soned with shame. They were silent, and their teacher again said, "Are you not ready to offer your prayer? We must ask our Father to forgive us as we have forgiven each other; and he knows all-all our lives and all our hearts."

Oh no, not now, not yet, not that one," said the children, "let us say some other prayer: let us say the other one which you taught us, "God be merciful to me a sinner.'

"Then you are not willing to say Our Father' to God, but each must go alone to the throne of grace and say, 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' And why can you not pray the Lord's prayer? Have you been more wicked to-day than usual?"

"No, but we cannot pray so, we did not know that it meant all that.'

"I take the reproof, my dear children, which your words imply, and pray God that he will not answer upon you the prayers which you offered in ignorance. But from this night, you must think for yourselves. To forgive truly and sincerely an injury is often very hard, but it must and can be done. It should be forgiven too, when it is received, as fully, as freely, and as promptly as we desire our sins to be forgiven of God.

"True forgiveness also, requires a forgetfulness of the injury received. We often hear the expression, 'I will forgive it, but I cannot forget it.' This is not right; no, true forgiveness banishes the remembrance of the deed: you could not one of you love and forgive your playmate, if all the time you were thinking of the blow or the unkind word which she had given you. And we do not wish God to remember our sins. We pray him to 'blot them out,' to 'remember them not against us,' and so we must do, or we cannot in sincerity pray, 'Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.' Let us think how many injuries our Saviour received, how much he suffered for our sakes, and how many sins we need to have forgiven. Remember this, my children, and now to-night we will offer the publican's prayer, God be merciful to me a sinner. May we be able to-morrow night to come together and offer the Lord's prayer." So both

teacher and children offered in tears this solitary prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner."

Afterwards those children were changed, they were quiet, loving, and forgiving; they had learned to offer the Lord's prayer, they had learned to forgive. And I hope and pray that every child that shall read this, may

learn to do the same; learn to be like the child of whom Christ said, "of such is the kingdom of heaven."

NOTICE OF BOOKS.

Life in Earnest. Six Lectures on Christian Activity and Ardor. By The REV. JAMES HAMILTON. London: Nisbet. pp. 136. 18mo.

We have been too long in recommending this most valuable treatise to our readers. We do not remember to have met with any thing for a long time so stirring, and so generally useful in enforcing the Apostolic precept, "Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit, serving the Lord." We can only give an extract or two as a specimen, hoping that our readers will be induced to possess the original.

Truly does our Author speak of love to Christ as the grand principle of action:

"Dear brethren, get love to the Lord Jesus, and you have every thing. Union to Jesus is salvation. Love to Jesus is religion. Love to the Lord Jesus is essential and vital Christianity. It is the mainspring of the life of God in the soul of man. It is the allinclusive germ, which involves within it every other grace. It is the pervasive spirit, without which the most correct demeanour is but dead works, and the seemliest exertions are an elegant futility. Love to Christ is the best incentive to action-the best antidote to idolatry. It adorns the labours which it animates, and hallows the friendships which it overshadows. It is the smell of the ivory wardrobe, the precious perfume of the believer's character, the fragrant mystery which only lingers round those souls which have been to a better clime. Its operation is most marvellous; for when there is enough of it, it makes the timid bold, and the slothful diligent. It puts eloquence into the stammering tongue, and energy into the withered arm, and ingenuity into the dull lethargic brain. It takes possession of the soul, and a joyous lustre beams in languid eyes, and wings of new obedience sprout from lazy, leaden feet. Love to Christ is the soul's true heroism, which courts gigantic feats, which selects the heaviest loads and the hardest toils, which glories in tribulations, and hugs reproaches, and smiles at

death till the king of terrors smiles again. It is the aliment which feeds assurance, the opiate which lulls suspicions, the oblivious draught which scatters misery, and remembers poverty no more. Love to Jesus is the beauty of the believing soul; it is the elasticity of the willing steps, and the brightness of the glowing countenance. If you would be a happy, a holy, and a useful Christian, you must be an eminently Christ-loving disciple. If you have no love to Jesus at all, then you are none of his. But if you have a little love-ever so little-a little drop, almost frozen in the coldness of your icy heart-oh! seek more. Look to Jesus, and cry for the Spirit till you find your love increasing; till you find it drowning besetting sins; till you find it drowning guilty fearsrising, till it touch that index, and open your closing lips-rising, till every nook and cranny of the soul is filled with it, and all the actions of life and relations of earth are pervaded by it-rising, till it swell up to the brim, and, like the Apostle's love, rush over in a full assurance: 'Yes, I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.""

