them their entire validity against the sinner?
Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly
tribunal, will guilty thoughts--of which guilty deeds are no more than
shadows,--will these draw down the full weight of a condemning
sentence in the supreme court of eternity? In the solitude of a
midnight chamber or in a desert afar from men or in a church while the
body is kneeling the soul may pollute itself even with those crimes
which we are accustomed to deem altogether carnal. If this be true, it
is a fearful truth.

Let us illustrate the subject by an imaginary example. A venerable
gentleman--one Mr. Smith--who had long been regarded as a pattern of
moral excellence was warming his aged blood with a glass or two of
generous wine. His children being gone forth about their worldly
business and his grandchildren at school, he sat alone in a deep
luxurious arm-chair with his feet beneath a richly-carved mahogany
table. Some old people have a dread of solitude, and when better
company may not be had rejoice even to hear the quiet breathing of a
babe asleep upon the carpet. But Mr. Smith, whose silver hair was the
bright symbol of a life unstained except by such spots as are
inseparable from human nature--he had no need of a babe to protect him
by its purity, nor of a grown person to stand between him and his own
soul. Nevertheless, either manhood must converse with age, or
womanhood must soothe him with gentle cares, or infancy must sport
around his chair, or his thoughts will stray into the misty region of
the past and the old man be chill and sad. Wine will not always cheer
him.

Such might have been the case with Mr. Smith, when, through the
brilliant medium of his glass of old Madeira, he beheld three figures
entering the room. These were Fancy, who had assumed the garb and
aspect of an itinerant showman, with a box of pictures on her back;
and Memory, in the likeness of a clerk, with a pen behind her ear, an
inkhorn at her buttonhole and a huge manuscript volume beneath her
arm; and lastly, behind the other two, a person shrouded in a dusky
mantle which concealed both face and form. But Mr. Smith had a shrewd
idea that it was Conscience. How kind of Fancy, Memory and Conscience
to visit the old gentleman just as he was beginning to imagine that
the wine had neither so bright a sparkle nor so excellent a flavor as
when himself and the liquor were less aged! Through the dim length of
the apart