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the filial service of worship and prayer. We hail the step as an advance, on the part of the church, of deeper meaning and better promise than any outside agitation. The Scotch ecclesiastical mind has long enough wrestled out all its doubtful questions, and done its best to prove the necessary downfall of a house divided against itself; but it has left the education of the heart to accidental means, and made provision for little but the intellect ual faculty, without perceiving, in the depths of its logicality, how entirely illogical and unreasonable a proceeding this was. It is not unusual to be dull, nor by any means unprecedented to find large bodies of people without any recognisable intellectual quality. Most congregations, indeed, of most churches prove themselves impervious to teaching to a sublime extent-but very few are the individuals of whom it can be said that they have no hearts; and on this basis, so much broader, more comprehensive and catholic, than any mental standingground, there is room for every church to work, and room, above all, for the Church of Scotland, which has hitherto left this soil virgin, and scarcely attempted to occupy the field.

This is the real question wherever we turn. It is intellect and the power of reason, it is said, which raise us above the brute creation; but it is the heart and the power of love which elevate us further-to the height of angels, to the feet of God. The most elementary and the most sublime of religious exercises are acts of worship. We teach the child, to whose undawned intelligence we can offer no explanation of the being of God, to falter in its earliest language those primitive snatches of prayer which convey a certainty of His existence, far stronger than any instruction could give, into the soul of the little dependent human creature which can worship long before it can learn; and, as we advance to the heights of human life, we learn more and more

that true worship is the highest blossom of the soul, and that all religious instruction is naught which does not bring us back to the primitive attitude, and increase our communion with God. This is the object of every pious ordinance. To bring the soul into more frequent and close intercourse with God is the aim of all religious teaching whatsoever. From the highest to the lowest of God's creatures, this is the catholic and universal exercise. "This poor man cried," nay, the very lions cry, seeking their meat from God; and the only occupation certainly disclosed to us of the immortal life beyond is that of worship. Intellectual power is great in this world: from the mind proceed all the great inventions by which we have accumulated comfort round us, and large share of the lovely things which embellish our lives; but intellect itself is, in its way, a cold material tyrant, of its very nature unequal, despotic, often unjust. It may be a Moloch or a Baal, as readily as an Apollo or Jupiter. Its bondage is as hard and arbitrary, and often more killing, than the bondage of external force. It is a heathen idea which elevates this majestic quality into the highest attribute of the human

race.

It is Christianity alone, ineffable in humbleness and exaltation, which discloses, as the chief object of human regard, in God the Almighty Love, in man the moving heart.

Is it not, then, the first duty of religion to provide for that part of man which still in its decadence bears the most universal mark of divinity? Teaching for the mind, worship for the heart; but worship always, and under all circumstances

teaching only as often as possible, and when it is to be had. This seems the true ground of Christian services. We can command all that it is possible to provide for the more essential devotions-fit expression, solemn time and place; true fervour and the spirit of prayer, of course, we cannot provide; but

it is in our power to order such a manner of worship as shall call forth and exalt the individual inspiration of every heart. We can do this, not perhaps arbitrarily to every man by one established form, but with the highest completeness competent to humanity, and with charity for as many forms as there may be prayerful souls. But we cannot command the faculty of preaching. So long as we insist upon having trained and educated ministers carefully prepared for that special profession, we must make up our minds that many must be inevitably found among their number not capable of preaching. We cannot cast them back after their toil and study; we will not be content to accept men untrained, who have discovered their vocation too late. Must we, then, go on as we are now doing, insisting upon the sermon, with the certain knowledge that it will in many cases be nothing but a tedium, and in some a positive injury? or, can we so far modify our prevailing customs as to omit this Sunday necessity from our services, and redistinguish, as we have already said, the office of priest or pastor from that of preacher? There are cases, no doubt, in which the bad sermon would be received gladly, as "better than none;" but it is impossible to deny that much dissatisfaction and uneasiness prevails throughout the country upon this important subject. Men complain that the sermon is too long, who listen with equanimity to a longer lecture or speech-they suggest the shortening, the altering, of the unescapable discourse-they try to persuade their clergyman and themselves that if he would but change his method they could listen,-but all these are superficial expediments. Nothing will confer the power which nature has denied. Let us be content that the honest priest who cannot preach should not preach. Let us make provision for our own deliverance and his. Such an arrangement would save

much aggravation, exasperation, and fatigue on both sides, and it would leave our ears all the more open for true instruction, wherever it may be procurable; while, at the same time, our birthright as Christians and members of the Church would remain undiminished-which is not the privilege of hearing sermons but of worshipping God.

