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elevate man-not to trample down his spirit, his dignity, and his hopes, and" "You are preaching again, my dear J——," interrupted Alice, "so I must call you down to the level of ordinary conversation. Of one thing I am satisfied in regard to your religion, Mr. Fearon's declaration to the contrary notwithstanding; it will do to die by-for to that fact I have witnessed several examples since I have sojourned with you here." "I will furnish you with the account of another, and very striking one," said Miss J-. "It is contained in a letter from a young minister in our connection to my uncle.'

She took the letter from her scrip, and read the account as follows: "I was last week riding in fulfilment of a round of appointments, when I met a young man and woman in a dearborn, with a coffin between them, which, on our stopping to converse, they informed me contained the corpse of a sister of theirs, in her 19th year, who had deceased at the house of another sister in Mt. Pleasant, and they were taking the corpse to inter it in the family burial place. Could you not officiate on the occasion?' they inquired. I informed them it was not possible, and inquired how it happened that I was applied to? when I had always understood the young woman to be of a very different faith.

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she was till within a month or two of her death,' was the reply, and it grieved her sister, in whose house she died, very much, that she should adopt your faith at so critical a time.' But so it was-one minister was sent for after another by her friends, to effect a change in her views, but in vain. Reasoning and threatening were equally ineffectual. I have been living,' she would sayas you all know, in daily expectation of death for the last five months-I have in that time reflected much on religion. Without other aid than that of my bible, I have settled into my present persuasion-and can you now think to frighten me out of opinions which have been adopted under such circumstances? It cannot be; I am immoveably made up to die in them!' I knew there was a little society of universalists in the place where she died, composed of some most estimable persons, and I inquired whether her sister was so hard-hearted as not to send for one of them. They informed me, that, on the contrary, the poor young woman was kept as ignorant as possible of the very existence of such a society. Oh! what

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would I not have given to have been but one hour by her dying pillow! that I might have dilated upon that impartial and unbounded love, to whose hands in that trying juncture she was so calmly entrusting her all of hope and happiness for ever. But she died alone, poor girl! Still it was a consolation to me to know, that her faith proved equal to the severe trial to which it was subjected.""Let me interrupt your reading here," said Alice; "supposing they could have extorted from the fears of the dying girl a retraction of her principles, what object would they have gained? would such retraction, wrung from her weakness, have atoned for errors deliberately adopted in the strength of her faculties ?" "If, by any means," answered Miss F-., they could have succeeded in wringing from her a denial of her faith, they would thereby have accomplished an important party purpose; the circumstance would have been loudly trumpeted forth as an evidence that the Universalist belief will not do to die by.' I have known the death-beds of the young and inexperienced to be haunted for this special end! Still, we may adopt a more charitable view of their conduct: their efforts may have been stimulated by the weak supposition that the Creator will damn mortals for their errors of opinion! a supposition which does great injustice to his character, unquestionably. But we will proceed with the letter" * "At a conference prayermeeting in the town, on the sabbath evening following this melancholy incident, a self-conceited sprig of divinity arose, and after the usual groans and distortions of countenance, delivered himself to the following effect. My friends, the young woman who was interred in our grave-yard a few days since, and who died in rebellion against God, and rejection of his truth, was offered a conveyance to a protracted meeting some time before her decease, but she refused to avail of it, and now-Oh!-Oh !— Oh!-she's gone where protracted-meeting opportunities will no more be afforded her!'

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“And who, think you, was this young saint? what were his pretensions? I will state a fact from which you may judge. He had had the charge of the school in that district, but was deprived of the same about a month before the delivery of the above recorded speech, for having repeatedly taken indelicate VOL. I.-C

No. 2.

liberties with the youug females entrusted to his care! This is an unexaggerated truth."

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"I have known," said our heroine, "just such lumpish boobies in Connecticut; and they could deliver themselves quite as edifyingly in conference prayer-meetings. That is a species of meeting to which I was accustomed at home from my infancy; and for as long back as I can remember, Deacon Snaffle invariably took the lead in it. I doubt if he once failed in all that time, to thank the Lord, that while others who are as good by nature as we are, and much better by practice, are trying the a-w-e-ful realities of eternity, we continue to be the spa-red monuments of thy dis-tin-guish-ing grace and mercy.' The good man's voice was so cracked, that its sounds wonderfully resembled the monotonous jingle of a cow-bell. I have often checked my sister Charity, for nicknaming him Old Brindle,' which was the name of a favourite bell-cow of ours. 'Old Brindle,' she would say, 'wants to make out that hell contains better folk than we are! I'm sure then it can't want for good society. But what are we to think of our Creator's justice, if he does indeed damn many, who are much better than others whom he saves? We could none of us answer the questions of the playful girl; so we all united in chiding her for what we termed her wickedness in asking them." "There is an admirable stoicism," said Miss J. "in our manner of talking about hell, and its inhabitants. Our bigotry damns men very liberally, and saves them very sparingly. Woe to us all if our Creator were as indifferent to our eternal interests as we seem to be to those of one another! My grandfather, the old squire, who, like most old people, is very garrulous, often entertains me with the Scotchman's prayer:

