"I have no wish to hear you.'

"I care not for that; but hear me you shall. You have given me your message, and I will give you mine. I, sir, was early taught to love God, and I early sought to serve him. I was early religious, and for some years found in religion all the enjoyment I had. Sectarian dissensions sprung up, grieved, and finally disgusted me. They compelled me to ask why I supported Christianity. I asked but could not answer; I went to my minister, and he told me if I doubted I should be damned.”

"And told you the truth," said Mr. Wilson.

"I went to another. another, and still another, and received the same answer. I complained not. I resorted to the Bible, read, re-read it, read every thing I could lay my hands on that promised to throw light on the subject laboring in my mind; I spent years in study; I prayed, and prayed God, by night and by day, to help me. I sought for the truth with my whole heart."

"That is false," interposed one of the clergymen present; no man ever prayed to God for the truth and remained an atheist."

"One article after another of my faith went, till I found myself at last without hope in iminortality or belief in God. I wept at this result; but I said nothing,-sought to unsettle no one's faith, but pursued my way peaceably as a man, a citizen, and a friend. At the request of one, whose request to me is a command, I attended the other day one of your inquiry meetings; you know what passed there. At your request I called here, with what result, you know as well as I. I am here again at your request, and I have thus far, for reasons best known to yourselves, received only insult and abuse. One word therefore to you, and to all who call yourselves ministers of God; I have found you always loud in your professions, but always unable or unwilling to give a reason for the faith you enjoin. I have ever found you in relation to your opponents proud, haughty, overbearing, relentless; professed preachers of peace and love, I have ever found you sowing the seeds of discord, meddling with every one's private affairs, poisoning the cup of domestic bliss, and withering the purest and holiest affections of the human heart. You have brought wrath and hatred into this hitherto peaceful village; you have blasted my hopes of happiness, done me all the injury man can do to man; and what you have done to me you have done to thousands,

and will do, so long as the world endures your profession. You make earth a hell that your own services may be in request-make the people believe in a God of wrath that you may be employed as mediators between them and his vengeance. Did I believe in your imaginary place of punishment, I would say to you in the words of your master, 'Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Hitherto I have treated you with respect; there is war between us now, and earth shall be rid of you, or I will die in the attempt. Farewell. Before you dream of converting the infidel, learn humility, honesty, and good man

ners."

So saying, I left the house and returned to my lodgings. When I was gone the reverend gentlemen looked at one another and smiled; "that young man," said one of them, "would make a most capital preacher were he only on the right side." "Perhaps," said another, "he is nearer right than we should be willing the world should believe." "Never mind," said still another, "the people are superstitious; they will have some kind of worship, and we must let them have their way." These reverend gentlemen it seems understood one another.

CHAPTER XII. -IMMORTALITY.

I pass over several months in which nothing I can bring myself to relate of much importance occurred. Elizabeth and I met a few times after the interview I have mentioned. She was ever the same pure-minded, affectionate girl; but the view which she had taken of her duty to God, and the struggle which thence ensued between religion and love, surrounded as she was by pious friends whose zeal for the soul hereafter far outran their knowledge of what would constitute its real well-being here, preyed upon her health, and threatened the worst results. From those results I raise not the veil.

One tie alone was left me, one alone bound me to my race, and to virtue. My mother, bowed with years and afflictions, still lived, though in a distant part of the country. A letter from a distant relative with whom she resided, informed me that she was very ill, and demanded my presence, as she could not survive many days. I need not say this letter afflicted me. I had not seen my mother for several years; not because I wanted filial affection, but I had rarely been able to do as I would. Poverty is a stern master,

and when combined with talent and ambition, often compels us to seem wanting in most of the better and more amiable affections of our nature. I had always loved and reverenced my mother; but her image rose before me now as it never had before. It looked mournfully upon me, and in the eloquence of mute sorrow seemed to upbraid me with neglect, and to tell me that I had failed to prove myself a good son.

I lost no time in complying with my mother's request. I found her still living, but evidently near her last. She recognized me, brightened up a moment, thanked me for coming to see her, thanked her God that he had permitted her to look once more upon the face of her son, her only child, and to God, the God in whom she believed, who had protected her through life, and in whom she had found. solace and support under all her trials and sorrows, she commended me for time and eternity, with all the fervor of undoubting piety, and the warmth of maternal love. The effort exhausted her; she sunk into a sort of lethargy, which in a few hours proved to be the sleep of death.

I watched by the lifeless body; I followed it to its resting place in the earth; went at twilight and stood by the grave which had closed over it. Do you ask what were my thoughts and feelings?