Let us, any how, more and more clearly recognise the high indispensable character of this privilege. Not preaching, but prayer has endeared the Church of England to the vast family of her children-not preaching, but prayer binds, with an attachment not to be shaken by reason or even by scepticism, the heart of the Roman Catholic to his communion. To exalt worship above instruction is only to acknowledge the undeniable fact, that the human intellect, which is limited on every side, and distributed with the most wonderful inequality, is, great though it may be, less important to life, less ethereal in nature, further off from God than the human heart, which partakes the nature of the infinite, and is capable of unspeakable longings. We watch with anxious eyes every effort to make this institution more perfect-to embrace more widely the mass of men who may all worship together, whatever they may conclude about the teaching-and to elevate the act of worship to the highest place. No teaching can satisfy so many wants, meet so many necessities, provide so completely for the necessities of the soul; and we cannot but believe that for every church, and especially for the one now, with boldness but doubtfulness, making its first step in this direction, it will be better to adopt the suggestion of the Psalmist, to be glad to go up to the house of God to worship with them that keep holy day, than to sit at the feet of any number of possible or impossible Gamaliels, accepting the meagre substitute of a sermon instead of this inalienable privilege and necessity of all Christian souls.

ACROSS THE CHANNEL.

(Continued and ended.)

THE precept that business should never be allowed to interfere with pleasure, ought to be the foundation of the tourist's faith; but it is no heresy to say that he should sedulously consider how he can turn his travelling to best account in seeing human life, deriving a rich influx of new impressions, and carrying away with him the greatest possible amount of practical knowledge about strange places, to be ruminated over and compared with his practical knowledge about home -for these are the exciting recreations of the traveller-they are the pleasurable return for his investments in fatigue and expense, and the elements of enjoyment which confer an indescribable zest and sense of felicitous vitality on the vacation ramble. Yet how to make the best in this way of any one's disposable time is a problem much oftener discussed than solved. Some people cut the knot at once by the fixed principle of taking all the sights in their way, beginning at the most wonderful, and broadening down gradually to the commoner thoroughfares of life.

I sincerely pity those who, in the pursuit of this spirit, can find nothing to enjoy in travelling but the theatres, the concerts, and other public amusements designed to vary the humdrum monotony of life to the native inhabitants of the towns where they are held. It seems to me, that to walk in the streets of a town inhabited by a strange people -to peep, not too impertinently, into their houses-to watch how they buy and sell and conduct their other affairs-to notice peculiarities in their costume or customs or recreations to individualise characters and special people among them, and look into the peculiarities which separate these from others; it seems to me, I say, that this is a means of

seeing a more vivid, animated, and absorbing sequence of scenes than ever were performed on any stage. It is here, indeed, that true exciting novelty is to be found; while the stage carries with it the conventional traditions of the player's craft all the world over, and is only a place where you lose a large proportion of the advantages of being abroad by finding that you are in some measure at home. And hence it is that I have nothing but compassion for those who are driven in their travels to such sources of enjoyment, because they evidently gain no accession of happiness by having moved over a few hundreds of miles, but are dependent on the same apparatus of enjoyment which they lean on in their own prosaic homes. To people so thoroughly muddy-minded, a fine poetic sentiment would be a pearl cast before swine; but to others of a higher tone of feeling, who are led by bad example to prefer the seeing of special sights among a strange people to the seeing of the people themselves, I would refer, as a prettilyturned precept to take things gently, the couplet

"Oh, happiness! how far we flee

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Thy own sweet paths in search of thee." It has been said by some who acknowledged the utter waste of time and labour in going abroad to look at such spectacles as one can see in his own country, that the only true way of seeing, and by seeing enjoying, foreign countries, is to get into society," and live for a while among the people. It is very plausibly said of this view, that the ordinary traveller cannot easily get out of the groove that has been made for him by other travellers who, on the right and left of it, have so coated it with the conventionalism of their own class, that the real character and condi

tion of the people through whom this groove passes are concealed from sight. This is true; and yet in society you may be but one degree better off-that is to say, you may become acquainted with one form of social life where there are fifty. We can easily infer, from our own country, what it is to get among a set-how thoroughly it is apt to obliterate any appreciation of the general condition of our varied population which the stranger might have imbibed, even from merely reading books about us. A traveller among us taking away with him the impressions of the special circle in which he may have moved, and knowing nothing further, might easily imbibe the notion that England consists entirely of quakers and vegetarians, that there is no religion in Scotland but high apostolic Episcopacy, and that the Irish are a nation of resolute Presbyterians. There are few people who cannot, were they to think over their experience, remember instances where strangers among us have so helplessly gravitated to the centre of some circle, that their notion of the country at large has been thus exceptional; and we see the effect of such disturbing influences in all the books written about us.

