ts to
providential direction, and his invariable habit of vindicating the
divine goodness under dispensations apparently the most unfavorable."

Here Sir John left me, and I could not forbear pursuing the subject in
soliloquy as I proceeded in my walk. I reflected with admiration that
Mr. Stanley, in his religious conversation, rendered himself so useful,
because instead of the uniform nostrum of _the drop and the pill_, he
applied a different class of arguments, as the case required, to
objectors to the different parts of Christianity; to ill informed
persons who adopted a partial gospel without understanding it as a
scheme, or embracing it as a whole; to those who allow its truth merely
on the same ground of evidence that establishes the truth of any other
well authenticated history, and who, satisfied with this external
evidence, not only do not feel its power on their own heart, but deny
that it has any such influence on the hearts of others; to those who
believe the gospel to be a mere code of ethics; to their antipodes, who
assert that Christ has lowered the requisitions of the law; to Lady
Belfield, who rests on her charities--Sir John, on his correctness--Lady
Aston, on her austerities; to this man, who values himself solely on the
stoutness of his orthodoxy; to another, on the firmness of his
integrity; to a third, on the peculiarities of his party, he addresses
himself with a particular view to their individual errors. This he does
with such a discriminating application to the case as might lead the
ill-informed to suspect that he was not equally earnest in those other
points, which, not being attacked, he does not feel himself called on to
defend, but which, had they been attacked, he would then have defended
with equal zeal as relative to the discussion. To crown all, I
contemplated that affectionate warmth of heart, that sympathizing
kindness, that tenderness of feeling, of which the gay and the
thoughtless fancy that they themselves possess the monopoly, while they
make over harshness, austerity, and want of charity to religious men, as
their inseparable characteristics.

These qualities excite in my heart a feeling compounded of veneration,
and of love. And oh! how impossible it is, even in religion itself, to
be disinterested! All these excellences I contemplate with a more
heartfelt delight from the presumptuous hope that I may one day have the
felicity of connecting myself still more intimately with t