There are many who would attend some of our churches if they could afford it. They are too spirited to sit in the pauper's seat, and they are not able to own a pew, nor to rent one, much less to pay the tax levied upon it in addition. This fact keeps away large numbers, who, though they may not be rich, yet have souls worth as much in the sight of God, as those of their more favored fellow beings; and it keeps them away when there are seats enough unoccupied. There is room enough in the churches in this city for nearly all the people who can conveniently at one time attend them; but that room is too expensive to be obtained. Pews are held as freehold estates; men call them their religious homes, and seem to be more anxious that their privacy should not be disturbed, or their cushions soiled, than they are, that the temple of God should be filled with worshippers. Let this evil be remedied, the aristocracy of our churches abolished, or let us cease to blame people for not filling them.

But were this difficulty obviated, were seats easily obtained by all, and so obtained as to imply on the part of no one an assumption of superiority, or a confession of inferiority, the preaching which is most common is far from being satisfactory, and the wants of the times would by no means be met. I say the preaching which is most common is far from being satisfactory; but not because it is not true. I accuse no preacher of not preaching the truth. The truth is, I believe, preached in all churches, of all denominations, to a certain extent at least; but not the right kind of truth, or not truth under the aspects demanded by the wants of the age, and country. All truth is valuable, but all truths are not equally valuable; and all aspects of the same truths are not at all times, in

all places, equally attractive. The fault I find with preaching in general is, that it is not on the right kind of topics to interest the masses in this age and country. The topics usually discussed may once have been of the highest importance; they may now be very interesting to the scholar, or to the student in his closet, or with his fellow students; but they are, to a great extent, matters of perfect indifference to the many. The many care nothing about the meaning of a Greek particle, or the settling of a various reading; nothing about the meaning of dogmas long since deprived of life, about the manners and customs of a people of whom they may have heard, but in whose destiny they feel no peculiar interest; they are not fed by descriptions of a Jewish marriage feast, a reiteration of Jewish threatenings, nor with beautiful essays, and rounded periods on some petty duty, or some insignificant point in theology. They want strong language, stirring discourses on great principles, which go deep into the universal mind, and strike a cord which vibrates through the universal heart. They want to be directed to the deep things of God and humanity, and enlightened and warmed on matters with which they every day come in contact, and which will be to them matters of kindling thought and strong feeling through eternity.

That our religious institutions, or our modes of dispensing Christian truth, are not in harmony with the wants of the times, is evinced by the increase of infidelity and the success infidels have in their exertions to collect societies and organize opposition to Christianity. There is sustained in this city a society of infidels, free enquirers, I believe they call themselves. Why has this society been collected?

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Not, I will venture to say, because their leader is an infidel. People do not go to hear him because he advocates atheistical or pantheistical doctrines not because he denies Christianity, rejects the Bible, and indulges in various witticisms at the expense of members of the clerical profession; but because he opposes the aristocracy of our churches, and vindicates the rights of the mind. He succeeds, not because he is an infidel, but because he has hitherto shown himself a democrat.

Men are never infidels for the sake of infidelity. Infidelity, - I use not the term reproachfully, — has no charms of its own. There is no charm in looking around on our fellow men as mere plants that spring up in the morning, wither and die ere it is night. It is not pleasant to look up into the heavens, brilliant with their sapphire gems, and see no spirit shining there — over the rich and flowering earth, and see no spirit blooming there abroad upon a world of mute, dead matter, and feel ourselves—alone. It is not pleasant to look upon the heavens as dispeopled of the Gods, and the earth of men, to feel ourselves in the centre of a universal blank, with no soul to love, no spirit with which to commune. I know well what is that sense of loneliness which comes over the unbeliever, the desolateness of soul under which he is oppressed, but I will not attempt to describe it.

I say, then, it is not infidelity, that gives the leader of the infidel party success. It is his defence of free inquiry and of democracy. In vindicating his own right to disbelieve Christianity, he has vindicated the rights of the mind, proved that all have a right to inquire fully into all subjects, and to abide by the honest convictions of their own understandings. In doing this he has met the wants of a large portion of

the communinity, and met them as no church has ever yet been able to meet them. I say not that he himself is a free inquirer, but he proclaims free inquiry as one of the rights of man; and in doing this, he has proclaimed what thousands feel, though they may not generally dare own it. The want to inquire, to ascertain what is truth, what and wherefore we believe, is becoming more and more urgent; we may disown, unchurch, anathematize it, but suppress it we cannot. It is too late to stay the progress of free inquiry. The dams and dykes we construct to keep back its swelling tide are but mere resting places, from which it may break forth in renovated power, and with redoubled fury. It is sweeping on, and, I say, let it sweep on, let it sweep on; the truth has nothing to fear.

Next to the want to inquire, to philosophize, the age is distinguished by its tendency to democracy, and its craving for social reform. Be pleased or displeased as we may, the age is unquestionably tending to deA mocracy; the democratic spirit is triumphing. The millions awake. The masses appear, and every day is more and more disclosed

"The might that slumbers in a peasant's arm."

The voice of the awakened millions rising into new and undreamed of importance, crying out for popular institutions, comes to us on every breeze, and mingles in every sound. All over the Christian world a contest is going on, not as in former times between monarchs and nobles, but between the people and their masters, between the many and the few, the privileged and the unprivileged, and victory, though here and there seeming at first view doubtful, everywhere inclines to the party of the many. Old distinctions are losing their value; titles are becoming less and less able to confer

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dignity; simple tastes, simple habits, simple manners, are becoming fashionable; the simple dignity of man is more and more coveted, and with the discerning it has already become far more honorable to call one simply a MAN than a gentleman.

Now it is to this democratic spirit that the leader of the infidel party appeals, and in which he finds a powerful element of his success. Correspondents of his paper attempt even to identify atheism and democracy. I myself once firmly believed that there could be no social progress, that man could not rise to his true dignity, without the destruction of religion; I really believed that religious institutions, tastes, and beliefs were the greatest, almost the sole, barrier to human improvement; and what I once honestly believed, is now as honestly believed by thousands, who would identify the progress of humanity with the progress of infidelity.

It is, I own, a new state of things, for infidelity to profess to be a democrat. Hobbes, one of the fathers, if not the father, of modern infidelity, had no sympathy with the masses.; Hume and Gibbon dreamed of very little social progress, and manifested no desire to elevate the low, and loosen the chains of the bound. Before Thomas Paine, no infidel writer in our language, to my knowledge, was a democrat, or thought of giving infidelity a democratic tendency. Since his times, the infidel has been fond of calling himself a democrat, and he has pretty generally claimed to be the friend of the masses and the advocate of progress. He now labors to prove the church aristocratic, to prove that it has no regard for the melioration of man's earthly mode of being. Unhappily in proportion as he succeeds, the church furnishes him with new instruments of