a few weeks afterwards did his friend and co-patriot Warren, in battle, on a field ever-memorable and glorious; but in solitude, amidst suffering, without associate and without witness; yet breathing forth a dying sigh for his country, desiring to live only to perform towards her a last and signal service.

A few hours after his death, the ship, with his lifeless remains, entered the harbour of Gloucester, Cape Ann. His arrival had been anticipated with anxious solicitude, and the intelligence of his death was received with an universal sorrow. By his family and immediate friends, the event was mourned as the extinction of their brightest hope. His contemporaries, faithful to his virtues, and deeply sensible of his services, early associated his name with those most honoured and most beloved of the period in which he lived. It was his lot to compress events and exertions sufficient for a long life within the compass of a few short years. To live forever in the hearts of his countrymen, and, by labour and virtue, to become immortal in the memory of future times, were the strong passions of his soul. That he was prohibited from filling the great sphere of usefulness, for which his intellectual powers seemed adapted and destined, is less a subject of regret, than it is of joy and gratitude that he was permitted, in so short a time, to perform so noble a part, and that to his desire has been granted so large a portion of that imperishable meed, which, beyond all earthly reward, was the object of his search and solicitude.

Danger of Delay in Religion.-BUCKMINSTER.

IT has been most acutely and justly observed, that all resolutions to repent at a future time are necessarily insincere, and must be a mere deception; because they imply a preference of a man's present habits and conduct; they imply, that he is really unwilling to change them, and that nothing but necessity would lead him to make any attempt of the kind. But let us suppose the expected leisure for repentance to have arrived; the avaricious or

fraudulent dealer to have attained that competency, which is to secure him from want; the profligate and debauched to have passed the slippery season of youth, and to be established in life; the gamester, by one successful throw, to have recovered his desperate finances; the dissipated and luxurious to have secured a peaceful retreat for the remainder of his days;-to each of these the long anticipated hour of amendment, the opportune leisure for religion, has at length arrived; but where, alas! is the disposition! where the necessary strength of resolution! How rare, and, I had almost said, how miraculous, is the instance of a change!

The

The danger of delay, even if we suppose this uncertain leisure and inclination to be secured, is inconceivably heightened, when we consider, further, the nature of repentance. It is a settled change of the disposition from vice to virtue, discovered in the gradual improvement of the life. It is not a fleeting wish, a vapoury sigh, a lengthened groan. Neither is it a twinge of remorse, a flutter of fear, nor any temporary and partial resolution. habits of a sinner have been long in forming. They have acquired a strength, which is not to be broken by a blow. The labour of a day will not build up a virtuous habit on the ruins of an old and vicious character. You, then, who have deferred, from year to year, the relinquishment of a vice; you, if such there be, who, while the wrinkles are gathering in your foreheads, are still dissatisfied with yourselves, remember, that amendment is a slow and laborious process. Can you be too assiduous, too fearful, when you consider how short the opportunity, and how much is required to complete the work of reformation, and to establish the dominion of virtue ?

It is impossible to dismiss this subject without considering a common topic,-the inefficacy of a death-bed repentance. It is to be feared that charity, which hopeth and believeth all things, has sometimes discovered more of generous credulity, than of well-founded hope, when it has laid great stress, and built much consolation, on the casual expressions and faint sighs of dying men. Far be it from us to excite suspicion or recall anxiety in the breast of surviving friendship, or to throw a new shade of terror

