and the perplexing question arises, Is every thing necessarily wrong abroad which is so at home? There are many customs and practices, which are innocent in themselves, and which become wrong only because they tend to evil from their being perverted by corrupt men. Must a man avoid all such abroad, as he would at home, for fear of giving countenance to vice? He has, perhaps, refrained from the use of distilled and fermented liquors; must he, therefore, deny himself the use of the mild and pure wines of Italy, and limit himself to its impure and often unwholesome water? He has avoided the theater at home, because he deemed it the school of vice; shall he, therefore, deprive himself of the pleasure to be derived from Italian concerts and operas, when he knows, that if there is a spot peculiarly free from impurity, in an Italian city, it is the larger theater? At home he has reprobated the evils of the fashionable ball and levee; shall he then, abroad, avoid the company of the great and the distinguished, or even shut himself out from all society? Another question equally difficult frequently occurs: How far does a laudable desire to obtain a knowledge of foreign customs, habits and character, justify him in passing limits which, otherwise, he might deen it sinful to transgress? Such are specimens of the questions in casuistry which are perpetually arising to perplex and perhaps to stumble the conscience. Now it may seem an easy thing to sit down in one's closet or study, and settle these and innumerable other questions, that come under the same category. In a pure and healthful moral atmosphere, it may appear easy to do it, unbiassed by prevailing corrupting example and habits. But it is a very different thing to do it when the power of temptation is upon the mind, obscuring the lines of truth and error, of right and wrong; when the moral sense is already chilled and blunted by unavoidable familiarity with vice in its most deceitful and alluring forms. Let all these things be considered, and it will not appear strange, that the young and inexperienced, especially such as are unfortified by religious principle, sometimes find themselves tripping, stumbling, and so acting, as in after-hours of soberness, when the glare is off from their eyes, they will reflect upon with shame and sorrow. Neither need we at all wonder, that the tourist, with all his care and anxiety, caution and firmness, on his return finds his conscience less tender, his heart less pure, and his spirit less elevated and heavenly in its aims and aspirations; nor that the mind, before inclined to seepticism, is more deeply entangled in the snares, and lost in the mazes of unbelief and error. Of all these things should one be aware, who is counting the cost of a journey or sojourn in Italy, and govern and prepare himself accordingly.

We approach a still more important part of the subject. What is the influence of foreign travel and residence on religious char

acter? So far as piety is affected by a sound moral state, and dependent upon it, we may form some notion how it may be influenced, by the general views already presented. Let us glance at the influence of the religious aspect of things on the mind of the traveler. The first thing that will strike his attention, is the effects of the religion there professed and inculcated. He is surrounded by a people sunk in the lowest degradation. Want, wretchedness, and misery, like frightful specters, stand ever before his eyes, rendered, if possible, still more frightful by the glaring contrast with the pomp and splendor of the priesthood. Ignorance, the most deplorable, he learns, it is the declared aim and tendency of this religion to maintain; and this object, he sees, is but too fatally accomplished. A low and grinding superstition, and a blind and malignant bigotry, ever ready to light up the fires of the inquisition, sway the passions; the prevalence of which brings the whole body of the people under the full control of selfish and ambitious priests and hierarchs. Vice, undisguised and shameless, in the most debasing forms, stalks forth unopposed over the land, which is literally immersed in a sea of corruption, misery and death. Such, he perceives, are the effects,—the natural effects,—of the religion of Italy; and these effects every where force themselves upon his view. He looks at the rites, the ceremonies, the worship of the church, and he turns away in disgust and horror at their hypocrisy and heartlessness. Every where he finds them intimately associated with vice and crime. The cut-throat and highway robber cross themselves and mutter their invocations to the virgin, as they set out on their work of death. The prostitute and thief make their customary weekly visits to the church, and mingle in the devotions there with as great degree of sincerity and eagerness as the sanctimonious priest, who officiates in his robes of white; mumbling over in an inaudible voice the customary service, which, perhaps, he himself understands no better than the mute, gazing spectators, and running burriedly through the routine of unmeaning forms and ceremonies of the

Or he sees the miserable, deluded victim of this crafty priesthood, prostrated on his knees before a pictured saint, or canonized pagan image, jabbering a series of prayers as unintelligible to him as if composed in the tongue of an American savage; his eyes wandering about while the lips continue their rapid motion, staring at every stranger who enters, with perhaps a prying look into his pockets in search of plunder, and every now and then turned, with a heavy sigh, on the string of beads in his hands, to count how many more must be slipped along ere the disagreeable penance is finished. Worship, due only to God, is every where idolatrously offered to men of real or supposed sanctity, or who have deluded mankind into a belief of their miracu

lous pretensions; while it is to the blessed virgin, and other saints, rather than to God, that the blinded populace are taught to look for prosperity and support in this life, and for salvation and comfort in that to come. The sabbath,-the hallowed day of the Lord,--of less sacredness than a saint's day, after a half an hour in the morning spent in the mummery of a mass, is devoted, religiously devoted, to recreations and amusements of the rudest and most debasing kind. Convents and monasteries, the refuges of sloth and every form of sensuality, are scattered over the land, an almost insupportable burthen on an indolent and impoverished people. And the sensualizing, debasing doctrines of this putrid church; of a purgatory, held up as a frightful bugbear before the weak and ignorant, to scare them into compliance with arbitrary exactions; of indulgence and absolution; of the impropriety and wrongfulness of exercising private judgment; of miraculous agency, transubstantiation and infallibility, come in to complete the humiliating picture of this religion.