'Lord bless me and my wife,
My son John and his wife;
Us four,

No more, my Lord, I care for no more.""

CHAPTER VI.

WERE you ever present, reader, at an universalist association? If you were, you need not that I describe one to you; if not, my advice to you is that you witness one for yourself as soon as pos

sible; you will thereby obtain a better idea of such a meeting than any verbal description of mine can give you: and, moreover, there are shades of difference in the same thing at different times, and in different places. You must therefore be content for the present with a sketch of that which took place in Universalia, and was the one referred to in the chaste and classical note of Dolly Trowler.

My soul! it is a goodly sight to see some fifteen or twenty hundred persons together, with eager attention, and joy-beaming eyes, listening to the embassage of pardon and love from heaven! No sighs of anguish are heard there, I trow; no screams of terror; far other music greets the ear than that arising from crushed hopes and broken hearts; for there are unfolded the riches of divine grace, as revealed in the covenant of promise.

"And there, in strains as sweet as angels use,
The gospel whispers peace."

Among the hearers on that occasion, was one who had been confined to her bed for many years from a paralytic stroke; yet even she had been brought a distance of forty miles to enjoy the happy influences of this glad meeting. The wagon containing the couch on which she lay was drawn close against the church window, which was left open in order that the accents of mercy from the preacher's lips might reach her ears. It is scarcely possible, methinks, to be present on such an occasion without appreciating the apostolic exclamation, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth glad tidings; that publisheth peace; that saith to Zion, thy God liveth; that preacheth good tidings of good!"

The intervals between the times of worship being too short to admit of the congregation repairing to their respective homes for refreshment, provisions, in basket loads, were taken to the place occupied for the transaction of business, (which was the school house afore-described,) and were spread out on a common table, to which, without respect to rank, or condition, or opinions, all that would come might come, and partake freely," without money and without price." Had you been there, reader, you could not, for the life of you, have distinguished between the clergy and the laics. All were on a parity; all distinctions of cast were lost sight of; all individualities were merged in the

mass: and as one family all rejoiced together in a common and glorious hope.

Oh, but I would like passing well to be able to give you the outline of the sermons delivered at this meeting! but space will not permit. The general themes were :-The immeasurable love of God as manifested to man through Christ Jesus; the perfect wisdom and benevolence of all the divine dispensations, throughout all space and all duration; the happiness inevitably attendant upon virtue, and misery upon vice; man's obligations to man, and to God; and how the due discharge of these is promotive of public and private good; the resurrection of all mankind to an incorruptible, immortal, and glorious state; the final extinction of death, suffering, sin; and the reconciliation of all intelligences to their all-perfect and benevolent Creator; that he may be all in all. These are but the general and more prominent topics; but within this grand outline many beautiful particulars were comprised. I am tempted to give you a sketch of the closing discourse, by Mr. S.; from it you may, with some approach to accuracy, infer the general character of the whole.

His text was from Matthew 6, 34: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself-Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." "It seems the scope and purpose of the popular theology," said the preacher, "to shed a frightful gloom upon man's vision of the future; to people that future with horrid phantoms, and thereby to encumber him with perplexities and harassing forecasts of evil; as if the brief path from the cradle to death were not already sufficiently thorny and tearful. The advice contained in the text, must have been designed by the benevolent Savior, as a preventive of this superstitious folly on the part of weak and blind humanity.

"If man is indeed," continued Mr. S. "ushered into the world an infant demon, full of malignant hatred toward his Creator, (of whom he is utterly ignorant, as of all things else,) and a subject of that Creator's wrath, and that wrath has kindled for his spirit, in a world beyond the grave, a furnace of intense and unquenchable fires; and man has but the short and precarious term of his mortal life allowed him, within which to appease that wrath and avoid those fires; if all this be the case, then indeed is his utmost solicitude about the future fully justified; and

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