stamped upon the pinched and sunken features; not eternity in the sense of imperishable matter, but in the sense of the fate of man.  Had all the gold of the Indies lain within his reach, the arm of Daggett was now powerless to touch it.  His eye could no longer gloat upon treasure, nor any part of his corporeal system profit by its possession.  A more striking commentary on the vanity of human wishes could not, just then, have been offered to the consideration of the deacon.  His moral being was very strangely constituted.  From early childhood he had been accustomed to the cant of religion; and, in many instances, impressions had been made on him that produced effects that it was easy to confound with the fruits that real piety brings forth.  This is a result that we often find in a state of society in which appearances are made to take the place of reality.  What is more, it is a result that we may look for equally among the formalists of established sects, and among the descendants of those who once deserted the homes of their fathers in order to escape from the impiety of so meretricious an abuse of the substance of godliness.  In the case of the latter, appearances occupy the mind more than that love of God which is the one great test of human conversion from sin to an improving state of that holiness, without which we are told no man shall see his Creator; without which, indeed, no man could endure to look upon that dread Being face to face.

The deacon had all the forms of godliness in puritanical perfection.  He had never taken the “name of his God in vain,” throughout the course of a long life; but, he had abstained from this revolting and gratuitous sin, more because it was a part of the teachings of his youth so to do, and because the neighbours would have been shocked at its commission, than because he felt the deep reverence for his Maker, which it became the insignificant being that was the work of his hand to entertain; and which would, of itself, most effectually have prevented any wanton use of his holy name, let the neighbours feel or think as they might on the subject.  In this way Deacon Pratt might be said to have respected most of the commands of the decalogue; not, however, because the spirit of God impelled him, through love, to reverence and obey, but because he had been brought up in a part of the country where it was considered seemly and right to be moral, to the senses, at least, if not to the all-seeing eye above.  It was in this way that the deacon had arrived at his preferment in the meeting.  He had all the usual sectarian terms at the end of his tongue; never uttered a careless expression; was regular at meeting; apparently performed all the duties that his church required of its professors, in the way of mere religious observances; yet was he as far from being in that state which St. Paul has described succinctly as “for me to live in Christ, and to die is gain,” as if he had been a pagan.  It was not the love of God that was active in his