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abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep Mine ordinance, that ye commit not any of these abominable customs which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the Lord."[1] In these days, my lord, we have many things to make us anxious—many things, I do not go too far in saying, to make us tremble; but I hardly know anything which should fill us more with anxiety, fear and trembling, than the thought that our legislature should bring us under this terrible curse of God, by sanctioning, as the act of a people among whom "Christianity is" still "the law of the land," any one of those abominations, for which even the nations of Canaan were cut off and spued out. And as to individuals, I must say, there are to me few things more calculated to raise mixed feelings of pity, contempt and horror, than the levity and recklessness of some of those who are advocating the change—pity for the ignorance of many who have been misled by mere bold assertion, contempt for the reasoning powers of others who seem never to dream of looking at any side of the question except that on which their own passions, prejudices, or wishes are enlisted, and horror at the fearful temerity of those who dare approach and argue upon such a subject, without at least a sense of its importance, of the reverence with which all discussion relative to it should be conducted, and an awe, at any rate, as to the possibility, after all, of God's law and will being in accordance with the Church's interpretation of it for so long a time, and wholly against the "new thing" which the spirit of modern lawlessness seems anxious to introduce!
My Lord, I have not designed or attempted to go through the whole argument on the question of the alteration of
