would they like if, quoting the notable | explanation of meteorites given by the French Academy last century, that they are just clods of earth, condensed into iron by a flash of lightning-or recalling the grand drama of the electrical girl, enacted the other day-or routing out all the funny problems which have been first to last propounded in our own Royal Society, how would they endure that we should thence infer that the whole pursuit of philosophy is a wild-goose chase? That inference would be neither candid nor courteous, and it would not be true. Whatever blunders individuals may commit, and whatever errors the learned world may sanction for a season, there is after all, nothing but truth in nature, and so far as man has sagacity or sincerity to collect that truth, he has got a true science-a true astronomy, or a true chemistry, or a true physiology, as the case may be. And even so, whatever vagaries particular persons may indulge, and whatever errors the religious world may have occasionally sanctioned, there is after all nothing but truth in the Bible, and so far as we have sincerity or sagacity to collect that Bible-truth, we have a true religion. It is very possible that the works of God may survive all the present systems of philosophy; but there are truths in science which are now so familiar that he who runs may read, and which no future discovery is likely to supersede. I need not stop to name them. And it is very possible that the Word of God may outlive all the existing schools of theology. The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth; our interpretations, however naturally they may appear to have effloresced, and however brightly they have blossomed, may fade and wither: but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever. And in that Word there are facts and statements which need no theory, and sufficiently interpret themselves; and just like the mariner who avails himself of Jupiter's eclipsed satellites, and would be safe to do so, though Copernicus had never existed; just like the gunner who allows for the earth's attraction, and must continue to allow for it, whatever becomes of the Newtonian philosophy; just like the apothecary who combines his salts and acids in definite proportions, and need have no forebodings as to the result, should any mischance befal the atomic theory, so these statements are facts on which we are wise and safe to act, whatever become of human theories. Let the Calvinistic or the Arminian scheme prove wrong—let all the present organizations of the Church break up and pass away-let all the sentiments and suggestions of man wax old and vanish, the sayings of God cannot pass away. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men. Except ye be born again, ye cannot see the kingdom of heaven. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him might not perish but might have everlasting life. This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. If any man be in Christ Jesus he is a new creature." So far as it is founded on sayings like these, religion is not only the simplest, but the most certain of all the sciences. However, I can suppose the man of science in a different case. He wishes to believe, and is sorry to doubt. From examining the evidence or reading the Bible itself, he is convinced that it is the book of God. He recognises on its page the same autograph with which he has long been familiar in the volume of creation-the same inimitable style of majesty, wisdom, goodness, purity, and power; and he feels that to refuse its outward credentials would be to set at defiance all the rules of research by which in other cases he is always decided. And he believes it, so long as he is in its own society. He loves it so long as he communes with it. So long as he looks it in the face, he sees the halo, and feels that it is Divine. But when he goes away from it, and the glow of its inspiration has ceased to warm him when he goes out to the cold materialisms which it is his province to study— when he handles the dry preparations, or the gritty fossils, or the fuming retort, the joy and fragrance and living power of that Bible fade, and his devotion dies away; or when he bores into the strata, and finds himself descending into ages of unfathomed time; or, when he pries through the sparkling vault, and finds himself borne away into the measureless abyss and its uncounted worlds, then all sorts of doubts and queries seem to rise like dragons from the deep, or to come trooping home like spectres from the dark immensity. He begins to feel himself an atom in creation, and his world a mere mote in the universe, and begins to fancy revelation too great a boon for such an atom, and the Advent too great a wonder for such a world. He catches himself saying, not in adoration, but in doubt, "What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? Or, what the Son of Man, that Thou shouldst visit him?" among them-the vessel halted over against an old German town. We were looking languidly at its slated spires and its decaying streets, and carelessly asked some one what town it was? "Worms." Worms! The battle-field of the Reformation; the little Armageddon where light and darkness, truth and error, liberty and despotism, the Son of God and Satan fought not so long ago! We immediately looked out for Luther, and half expected to see on the house-tops Now I will not stop to suggest the something else than tiles; but though cure for all these cavils. I might say it was the very spot where Protestantism that the best cure for nervous