full, had probably great influence in occasioning this preference. No classic work emanated from Anglican Evangelism; to the Anglican Evangelicals all his favourite Greek historians and philosophers had ceased to be objects of interest; and, not without something like contempt, he turned away from the men, whose greatest renown was the popular volume of discourses which the "Christian Observer" reviewed, highly to praise, and of which Hatchard, or Seeley, sold a dozen of editions, to the men across the German Ocean, who, while they conned the Bible well, and loved God in Christ with that love which the Spirit gives, still liked well to study, and liked as well to quote, the old poets, and orators, and historians, who were lying in the dust centuries before the Saviour came. Arnold had the classic learning of these men; he had their earnest zeal for the advancement of the Christian faith, but he also had their unsystematic theology. His ideas of inspiration had all the deficiency of the German school; he had not right views of the obligation to hallow all the Lord'sday; and it will be grievously to the injury of England, in those days when the integrity of God's Word is not prized as of old, and the holy rest of the Sabbath is assailed by the world's loud outcry of hatred, if Arnold's theological views should pervade accomplished and influential minds.

How refreshing and reviving to the mind to turn from the errors of this great and good, but, in some important points, mistaken man, to the character and history of Thomas Chalmers. In him no one could say that there was a want of breadth of view. If Arnold was the man of his time for England, as his pupils and admirers fondly say, far more was Chalmers the man of his time for Scotland. God raised him up, and held him up, to do a great work for Scotland, and in it. He was not an eminent classical scholar, like Arnold; but he was a man of much scientific accomplishment. Arnold had a fresh way of presenting truth; still greater, in this respect, was the gift of Chalmers. Arnold gave his whole soul to God's work, yet his views were very dim at first, and into the full light of God's system, which Paul proclaimed and Calvin revived, they never brightened. Chalmers, in a sphere narrow at first, but widening with the growth of years, and the development of

his high powers, gave his whole soul (after his conversion) and devoted all his energies to the advancement of the Redeemer's kingdom. Those energies were under the guidance of a thorough grasp of the system of Divine truth. "O Lord, are not thine eyes upon the truth?" He, who would do most work, and that of the best kind, for Christ, must hold, and must unfold, the whole truth which Christ has revealed. And, in addition to the power placed in the hand of Chalmers by the hold which he had of the whole doctrinal truth of God, there was the not less remarkable power placed in his hand by his belonging to a Church which is in possession of Christ's truth respecting the government of the Church.

Arnold was fettered on every side by that Prelatic system to which he outwardly belonged, and which he, as many of his letters show, inwardly disliked. While attached from association to a Liturgy, whose deficiency in doctrinal statement harmonized with his own opinions, and while looking down, somewhat superciliously, it may be, on the general unlettered aspect of Methodist and Congregational Dissent, he deeply felt, and warmly expressed, his aversion to the cumbrous, medieval, Prelacy of England. He would have been far more at home in the midst of the Presbyterian system. His great powers would have been more thoroughly exercised there. The crotchets which his isolation amid a hostile or half-friendly clergy only cherished into deeper inveteracy, would have been removed by frequent intercourse with brethren on the same level with himself. He would have attained, too, clearer views of Divine truth. would have been in the midst of men ; for no one can throw out the reproach of womanishness against the Evangelism of Scotland. The Church of Knox, and Melville, and Henderson; the Church of Erskine, and Moncrieff, and Thomson, was, and is, a Church of men. Chalmers was every inch a man; a man in his contendings against the large majorities of Moderatism in his younger days; and not less a man when, in the decline of years, and in but the maturity of his powers, he fought the battle of the Christian people of Scotland against the great and titled of the land. Chalmers was every inch a man when in the western city of Scotland he maintained a testimony for free grace and consistent

He

holiness in the midst of a wealthy class, who had little love for the former, and as little affection for the latter. His whole history might be (would they only receive it) a most striking lesson to the Anglican Evangelicals, that they will never do themselves justice, and, of far more consequence, never do Christ's truth and cause justice, till, casting apostolic succession to the winds, and abjuring their unchristian Erastianism,

they separate from a State, from which they have had three centuries of oppression under the mask of favour, and form themselves into a Church, boldly avowing and firmly maintaining the whole of that truth in government and discipline, as well as doctrine, which the Lord Jesus, the Great Prophet of the Church, “the Apostle of our profession," has revealed in his holy Word.

Winter-Spring-Climate-Mount Auburn.

IT was in the end of March, as winter was coming to its close, that I landed on the shores of New England. On the night preceding the arrival of the steamer, there had been a heavy fall of snow, and everything around wore a wintry aspect. Šleighs were the principal conveyances to be seen in the streets, and these glided so swiftly and noiselessly along, as to be dangerous to the passers-by, were it not for the jingle of the little bells, which the horses wear to give warning of the approach of such vehicles. The drivers, or persons seated in them, were almost invariably wrapped in buffalo-skins, apparently an indispensable protection against the cold, which from the rapidity of this mode of travelling, is often very great. Footpassengers slipped about in the slush, shod with india-rubber goloshes, the gentlemen, for the most part, muffled up in short black cloaks, with their shirt collars turned down, and their throats bare.

