RELIGIOUS BOOKS.
There is an amusing anecdote related of a country curate, who having published a volume of sermons, in which he more particularly pointed out the dangers of a lax morality, and the want of strict religious principles among the higher classes of society, wrote a few weeks afterwards to a friend in town, inquiring in his extreme simplicity, "whether he did not observe any signs of reformation in the fashionable world?" the answer that he obtained may easily be divined. The good man had entirely forgotten that those who most needed his exhortations, were precisely those who would not read them; or who, if they read, would be the last to attend to them. If books could reform the world, it had been reformed long ago; but no disparagement either to good books—something else is necessary.