I was a disbeliever, but I was a man, and had a heart; and not the less a heart because few shared its affections. But the feelings with which professed believers and unbelievers meet death, either for themselves or for others, are very nearly similar. When death comes into the circle of our friends and sunders the cords of affection, it is backward we look, not forward, and we are with the departed as he lives in our memories, not as he may be in our hopes. The hopes nurtured by religion are very consoling when grief exists only in anticipation, or after time has hallowed. it; but they have little power in the moment when it actually breaks in upon the soul, and pierces the heart. Besides, there are few people who know how to use their immortality. Death to the great mass of believers as well as of unbelievers comes as the king of terrors, in the shape of a total extinction of being. The immortality of the soul is assented to rather than believed,-believed rather than lived. And withal it is something so far in the distant future, that till long after the spirit has left the body, we think and speak of the loved ones as no more. Rarely does the

believer find that relief in the doctrine of immortality, which he insists on with so much eloquence in his controversy with unbelievers. He might find it, he ought to find it, and one day will; but not till he learns that man is immortal, and not merely is to be immortal.

I lingered several weeks around the grave of my mother, and in the neighborhood where she had lived. It was the place where I had passed my own childhood and youth. It was the scene of those early associations which become the dearer to us as we leave them the further behind. I stood where I had sported in the freedom of early childhood; but I stood alone, for no one was there with whom I could speak of its frolics. One feels singularly desolate when one sees only strange faces, and hears only strange voices in what was the home of one's early life.

I returned to the village where I resided when I first introduced myself to my readers. But what was that spot to me now? Nature had done much for it, but nature hierself is very much what we make her. There must be beauty in our souls, or we shall see no loveliness in her face; and beauty had died out of my soul. She who might have recalled it to life, and thrown its hues over all the world was--but of that I will not speak.

It was now that I really needed the hope of immortality. The world was to me one vast desert, and life was without end or aim. The hope of immortality is not needed to enable us to bear grief, to meet great calamities. These can be, as they have been, met by the atheist with a serene brow and a tranquil pulse. We need not the hope of immortality in order to meet death with composure. The manner in which we meet death depends altogether more on the state of our nerves than the nature of our hopes. But we want it when earth has lost its gloss of novelty, when our hopes have been blasted, our affections withered, and the shortness of life and the vanity of all human pursuits have come home to us, and made us exclaim, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity;" we want then the hope of immortality to give to life an end, an aim.

We all of us at times feel this want. The infidel feels it early in life. He learns all too soon, what to him is a withering fact, that man does not complete his destiny on earth. Man never completes any thing here. What then shall he do if there be no hereafter? With what courage can I betake myself to my task? I may begin-but the grave

lies between me and the completion. Death will come to interrupt my work, and compel me to leave it unfinished. This is more terrible to me than the thought of ceasing to be. I could almost-at least, I think I could-consent to be no more, after I had finished my work, achieved my destiny; but to die before my work is completed, while that destiny is but begun,-this is the death which comes to me indeed as a "King of Terrors."

The hope of another life to be the complement of this, steps in to save us from this death, to give us the courage and the hope to begin. The rough sketch shall hereafter become the finished picture, the artist shall give it the last touch at his easel; the science we had just begun shall be completed, and the incipient destiny shall be achieved. Fear not to begin, thou hast eternity before thee in which to end.

I wanted, at the time of which I speak, this hope. I had no future. I was shut up in this narrow life as in a cage. All for whom I could have lived, labored, and died, were gone, or worse than gone. I had no end, no aim. My affections were driven back to stagnate and become putrid in my own breast. I had no one to care for. The world was to me as if it were not; and yet a strange restlessness came over me. I could be still nowhere. I roved listlessly from object to object, my body was carried from place to place, I knew not why, and asked not myself wherefore. And yet change of object, change of scene, wrought no change within me. I existed, but did not live. He who has no future, has no life.

CHAPTER XIII.- -THE REFORMER.

It is no part of my plan to give a minute history of my life. My wanderings extended far and lasted a weary while; but time at length began to exert its healing influence, and I to return slowly toward life. I gradually began to make observations on what was passing around me, and was at length arrested by the imperfections of the social state. Wherever I went I beheld injustice, oppression, inequality in wealth, social position, moral and intellectual culture, the many everywhere toiling for the few. Here is a man well made, with vigorous body and active limbs, an intellect capable of grappling with the weightiest problems of science, and a heart of loving all things which are beautiful and good; and yet is he compelled to toil and rack