over the valley of death; but better, far better, were It for a thousand breasts to be pierced with temporary anguish, and a new horror be added to the dreary passage of the grave, than that one soul be lost to heaven by the delusive expectation of effectual repentance in a dying hour. For, as we have repeatedly asked, what is effectual repentance? Can it be supposed, that, where the vigour of life has been spent in the establishment of vicious propensities; where all the vivacity of youth, all the soberness of manhood, and all the leisure of old age, have been given to the service of sin; where vice has been growing with the growth, and strengthening with the strength; where it has spread out with the limbs of the stripling, and become rigid with the fibres of the aged; can it, I say, be supposed, that the labours of such a life are to be overthrown by one last exertion of a mind impaired with disease, by the convulsive exercise of an affrighted spirit, and by the inarticulate and feeble sounds of an expiring breath? Repentance consists not in one or more acts of contrition; it is a permanent change of the disposition. Those dispositions and habits of mind, which you bring to your dying bed, you will carry with you to another world. These habits are the dying dress of the soul. They are the grave-clothes, in which it must come forth, at the last, to meet the sentence of an impartial Judge. If they were filthy, they will be filthy still. The washing of baptismal water will not, at that hour, cleanse the spots of the soul. The confession of sins, which have never been removed, will not furnish the conscience with an answer towards God. The reception of the elements will not, then, infuse a principle of spiritual life, any more than unconsecrated bread and wine will infuse health into the limbs, on which the cold damps of death have already collected. Say not, that you have discarded such superstitious expectations. You have not discarded them, while you defer any thing to that hour; while you venture to rely on any thing but the mercy of God toward a heart, holy, sincere, and sanctified; a heart, which loves heaven for its purity, and God for his goodness. If, in this solemn hour, the soul of an habitual and inveterate offender be prepared for the residence of pure and spotless spirits, it can be only by a sovereign and miracu

lous interposition of Omnipotence. His power we pretend not to limit. He can wash the sooty Ethiop white, and cause the spots on the leopard's skin to disappear. We presume not to fathom the counsels of his will; but this we will venture to assert, that if, at the last hour of the sinner's life, the power of God ever interposes to snatch him from his ruin, such interposition will never be disclosed to the curiosity of man. For, if it should once be believed, that the rewards of heaven can be obtained by such an instantaneous and miraculous change at the last hour of life, all our ideas of moral probation, and of the connexion between character here, and condition hereafter, are loose, unstable, and groundless; the nature and the laws of God's moral government are made at once inexplicable; our exhortations are useless, our experience false, and the whole apparatus of Gospel means and motives becomes a cumbrous and unnecessary provision.

What, then, is the great conclusion, which we should deduce from all that we have said of the nature of habit, and the difficulty of repentance ? It is this: Behold, now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. If you are young, you cannot begin too soon; if you are old, you may begin too late. Age, says the proverb, strips us of every thing, even of resolution. To-morrow we shall be older; to-morrow, indeed, Death may fix his seal forever on our characters. It is a seal which can never be broken, till the voice of the Son of man shall burst the tombs, which enclose us. If, then, we leave this place, sensible of a propensity which ought to be restrained, of a lust which ought to be exterminated, of a habit which ought to be broken, and rashly defer the hour of amendment, consider, I beseech vou, it may, perhaps, be merciful in God to refuse us another opportunity. It may be a gracious method of preventing an abuse, which will only aggravate the retribution, which awaits the impenitent. Make haste, then, and delay not to keep the commandments of God; of that God, who has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way, and live.

Scenes in Philadelphia during the Prevalence of the Yellow Fever, in 1793.-C. B. BROWN.

My thoughts were called away from pursuing these inquiries by a rumour, which had gradually swelled to formidable dimensions; and which, at length, reached us in our quiet retreats. The city, we were told, was involved in confusion and panic; for a pestilential disease had begun its destructive progress. Magistrates and citizens were flying to the country. The numbers of the sick multiplied beyond all example; even in the pest-affected cities of the Levant. The malady was malignant and unsparing.

The usual occupations and amusements of life were at an end. Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents. Some had shut themselves in their houses, and debarred themselves from all communication with the rest of mankind. The consternation of others had destroyed their understanding, and their misguided steps hurried them into the midst of the danger which they had previously laboured to shun. Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.

The chambers of disease were deserted, and the sick left to die of negligence. None could be found to remove the lifeless bodies. Their remains, suffered to decay by piecemeal, filled the air with deadly exhalations, and added tenfold to the devastation.

Such was the tale, distorted and diversified a thousand ways, by the credulity and exaggeration of the tellers. At first I listened to the story with indifference or mirth. Methought it was confuted by its own extravagance. The enormity and variety of such an evil made it unworthy to be believed. I expected that every new day would detect the absurdity and fallacy of such representations. Every new day, however, added to the number of witnesses, and the consistency of the tale, till, at length, it was not possible to withhold my faith.

This rumour was of a nature to absorb and suspend the whole soul. A certain sublimity is connected with enormous