he is incapable of becoming better, or that he is devoid of feeling. A judge in central New York, whose head is whitened with the coming frosts of age, and who has long sat on the bench of justice, said to me-" In the whole course of my experience as a judge, I have never yet had a criminal before me for sentence, but whose feelings I could touch, and whose heart I could subdue, by referring to the mother who watched over and sustained him, or by kindly and affectionately describing to him the evil which he had brought upon himself." A community practises the law of kindness, when it places men over its prisons, who are qualified for their duty by a thorough acquaintance with human nature, by the most extensive and earnest Christian benev there were any spark of grace or charity in him, it would make his heart to bleed for pity and compassion." His lordship then proceeds to show that the method of preventing crime is-1. By training up youth in the principles of religion and habits of industry. 2. In the execution of good laws. 3. In the granting pardon very rarely, and upon good reasons. He then concludes "that the consideration of this prevention were worthy of the wisdom of parliament; and in the mean time expert and wise men to make preparation for ut benedicat eis dominus. Blessed shall he be that layeth the first stone of the building; more blessed that proceeds in it; most of all, that finisheth it, to the glory of God and the honor of our king and nation."-Penny Magazine, Vol. VIII., p. 283. olence, joined with prudent firmness, and by a deep conviction that criminals are morally sick, and are deprived of their liberty only that moral medicine may be applied to them to restore them to the health of virtue. A nation practises the law of kindness when its energies are directed to the advancement of education in reference to each and every one of its members. Especially when its attention ist directed to the education of the poor children who may now be found in every community, growing up in ignorance, theft, and crime of all kinds, to fill jails and prisons, and at last to form a debased rabble, subject to the nod of any demagogue who may use them to destroy our government. The kindness consists in preparing them by knowledge to become good citizens and defenders of the American Constitution, as well as lovers of religion and virtue. A nation or community practises the law of kindness, when it stretches the broad hand of its protection over the poor as well as the rich, and seeks to raise the condition of the lowly and degraded -when it aims to remove poverty and distress, by encouraging industry, by compelling the idle to be active, by removing the causes of crime, and by holding out encouragement to the weak and the feeble. In these, and in many other ways, a nation or a community may practise the law of kindness. And I have no hesitation in saying, that a nation or community practising it, will become the abode of truth, virtue, peace, justice, temperance, and love towards God and man. 16 CHAPTER X. KINDNESS AND PERSECUTION. "Hence jarring sectaries may learn Their real interests to discern; That brother should not war with brother, COWPER. PERHAPS there is no one subject pertaining to the welfare of men, in which the practice of kindness is more needed, or is more efficacious, than in the method of advancing or establishing what, in different ages of Christendom, has been named Religion. And it may well be added, that in no one department of life has it been more flagrantly neglected, or its opposite, cruelty, been more thoroughly manifested in all its horrible features. For no sooner did professed Christians exclude the Pagans from the government of the Roman Empire, than they began to persecute each other with all the painful forms. in which bigotry can develop itself. And from that time to the present, as sect after sect has obtained the ascendency over other sects, persecution, in some one of its numerous phases has been put into requisition, to establish a uniformity of religious faith. Seldom indeed are the instances in which truth has been scattered, and left to win its own triumphs over error in minds untrammelled by the fear of political power. In most cases, the spirit of Mahommed's watchword to his conquered subjects, "the Kōran or the sabre," has been adopted by dominant sects of professed followers of Christ, in order to compel other and weaker sects to bow to their will and receive their creed as the word of God. It is too true that the records of ecclesiastical history speak in acts of blood, instead of rejoicing in the blessings of a Christian toleration, whose foundation is the divine truth, that "love worketh no ill to his neighbor." Let any person take up the history of the sons and daughters of Israel, from the time when Constantine, Emperor of the Roman Empire, reared a politico-christian banner, very nearly to our own days—and what is its voice? For their stern and dogmatic adhesion to the faith of their fathers, professed Christians have made them write their history in their own blood, and suffer forms of cruelty—especially in Germany, by the first horde of crusaders under the command of Peter the Hermit and Walter the Pennyless, and half a century after, in the same country, under the instigation of the |