To be in good society is an advantage to any one, whether at home or abroad; but it is denied to many a worthy and respectable man in his own country, and is a still more difficult thing to achieve among strangers, notwithstanding a common superstition of the road, that a true-born Briton is received all the world over as a sort of heaven-born aristocrat-entitled to social equality at least with every one he sees, if not to such a general superiority as is averred in those lines of Goldsmith, which somehow seem to vibrate between the sublime and the ridiculous,

"Pride in each port, defiance in each eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by.' Our friend, there, from Birmingham, with whom we have had an

instructive talk on the deck of the steamer-who seems extremely alarmed lest the attentions of that dingy foreigner should bring him in for a questionable acquaintance

he, despite the brilliant gloss of his hat and boots, and the unquestionable bullion of that watchchain, and the genuineness of his diamond studs, has never had the faintest glimpse of good society in his own country, nor has he any more chance of mixing with it than of taking his bottle of lachrymæ with the Pope, or his pipe with the Sultan of Turkey. And this is quite well known to the dingy foreigner at whose proffer of politeness he is so alarmed; and who, by reason of a certain quiet superiority of manner, as well as a cut or two on the left breast of his coat, a more experienced observer would take to be somebody. Were I the director of that well-fed and wellclad countryman of mine, who aspirates his vowels and sinks his h's, I would offer him two pieces of advice: the one, not to be afraid that the seedy foreign fellow has any designs on his primy-cheeked daughter and her ten thousand pounds; and, on the other hand, when he learns that the foreign fellow-so like all other foreigners he couldn't 'ave thought it-happens to be a person of high rank with a European name, I would advise him not to proclaim, when he returns to the brass of his birthplace, that his arm is quite tired from shaking hands with princes and dukes, for people will not believe that he has carried by assault in a month that social standard which he has been in vain besieging for many long years at home.

Nor, after all, is the traveller at the opposite end of the social scale, whose eminence is such that he never can by possibility get out of good, or at all events high, society, much more to be envied. There must be a dreary monotony in such a fate. There might perhaps be good fun in acting the part for a while-as

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in the instance of him who, not being prepared specifically to define his rank or profession, said he was an elector of Middlesex," and so received semi-regal honours as an Elector of the Empire; or of that other, who found himself surrounded by a mysterious atmosphere of muffled veneration wherever he went, like that which surrounds a monarch travelling incognito, and after frantic but vain efforts to get at the secret which no one would admit that he knew, finding that it was all along of a pair of boots, which had been constructed by an artist who enjoyed the title of bootmaker to a royal duke, and who had so adorned his leather with titles and heraldic devices, as to convey the impression that the boots were made for the illustrious legs of his royal patron. This might be an interesting variety; but the continued separation in some high region from the rest of mankind-the passing, as it were, from drawing-room to drawing-room all over the world, without ever descending to the basement floor, with its cellars and kitchen, or shouldering passengers on the street, or mingling in groups of common folk unstared at must entail a heavy burden of wearyness on him who endures it. The charm of vagrant enjoyment is, I suspect, personal freedom, and to be perfectly free you must be unknown; for there is something in particulars of your separate identity being known to those you go about among which partakes of slavery.

Of ways of independent travelling, one, which must have had its own special enjoyments, became extinct before the present generation -that of the horseman. It had its troubles, as all human things have, since the cavalry force of honest men going forth on business or pleasure had to deal with an antagonist cavalry of mounted highwaymen ; but probably this only gave zest to the life frequenters of the road, who, if we may judge from

the old novels, lived in a perpetual succession of exciting enjoyments. I can now recall from very early boyhood the vision of a relation, who, being then past eighty, and keeping up customs now a hundred years old, had just finished a five hundred miles' journey on horseback. I looked into his face to see the stamp of the intense enjoyment that must have been treasured up in such a performance, and thought I distinctly saw it there. The heavy waggon, too, must have had its pleasures, less as a means of locomotion than a place of rest, from which the pedestrian could make his casual excursions.

Pedestrianism, however-" padding the hoof," as it used to be called-is the true and ultimate perfection of pleasure-travelling. It is impossible to recall any condition of mixed mental and physical exhilaration higher than that of starting with the summer dawn over an uninhabited track of mixed mountain and forest land, when the sun has not yet dried the dew, and the perfume from the pine or the bog-myrtle comes freshened and purified through its watery coating. Like all the higher elements of human enjoyment, pedestrianism deserves careful study and attention to perfectionate it, as the French say; and yet, like other blessed things, its perfection will be found in a judicious discovery of, and adherence to, a few very simple elementary principles. The first thing is to choose your ground; and here all that can be said ismake sure that it is the kind of ground you like, and not a district forced upon you by that mysterious law of the road which holds the will of tourists in its iron gripe. If it really be that you love to traverse the great plain of northern Europe, with half-barren fields on either side, and a straight road surging with dust, by all means indulge yourself in it to your heart's content; so also if you are fond of a coal and iron district, where the springs run ink, and a hundred

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