A HIGHER STANDARD OF PIETY.
While impurity is making a Sodom of a portion of our country, while oppression is preparing a larger portion for scenes more horrible than were enacted in France during the reign of Terror—and while the rapid growth of our cities, and their still more rapid progress in extravagance, idleness, and dissipation are threatening ruin to our prospects as a Christian nation, it becomes every considerate Christian prayerfully to inquire how can these evils be arrested? Do we not need a higher standard of holiness in our churches? We can readily see in nominally Christian countries how the glaringly inconsistent example of the church is rather deterring from, than inviting the infidel to its fold. Generation after generation of the deluded followers of Mohammed have gone down to a wretched eternity in the midst of churches who had ceased to be "the light of the world," for what would they have gained by exchanging their superstitions for those of the Nestorian and Armenian? Does not a warning voice come to us from these lands and lead us to ask to what extent the low standard of piety in our churches is repelling from our embraces the large masses in our community? We build costly houses of public worship, and spare no expense to secure for our pulpits the highest talents of our colleges and theological seminaries; and in our exclusive pews and fashionable assemblies forget that we are the disciples of that meek and lowly Saviour who said, "To the poor the Gospel is preached"—when not even once a week do "the rich and the poor meet together" around one common mercy-seat, to feel that "the Lord is the maker of them all." Do we not virtually say "to the poor man in vile raiment, Stand thou there or sit here under my foot-stool?"—Independent.