spectres or gained its decisive victory, the spot where nightmare horrors, is to get a light or modern Europe threw off the cerements look at something familiar and real; and of the middle age and emerged to life, the best cure for sceptic doubts is to look enterprise, and freedom, there was no at the Bible itself. And I might farther outward sign to tell it,—a dreary German say, that the mind is soundest and best-town on a swampy plain-that was all. constructed which receives all truth on its own evidence, and does not suffer any wandering chimera to devour or scare away a truth thus ascertained. But as a difficulty, which will occur to thoughtful minds, we may just glance a little at the religious doubts occasioned by the extent of the universe. Sixteen years ago some English voyagers were standing on a flat beach within the Arctic Seas. From the excitement of their looks, the avidity with which they gazed into the ground, and the enthusiasm with which they looked around them, it was evident that they deemed it a spot of signal interest. But anything outwardly less interesting you could hardly imagine. On the one side the coast retreated in low and wintry ridges, and on the other a pale ocean bore its icy freight beneath a watery sky, whilst under the travellers' feet lay neither bars of gold nor a gravel of gems, but blocks of unsightly lime-stone. Yet it was the centre of one of nature's greatest mysteries. It was the reward of years of adventure and hardship; it was the answer to the long aspirations and efforts of science; it was the Magnetic Pole. The travellers grudged that a place so important should appear so tame. They would have liked that it had been marked by some natural monument, a lofty peak or a singular rock. They were almost disappointed at not finding an iron needle as high as Cleopatra's own, or a loadstone as big as Mont Blanc. One day, two summers since, sailing up the Rhine on a dull and windy after noon, with little to look at but the sedgy banks and the storks exploring for reptiles And so of most memorable places. There is nothing external to arrest the vulgar eye; no gigantic landmark nor natural sign to serve for a siste viator: and the more refined and reflective do not grudge this. They feel that morally there is nothing so sublime as simplicity, and that it is God's way to work great wonders, not only by means of the things which are despised, but in despicable places. Man is a materialist, and he tries to give a material magnitude to memorable places; but God chooses any common spot for the cradle of a mighty incident, or the home of a mighty spirit. Elbowing through Bread-street, amid trucks and drays and Cheapside tumult, who would fancy that here was the bower where the bard of Paradise was born; or looking up to that grim window in the Canongate, who would guess that from these narrow precincts the spirit which new-created Scotland passed away? Or, sailing along the deep, what is there to tell you that this rock was the cage of the captured eagle, the basaltic prison where he chafed and pined and died; and yon, the willowtree, under which he quietly sleeps, the Magor-Missabib of modern history? Or, coasting on the soft Egean, and looking up to the marble cliffs, where the aconite grows and the halcyon slumbers in the sun, what trace is there to tell that heaven's windows once opened here; that here the last thrill of inspiration was felt, and here the last glimpse of a glorified Redeemer vouchsafed? To the passing glance or the uninstructed eye, they are mean and inconspicuous places-so mean, that ascertaining the wonders connected with them, the vulgar world declares them unworthy of such distinction till otherwise distinguished, and exclaims, "Let us build a monument, a mausoleum, or a church." But to minds truly great every place is great which mind or moral glory has aggrandized. Patmos could not be improved though it were expanded into a continent; nor the house where John Knox died, though it were enshrined beneath a national monument.* There is another remark which we may make regarding memorable places. They are usually more interesting to strangers than to the regular residents. Had the Esquimaux seen Captain Ross and his party, they would have marvelled what brought a band of Englishmen from their comfortable homes to that bleak and barren shore. And, far from sympathizing in their errand, they could hardly have been taught to understand it. Food, not information, being their chief motive to exertion, they would gladly have sold the magnetic pole for a few pounds of blubber or a few pints of oil. It was interesting enough to British science to bring many at the peril of their lives; but to the poor benighted natives it never had occurred that there was anything more important in that particular spot than any other bend of their frozen beach. And so of historic scenes. You know more about Luther's bold appearance at the Imperial Diet than do any of the people who now dwell at The spot where a great battle was fought, or where a hero breathed his last, is often interesting to its inhabitants only as a source of gain; and unless they be men of congenial taste and strong emotion, people will hurry daily past the places consecrated by departed greatness, without finding their step detained or their spirit stirred. It is reserved for the far-come traveller to stand still and wonder where the incurious native trudges on, or only wonders what it is that the stranger is gazing at. Worms. Our earth is a little world. In bulk it is little as compared with some of its *The author would be sorry if any one understood him as speaking disparagingly of the effort made by the Free Church to pre serve from destruction John Knox's House at Edinburgh. A man of taste and feeling would like to see the house as nearly as possible what the Reformer left it; but he would also be thankful for every effort to save it from desecration or decay. it neighbours. Even the same planetary system contains one world a hundred times, and another three hundred times as large; whilst, if suns be peopled worlds, there are suns hundreds of thousands of times as large. And there are races of intelligence and capacity far beyond our own-races both fallen and unfallen, to which our highest genius appears a curious simplicity, and our vastest information an interesting ignorance, even as we may smile at the wit and knowledge of the Esquimaux. But this is the little world, and ours the lowly race, which God selected as the scene and the subject of the most amazing interposition. Like its own Bethlehem Ephratah, little among thousands of worlds; like its own Patmos, a point in the ocean of existence, our earth already stands alone in the universe, and will stand forth in the annals of eternity, illustrious for its fact without a parallel. It is the world on which the mystery of redemption was transacted; is the world into which Christ came. And though lower than the angels, ours is the race which Jehovah has crowned with one peerless glory, one unequalled honour. It is the race which God has visited. Ours is the flesh which Incarnate Deity wore, and ours the race for whose sinners the Son of God poured forth a ransom in his blood. This is the event which sheds a solemn interest round our little planet, and draws toward it the wondering gaze of other worlds. And just as in traversing the deep, when there rises on the view some spot of awful interest or affecting memory, you slack the sail, and passengers strain the eye, and look on in silent reverence; so, on their journeys through immensity the flight of highest intelligences falters into wonder and delay as they near this tiny globe. There is something in it which makes them feel like Moses at Horeb, "Let me draw near and see this great sight,”—a marvel and a mystery here which angels desire to look into. It is a little world, but it is the world where God was manifest in flesh. And though there may be spots round which the interest gathers in most touching intensity; though it may be possible to visit the very land whose acres were trod by those blessed feet which our offences nailed to the accursed tree; though you might like to look on David's town where the advent took place, and on the hills of Galilee where His sermons were preached, and on the limpid Gennesareth which once kissed His buoyant sandals, and on that Jerusalem which He loved and pitied and where He died, and that Olivet, from whose gentle slope the Prince of Peace ascended, I own that with me it is not so much Jerusalem or Palestine as Earth, Earth herself. Since it received the visit of the Son of God, in the eye of the universe the entire globe is a Holy Land; and such let it ever be to me. So wicked and sin-tainted that it must pass through the fire, ere all be ended, it is withal so consecrated and so dear to heaven that it must not be destroyed; but a new earth with righteousness dwelling in it shall perpetuate to distant ages its own amazing story. And though an illustrious author wrote, "I have long lost all attachment to this world as a locality," I don't wish to share the feeling. I like it for its very littleness. I like to stand on its lonely remoteness, and look aloft to vaster and brighter orbs; and when I consider the heavens, the moon and the stars, then say I, "What is the son of man that thou shouldst visit him?" And, as in the voyage of the spheres, I sail away in this, the little barque of man, it comes over me with melting surprise and adoring astonishment that mine is the very world into which the Saviour came; and as I farther recal who that Saviour was, that for him to become the highest seraph would have been an infinite descent, or to occupy the hugest globe a strange captivity, instead of seeking to inflate this tiny ball into the mightiest sphere, or stilt up this feeble race to angelic stature, I see many a reason why, if an incarnation were at all to be, a little world should be the theatre and a little race the object. I would have been very glad to glance at other points. I would have liked to show the little difficulty which a scientific man should feel in accepting the Bible miracles, and I might have pointed out the confirmations of Scripture supplied by many of the sciences. But I overleap all that, in order to reach the parting word. And, first of all, would it not be well if there were more of mutual respect and tolerance betwixt the men of physics and the men of faith? We often hear good people speak contemptuously of the material sciences, and we fear that material philosophers often speak dis dainfully of Bible truth. And both are wrong. The Bible is not an old wife's fable; and the material universe is no device of the devil. The one and the other are equally the work of God; and it is from the two together that all of God can be gathered which our species is ever likely to learn. To neglect the one revelation is to neglect a large source of instruction: to neglect the other is to forfeit everlasting life. But those large capacities and well-balanced judgments which have put each in its proper place are very few; very few the men who