I pardon you with all my heart. The Religious wished to embrace him to prove his forgiveness; at that instant the cripple seized him by the throat, tore his face with his nails, and endeavored to strangle him. The Religious having freed himself from his hands, the enraged man said to him, away with you, I shall be the death of you.

The charitable Religious bore in patience with him, for three or four years. During which time, it is impossible to relate the indignities and cruelties, that this cripple heaped upon him, telling him every moment, that he wished to be conveyed to the place where he had found him, that he would rather die of hunger, or cold; or be devoured by wild beasts, than to live with him.

The Religions knew not what to do; for, on the one hand, he feared, that if he carried the man to the place where he had found him, he would perish through want; and on the other, he was apprehensive of losing his patience with him. In this perplexity, he went to consult one of his friends.

His friend, a man inspired by God, thus said to him: "Ah! my son, take care; the thought that you have of leaving this poor man, is a temptation of the devil who strives to deprive you of your crown. If you abandon him, God will not. But, replied the young Religious, I fear that I shall lose my patience with him. Why should you lose it? inquired the holy man. Do you not know that it is towards those who have done us the greatest injury, we are to exercise the greatest charity? What merit would you have in being patient with a person who had never injured you? Charity is a heroic virtue, which looks not to the vices of man, but has God alone in view. Thus, my son, protect the cripple, and the more wicked he is, the more you should pity him. Whatever you do for him through charity, our Lord will consider it as done to himself. Prove by your patience, that you are a disciple of a suffering God; and remember that it is by patience and charity a Christian is known. Regard this poor man, as a means which God has given you to gain your heavenly

crown.

The Religious followed the advice of the holy man; he had greater charity for this miserable man than before, and he never ceased to pray for him. God blessed such heroic patience. The poor man was at length converted,

and passed the remainder of his life in repentance and piety.

But

Oh! the excellent example of charity, which will one day confound so many who do not now endure a harsh word, or the slightest affront. Without charity, you will never be saved, although you might work miracles. there is no charity where there is no patience. It is not to love our neighbor according to God, when we will neither put up with him, nor bear with his defects; and it is not sufficient to do all this once, we must constantly reduce it to practice.

DUTIES OF MAN TOWARD HIMSELF.

MAN does not belong to himself, he belongs to Almighty God. It is from the Divine Goodness that he received his soul with its intellectual faculties, and his body with its wonderful powers. He must then use his soul and his body according to the will of his Creator. All his senses must then be employed for the, service of God; he must avoid all intemperance, and impurity, and any vice by which his body might be defiled. He must have a still greater care, if possible, for his soul, improving his intellectual faculties, by acquiring as much knowledge, as his duty will require and his circumstances will allow him to do, and above all, by adorning his heart by the practice of every virtue.

MAN CONSIDERED WITH REGARD TO HIS BODY.

Ir there be any thing in the creation calculated to arrest our astonishment more than another, it is the study of man, for whose use and benefit every other object was created. Hence with our favorite poet, we may say:

"The proper study for mankind is man.”

Man is here below the master-piece of the Almighty. In vain can we endeavor to give his beauties. The pencil is too tame to correspond with the liveliness of the conceptions. Every thing in man speaks him lord of the

universe. His attitude, his noble and majestic gait, is that of a commander, and sufficiently announces the superiority of his rank. His head erect seems made to admire the heavens, his future inheritance. On his august countenance is imprinted the character of his dignity, and in his physiognomy may be read the image of his immortal soul. The super-excellency of his nature pierces the material organs, and animates with a divine fire the traits of his countenance. Examine with the nicest eye his every member formed equally for utility and ornament. His head adorned with graceful tresses; his open and raised forehead, his lively and piercing eyes, those eloquent interpreters of the sentiments of his soul; his mouth, the seat of laughter and organ of speech; his hands, the constant source of new productions; his open breast, which projects with so much grace; his easy and dignified figure; his legs so admirably well proportioned to the edifice which they support; his feet, that form the narrow but solid basis-he only touches the earth with his farthest extremities, beholding it, as it were at a distance, and seeming to despise it. But, if we enter into the interior of this beautiful edifice, we can never satisfy ourselves with contemplating the riches of the detail. What a great variety in the form, structure, order, situation, movement and harmony of the nerves, sinews, bones, joints, veins and arteries; not one of them all ill-shaped, ill-placed, or useless; not one that interferes or hinders the free exercise of the others. What a wonderful microcosm is man, to such as consider the component parts, the harmony and economy of his whole frame, the different fluids, the four hundred bones, the forty different sorts of glands, the four hundred and sixty-six muscles, the forty pair of nerves, the fibres, the membranes, the arteries, the veins, the lymphatic ducts, the excretory vessels, the tendons, the ligaments, the cartilages. Can we consider without astonishment, the constant play of the lungs, the organs of respiration, together with the energy of the heart, which in a healthy person contracts not much less than five thousand times in an hour, and transmits the blood to the most remote parts of the body. The large muscles of the arm, or of the thigh, are soon wearied: a day's labor, or a day's journey, exhausts their strength. But the heart toils whole weeks, months and years unwearied, and is equally

