thing as weighing against each other the pleasures and pains of memory, this consideration alone would make the scale sink at once that was charged with such a weight of sorrows.

It has

I have thus tried to follow out a short course of analytic thought upon a great practical subject. I know. that I have but just touched some of its borders. more points than I have fingers, and it is too broad for my hand. I will speculate on it no further, but will gather up some conclusions from what has now passed through my mind, that I may employ them for future guidance. The moral uses of memory are all that need much concern me, or any man. To these the grand laws of our being have chief respect. In these every question of the mere enjoyments or troubles that we derive from it may well be swallowed up. I am made to look "before and after"; but to look after, only that I may look before the better. I will not be living indolently and unprofitably in the past time. Its tents have been struck, and I will resist the tendency to keep exploring backward for the trampled grass, and the dear fires now turned to ashes, which they once covered with their protection. I will not try to color up with life what has faded into dreams; and I will not suffer the shadows of what is gone to be lengthened and deepened by my unavailing regrets. Hope isbetter than memory, and faith is better than hope; and a faithful employment and en

joyment of each flying day may be made as good as the whole three. No. I will not remember to repine, or even to repent. How should I be profited by either, or by one any more than the other? What is wasted can

not be replenished thus, and what has been done amiss cannot, by such a going over again, be done better. I do not really live but in what I am doing, and in what I am, at the present moment. I will go back for instruction, but not for any amusement of an idle mind or a vain or a passionate heart. I will seize and redeem from that hollow repository, where nothing speaks that has consciousness and nothing moves that has breath, the instruments that will be useful for further activity; and nothing that I can help shall be sought out from it of meaner value. If I bring forth the faded records of now many years, it shall be to write thankfulness upon all their margins, and to add other and fresh pages, that, with God's blessing, may be brighter than they.

Every one may have observed, who would, that the memory is the first of our better powers to yield to the pressure of age. The judgment is the last to give way. The affections resist it for ever. The inference is obvious enough. We may attach too sensitive an importance to the first of these. The last is the immortal sphere in which we are lovingly to dwell; and it is this that calls for our chief concern.

I am now standing at that point of life when even the forbearance of Roman computation disallowed the title of young, and when the rigor of the very Roman discipline dismissed its soldier from the field. But I remember the instances not a few of those who, after the "fourscore years" which we speak of full often enough as nothing but "labor and sorrow," rode under their helmets still; and I firmly believe that there are qualities of youth which do not care much for the calendar, but can live at the core of our being when they have shrunk from the limb and dimmed from the eye and lost color from the face of man and woman. We have our service too, though not in armor. It is not Time that dismisses us from it, and,

In Bayle's article on Ménage, there are are some interesting illustrations of this fact. There are also some fine Latin lines, written by that prodigy of memory, Ménage himself, in whom this faculty failed when he became old, but was restored to him as he grew older.

with grace to speed, we shall not be incapable of it. We talk too readily of becoming such exempts and such incompetents. We grow old in imagination too fast,nous autres, and so are less than our fathers. Whatever dreary result the Heavenly Providence may ordain, let me take care that it shall be the work of that Providence alone, and that no sick fancies or startled apprehensions of mine lay any hand there.

My subject here fairly closes, and, in fact, overstepped itself before it closed. But I will set down one word more, if it is only that I may not forget it. My thoughts have been lately turned towards an account, that might be made very interesting, and would of itself be full of encouragement,- that of the intellectual exploits of the aged. More than sixty years had turned their backs upon Bacon and Leibnitz and Locke, more than seventy upon Kant and Reid, when their most memora ble writings were begun. But these were philosophers. I will remember, then, that the sun of more than threescore summers was shining on the darkened eyes of Milton when his Samson Agonistes, and the great sequel to the greatest sacred epic of our language and of modern times, sprung to light. St. Augustine revised for circulation the works that amaze modern scholarship with the profound intricacies of their subjects and the huge volumes of their contents, when he was seventy-three years old. Cassiodorus, a statesman before he became a monastic, was ninety-three when his favorite study of Language found him still employed with his pen. The most learned of the Romans, Varro, was an octogenarian when he wrote his treatise on Farming; and, best of all, it was dedicated to Fundania, his wife, at whose instance it was composed. The most illustrious scourger of Roman degeneracy, Juvenal, was but little short of that age, when his thirteenth and fifteenth satires showed that nothing of the former vigor or skill was lost. Strabo, the prince of Grecian geographers, was still further advanced when his folios were first taken in hand. Aristobulus, one of the generals of Alexander the Great, made it the amusement of his eighty-fourth year to write the history of his young commander. Plato was laboring cheerfully upon his books of The Laws, at a period of life when the ninetieth Psalm, if he could have read it in its un

