Alexandria Daily Advertiser

RELIGION

Is the only balm for a wounded spirit. It is the only sure staff for the weary traveller, through this wilderness of misery and sin. What an inexpressible grace does it throw over the countenance and actions of its sincere votaries? It purifies, it adorns, it ennobles our nature. By it we are lifted far above the little considerations of an existence, short as the winter twilight, and unimportant as a faint vision of a distant star.

We are led by its influence to contemplate "the first good, first perfect, and first fair;" and, as without the aid of a telescope, the ship-wrecked sailor could never discern in the far-off horizon the vessel that is to bring him relief, but might abandon himself to despair; so, without religion, man's views would be confined to a narrow circle of melancholy incidents and thoughts; and he might resign his mind to the dreadful idea, that the earth was his only home, and that death was an eternal sleep. But now he soars in the certainty to other worlds of endless duration, where he shall join his parents and his friends in the presence of a common God.