ADDRESS. I AM not a politician, nor do I belong to any political party: my own station is a country parish, and I seldom pass its boundaries. However, in the Periodical Work I am now publishing, I would go forth through the land on a mission of high importance, holding up the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ as the great remedy of Social Evils. I hope to be admitted into many a household circle, and to be allowed at least a hearing. My mission relates not only to the happiness of "the life that now is," but to the highest interests of man, to the life and death of the immortal spirit; and I do not come as a trifler, but as one bearing and showing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God. I do not meddle with the question, whether the Gospel is, or is not, the remedy for evils in the organization of society; but I do assert, that it will introduce a new spirit even into a badly organized society, and thus make it superior to the most admirable organization without that spirit. As it is with the human body, so it is with the body politic. It is not the province or proper office of religion to restore to symmetry and to beauty the deformed figure, but to introduce the graces of a renewed spirit within that deformed figure, and thus to impart even to the unshapen, and the coarse featured, a charm for which we may vainly search, where the proportions of the form are in exquisite symmetry, and the features beautiful, if that spirit is not present. It is not my proper office, as a Pastor of Christ's flock, to point out the faults and the remedy in the organization of the body politic. Perhaps I am not blinder than others to those faults, and, perhaps, many others, no better fitted than myself for the office, would do well to leave the work to wiser heads and better hands than their own. I am not at all disposed to undervalue the science of political economy, nor to assert that many of the popular views of political economists are not right views, many of their plans, right plans; but I would have political economy kept to its proper place, and in its proper department; and I must lift up my voice, however feeble it may be, against the cant of a party, that would propose to remedy every evil, by ways which are founded neither on sound philosophy nor common sense. I would direct the attention of my reader to the remedy provided by God himself, for evils which neither the laws of our country, nor the laws of society can reach; and here I would, therefore, repeat, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its pure and holy simplicity, is the remedy for the thousand evils, which are effects to the real care of all misery and suffering,—that cause is sin. If we propose to reform society, we begin at the wrong end, if we begin merely with the great body. We must begin with the individual; for any body of men is made up of a certain number of individuals. Again, not only is it necessary in order to reform a body of individuals, to begin with the separate individual, but in order to reform the individual, it is absolutely necessary to begin with his heart. This is the peculiar province of the Christian Pastor, as being the commission of Him whose demand of every man is, "My son, give me thy heart," and who has graciously added, "a new heart will I give you." Hodnet, 1834. THE SOLDIER. CHAPTER I. Surely never did there live on earth WORDSWORTH. "I DONT know what first made me wish to be a soldier. The strong and ruling passion of my life is like a stream, which owes its fulness and its strength to a hundred little nameless rills. But since you must have an answer, my sweet wife, I will try and give you some account of what first made me wish to be a soldier. My mother was left a widow when I was but a little fellow, but she was not the widow of a soldier: for my father was a quiet country clergyman. When he died, we went to live with my dear mother's father, and he had been a soldier. Like most men of enlarged minds and noble dispositions, he would often stoop to make a child his B |