d life are
directed to the increase of human enjoyment, the incitement of human
desire. Need we wonder, then, if religion, which prescribes an
_abstinence_ from the pleasures of sin, which enjoins continence to the
sensual, sobriety to the drunkard, reflection to the unheeding,
gentleness to the irascible, restraint to the voluptuous, probity to the
avaricious, punishment to the profligate, meets in such an age with very
few votaries? Some, doubtless, will always be found, who, disgusted with
the profligacy with which they are surrounded, are led only the more
rapidly to a life of rectitude and duty by such vice; but how many are
they amidst the crowd of sensual and unreflecting? Perhaps one in
twenty. The great mass pass quietly by on the other side; they do not
say there is no God, but they live altogether without God in the world.
In vain are efforts made to reclaim the vicious, to bring up their
children in the way they should go, in the hope that when they are old
they will not desert it. The grown-up will not go to church; in
manufacturing towns they will not even put on Sunday's clothes, but
revel in intoxication or sloth in their working-dresses all the Lord's
day; except when softened by misfortune, or roused by calamity, they
will not listen, even at home, to the voice of religious counsel.
Children may learn their catechism, and repeat their responses at
school; but when they become men and women, will they resist the
temptations by which they are surrounded? Numerous congregations are
often suddenly formed by the planting of an eloquent and earnest divine
into a densely peopled and neglected locality; but where does the
congregation in general come from? Go into the thinned or deserted
churches or chapels in its vicinity, and you will find you have only
_transferred_ the serious and Christian community from one place of
worship to another.

Nor let it be said that these dangers affect only a limited portion of
the community, and that, provided only society holds together, and
property is upon the whole secure, it is of little consequence to the
great bulk of the nation whether its criminals are doubling or tripling
every ten years, whether its convicts are hanged, imprisoned, or
transported. Doubtless that is the view taken by the majority of men,
and which ever makes them resist so strenuously any measures calculated
to arrest the general evils by a forced contribution from all classes of
the state. But is