Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/14

 hope to gain a hearing. It is true, also, that the appetite has grown with its unwholesome nourishment; and now, as by a self-created necessity, all seem to be absorbed into the tide; and it is rare to find any cause advocated in the plain, open, straightforward tone which was once the characteristic of our land. Not simply our periodical literature, or our journals, but our courts of law, and that branch of the legislature which is liable to be affected by popular taste, are infected by the mal-aria of this destructive habit. Man's happiness, or God's displeasure, domestic misery or national sin, are continually a jest. Adultery, fornication, theft, drunkenness, lying, are daily matters of sport. If justice is to be perverted, men's minds blinded, sin to escape unpunished, a jest is the refuge; caricatures are the vehicles of public instruction, and "a mock at sin" the source of public amusement.

It is indeed strange, and a lamentable part of this sad merriment, that many right-minded people are so little sickened at it, or so little express their weariness. But so it is with every other prevailing sin; those who live amidst it are, in their several degrees, infected by it: the fineness of our moral perceptions is blunted by the very acquaintance with sin, all mention whereof we at first loathed; our ears become untuned to the chords of Heaven, by listening constantly to the jarring sounds of earth, and are less offended by their discordancy. Most men feel themselves compelled to an over-acquaintance with the things of the day, and so are insensibly inured to its wretchedness, and deem it irremediable. They are indeed mistaken; the more earnest spirit is not fled: it sleeps only, or rather is drugged by these continued poisonous appliances; and brighter days may yet come, when our countrymen shall again be spoken to, not as members of a vast machine, or as the slaves of temporal interests, but as responsible immortal agents, as Christians, as members of Christ the Son of God.

It is one consolation, that if all our outward privileges, yea, every thing except truth, be lost, then the temptation of ap-