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Lord Chesterfeld wandered into a chapel once when George Whitefield was preaching. He sat in the pew that belonged to Lady Huntingdon, listening intensely. The preacher was comparing an ignorant sinner to a blind beggar on a dangerous road. His little dog gets away from him when skirting the edge of a precipice, and the old man is left to explore the path with his iron-shod staff. On the very edge of the cliff his stick slips through his fingers, and falls away down the abyss. All unconscious, its helpless owner stoops down to regain it, and stumbling forward. At this moment Chesterfilef, who had been listening with breathless alarm to this description of the blind man's movements, jumped up from his seat shouting, “Good God! he is gone!", trying to prevent the catastrophe.

Though religion, in its ordinary mode of exhibition, commands but little respect, when it rises to the sublime, and is perceived to colour and pervade the whole character, it rarely fails to draw forth the homage of mankind. The most hardened ungodliness, and daring immorality, will find it difficult to despise the man who manifestly appears to walk with God, whose whole system of life is evidently influenced and directed by the power of the world to come. The ridicule cast on religious characters, is not always directed towards their religion, but more often perhaps to the little it performs, contrasted with the loftiness of its pretensions; a ridicule which derives its force from the very sublimity of the principles which the profession of piety assume.  ROBERT HALL