which men shall be damned in that day. They are unbelievers, Sabbath-breakers, swearers, and whoremongers; as husbands, they are cruel; as parents, negligent; as children, undutiful; as neighbors, quarrelsome; and as tradesmen, dishonorable. Every drunkard is a walking pestilence, and a public nuisance; an enemy to God, and a factor for the devil. "He casteth abroad firebrands, arrows, and death; he deceiveth his neighbor, and saith, Am not I in sport?" The wo of such will be the heaviest wo; and their hell will be the nethermost hell. If so, our path is plain, and our duty is obvious. We profess to love our neighbor as ourselves; and, doing so, we are bound personally to renounce, and by every means in our power to discountenance in him, an evil which tends to starve his family, dethrone his reason, brutalize his passions, enervate his constitution, abridge his life, and ruin his soul. We cannot escape from the duty which devolves on us in relation to this matter, except it be by asking, with the first murderer, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

That

We love our king and country, and they deserve our love; we pray for their prosperity, and they merit our prayers: we are prepared to defend them against every assailing foe, and they are entitled to the most valorous defence we can afford. Foreign enemies, blessed be God, we have none; but there is a home incendiary, a domestic assassin, who, in a time of profound peace, is murdering thousands of our population, is stealing millions of our money, is consuming our grain, increasing our taxes, corrupting our youth, filling our prisons, and endangering our national character and tranquillity. incendiary is intemperance. To it we deliberately attribute nineteentwentieths of the crimes which are punished by our judges, of the suits which enrich our lawyers, of the accidents and diseases which shorten life; and far more than this proportion of the pauperism, family feuds, and general wretchedness, which disgrace and afflict the land of our fathers, which, but for this enormous ill, would be the glory of all lands. A radical and universal reform here would advantage the nation in all its interests, and through all its borders. Methodism, in connection with other systems and societies, has already contributed to the commencement of this reform; but its capabilities for carrying the reformation to a successful termination are greater than its greatest friends imagine; and were its energies and various agencies fairly enlisted in the service, the cause of temperance would receive an impetus such as it has never received, and such as no other community could have imparted. National crimes bring down national judgments; and to avert these by removing their cause, is true philanthropy. The patriotism which occupies itself in effecting moral reforms, is a virtue of the highest order; and the Christian community which does most to accomplish these, answers best the design of God in continuing to men "the ministry of reconciliation."

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In conclusion, we desire to see Methodism more fully identified with the cause of temperance, on account of the intimate connection which exists between that cause and the revival of "pure and undefiled religion.' None but God can estimate the amount of talent which spirit drinking has neutralized, or the quantum of divine influence which it has forfeited, or the magnitude of those barriers which it presents to the progress of truth, or the number of souls it has sent to the bottomless pit. With a ministry, said to be the most able in the world, a

peasantry generally instructed, the Bible in almost every house, and places of worship in every town and hamlet, what is the state of morality and religion in the nation? Alas! iniquity abounds; sound conversions are few and far between; the forms of family religion are not found in the tenth house in the land; while Sabbath-breaking, uncleanness, and juvenile delinquency are fearfully on the increase. Many causes have, doubtless, contributed to bring about this lamentable state of things; but, far above all others, we place intemperance; verily believing that this single sin is destroying more souls than all the ministers in Britain are instrumental in saving.

Thus it is at home; and if we look abroad, we see the same cursed thing corrupting the heathen, and causing them to blaspheme our holy Christianity; seducing the native Christian, making him "twofold more the child of hell" than he was in his pagan state; and casting a general blight over the fair fruits of missionary toil. Could we only induce ministers and church officers, together with the mass of the professing community, to abstain from the pestiferous liquid, and in their respective spheres frown upon its use under any form, then might we hope for "times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord." Followers of Christ, and members of the Methodist Society, if you love yourselves, your fellow-men, your country, and your God; you dread his wrath, revere his authority, and respect his laws; if you would see his name adored, his Sabbaths sanctified, his temples crowded, and his cause flourishing both at home and abroad; then renounce the use of spirits, refute the false pleas by which they are recommended, be temperate in all things, and unite in scriptural efforts to banish intemperance, with its attendant evils, from the face of the earth. CEPHAS.

if

From the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine for Jan. 1837.