have sanctified their enthusiasm for science by veneration for the word of God. The mighty founder of modern Dynamics was one; and the reproof which he dealt to his Infidel contemporary, Halley, when jeering at some sacred subject, is a sword of double edge, and may be dealt both to Infidel flippancy and anti-scientific bigotry, "I have studied these things:—you have not." But secondly, science wants a soul. It is a fine exercise of intellect; but it wants something to inspire it-something to moralize and to sanctify and etherealize it. We should hear no more of the pride and envy and dishonesty of naturalists, if on every house and study-door were inscribed what Linnæus wrote on his, "Innocui vivite, Numen adest;" or better still if His presence were so realized that they could never pronounce His name without the reverence which always marked it on the lips of the illustrious Boyle. And it would give a new sublimity to pursuits sublime already, if every investigation were conducted with entreated help from God, and every discovery was first presented to Himself as a votive offering. It would be the baptism of science and the sanctification of research, did every investigator drink the spirit of that most minute, yet most majestic of our English sages, who has recorded his own emotions in these words, "When with bold telescopes I survey the stars and planets that adorn the upper region of the world; and when with excellent microscopes I discern the inimitable subtlety of nature's curious workmanship, I find myself oftentimes reduced to exclaim with the Psalmist, 'How manifold are thy works, O Lord! in wisdom hast thou made them all.' And when I have been losing myself in admiration of what I cannot comprehend, I am often obliged to interrupt my inquiries in the words of the apostle, 'Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God; how unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out!'" But to conclude. I began by quoting the words of Davy, when he pronounces a firm faith, if it could be attained, the greatest of blessings. May I be permitted to say, that had he devoted a tithe of the pains to the attainment of this faith which he gave to the pursuit of fame, that blessing would have been his own? And if it would have been a blessing when he wrote these words, how infinitely greater before he died! When the raptures of the Royal Institution were over, when the grand battery was corroded, and there were no new metallic bases to discover, when the miner was pursuing his clammy path by the light of the safety lamp, and the hosannahs to the inventor had died away, when poetry and brilliant memories were all that remained to the paralytic exile, a true faith would have been a priceless blessing. Yes; had he been able to say, "I know whom I have believed," there would have been no need to inscribe so often in his mournful diary, “Valde miserabilis ;" and had he found a friend in the Divine Redeemer, that Saviour's benignant presence would have been the best "Consolation of Travel." And so, dear Sirs, should any such be heresuffer a minister of Christ to say it-the time is coming when you will recognise as the greatest blessing, this firm faith, the faith which sustained the dying hours of Boyle and Haller, of Pascal, Ray, and Boerhaave; and would gladly exchange the trust in Jesus Christ expressed by Clementine Cuvier for all the proud renown of her illustrious father. When the laboratory fire is out, or the telescope lens is rusty; when survivors are turning over your herbarium, or are trying to puzzle out your unarranged collections, it will make little difference to you how many pages of Society Transactions you filled, or to how many productions of nature your name is attached. But it will make all the difference if you have been a believer in Jesus, and if now and then some Christian friend pay a tender and hopeful visit to a fellowbeliever's tomb, over which a voice from heaven has said, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY: ITS LEADING INCIDENTS BY THE REV. PROFESSOR M'CRIE, D.D., EDINBURGH. (Continued from the "Messenger" of February.) LET me now request you to accompany room but for five or six score. At the me to the interior of the Assembly. And, uppermost end there is a chair set on a first, let us hear the description given of frame, a foot from the earth, for the Mr. it by Robert Baillie, in his own simple Prolocutor, Dr. Twisse. Before it, on and graphic manner:-"The like of that the ground, stand the two chairs for the Assembly I did never see; and, as we two Mr. Assessors, Dr. Burgess and Mr. hear say, the like was never in England, White. Before these two chairs, through nor any where is shortly like to be. They the length of the room, stands a table, at did sit in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, in which sit the two scribes, Mr. Byfield and the place of the Convocation; but since Mr. Roborough. The house is all well the weather grew cold, they did go to hung (with tapestry), and has a good fire, Jerusalem Chamber, a fair room in the which is some dainties at London. OppoAbbey of Westminster, about the bounds site the table, upon the Prolocutor's right of the College fore-hall (in Glasgow), but hand, there are three or four ranks of wider. At one end of the door, and benches. On the lowest we five do sit. along both sides, are stages of seats, as Upon the other, at our backs, the Memin the New Assembly House at Edin-bers of Parliament deputed to the Asburgh, but not so high; for there will be sembly. On the benches opposite to us, |