a stranger to intermission and fatigue. In whatever light I contemplate the wonderful mechanism of the human frame, where delicacy is united with strength, lightness with solidity, multiplicity of parts with simplicity of the whole, I feel disposed to join the ancient philosopher in his assertion, that the description of the human frame is the most beautiful hymn in the honor of the Deity, and had I been an atheist before, like Galen, I should feel compelled to confess from the excellency of the design, the existence of an omnipotent Designer. Nor shall any one ever convince me that this body, framed with such exquisite art, and gifted with such excellent powers, is merely destined for the short day of this transitory life, and that it will not be restored to me, on a future day, infinitely more perfect. When the heavens shall pass away with the noise of a tempest, when the edifice of the universe shall crumble to pieces, I shall not be buried under its ruins; but shall rise again in this very same body, which if I am careful not to defile with sin, will become conformable to the glorified body of my Savior.

VANITY IN DRESS.

EXPERIENCE too often demonstrates, that persons who place their affections at first upon trifles for amusement, will find those trifles in the end become their most serious concern; nor can there be a surer mark of a weak and little mind, than a constant solicitude for trinkets, and a passsionate love for finery; for then it becomes a central point to which every thought is referred. But this blame or censure ought to be shared among more than it generally reaches. Far more guilty are those men, who priding themselves on a superior understanding, and claiming a superiority which others seem to bow to, exalt trifles by immoderate praise, and admire a feather or a riband well disposed, more than any mental or moral excellence. Ought not all such persons as thus mislead unwary minds, minds studious of pleasing, to be considered as perverters of reason, and corrupters of the world. Were the men to admire mental accomplishments more, and to value less things by which no real excellence is conferred, we

would observe the ladies spending less time at their toilet, and more at their studies. If we seem to pity'a child when we behold it placing its supreme felicity on toys, which soon fall to pieces in its hands, how must our pity be excited at those grown up children, who place their enjoyment in toys of a different description, but equally fragile. The only difference between them both is, that the frivolity of the latter is voluntary, and the effect a premeditated choice.

On

In dress, as in other things, all extremes should be avoided; for, as the mind and heart can be but little improved when all care is swallowed up in the decoration of the person, so a total inattention to dress often originates in a pride that frequently proceeds from a contempt of mankind. What can render us more deservedly contemptible in the eyes of others, than that those very things we have lived without half our lives, should make us miserable, if lost but for half a day; and that we, who once had wishes only proportioned to our wants, should now feel wants in proportion to our wishes. the other hand, how much must we admire the sense and happiness of a sister, who, in the midst of a grand display of finery and trinkets, and hearing her other sisters each expressing their various wants and wishes, could say: "how many things are there here for which I neither feel a want nor a wish!" It is paying a poor compliment to ourselves or acquaintance to suppose that we have no better claim upon their attention than the extravagance or elegance of their dress. It moreover shows us destitute of true Christian spirit, and grossly ignorant of our first beginning and last end. Were we seriously to reflect, that in man are comprised two distinct existences, and, as it were, two distinct men; one corporeal, frail and perishable; the other spiritual and immortal:-that the part of him which came from the earth, shall return to dust again; and the part which came from the Deity, shall again return to him:-that at the grave, where this temporal life is concluded, begins the life of eternity, we should feel ashamed of our weakness, in giving so decided a preference to the fashionably adorning of our poor tenements of clay, before ornamenting our immortal souls. Theodoret, well known for his Church History, informs us, that his mother, who suffered a great deal from a