Messrs. Editors: The recent account of the suicide of a lad of thirteen years old, republished in the Intelligencer of the 4^th instant from the Louisville Journal, is an extraordinary and most distressing instance of the influence of religious training on the mind of the young. His mother, it seems, in order to soothe his distress at the death of his sister, had told him "he would meet his sister in heaven after death." To attain this promised pleasure the poor little fellow secretly cut his throat and died! Truly, as the Journal says, it was "a sorry sight to look upon a heart-broken mother, afflicted father, and distressed relatives. It was a scene to dissolve a heart of stone. Every one present was in tears; every man became as it were a child." The sad result seems thus to have been clearly traceable to what the child had been taught to believe concerning his sister’s destiny and his own, that they would both be in heaven at death.

Now, what has happened once may occur again. Poor little Henry may not be the only victim to the same belief. Does not humanity, then—the mere chance of another innocent being sacrificed on the same altar—give us a title to inquire into the truth of this item of the popular religious creed of our age and country. Whence do we derive the opinion, so current, and the inculcation of which into the sensitive mind of little Henry has led to his premature and most distressing fate, that death will introduce the pure and holy into heaven. The Bible, avowedly the source of the religion of Protestants, seems to give no countenance to the tenet; for it is there written of a good and great man, one after God’s own heart, "David is not ascended into the heavens"—Acts 2: 34. So, too, Christ declares to his disciples, John 13: 33—"Whither I go ye cannot come." Now, He went to heaven, to the right hand of God. It is Christ, also, who says plainly in John 3: 13—"No man hath ascended into heaven but the Son of Man," et cetera.

To the same purport it is declared in Proverbs 11: 33—"Behold the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth; much more the wicked and the sinner." When Mary and Martha, friends of Jesus, bewailed the death of their brother Lazarus, —see John 11—the Saviour consoles them by the assurance, "Thy brother shall rise again." Mark! He does not offer the consolation which was presented with such fatal consequences to the little Henry.

St. Paul, too, when comforting his Thessalonian brethren "concerning them that are asleep," (or dead,) gives them the assurance that God will awaken them from the dead, "when the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, and the dead shall be caught up from their graves and meet him in the air"—1 Thessalonians 4: 13. To the same effect, and all tending to a conclusion directly opposed to the popular creed as to the state of the dead, the following passages of Holy Scriptures testify: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth;" "Thy kingdom come, that thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven;" "In that day the Lord shall be King over all the earth."

Does not candour compel the admission that this testimony proves incontestably that the Earth, not Heaven, is the place, and the coming of Christ and the resurrection-day the time for the dead to awake and receive their appropriate reward? Had little Henry been taught this wholesome Bible truth, he would have known that death could not bring him nearer his deceased favourite, and his sad fate—the victim of a mischievous delusion—would have been averted.

I hope you will publish this. It may prove a friendly warning to the parents of susceptible and tender-hearted children. It may possibly save some gentle sufferers from a similar disaster. I will at least, I hope, awaken the consideration of the thoughtful and conscientious, and lead them to expunge from their creed a dogma which can claim no higher authority for its support than the heathen philosophy of Greece and Rome, and is entirely at variance with the teachings of Christ, the Prophets, and the Apostles.

A.B. MAGRUDER.

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