his newly-formed taste. He runs the round of fashion. Balls, and cards, and their almost invariable concomitant, wine, become his chief joy. He becomes wholly a man of pleasure, and known not where to look for happiness, but in the exhilarations of mirthful music, and wine, and deep play.

Who has not often witnessed such transformations as the above? But again we see this same person, touched by some heavy affliction, at once stopped short in his career of pleasure. He abandons all the haunts of hilarity. He returns to the bosom of his family. He begins to inquire for what purpose God made him, and to what purpose he should consecrate his life." He reads his Bible. He prays to God for guidance. Before his reflecting mind, eternity is opened, and immortality dwells in his thoughts. He loses all relish for whist, and cotillions, and wonders that he ever could have found any pleasure in them. A new world is open before him, and new motives inspire him. He begins to find a new joy in communion with God, in coöperating with Christians for the conversion of the world. His spirit of enterprise is called into delightful action in the field of expansive benevolence. You now find him at the conference meeting, the prayer meeting, and the communion table. He has abandoned all his former

haunts, because he has lost all relish for that kind of pleasures. He has found new joys, more noble, more permanent, more satisfying.

3. One of the primary objects of a state of probation is, that we may cultivate a taste for the right kind of enjoyment-enjoyment which will be improving, permanent, and the spirit of which we can carry with us to the heavenly world. This is a world of allurement, of temptation to false and forbidden pleasures - forbidden because false, because their end is disappointment and sorrow. There is no doubt that the intemperate man finds pleasure in the taste of the ardent spirits he drinks, and in the momentary exhilaration it produces. And he can acquire such a relish for this pleasure, that nothing else, for the time being, can be an equivalent. But its end is wretchedness and ruin.

There can be no doubt that the degraded gang of dissolute wretches, not long ago detected by the Boston police officers around the cockpit, witnessing the maddened birds, with bloody spurs and beak, pecking at each other's eyes, found a kind of pleasure in their inhuman sport. But surely God will not receive it, in judgment, as an excuse, that they had a taste for such joys.

We are bound to cultivate a taste for those

enjoyments which are of an elevated nature. which will promote our permanent usefulness and happiness. If there are any pleasures which are of a contrary tendency, it is our duty to avoid them.

This is the principle upon which we ought to decide respecting what are called the gayeties of life. There is a class of amusements in which many persons find much enjoyment, consisting of the theatre, card parties, and dancing assemblies. They cultivate a taste for these enjoyments, and relish them, for the time being, highly. The disciples of Jesus Christ have generally, in all ages of the world, deemed it their duty to abstain from these pursuits, and cultivate a taste for different enjoyments. And they do it upon the principle to which I have now alluded. God assures them that these pleasures are, on the whole, detrimental to happiness and to usefulness, and that life will glide away far more pleasantly and profitably in the cultivation of a taste for different enjoyments.

I would therefore caution the young by all means to avoid cultivating a taste for this kind of pleasures. When you get a little older, you will find temptation crowding upon you. But resist it. Resolve to seek your happiness in those pursuits which tend to elevate and purify

the mind; and seek those recreations by which you may be invigorated to return with new zeal to life's great responsibilities.

That the gayeties of life tend, on the whole, to mar human happiness, is a truth very conclusively settled. The testimony of thousands who have pursued these pleasures, has been heard proclaiming the same sad story of disappointment and chagrin. We hear continually a voice coming up from the honest depths of the human heart, exclaiming, "It is all vanity and vexation. of spirit."

It is strange that the young, with the testimony of all the millions who have gone before them, can be so deluded respecting the value of . those pleasures which can be secured without religion. Biography tells but one story. The epitaph upon every man's tomb is, "evil and few."

George IV. was born a prince, to inherit a throne. The golden hours of childhood passed away in the rigorous, but salutary discipline of constant employment. At the age of 18, with health and cultivated mind, and commanding person, and polished manners; with an annual income of about half a million of dollars; surrounded by obsequious attendants, and with courtiers, knowing no law but his will; the heir of the most powerful throne on earth, and

with every court in Europe soliciting his alliance, he was launched forth upon the world, free to find his pleasure. But with all his wealth, his expenditures were such that he was continually pinched with debt and poverty. Palled with pleasure to weariness and satiety; thwarted in his plans; stung to the very quick by the triumphs of political adversaries; and hoping in vain, month after month, and year after year, that his father would die, that he might ascend the throne, he was constantly harassed by mortification and disappointment.

And when, at last, the long-waited-for day for regal coronation came, and he was decked in the robes of state, and felt the crown pressing his brow, and grasped the sceptre of British power, it was but to retire from the gorgeous splendor of Westminster Hall, to the sick chamber of premature old age, with the gout gnawing at his bandaged bones, his head aching with its shattered nerves, and dropsy filling his chest ; it was to sit in his arm-chair in regal wretchedness, in the very lowest depths of mental depression, for sleepless nights, and woful days, wrapped in flannels, with nausea at his stomach, and nurses, and medicine phials, and gruel at his side.

He had now attained the object of the desires of his life; and he thus lingered with a sick