ing a work of supererogation, when we voluntarily associate for the purpose of emancipating ourselves, our country, and our posterity from the odious thraldom of intemperance.

How beautiful and cheering to the eye and the heart of humanity and patriotism and Christian charity would not be the moral aspect of this favoured and growing city, if ardent spirit were forever excluded from our commerce and from our habitations?

How many happy mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, would not be assured by this one act, which we are now summoned to perform, of heroic self-denial, and of generous devotion to the purest affections and permanent felicity of those whom it is our pride and our honour to love and to protect?

Ladies too have often been directly appealed to on occasions like the present-and I believe their suffrage in behalf of the temperance cause has never been withheld. Would they exert all the influence which they justly possess in every Christian community, they would soon constrain the lords of creation to walk in the paths of virtue and sobriety. I hope they will not be held responsible in the last great day for all the evil which they might have prevented.

The members of the Tennessee Temperance Society have agreed and promised to abstain totally from the use of ardent spirits-and they cordially invite others to join them upon the same condition. This, I understand, is the precise object of our present meeting.

Let us, then, my friends, before God and this assem

bly, declare that, henceforward, we will touch not, taste not, handle not, the accursed thing. Let us, without fear or shame or hesitation, add our names to the hundreds of thousands of the good and wise, who, in every region of Christendom, are labouring to exterminate this pestiferous and most degrading iniquity from the face of the earth.

This, at least, will be one of the few transactions of our lives which we shall never regret, and which will not aggravate the gloom and the terrors of a dying bed.

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS.

BANKS-BROKERS-USURY.

A SERIES OF FRAGMENTARY THOUGHTS.*

"WHEREFORE then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury?" en Ty Tpañetav, (Luke, xix. 23.) τрansla, a table, with four legs -the table of a moneyrpañɛla, changer a broker's table or counter-a broker's office or bank, where money was deposited and loaned out on interest or usury.

1. Usury or interest. The law of Moses. Opinion of Aristotle. Mohammed's prohibition. The canon law. Usury pronounced a mortal sin by the canon law of the church.

2. Banks. Their origin and primitive character. The Jews were bankers, brokers, and money-lenders, for many ages, among the principal cities, after their dispersion from Judea.

* This and the following article, published here just as they stand in the author's manuscript, are given as illustrations of his method of preparing materials for his extemporaneous and conversational lectures. The reader will in fact find many of these little fragmentary thoughts wrought out and incorporated in other parts of his writings. These two pieces are inserted as specimens of a large class of similar collections of facts and ideas, arranged evidently with a view to be reproduced in a lecture or course of lectures, in the class room or before a public audience.

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