INTRODUCTION.

I PLEAD for a neglected bit of the Christian armour. The strong helmet, the sharp sword, the ready shield,-even the shining breastplate, have many wearers. But the quiet shoes are out of date. I think people wellnigh forget that such things are possible. Yet there stands the injunction:

'Your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.'-EPH. vi. 15.

While the old and never-revoked promise covers all the roughness, of every road.

'Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.'-DEUT. xxxiii. 25.

August 1884.

THE SHOES OF PEACE.

L

A Cloud in the West.

ISTENING the other day to the rattling echoes among our hills, as gun after gun gave forth its welcome to the Twenty-second of February, I began to wonder with myself what the Father of his Country would say to this great child of his, decked in all her nineteenth century progress? How would these almost forty States compare with the old thirteen, to those sagacious and far-seeing eyes?

It is hard, I suppose, for the wisest man to judge fairly between his own age and another, or even between one part and another of his own. That early time

'When feelings were young, and the world was new,' must of necessity stand always apart, and in

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some sort unapproachable. Then eyes were ignorant, and hearts untried, and storms made no impression; but now come 'the evil days' spoken of by the Preacher, and 'the clouds return after the rain.' Can that small, pale moon overhead, threading her way among obscuring vapours, be possibly the very same great golden ball that rolled up so grandly from the eastern horizon? In the look of all earthly affairs the passage of time, the growth of knowledge, must make a change. Yet a few things remain, for they are promised; and a few are unalterable, being established for ever.' 'Though a sinner do evil an hundred times, and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God, which fear before Him' (Eccles. viii. 12).

With Bible help, then, it is well worth our while it is our bounden duty-to study the age we live in. Not for its money-making facilities alone; but for its dangers, its mistakes, its drift. We all study the day's temperature, we all peer earnestly into to-morrow's weather; but the electric and magnetic conditions of the times are passed by unnoticed. And the few who pause to examine and dare to proclaim, are classed by the rest with those proverbial people who always