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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1824 Excerpt: ... BIBLICAL LADIES. or ANTIQ UITi: SlK, ...... Were the efforts of certain Associations directed to the physical improvement, to the amelioration of any one of the thousand ills that bear with such force on a hard-condi' tioned, long suffering people, we should hail with gratitude the generous exertion. But when misery is mocked by the prospect of relief, awaiting the barter of conscience and principle; when it is sought to introduce the horrors of a dark and gloomy fanaticism into the wretched huts of our wretched peasantry; when the Bible is given for food and raiment, to a ragged, squalid, and famish" ing creature when his own private and fallible judgment is set up as the chart of his wayward course, through all the aberrations of wandering reason--duty, conscience, every motive of propriety, and every principle of necessity and self preservation, oblige us to counteract a plan inimical to the peace and well-being of society, a plan, subversive of all social order and religion, a plan which would rise on the ruins of the altar and throne, and which, if it should succeed, would lead to a violent and bloody revolution. It should seem, indeed, as if this most wretched and ill-fated land was marked as the arena of man's degradation, as if it was destined to exhibit to the rest of the earth, a sad and solitary instance of the lengths to which the malignity of his creature can go, in traversing the benignant Lord of the creation. Stripped of existence as an independent State, obliterated and. effaced from the list of nations--strangled by a legal assassination--annihilated by a perfidy which extinguished her rights in the blood of her sons, extremes of ill have followed in succession so rapid and so disastrous, that the mind, overwhelmed at length, sought refuge ...