By

Review of the Rambler in North America: 1832-1833. CHARLES JOSEPH LATROBE, Author of the " Alpenstock," &c. 12mo. 2 vols. pp. 321, 336. Second Edition. Seely and Burnside. THE large number of books of travels which have of late years issued from the press, present, as might be expected, a great variety of authorship. Too many of them exhibit little more than the restless vanity of the writers, who appear to have been most careful to preserve, both in travelling and writing, that smiling air of selfcomplacency which calls on every body to treat them according to their own estimation of their merits and importance. Formerly, "returning from their finished tour," in the course of which they had only "grown ten times perter than before," they would have been satisfied with being "talking sparks;" but now, forsooth, the whole tribe of them must be writers. Time was, when they were only the insufferable coxcombs of private society; but nothing will content them now but telling the public that they have been "round the world," "to see whatever's to be seen." It is at once amusing and vexatious to meet with works of this character. They would be perfectly soporific were it not for the varying effects produced on the reader's mind by the proofs which are continually forced upon it of the vast difference between the writer as he really is, VOL. VIII.-April, 1837.

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and as he wishes to be thought to be; between the truth and the pretension. But this is by no means the worst of the case. That which is perfectly useless may yet be perfectly innoxious. Not thus is it with writers of this class. While they add little or nothing to the stock of general knowledge, they often administer very largely to the stock of public prejudices, and exasperate that bitter exclusiveness which is by so many mistaken for patriotism. There are some who appear to have gone abroad in the temper in which a Jew or a Samaritan might have travelled through each other's territories. If they are not always angry, they seem to be always under the influence of the opinion that the interests of different countries are essentially and irreconcilably at variance; and that that is the most. prosperous and palmy state of a nation in which the spirit of a hostile rivalry with all others is fiercely predominant, at once pervading the public feeling, and guiding the administration of public affairs. Of this temper there are two very opposite developments. In the one, nothing appears to be aimed at but the discovery or invention of faults; while the other, renouncing all the feelings and attachments of home, seems never so happy as when instituting comparisons to its disadvantage and dishonor. The men of this class often endeavor to monopolize the name of patriots, while they make it evident that their patriotism consists in little more than a partially disguised hatred of their father-land and its institutions.

The evils of which we thus complain seem especially to be found among English travellers in America. It would be easy to find instances of an evident determination to condemn every thing American, as though the mother country could only be honored by the infamy of her descendants. Their public institutions and domestic manners are, by the writers of this class, held up to ridicule and scorn with a pleasure and flippancy which at once prove the viciousness of the heart, and the imbecility of the understanding; while every excellence is either explained away or concealed, as though no praise could be given to America but at the cost of England. And, on the other hand, instances are equally common in which the same vicious imbecility is shown in that monstrous antipathy to every thing English which has been gendered by a spurious liberality. Englishmen have gone to America for the purpose of slandering their own country, and paying to the one they have visited the equivocal compliment of exalting her at the expense of that to which they belong. Instead of expanding the local into the more general affection, and pledging their patriotism as the best security for their philanthropy, they endeavor to conceal their traitorous hatred to the land of their birth, by noisy professions of their attachment to another; professions which are significant only of their own egregious vanity and self-conceit.

We wish we could exempt from these censures such travellers in America as constrain us to acknowledge their talents, even while we thoroughly and most conscientiously dissent from their opinions. Some of the most respectable of the English tourists in the United States (respectable, we mean, both for talent and character) have been among the most guilty. Nor need we search long for the reason. In England they have been political partisans, and they have carried all their prejudices with them in their voyage over the Atlantic; thus strikingly illustrating the well-known verse of

Horace, which Mr. Latrobe has significantly placed on his title. page

Cælum, non animum mutant qui transmare currunt.

"The sky they change but not the mind,
Across the seas who go."

