AND

THE past week, dear friends, has been one of most painful local excitement. Many associations connected with it, you are all anxious, no doubt, to dismiss from your minds. The streets were gorged with a vast multitude, impatient, at the hazard of limb or life, to gloat on the humiliating spectacle exhibited in the dying throes of two wretched malefactors. Some, we are told, fell victims to their morbid curiosity; crushed in the crowd, and removed to the hospital, they have since died. A poor woman, bereft of reason, by the intensity of her grief, wandered to and fro in a state of distraction and bewilderment; and an infant, falling from its mother's arms, perished in the street. Strong doubts have been excited in the minds of many as to the propriety of capital punishment-earnest desire expressed for its abolition; and in all humane and thoughtful persons, there is a growing repugnance to the mode of its infliction. There can be no question that the scenes just witnessed are extremely demoralizing. Revolting as the spectacle has been, however, we must not suffer it to pass from our own recollection without some effort to gain the indirect instruction it is calculated to suggest. We must bring all our experience and observation to the clear and powerful light of the word of God. In the annals of crime it would be difficult, perhaps, to find offenders whose guilt was of greater enormity than that

VOL. VII.

of the unhappy pair who met their temporal doom on the morning of Tuesday. Yet must we remember that we inherit depravity, which, but for the restraining or the renewing grace of God, might have ripened to the same degree of wickedness, and terminated in misery and degradation equal to their own. We have all reason to entertain, with the deepest seriousness, the question of the Apostle, "Who maketh thee to differ?" or, "Who distinguisheth thee?" Let us

turn aside, then, from this sight of ignominy and horror-the saddest exhibited on earth-to contemplate the dignity and glory conferred upon the believer in the abounding grace of God. Our attention is directed,

I. To an original common resemblance. These unhappy culprits were of our own species; they were addressed in the prison chapel by the minister, respectively, as his "brother" and "sister." They disgraced humanity, but they could not divest themselves of it. In the days of infancy, as they slumbered in the cradle, you might have found it difficult to distinguish between them and children of their own age, who have since lived to become the ornaments and the benefactors of their race. The external condition of mankind is greatly diversified. Among millions it is impossible to find two persons perfectly similar. Every one has some distinctive peculiarity; yet in all that properly constitutes us human,

B