much more; and they seem to encourage us by their success, and to sympathise in our essay. Now it is our turn; and all ministering spirits keep silence and look on. O let not your foot slip, or your eye be false, or your ear dull, or your attention flagging! Be not dispirited; be not afraid; keep a good heart; be bold; draw not back ;--you will be carried through. Whatever troubles come on you, of mind, body, or estate; from within or from without, from chance or from intent; from friends or foes; whatever your trouble be, though you be lonely, O children of a heavenly Father, be not afraid! quit you like men in your day; and when it is over, Christ will receive you to Himself, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.

Christ is already in that place of peace, which is all in all. He is on the right hand of God. He is hidden in the brightness of the radiance which issues from the everlasting Throne. He is in the very abyss of peace, where there is no voice of tumult or distress, but a deep stillness,-stillness, that greatest and most awful of all goods which we can fancy,—that most perfect of joys, the utter, profound, ineffable tranquillity of the divine essence. He has entered into His rest.

(From the Same.)

PARTING OF FRIENDS

WHAT are all these instances but memorials and tokens of the Son of Man, when His work and His labour were coming to an end? Like Jacob, like Ishmael, like Elisha, like the Evangelist whose day is just passed, He kept feast before His departure; and, like David, He was persecuted by the rulers in Israel; and, like Naomi, He was deserted by His friends; and, like Ishmael, He cried out, "I thirst" in a barren and dry land; and at length, like Jacob, He went to sleep with a stone for His pillow in the evening. And, like St. Paul, He had "finished the work which God gave Him to do," and had "witnessed a good confession"; and, beyond St. Paul, “the Prince of this World had come, and had nothing in Him." "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." Heavily did He leave, tenderly did He mourn over the country and city which rejected Him. "When He was come near, He beheld the city, and wept

over it, saying, if thou hadst known, even thou, in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. And again, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate."

A lesson surely, and a warning to us all, in every place where He puts His name, to the end of time; lest we be cold towards His gifts, or unbelieving towards His words, or jealous of His workings, or heartless towards His mercies. . mother of saints! O school of the wise! O nurse of the heroic! of whom went forth, in whom have dwelt, memorable names of old, to spread the truth abroad, or to cherish and illustrate it at home! O thou from whom surrounding nations lit their lamps ! O virgin of Israel! wherefore dost thou now sit on the ground and keep silence, like one of the foolish women who were without oil on the coming of the Bridegroom? Where is now the ruler in Sion, and the doctor in the Temple, and the ascetic on Carmel, and the herald in the wilderness, and the preacher in the marketplace? where are thy "effectual fervent prayers," offered in secret, and thy alms and good works coming up as a memorial before God? How is it, O once holy place, that "the land mourneth, for the corn is wasted, the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth, ... because joy is withered away from the sons of men ? " "Alas for the day! . . . how do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture, yea, the flocks of sheep are made desolate." "Lebanon is ashamed and hewn down; Sharon is like a wilderness, and Bashan and Carmel shake off their fruits. O my mother, whence is this unto thee, that thou hast good things poured upon thee and canst not keep them, and bearest children, yet darest not own them? Why hast thou not the skill to use their services, nor the heart to rejoice in their love? how is it that whatever is generous in purpose, and tender or deep in devotion, thy flower and thy promise, falls from thy bosom and finds no home within thine arms? Who hath put this note upon thee, to have "a miscarrying womb, and dry breasts," to be strange to thine own flesh, and thine eye cruel to thy little ones ? Thine own offspring, the fruit of thy womb, who love thee and would toil for thee, thou dost gaze upon with fear, as though a portent, or thou dost loathe as an offence; at best thou dost

but endure, as if they had no claim but on thy patience, selfpossession, and vigilance, to be rid of them as easily as thou mayest. Thou makest them "stand all the day idle," as the very condition of thy bearing with them; or thou biddest them be gone where they will be more welcome; or thou sellest them for nought to the stranger that passes by. And what wilt thou do in the end thereof.

(From Sermons on Subjects of the Day.)

