man, who, because he dislikes the unyielding purity of the moral law, and the awful sanctions by which it is accompanied, deliberately alters it to suit his wishes and his self-indulgence.  If a person is tempted and falls into sin, and yet does not change his religious creed in order to escape the reproaches of conscience and the fear of retribution, there is hope that the orthodoxy of his head may result, by God’s blessing upon his own truth, in sorrow for the sin and a forsaking thereof.  A man, for instance, who amidst all his temptations and transgressions still retains the truth taught him from the Scriptures, at his mother’s knees, that a finally impenitent sinner will go down to eternal torment, feels a powerful check upon his passions, and is often kept from outward and actual transgressions by his creed.  But if he deliberately, and by an act of will, says in his heart:  “There is no hell;” if he substitutes for the theory that renders the commission of sin dangerous and fearful, a theory that relieves it from all danger and all fear, there is no hope that he will ever cease from sinning.  On the contrary, having brought his head into harmony with his heart; having adjusted his theory to his practice; having shaped his creed by his passions; having changed the truth of God into a lie; he then plunges into sin with an abandonment and a momentum that is awful.  In the phrase of the prophet, he “draws iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart-rope.”

It is here that we see the deep guilt of those, who, by false theories of God and man and law and penalty, tempt the young or the old to their eternal destruction.  It is sad and fearful, when the weak physical nature is plied with all the enticements of earth and sense; but it is yet sadder and more fearful, when the intellectual nature is sought to be perverted and ensnared by specious theories that annihilate the distinction between virtue and vice, that take away all holy fear of God, and reverence for His law, that represent the everlasting future either as an everlasting elysium for all, or else as an eternal sleep.  The demoralization, in this instance, is central and radical.  It is in the brain, in the very understanding itself.  If the foundations themselves of morals and religion are destroyed, what can be done for the salvation of the creature?  A heavy woe is denounced against any and every one who tempts a fellow-being.  Temptation implies malice.  It is Satanic.  It betokens a desire to ruin an immortal spirit.  When therefore the siren would allure a human creature from the path of virtue, the inspiration of God utters a deep and bitter curse against her.  But when the cold-blooded Mephistopheles endeavors to sophisticate the reason, to debauch the judgment, to sear the conscience; when the temptation is addressed to the intellect, and the desire of the tempter is to overthrow the entire religious creed of a human being,—­perhaps a youth just entering upon that hazardous enterprise