visitations of the plague or cholera occasionally occur, carrying off their hundreds and their thousands. The approach of those pestilences, indeed, acts merely as the application of a torch to kindle the sulphurous materials just ready to burst into a flame. We read occasionally, in the newspapers, of cases of spontaneous combustion, which the physical system, inflamed to the highest point by habitual excess, by having the liquid fire of alcohol continually poured into it, and stimulated no doubt by the internal fire of all bad passions at the same time—at length actually bursts out into a flame, consuming the living man, body and clothes. How horrid a picture! Would not such a burning man seem to represent in fearful form the state of the spirit within, blazing with "the fire that is not quenched?" Physicians can tell fearful tales of the ravages of disease, proceeding directly from sinful indulgences and moral corruption; disease, in which rottenness pervades the marrow and bones, and eats away the very features of the face—leaving the man a horrid monument of his own evil, and a dreadful proof of the correspondence that exists between moral disease and physical.
That there exists a direct connection between physical and moral disorders, or between bodily disease and sin, is very distinctly taught in the pages of Holy Writ. Was it not declared in a very striking manner to the Israelites, that if they would live in a state of obedience to the Divine commandments, that is, in a state of moral and spiritual order, they would be blessed with all outward comforts and enjoyments, as well as inward peace,—health of body and health of mind; but that, if they disobeyed, and lived in a state