NOTES OF THE TRUE CHURCH

ON the whole then I conclude as follows:-if there is a form of Christianity now in the world which is accused of gross superstition, of borrowing its rites and customs from the heathen, and of ascribing to forms and ceremonies an occult virtue;—a religion which is considered to burden and enslave the mind by its requisitions, to address itself to the weak-minded and ignorant, to be supported by sophistry and imposture, and to contradict reason and exalt mere irrational faith ;;-a religion which impresses on the serious mind very distressing views of the guilt and consequences of sin, sets upon the minute acts of the day, one by one, their definite value of praise or blame, and thus casts a grave shadow over the future ;—a religion which holds up to admiration the surrender of wealth, and disables serious persons from enjoying it if they would ;—a religion, the doctrines of which, be they good or bad, are to the generality of men unknown, which is considered to bear on its very surface signs of folly and falsehood so distinct that a glance suffices to judge of it, and that careful examination is preposterous, which is felt to be so simply bad, that it may be calumniated at hazard and at pleasure, it being nothing but absurdity to stand upon the accurate distribution of its guilt among its particular acts, or painfully to determine how far this or that story concerning it is literally true, or what has to be allowed in candour, or what is improbable or what cuts two ways, or what is not proved, or what may be plausibly defended;—a religion such that men look at a convert to it with a feeling which no other denomination raises except Judaism, Socialism, or Mormonism, viz. with curiosity, suspicion, fear, disgust, as the case may be, as if something strange had befallen him, as if he had had an initiation into a mystery, and had come into communion with

dreadful influences, as if he were now one of a confederacy which claimed him, absorbed him, stripped him of his personality, reduced him to a mere organ or instrument of a whole ;—a religion which men hate as proselytising, anti-social, revolutionary, a dividing families, separating chief friends, corrupting the maxims of government, making a mock at law, dissolving the empire, the enemy of human nature, and a conspirator against its rights and privileges";-a religion which they consider the champion and instrument of darkness, and a pollution calling down upon the land the anger of heaven ;—a religion which they associate with intrigue and conspiracy, which they speak about in whispers, which they detect by anticipation in whatever goes wrong, and to which they impute whatever is unaccountable ;-a religion, the very name of which they cast out as evil, and use simply as a bad epithet, and which from the impulse of self-preservation they would persecute if they could ;-if there be such a religion now in the world, it is not unlike Christianity as the same world viewed it, when first it came forth from its divine author.

(From Essay on Development.)

THE CLASSICS

LET us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years with a power over the mind, and a charm which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as of a prophet or a magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines,

giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time. (From Grammar of Assent.)

A PARODY OF POPULAR ANTI-ROMAN RHETORIC

GENTLEMEN, can it surprise you to be told, after such an exposition of the blasphemies of England, that, astonishing to say, Queen Victoria is distinctly pointed out in the Book of Revelation as having the number of the beast! You may recollect that number is 666; now, she came to the throne in the year thirty-seven, at which date she was eighteen years old. Multiply then 37 by 18, and you have the very number 666, which is the mystical emblem of the lawless King!!!

"The

No wonder, then, with such monstrous pretensions, and such awful auguries, that John-Bullism is in act and deed, as savage and profligate, as in profession it is saintly and innocent. Its annals are marked with blood and corruption. The historian Hallam, though one of the ultra-bullist party, in his Constitutional History admits that the English tribunals are "disgraced by the brutal manners and the iniquitous partiality of the bench." general behaviour of the bench," he says elsewhere, “had covered it with infamy." Soon after, he tells us that the dominant faction inflicted on the High Church Clergy "the disgrace and remorse of perjury!" The English kings have been the curse and shame of human nature. Richard the First boasted that the evil spirit was the father of his family; of Henry the Second St. Bernard said, "From the devil he came, and to the devil he will go;" William the Second was killed by the enemy of man, to whom he had sold himself, while hunting in one of his forests; Henry the First died of eating lampreys; John died of eating peaches ; Clarence, a king's brother, was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine; Richard the Third put to death his sovereign, his sovereign's son, his two brothers, his wife, two nephews, and half a dozen friends. Henry the Eighth successively married and murdered no less than 600 women. I quote the words of the Edinburgh Review, that according to Hollinshed, no less than 70,000 persons died under the hand of the executioner in his reign. Sir John Fortescue tells us that in his day there were