part of Christianity, neglects the principal means with which that divine system furnishes us, for reclaiming the vicious and improving the pious, for converting the sinner and edifying the saint, for making the bad good, and the good better. Such plainly were the views of the Apostle Peter, who in that epistle, of which our text forms a part, insists largely on the peculiar privileges of Christians, representing them as at once a perennial, exuberant source of abundant consolation and good hope,