es, under the same circumstances. Above three thousand
new-born infants are annually exposed in the streets of Pekin. See Le
Comte, Memoires sur la Chine, and the Recherches sur les Chinois et
les Egyptians, tom. i. p. 61.]

II. It is the undoubted right of every society to exclude from its
communion and benefits such among its members as reject or violate those
regulations which have been established by general consent. In the
exercise of this power, the censures of the Christian church were
chiefly directed against scandalous sinners, and particularly those who
were guilty of murder, of fraud, or of incontinence; against the authors
or the followers of any heretical opinions which had been condemned by
the judgment of the episcopal order; and against those unhappy persons,
who, whether from choice or compulsion, had polluted themselves after
their baptism by any act of idolatrous worship. The consequences of
excommunication were of a temporal as well as a spiritual nature. The
Christian against whom it was pronounced, was deprived of any part in
the oblations of the faithful. The ties both of religious and of private
friendship were dissolved: he found himself a profane object of
abhorrence to the persons whom he the most esteemed, or by whom he had
been the most tenderly beloved; and as far as an expulsion from a
respectable society could imprint on his character a mark of disgrace,
he was shunned or suspected by the generality of mankind. The situation
of these unfortunate exiles was in itself very painful and melancholy;
but, as it usually happens, their apprehensions far exceeded their
sufferings. The benefits of the Christian communion were those of
eternal life; nor could they erase from their minds the awful opinion,
that to those ecclesiastical governors by whom they were condemned, the
Deity had committed the keys of Hell and of Paradise. The heretics,
indeed, who might be supported by the consciousness of their intentions,
and by the flattering hope that they alone had discovered the true path
of salvation, endeavored to regain, in their separate assemblies, those
comforts, temporal as well as spiritual, which they no longer derived
from the great society of Christians. But almost all those who had
reluctantly yielded to the power of vice or idolatry were sensible of
their fallen condition, and anxiously desirous of being restored to the
benefits of the Christian communion.

With regard to the treatment o