This fall of snow was followed by several days of hard frost, and of cold more intense than any I ever felt in England or Scotland; but the thermometer in Boston often falls in winter twenty or thirty degrees below the freezing point, and on the other hand, when the sun is up, it will rise as many degrees above it. It has been known to stand at 4° during a night in March, and to rise as high as 75° during the day. So wide a range and such sudden changes in the temperature are attended with much discomfort, and act most injuriously upon

the health. These extremes of cold are not a little remarkable, when it is remembered that the New England states are in the same latitude as Italy, and that Boston stands on almost the same parallel as Rome. The principal cause of the greater cold of North America, is doubtless to be found in the vast extent of land which there stretches, with little intermission, away into the polar regions, and forms an immense deposit of ice and snow that make the climate of the southern parts greatly colder than the climate of similar latitudes in Europe. One feature in the landscape at this season struck me very forcibly. Boston being about ten degrees further south than London, in the latitude nearly of Madrid and Constantinople, the sun in the months of March and April seemed as high in the heavens, and shone as brightly, and felt as warm, as it does with us in May and June; and it was a novel and startling thing for me to look at sheets of ice and fields of snow, under the beams of a sun like ours at Midsummer. The reflection of his light was so dazzling as to be painful to the eyes; the water poured in streams from the tops of houses where his rays struck; one side of the street was in a flood with melting snow; and on the other side, which was in the shade, the temperature was so low, that the snow had lost all adhesiveness, was too dry to be trodden down, and so loose that it could be kicked about like dust. Scarcely, however, had a fortnight elapsed when every trace of ice and snow had disappeared, and the same route along the outskirts of Boston, which on the third day after

my arrival I had traversed in a sleigh, wrapped up in skins as a protection against the wind and cold that threatened to cut one through, I passed over, ten days after, in an open chaise, choked with the dust which lay at least three inches thick upon the roads, and broiled by the sun. The rapidity with which the season advanced was truly surprising. Scarcely had the snow disappeared, when one could see the young green blades of grass, springing needle-like through the flattened, withered straw with which the fields seemed to be covered,-relics of the rank herbage, which the earlier frosts and snow of the previous winter had levelled and destroyed. Ere a week was gone, the eye rested everywhere on patches of the freshest green; the leaf and blossom buds of trees and shrubs were swelled to bursting; while those of the willow tribe, and here and there a plane, were already in full verdure. When the weather was fine, the sky was as cloudless and the sun as bright and the air as warm as they are with us in our most glorious days in June and July; but it was strange with such a sun and sky and atmosphere as we associate, at home with luxuriant foliage and the richest garb of summer, to look around upon the generally leafless trees, and to a great extent still torpid vegetation. I could hardly realize the fact that it was only the middle of April, when the thermometer was at 75° in the shade, the sun shone with such amazing brilliancy, and the heavens presented one deep unbroken blue. It was almost difficult to believe that, with such a climate, some calamity had not befallen nature, some arrest had not been put upon her usual movements. It seemed as if the bursting spring had, by some freak or force, been kept back till the days of Midsummer had arrived. All this, however, lasted for a very brief space indeed. Long before May came, nature had put forth her wondrous energies, and wanted nothing of her richest dress; and every field and garden, tree, and shrub, and flower, was arrayed in a splendour, such as "Solomon in all his glory" never knew.

The suburbs of Boston, I have said in a former paper, are replete with beauty. The surface of the country undulates surprisingly. There are many rocky eminences dotted with small pines, and sheltered nooks or "sleepy hollows," and gently rising slopes; and advantage has

been taken of these varieties in selecting the sites for the neighbouring villages. On some of these villages you come quite unexpectedly, lying in some sweet secluded spot into which they seemed to have crept for shelter or privacy; others again appear to have been arrested in their progress up some gentle acclivity; and others, more successful in their ambition, are seen perched on the summit of some little hill. The houses are invariably of wood, painted the whitest of the white, their numerous windows flanked by jalousy blinds, painted the brightest green. The process of building was going on everywhere; and wooden houses, at different stages of their progress to completion, were novel objects. Some had merely the frame-work up, when they resembled large wicker cages. finished, but not yet painted, or roofed,

were

Others nearly

more like huge packing boxes; while those just completed had a light, clean, sharp appearance, and looked in the distance just as if they had been made of card. Neat churches of the same character abounded; having light taper spires, not rising as with us from a tower, but springing out of one end of the roof. Two or three of these could be seen peering over every town, as each collection of a few houses is here called. Fine villas-the summer residences of the Boston aristocracy-stud the surrounding country; each with its verandah festooned with creepers, and having its garden attached, with flowers of many brilliant hues.