The Author's illustration of the value of industry is striking :

"The usefulness and happiness of your future life depend very much on the amount of solid learning and graceful accomplishments, and above all, on the extent of Bible knowledge which you presently acquire, and if you be only willing you may acquire as much as ever you please. To use the words of the most philosophic of British artists, Nothing is denied to well-directed diligence.' Long ago, a little boy was entered at Harrow school. He was put into a class beyond his years, and where all the scholars had the advantage of previous instruction denied to him. His master chid him for his dulness, and all his own efforts could not raise him from the lowest place on the form. But, nothing daunted, he procured the grammars and other elementary books which his class-fellows had gone through in previous terms. He devoted the hours of play, and not a few of the hours of sleep, to the mastering of these; till in a few weeks he gradually began to rise, and it was not long till he shot far a-head of all his companions, and became not only dux of that division, but the pride of Harrow. That boy, whose career began with this fit of energetic application, you may see his statue in St. Paul's Cathedral to-morrow; for he lived to be the greatest oriental scholar of modern Europe, and most of you have heard the name of Sir William Jones. God denies nothing in the way of learning to well-directed diligence. It is possible that you may be rather depressed than stimulated when asked to contemplate some first-rate name in literature or science. When you see the lofty pinnacle of attainment on which that name is now reposing, you feel as if it had been created there rather than had travelled thither. No such thing. The most illustrious in the annals of philosophy, once on a time, knew no more of it than you now do. And how did he arrive at his peerless proficiency? By dint of diligence, by downright painstaking. When Newton was asked how he came by those

discoveries which looked like divination or intuitions of a higher intelligence, rather than the results of mere research, he declared that he could not otherwise account for them unless it were that he could pay longer attention to the subject than most men cared to do. In other words, it was by diligence in his business that he became the most renowned of British sages. The discovery of gravi tation, the grand secret of the universe, was not whispered in his ear by any oracle. It did not drop into his idle lap a windfall from the clouds. But he reached it by self-denying toil, by midnight study, by the large command of accurate science, and by bending all his powers of mind in the one direction, and keeping them thus bent. And whatever may be the subject of your pursuit, if you have any natural aptitude for it at all, there is no limit to your pro ficiency, except the limits of your own pains-taking.'

Our Author's invaluable address to Teachers we must defer till next month, as we must give it entire.

AN AMERICAN CHURCH AND SUNDAY-
SCHOOL.

IN the summer of 1843, the Rev. Dr. Cutler, Rector of St. Ann's Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, New York, crossed the Atlantic for the land of his fathers, in quest of that most precious of temporal blessings-health. He left behind him an attached flock, sorrowing on account of the cause which bore him across the deep, and ardently longing for his return. Many entered into a covenant for simultaneous prayer, that their pastor might, in due time, be restored to them with a renewed body, and "in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ." Nor was this exercise of feeling on the side of this people alone. The writer well remembers the affecting terms in which the Doctor alluded to the events im mediately preceding his departure. Of none did he speak with more emphasis and heart, than of his farewell interview with his large and flourishing Sunday-schools. The ties which bound the pastor to the lambs of his flock, were evidently of the tenderest kind. They sorrowed for a time to part, but their grief was not unalleviated. The children had an opportunity of shewing the influence of those lessons of piety which they had been taught; and it was made evident, that neither their minister nor their Teachers had laboured in vain-blessed discovery! How cheering to him who had watched for their souls, and to those under-shepherds whose holy care had thus been favoured from on high. The children, like their elders, engaged to mingle their united supplications with those of their distant pastor, at stated times, during his absence: thus meeting at the throne of grace when they could meet no where else.

How privileged are the people of God! None can separate them from each other, till they are separated from the sanctuary and excluded, self-excluded, from the altar of their common Father that altar round which his whole family in heaven and in earth are at once to gather. The thoughts of these young Christians were not, however, confined to their parties or themselves. They had been carefully instructed to cherish a missionary sympathy for their fellow immortals, especially for the young. They had, moreover, been taught to cultivate an affectionate attachment to all in every land, who called upon the name of Jesus, especially to the children who, like themselves, enjoyed the blessings of the Sabbath-school. They had heard of England as a land pre-eminently blessed-a land of churches, of Bibles, and of schools-Sunday-schools; and their first impulse, was to send to their transatlantic brothers and sisters a message of their love. They did so in a manner most impressive. They searched those Scriptures which, in their school, as in the schools of our Church, were the great subject of study-the object of supreme veneration and love—for words to express the thoughts which filled their hearts. The result was most delightful: a large collection of Scripture texts, selected by the children themselves, and remarkable for their point and adaptation, were addressed by them to the Sunday-school children of England. The scope afforded by such an undertaking, for testing how far the acquintance of these little ones with the Word of God was intelligent, or other wise, need not be dilated upon. The writer does not recollect out of fifty or more, (some of them sent by the very youngest,) one that was inapposite. How triumphant an argument is this for Sundayschools.

These messages were brought by Dr. Cutler to this country, and read to several Sunday-schools by the Doctor himself, in connection with addresses of a most edifying kind. They kindled the liveliest emotions of those who were privileged to hear them. May we not hope that such precious seed fell here and there on good ground? The children of one of the schools to which they were read, viz, that of St. Mary, Aldermanbury, London, were inspired with a desire to reciprocate the kindness of their youngAmerican friends, by returning a similar reply. This wish was gratified. Dr. C. undertook to carry to his native land a packet of selected Scripture texts, accompanied by a letter from one of the Teachers, addressed to their schools collectively.

With renewed frame and earnest yearnings, once more to join his flock, the Rev. Ductor prepared for his return home. He embarked in the Sheffield, October, 1843, full of anticipation; but alas! be