o find plausible
objections to justify their dislike; and while they conceal, even from
themselves, the real motive of their aversion, the vigilance with which
they pry into the characters of men who are reckoned pious, is exercised
with the secret hope of finding faults enough to confirm their
prejudices."

"As a general truth, you are perfectly right," said Mr. Carlton; "but at
the period to which I allude, I had now got to that stage of my
progress, as to be rather searching for instances to invite than to
repel me in my inquiry."

"You will grant, however," said I, "that it is a common effect of
prejudice to transfer the fault of a religious man to religion itself.
Such a man happens to have an uncouth manner, an awkward gesture, an
unmodulated voice; his allusions may be coarse, his phraseology quaint,
his language slovenly. The solid virtues which may lie disguised under
these incumbrances go for nothing. The man is absurd, and therefore
Christianity is ridiculous. Its truth, however, though it may be
eclipsed, can not be extinguished. Like its divine Author, it is the
same yesterday, to-day, and forever."

"There was another repulsive circumstance," replied Mr. Carlton: "the
scanty charities both of Tyrrel and his new friends, so inferior to the
liberality of my father and of Mr. Flam, who never professed to be
governed by any higher motive than mere feeling, strengthened my
dislike. The calculations of mere reason taught me that the religious
man who does not greatly exceed the man of the world in his
liberalities, falls short of him; because the worldly man who gives
liberally, acts above his principle, while the Christian who does no
more, falls short of his. And though I by no means insist that
liberality is a certain indication of piety, yet I will venture to
assert that the want of the one is no doubtful symptom of the absence of
the other.

"I next resolved to watch carefully the conduct of another description
of Christians, who come under the class of the formal and the decent.
They were considered as more creditable, but I did not perceive them to
be more exemplary. They were more absorbed in the world, and more
governed by its opinions. I found them clamorous in defense of the
church in words, but neither adorning it by their lives, nor embracing
its doctrines in their hearts. Rigid in the observance of some of its
external rites, but little influenced by its liberal principles, and
charitable spi