ruins to gratify a satanic love of sin. What fathomless depths of guilt in the being of so great a sinner! His heart is a pestilent Dead Sea, in which at least one Sodom and Gomorrah is engulphed, from whose surface deadly exhalations rise, and on whose banks not a green thing grows. - Such is the character of the libertine; and now we inquire how it is formed? What is the philosophy of its formation? In reply, we answer, it lies in the operation of the laws considered the force and direction which their united action gives to all the passions and propensities of human nature. For these are ruled and reined by association, imitation, assimilation and habit. These together conspire to make the man what he is. The base workmanship was not wrought in a day. Long since he began to mingle in scenes that created in his mind polluting associations. His eye rested upon obscene pictures or characters. His mind communed with fictitious and disgusting tales. He resorted to the billiard-room, the theatre, and at last to the midnight symposia. Guilty association was wed to association, imitation began to make rough sketches of the terrible reality, and assimilation gradually moulded over the disposition and the taste, repetition succeeding repetition, until the most damning vice was wrought into a masterly habit. Thus the united action of these laws has imbruted humanity, and stricken out from the soul the last trace of every manly virtue. They have haunted the imagination with the ghosts of ugly vices, and inscribed the walls of the memory all over with obscene figures and disgusting sentences. Could we turn that filthy mind inside out, and trace upon its imperishable parchment the base inscriptions, we should not wonder that the distorted mental and moral vision saw only the gilded forms of impurity. I have seen a shattered building whose interior walls were literally covered with vile pictures and viler sentiments. It was to me an expressive symbol of the depraved minds of those who had been there to scratch and scrawl. Upon those walls the law of association had inscribed what it had before inscribed upon the mind. Immoral men had been unconsciously, but with master-stroke, delineating their characters there-truthful auto-biographies. So with the libertine whose character is drawn above. Another law having to do with the formation of character is that of Hereditary Developments. Estates descend from father to son with no less certainty than do some marked traits of character, both good and evil. Procreated and perpetuated, inborn and inbred, they leave their impressions deep down in the soul as clear and undoubted as "footprints" upon the "old red sandstone.” If they are pernicious characteristics it is well nigh as difficult to eradicate them as it is to eradicate consumption and scrofula that are begotten with one's existence and tnt the blood to the third and fourth generation. Without prolonging remarks upon this law, one character may be cited, by way of illustration, the leading element of which is frequently inherited. It is the cynic — the man who discovers few attractions in his fellow-men, but uncounted delinquences. In a season of counter opinions and principles he is a most uncomfortable companion in the political world, and in the church, as an eccentric divine has said, "the crookedest stick that grows on Zion's hill." He is of very ancient pedigree, tracing back the ancestral line to a sect of strange philosophers, called cynics, who lived in Pontus about three hundred years before Christ. They gloried in disliking what other men loved. In others words, their vocation was fault-finding. Diogenes, the old bachelor who lived in a tub, belonged to that sect. He saw so little good in mankind that he ran through the streets at midday with a lantern in his hand, declaring that he was searching for an honest man. The character to whom allusion is made is an off-shoot of that ancient stock—a legitimate descendant of old Diogenes. He passes through the world eyeing every body askance, seeing nothing well done unless done by himself. When he handles character he is a complete anatomist, thrusting the tongue's dissecting knife through the veins and arteries of reputation at a most fearful rate, leaving nothing but a ghostly skeleton when the work is completed. His fort lies in this anatomical investigation of character. There is only one strange thing in the science, and that is, he dissects to discover all the putrid ulcers, and huge tumors, and festering sores possible-the faults of human character-disappointed only when no disease is found. A true picture of himself and comrades at their work may be seen in a rotten carcass, overrun with the cynics of a lower order, and never so happy as when devouring the dissolving carrion. Such is the cynic; and a close observation will satisfy every person that in a majority of instances this feature of his character is inherited. Run back in the lineal survey, and often it will be found that his father, and earlier ancestors, possessed the same characteristic. It has come down from generation to generation like the heir-loom or wasting homestead. The Law of Conscience holds an important place in the formation of character. We mean not the faculty itself, so much as the law by which it is controlled -the same as that which governs all our powers, viz. It is strengthened by use, it is impaired by disuse. It is not by reading moral essays that this faculty is improved. It is by a careful regard to moral distinctions that it becomes tender and active, by asking the question concerning our actions, is this right? is that wrong? thus bringing all our acts to a signal test. Facts prove to us that the conscience may become a more powerful agency of restraint than even statutes and decrees. We read of men whose guilty actions were undisclosed, and yet, who seemed to themselves," in the language of Melville, 66 "to be surrounded with witnesses and avengers, so that the sound of their own foot-tread has startled them as if it had been the piercing cry of an accuser, and the rustling of every tree and the murmur of every brook has sounded like the utterance of one clamorous for their punishment. They have felt, as though, in the absence of all accusation from beings of their own race, they had arrayed against themselves the whole visible creation, sun, moon, and stars, and forests and waters growing vocal that they might publish their crimes." True, such examples of its power are not the result of its healthful discipline; but we know that a similar power it may acquire by a careful and constant regard to its decisions; so that a man would almost as soon dare the flaming wrath of God as the lightning of its conviction, or provoke the trump of Gabriel as the thunder of its voice. Every time a person does right he fulfils this law, and gains thereby a victory over his base propensities, and is absolutely laying up a revenue of moral strength for seasons of temptation. Just as in his business he lays in a capital upon which to settle back when hard times convulse the mercantile community, and tottle down mighty ware-houses; so here every instance of regard to the decisions of conscience makes a man stronger for good, builds up his character as if in solid granite, and increases his moral force to a revenue against hard times that come in morals as well as in the trades seasons of temptation and moral peril when men must stand or fall upon their own tried virtues, as young eagles are jostled from their nests to be saved by their own pinions, or fall and perish. We cannot too highly value such an achieving element of character. On the other hand, every time this law is violated it blinds a man to moral distinctions, it diminishes his moral power, it overcomes his aversion to sin, so that the perpetration of a wrong which once would have caused his feelings to revolt, is now taken upon the soul without remorse. By every re peated violation of its mandates he is less and less impelled to do right. Hence, it follows that whatever blinds men to moral distinctions is sadly violating this law, no matter how trifling the act. The most trifling immoral act, from the very fact that its immorality may not be so readily noticed, may be most dangerous. Here we meet a fact which this philosophy explains. Many a young man of supposed integrity has commenced. business with as much credit as he could desire, and closed with as little. To many it is almost unaccountable, while yet an examination may show it to be less strange. There are certain characteristics of the times, which tend directly to blind men to moral distinctions, and hence to violate the law of conscience. Two are presented for illustration. The first is that corrupt public sentiment which bestows its honors upon vice instead of virtue, or which, at least, does not make a distinction between right and wrong in conferring reward. We speak here upon no doubtful theme, but of what the eye beholds. We see that in filling the offices of the land, the distinction between virtue and vice is almost annihilated. There are men sharing largely in official honors in whose souls virtue does not find an abiding place —a sound moral principle would die there from utter loneliness; men, who stripped of official badges, would be admitted to the circle of your sons and daughters no sooner than a serpent or an alligator;· -as soon would you turn a raging ox into your blooming garden to pasture, and trample on the rose and flowering almond, as admit them to the familiar intercourse of home; -for among them are the intemperate, the profane, the vulgar, and the licentious. - Mark a single fact with the common people. Attach some sounding title to even an immoral man's name, as archbishop, duke, or king, and send him through the streets, and old men and matrons, young men and maidens will throng the |