translated Hebrew, would have pointed its grim text at him, but in vain. Sophocles, the warrior dramatist, wrote his "Edipus at Colonus" at the age of ninety; and the critics who find it somewhat tamer than his "Edipus King," find only the natural difference between a palace and a cottage scene, and between the Theban hero him; self in his martial and his secluded days. There is nothing in the piece that is unworthy of its author's fame. Isocrates, Milton's "old man eloquent," spanned almost a century, and kept his reputation to the last. At the age of eighty-two he composed the masterly oration in which he defended his profession against the aspersions of Plato. Then there was Theophrastus, the disciple, friend, and successor of "the mighty Stagirite," to whom that most really philosophic mind of the Grecian world committed his writings. He was a scholar and a teacher, and something better than that, a man of great public and private service. Tradition assigns to him an age further advanced than can be soberly believed in; and when he left the world, it was not as if delivered from a prison, but taking a reluctant farewell of the light. He chided with Nature, Cicero tells us, that she should bestow a protracted existence upon the stag and the crow, who did not need it, and withhold it from man, who could continually bring so much to pass. He complained that, when he was but beginning to see things as they were, he should be "extinguished." Doubtless he was unreasonable in that complaint; and doubtless he was in error when he supposed that human improvement would be advanced by the further extension of the term of human life. But who can help admiring the courageous manhood that could express itself in such words as his? And who will refuse to bless that Nature with which he found fault, that she has made it possible to carry our poor faculties here on the earth so far and so well?

Examples such as have now come to my mind might be multiplied to almost any extent by those who would make this subject one of special research. I have no purpose in pursuing it even so far as this, but to record an animating lesson against the desponding thoughts

* Grote's Greece, Vol. VIII. p. 490, note.

that tempt men to give over too soon, and allow that portion of their permitted time to be darkened which most needs to be cheered, and keep them looking back and hanging back, instead of going on with their faces forward and their feet in the path, till they "rest and stand in their lot,"ay, and stand steadfastly, too,"at the end of the days."

One who neither expects nor asks, for his part, that this end may be set a very great way off, who has no achievements in prospect to solicit the notice of men, and who is conscious that he has not the least fame of any kind either to keep or to win, sends out this private meditation to see if it can find a reader, and to try if it can be of some little benefit elsewhere than within himself.

ART. IV. - ROMANISM IN ITS WORSHIP.*

It is commonly thought that the true and specific service which the Protestant Reformation rendered to the Christian religion consists in the redemption from Papal authority, and the substitution of private judgment for ecclesiastical infallibility as a rule of faith. We fully appreciate this deliverance, which, however imperfect as yet, was happily initiated by the Saxon Reformer, and has steadily advanced since the Saxon schism.

But it seems to us that an equally important result of that schism was the revolution effected by it in Christian worship, its abolition of the Mass and of idolism; the preponderance given to intellectual over material action in the service of the Church; the substitution of intelligent speech for manipulation and dumb show.

* 1. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Ecumenical Council of Trent, celebrated under the Sovereign Pontiffs Paul III., Julius III., and Pius IV. Translated by the REV. J. WATERWORTH. To which are prefixed Essays on the External and Internal History of the Council. - Session XXI. "On the Sacrifice of the Mass." Session XXV. “ Purgatory. Invocation of Saints. Images." London: C. Dolman. 1848. 8vo. pp. 326. 2. Rome Paienne. Par NAPOLÉON ROUSSEL. Paris. 1848. Tract. pp. 32.