One of the loveliest spots in the immediate vicinity of Boston is the cemetery at Mount Auburn. It is situated on the banks of the Charles River, which runs along its rear, and it is remarkable for its singular variety of surface, in an area of about a hundred acres. There are several heights in it of considerable elevation, with their corresponding hollows; ponds natural and aided by art; knolls and dells covered with various kinds of wood; streams and water courses interspersed; clumps and avenues of trees, such as pines, walnuts, chesnuts, elms, planes, oaks, &c., among whose branches frisked, or flitted, black and spotted squirrels, and bright blue and crimson birds. It is, altogether, a very wilderness of natural beauty. From the summit of the principal eminence, which gives its name to the cemetery, there is an extensive and beautiful prospect of

Boston and the adjacent country, with its varied objects of interest. A few yards' descent, however, brings the visitor into some secluded glade, or some "deep dell by rocks o'ercanopied," in the midst of umbrageous woods, where he is as much shut out from the visible world as if he were a thousand miles removed from the habitations of men; and where there is nothing to disturb his sympathy with the tranquil repose of the surrounding dead. There are a great number of tombs and monuments scattered about; some of them are very imposing, others are in a simpler taste. Marble is the prevailing material, its principal rival being polished granite; and many enclosures are marked off by stone pillars, supporting curiously-twisted chains. Spurzheim, the famous Phrenologist, is buried here. One monument of great beauty struck me very much. Beneath

a flat slab of veined marble, resembling the lid of a sarcophagus, and supported at each corner by a Corinthian pillar, there lay, cut in white marble, as if tired with play it had flung itself upon a bed of yielding down, and had sunk into a quiet sleep, the figure of a child of four, with long flowing locks, in its ordinary dress, but with its feet bare, and the sleep upon it plainly the sleep of death. It was exquisitely cut, and I was told that it was, in figure and face, the very image of an only child that lies buried there; and that the mother used to come and sit by the tomb, with her eyes fastened on the figure, for hours at a time. Unfortunately the white marble has suffered from the climate, and is now covered with spots of what resembles rust, suggesting painfully the idea of the decaying form in the dust beneath. (To be continued.)

THE SYNOD FUND.

THE Synod of our Church, at its meeting at Sunderland, after expressing deep regret that this fund was not in a more prosperous condition, and declaring its maintenance to be essential to the interests of the Church, appointed a Collection to be made in aid thereof on

the third Sabbath in March in each year. The Treasurer would now call the attention of the several Kirk Sessions to this appointment, in the hope that every congregation will conform to the injunction of the Synod, and make the collection on the appointed day, Sabbath the 19th March, so that it may be transmitted to him in good time to be reported at the meeting of Synod in April. It can hardly now be necessary to state that the object of the fund is to pay, in part, the travelling expenses of members attending the meetings of Synod and Commission, the cost of printing, and other incidental charges connected with the proceedings of the Synod. Under the regulations adopted at last meeting, it is believed that annual collections, regularly made, will, for the future, be adequate to meet the demand upon the fund within the year; but at the close of 1846, there was due to the Treasurer the sum of 1387. 3s. 1d., and he is still in advance more than 100%.; he would therefore urge increased liberality upon this occasion, so that this old debt may be extinguished, and that provision may also be made for the current expenses of the year.

ALEX. GILLESPIE, Treasurer, 13, America-square. London, March, 1848. [We trust that this appeal of the Treasurer of the Synod Fund will

be duly responded to. In time of war, those who do not carry arms and go forth to actual service, are glad to pay their share of public expense, as the condition of staying safely at home. It is the same with all public duty; or at least it ought to be. Those who are relieved from personal toil ought to be willing to contribute towards the charges of those who serve. In the conduct of our ecclesiastical affairs a certain number of office-bearers necessarily engaged; and no light work it is to attend meeting of Synods, and Church courts, and committees, by night and by day, and sometimes at a far distance from home. Those who devote

are

much time and toil to the service of the Church, ought not to be left at the same time to pay all the expenses attendant on their official duties. By contributing to the Synod Fund, all may make up somewhat of their "lack of service," and lighten the expenses, if not the labour, of those who are set to "bear the heat and burden of the day."]

CENTRAL FUND FOR THE SUP

PORT OF THE MINISTRY.

AT the last meeting of the London Presbytery, the consideration of this subject was taken up, and is to be resumed at the meeting in March. Being unwilling either to anticipate or to influence the decision of that court, we refrain from referring to the practical points that were discussed, and shall here simply state what ground was gone

over.

1. A statement was given of the condition of the churches throughout the Synod. The statistical information was