s and true holiness." The persons of whom we
are speaking are no longer, indeed, so thoughtless, and wild, and
dissipated, as formerly; so negligent in their attention to objects of
real value; so eager in the pursuit of pleasure; so prone to yield to
the impulse of appetite. But this is no more than the change of which a
writer of no very strict cast speaks, as naturally belonging to their
riper age:

Conversis studiis, aetas animusque virilis
Quaerit opus, & amicitias: inservit honori:
Commisisse cavet, quod mox mutare laboret.
HOR.

This is a point of infinite importance: let it not be thought tedious to
spend even yet a few more moments in the discussion of it. Put the
question to another issue, and try it, by appealing to the principle of
life being a state of probation; (a proposition, indeed, true in a
certain sense, though not exactly in that which is sometimes assigned to
it,) and you will still be led to no very different conclusion.
Probation implies resisting, in obedience to the dictates of Religion,
appetites which we are naturally prompted to gratify. Young people are
not tempted to be churlish, interested, covetous; but to be
inconsiderate and dissipated, "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of
God." People again in middle age are not so strongly tempted to be
thoughtless, and idle, and licentious. From excesses of this sort they
are sufficiently withheld, particularly when happily settled in domestic
life, by a regard to their characters, by the restraints of family
connections, and by a sense of what is due to the decencies of the
married state. _Their_ probation is of another sort; _they_ are tempted
to be supremely engrossed by worldly cares, by family interests, by
professional objects, by the pursuit of wealth or of ambition. Thus
occupied, they are tempted to "mind earthly rather than heavenly
things," forgetting "the one thing needful;" to "set their affections"
on temporal rather than eternal concerns, and to take up with "a form of
godliness," instead of seeking to experience the power thereof: the
foundations of this nominal Religion being laid, as was formerly
explained more at large, in the forgetfulness, if not in the ignorance,
of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity. These are the _ready-made_
Christians formerly spoken of, who consider Christianity as a
geographical term, properly applicable to all those who have been born
an