With such a picture ever before the eye, what must be the bias and direction given to the religious feelings? What intelligent mind can look upon such a religion, as a whole, manifesting itself in such forms and effects, and recognize it as the religion of truth, -the religion of the word of God? And what mind works so accurately as to separate between the true and the false, or suffer itself to kindle and glow before the one, and recoil with disgust and horror from the other? Is there not danger, especially in a mind at all unsettled as to the great truths of religion, of its becoming more and more sceptical and averse to all religion? And will not familiarity here with hypocrisy, monkery and superstition, as in other cases, exert its unhappy influence upon the feelings

and heart?

Sum up, now, the influences which the traveler and resident in Italy must necessarily encounter; the influence of contact with a sensual and vicious society of indecent manners and impure habits; the influence of indelicate paintings, statues and other productions of art; of perpetually recurring questions in casuistry, which seem to confound all ideas of virtue, and destroy all distinction between right and wrong; the influence of a corrupt creed, with its polluting and destructive tendencies and effects, its heartless, unmeaning rites and worship, its deluding and ruinous doctrines; bear in mind the power of familiarity with moral degradation, and the condition of the traveler as deprived of all the restraints, which, at home, keep him in the path of rectitude and virtue, and of all the aids and means he has to assist, encourage and support him; let there also be added the enervating influence of a climate still farther disabling the mind for successful resistance to evil, together with the known dissipating effects of travel generally, and we may form

some notion of what awaits the individual who sets out on a foreign tour. What, we would ask, but religious principle, firm, decided principle, which, instead of suffering an abatement of watchfulness and diligence, leads to redoubled exertions, can withstand this tide of iniquity, and prevent deplorable declension?

Our remarks have been directed principally to Italy. But most of them are applicable to a residence in France. Indeed, there is little to choose between Paris and Rome or Naples. If one is not thrown into the circle of religious society in Paris, we are decidedly of opinion that Rome is the place, of the two, less dangerous to the moral and religious feelings. What, then, in view of these representations, must we think of those, who, in the instability and unformed character of youth, with their openness to impression, their recklessness of danger, their thoughtlessness and heedlessness, are forced, by the cruel kindness of parents and guardians, to encounter, no, not encounter,-to be carried away by this torrent of polluting influences, for the professed aim and design of giving a finish to their education? Better, far better, for the most part, that the ship which bears them across the Atlantic, should sink with its burden into the bottomless depths of the ocean, than that they should be wafted across in safety, only to be buried in this gulf of moral death. We speak not from bare conjecture,—from mere opinion, founded on the nature or supposed tendencies of things. We speak from actual observation; from our own personal knowledge. We have known the youth of promise, endowed with an intellect of superior order, which had been cultivated and trained with unusual care and success; with a disposition of enviable loveliness and worth, refined by the purifying efficacy of religious truth; the youth of a mother's anxious prayers, and a father's religious instructions, who, at one time, seemed all that a parent's heart could wish, a pious, dutiful, accomplished son,-we have seen this youth of promise brought under the withering, corrupting, wasting influence of foreign skies, and have witnessed all these buds of promise blasted, all these hopes destroyed; and he, who, a few months since, was, to all human appearance, the serious, lovely, devoted christian, adorned with every grace, and furnished with every capability of usefulness, now a cold, doubting sceptic; nay, a decided and avowed atheist! Who would not weep over the ruin of such prospects and the destruction of such hopes, caused by the melancholy influence of familiarity with the scenes and temptations incident to foreign travel!

ART. VIII.-COLTON AND CONNELLY ON THE RELIGIOUS STATE OF THE COUNTRY.

Thoughts on the Religious State of the Country; with reasons for preferring Episcopacy. By Rev. CALVIN COLTON. Second Edition. New-York: 1836.

A Letter and a Farewell Sermon, with Notes. By PIERCE CONNELLY, A. M. Indica mihi, quem diligit anima mea, ubi pascas. Cant.i. Natchez, 1835.

THE first of these books may be considered in several aspects. First, and most obviously, it is a sort of Biographia Theologico-literaria, or memoirs of the life, opinions and changes of the Rev. Calvin Colton, once pastor of a Presbyterian church at Batavia, New-York,-afterwards chaplain to a certain "classical institution" in Massachusetts,-next a traveling correspondent of the New-York Observer, and at the same time author of books published in London to recommend American revivals, to defend American character, and to aid in the controversy about church and state, then for a twelve-month a candidate for some employment suitable to the dignity of a man who, having written a pamphlet against the bishop of London, and having seen the self-same bishop at the king's levee, was yet alive, and now, at last, (post tot discrimina tutus!) a deacon in the Protestant Episcopal church of the United States of America. In this point of view, the book probably seems to the author very important; but to us, and to the public at large, the mutations of opinion and of position undergone by the Rev. Calvin Colton, are a matter of no great moment. The author has no occasion to apologize or explain; for his "changing his religious connections" has not involved any considerable loss of character or of public respect. So far as we know, he is as well thought of, now that he has become a "deacon" by the laying on of apostolic hands, as when he was dubbed "our social and moral consul and charge des affaires near the person of his Majesty king William."

"To pass from one christian sect to another," says Mr. Colton, "is an indirect censure on that which is left behind, and a compliment to that which is adopted; the latter is gratified, the former feels injured." The concluding part of this aphorism does not hold true in all cases. The gratification afforded by "a compliment," depends sometimes upon the estimation in which the complimentor happens to be held by the complimentee, and the injury which censure, direct or indirect, inflicts upon the feelings, is greater or less, or nothing at all, according to the deference which is felt to be due to the censor. We might easily reckon up a goodly number of Episcopalian priests and deacons whose coming over to Presbyterianism or Congregationalism would be regarded as a very doubtful compliment; and we might as easily, perhaps, name some ten or fifteen ministers on our side of the controversy