So long as nature only is contemplated and described, their prejudices remain, for the most part, quiescent; but so soon as man appears on the scene, they start up in their full strength. And hence it is that those travels, especially in America, are the most interesting, in which we are chiefly led amidst natural scenery. The elementary components of a landscape are the same everywhere; and the tourist, as the painter, has only to describe what he sees, addressing himself, in so doing, to the common feelings of our nature; whereas, human actions and human institutions will always be seen in connection with the preconceived notions of the observer, and will be described, not as they are in themselves, but in the character which they receive from their comparison with long cherished ideas, whose accuracy we never dream of suspecting. The time may come we believe it will come, but we fear that at present it is far distant-when the extensive diffusion and powerful influence of Christian truth shall have so augmented the knowledge of man, and enthroned in his conscience the great principles of justice and benevolence, that the tourist, whether American or English, may safely make man his study; and when, by publishing the results of a profoundly philosophical observation, he shall excite an interest as general and pleasing as that which the happiest descriptions of natural scenery would now produce, without any fear of flattering the base, or exasperating the malignant, passions of our fallen nature. Such books of travel may already be very common in Utopia or the New Atlantis, but they are very scarce both in England and America.

In the mean while, and till these better times come, we are thankful to find a work whose least praise it is to be free from the glaring defects to which we have adverted; and which, if it does not answer to our beau ideal of a book of travels, has far more to recommend it than many of much greater pretension. When Mr. Latrobe first published his "Alpenstock," we were scarcely able to lay it down till we had rambled with the author among those natural sublimities (with all their stirring associations) which the Old World presents ; and we anticipated no ordinary pleasure when the publication of the volumes before us invited us to accompany him to the New World, and ramble with him north and south, and east and west, through the great republican Union there. Our expectations have not been disappointed. In Mr. Latrobe's volumes there is far more of performance than of pretension; and more performance than a hasty reader, or perhaps than any reader, on a first perusal, will perceive. The author always writes good humoredly, even to a degree of playfulness; and he always writes honestly. But though honesty and good humor are the obvious characteristics of the Rambler in North America and Mexico, yet, occasionally, there is observable a depth and power, a comprehensiveness and discrimination of thought, which prove that had he chosen to take the lance rather than the walking-stick, and invade the debatable ground on the borders

of which every traveller in America unavoidably moves, there are few better qualified to make and maintain conquests there.

A few extracts, while they serve to justify the favorable opinion we have expressed, will be, at the same time, interesting to such of our readers as may not have the opportunity of perusing the entire volumes.

Mr. Latrobe sailed from Havre in April, 1832, in company with Washington Irving, and the Count de Pourtales, whom he calls. "a cheerful and accomplished travelling companion, who, I believe, was bent, like myself, on forming opinions from observation."

The views and feelings with which he entered on his "rambles" shall be given in his own words :

"Preparatory to this visit, my efforts were more negative than positive; by which expression is meant, that I attempted to keep my imagination and my mind unbiased and uninfluenced by preconceived notions, from whatever source they might be drawn, rather than, by reading the works, or listening to the opinions, of preceding travellers, to run the risk of adding the prejudices of others to my own. As a foreigner, and above all, an Englishman, about to travel in a country where comparison would force itself on the mind at every turn, it was to be feared that there were obstacles already existing in my own bosom, in the way of forming a sound unbiased judgment of men and things. Education, habit, political bias and tastes might all be arrayed on the opposite side, even supposing there were an absence of violent and uncontrollable prejudice. For the rest, I flattered myself that I had some advantages to. counterbalare the great disadvantage of being born within the sound of Bow bells. I laid some claim to the character of an old traveller, having seen divers countries beside my own. Difficulties and asperities which might disgust others from their novelty, might not work with equal effect on the temper of one whose European rambles had made him pretty fully acquainted with both the rough and smooth passages of a traveller's life. Providential circumstances had, as you are aware, prepared for me a home, and a place in society, as long as I should remain in America. I was, as you may recollect, no very violent politician; and was inclined, whether from natural indolence, or dull good nature, to allow a very considerable diversity of opinion in my neighbor, as long as he took care not to contradict me. I had seen enough of mankind in divers countries to believe that no system of government is of general application, and that the government must be made to suit the people, and not the people to suit the government. I loved my own country and its institutions better than any other on the face of the earth, and had no fear of giving a preference to any other, however its peculiar advantages might excite my admiration; and I need hardly add, that no change has been wrought in this feeling, in which I hope to live and die." (Vol. I., p. 8.)

"You will not look to me for elaborate sketches and dissertations on transatlantic politics; for I am quite ready to own my poverty. of satisfactory information on that head. Virulence of party, with all its concomitants of misrepresentation, falsification, and personality, is found within the United States in as great a degree as within the bounds of Britain; and leaves little for a stranger like myself to do, after attempting to pry into the state of politics in America,