on the departed soul of uncle Jacob.  He descanted for a considerable time on the virtues of the deceased while young, told all he knew of his religious experience, not forgetting the virtues of the entire family, and what they had done for religion by circulation of tracts, by subscription to Bible societies, by adopting and raising of destitute orphans, and other good deeds, all tending to the honor of Calvinism.  “The only instance of any thing like want of belief that happened for a hundred years in the family,” said he, “was the seduction of our brother to the ranks of Popery.  His faith was weak, my friends,” he continued; “but if he did not believe strongly, we believed, and our faith saved him.  His soul is in glory, I have no doubt.  The faith of his family and all our faith saved him.  Glory be to the Lord.  Amen.”

The conclusion of this discourse was applied to the warning of the faithful against the influence of the Papists; the necessity and obligation incumbent on all to compel their Catholic servants to join their prayer and other meetings; and, above all, to take care that all Popish books and publications, should be excluded from their houses.  “We are fallen on dangerous times, my friends,” he said; “and if the friends of the Bible and free religion do not combine their efforts against the common enemy, our institutions are doomed, and the glory of our country is extinguished forever.”

The reader is not to imagine that Mr. Gulmore and men of his class are so brutally ignorant as some would imagine.  When, therefore, we hear them speak of our institutions being in danger, they mean the institutions of heresy and sectarianism; namely, parsons, and their wives and children, and countless sects and contradictions in creed—­institutions that, sure enough, are in imminent danger, and doomed to fall before the irresistible and unerring progress of Catholicity.  But will this divinely decreed result be injurious to the progress or prosperity of the republic?  On the contrary, there can never be a real union among the States till the minds of the people, north and south, are united in faith and sentiment.  And by the annihilation of sectarianism and its castes, the people will be freed from a very burdensome tax now going to the support of a large and lazy body of men, women, and children, whose only object in existence seems to be to eat and consume, and who, besides, by their idleness and habits, keep up a system of detraction, jealousy, and discord among otherwise well-disposed citizens, that, like so many cancers, are eating into the very vitals of the public morals.  Let not the American citizen, therefore, bewail the certain decline and rapid decay of the institutions of sectarianism, but rather pray for the dawn of that glorious approaching day when, as we are but a one people and a united nation, we may have but one religion, and a country that will know no sectional divisions.