general attention and interest. We are glad to state that DR. EDMOND, of London, has engaged to furnish, during the course of next year, a series of American Notes, which cannot fail to be seasonable and instructive.

Relying on the help of our valued Contributors, no effort will be spared to make this Journal both useful and attractive; and while grateful for the amount of success that has continued to attend our efforts, we make an appeal for increased support to the Members as well as Office-bearers of the Church, and with hopefulness address ourselves to the new pages, and untried paths of the coming year.

EDINBURGH, December 1, 1871.

THE

UNITED PRESBYTERIAN MAGAZINE.

JANUARY 2, 1871.

Miscellaneous Communications.

PRESENCE AND PROMISE.

BY THE EDITOR.

Ir is a good practice to choose, at the commencement of each day, a short passage of Scripture that may cast its light upon the path, and in moments of leisure may be at hand as food for thought. In addition to this, it would be well to adopt a motto for the entire year, that by such a bond of perfectness its varied activities might be gathered into one. It is not, indeed, conducive to a healthy Christianity to fetter one's self with minute rules, apart from which it may be fancied no progress can be made; but the true art of Christian living is attained, when the word of God dwells in us richly in all wisdom.

For each fresh engagement in the great campaign of life, we should be heartened by some word of cheer from the lips of the Captain who ever goeth before us. One word may suffice, if it be a word in season. It is told of Sir Colin Campbell, that, at the commencement of the famous charge before Sebastopol, he spoke only two words to his men-but they were enough'Forward, Forty-second.' Up the Kourgane slopes the Highlanders advanced obediently. Not till the enemy fled did they utter a word; but then the hillside resounded with terrific cheers.

The new year discloses to us heights of attainment to be won: let us take the General's word of command, and go in the strength of the Lord God— whatever may betide-quiet, but obedient, and resolved. When Moses had obtained respite for sinning Israel, God gave him this gracious assurance: My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.' Let this be our watchword for the coming year. It sums up within it the noblest privilege of the Church, and the truest hope for the world. It is repeated in both its parts by Him who spake as never man spake. Almost the last utterance of love from the lips of Jesus ere He left the earth to go unto the Father, was, 'Lo, I am with you alway;' and already, as the Desire of all nations, He had unfurled His banner, and proclaimed the prize for conquerors: 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' This word, like a stream, has flowed from the beginning beside the city of God, and still it flows for us,—for all who will. We can wish for our readers nothing more truly noble than that the gracious presence and the

NO. I. VOL. XV. NEW SERIES.-JANUARY 1871.

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peaceful promise of the Master may be renewed in their experience throughout the year.

There is helpfulness in the nearness of a friend. The thought of that will cheer us, though as yet we see him not. So does Bunyan represent Christian as greatly comforted, when passing through the valley of the shadow of death, by the voice of one before him, whom he could not see, but whom he knew to be a fellow-pilgrim from the words he uttered. Who of us has not got such help from others,-help to struggle on, and out of the darkness into God's marvellous light? It is not yet all light for us on life's way. The future is unknown, and into its shadows we are ever pressing; but better than to have all mysteries plain, is the faith that follows Him who has the keys of both worlds, and reveals, as we are able to bear it, the glories of immortality. The year 1870 is gone. We can mark it no more on our letters. It is a finished volume. Its writings have been very strange and very startling for the world. Few years have had compressed into them such tales of change, disaster, death. The clock of time goes faster as the midnight hour draws The kingdoms are moved. Shall it follow-He uttered His voice? With many, the year just closed has been one of soul conflict. Continental battlefields are a representation, if not a result, of the spiritual state of nations. The seeds of unbelief have been widely scattered, and are springing up in a harvest of licentiousness. The Church of Christ, in all its branches, is entering on a course of unexampled difficulty and danger. The winds are loud, the waves high, as when the Galilean fishermen, with Christ absent, made in vain for the other side of the lake. But their refuge is ours. When the night was darkest, One appeared to them, walking on that sea in whose depths they were ready to sink; and as He said, 'Be of good cheer: it is I,' their fear was changed into adoring admiration.

on.

Every Christian advances under the shelter of his Lord's presence. How else could the future, the eternal future, be faced? Eternity is too great a burden for any creature to bear. He only who inhabiteth eternity can bear its burden. But we see its reflected light in the uplifted countenance of Jesus. The presence assured us, is more than divine nearness. It means divine friendliness and fellowship. All creatures are within the brightness of God's eye; some shut themselves out from the warmth of His heart. Faith draws the soul within the charmed circle of the divine tenderness. We are at home in God, delighting ourselves in the attractiveness of the divine character, and in the order of the divine arrangements. The world is different, and you also are different, when the Lifegiver is your best friend, and when, through love of God, you learn the secrets of His friendship. The felt sense of God's nearness is heaven begun on earth, as it is the heaven of heaven above. Our safety as individuals, and as a Church, is in simply, constantly, joyfully, looking to the great Leader, following His footsteps, and receiving out of His fulness. Less of the human, and more of the Divine presence will steady the vessel, and bring us sooner to the desired haven.

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What more is needed, what more could we wish, than the presence of the Master in our hearts, homes, sanctuaries, assemblies? Yet, to strengthen the weak and encourage the downcast, there is the added promise of rest. wise and loving nature leaves a calming impression on those brought in contact with it. An angry mob has been quieted by the look of a trusted patriot. You have felt that the mountains bring peace; and so in the shadow of your friend's greatness you were glad to rest. The highest nature of all, has the most unbroken peace, and eternally gives forth of its

own.

Christ Jesus, by His appearance on the earth, has taught us wherein true rest consists, and from His pierced hands the blessing comes as God's free gift. Every day of this new year we may have, if we will take it, rest of conscience and intellect, rest of heart and will. God's presence brings rest, not at once and entirely for our whole nature; for it is with us as with the sea after a storm, the winds are hushed, and the waves have ceased their raging, yet the surface is still broken and foamy for a season, and a spent billow, ever and anon, dashes wearily against the rock.

All true rest for the soul and for the world must be won through conflict, and the rest will be blissful in proportion to the severity and the faithfulness of the struggle. Of this let us be well assured,-rest is before us. There are better things in store for us than we have ever conceived. God's rest is to be ours; and such better days for the Church on earth may be much nearer than the dimmed eye of sense can see. This also we may be sure of, that union-manifested unity-is in the Church's future history, because it is in the Master's will. Let it be ours to do nothing which would break the peace which Christ's own presence brings. Light is around us, waiting for us to use, and be happy. What if, as Whitfield once put it, this little hand placed before my eye should shut out the blessings of the sun! The finger of self can eclipse for us the glory of God's truth.

Some eyes now looking on these lines shall be closed in death ere 1871 rings out. But if the presence be with you all the way, the promise also will be abundantly fulfilled. The year, begun in weakness, will be closed in strength,-begun amid the din of conflict, shall end amid the welcomes and surprises of the Father's house.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.'

NOTES OF A TOUR IN THE EAST.

I. THE VOYAGE TO ALEXANDRIA.

THE tour of which I propose to give some account in this and some other papers, commenced on the 24th of January 1870, and extended till towards the end of the following May. The party who had agreed to travel together in fulfilment of a long-cherished desire to visit the lands of the Bible, consisted of five ministers, all of the United Presbyterian Church except one, who is a respected minister of the Church of Scotland. We left Glasgow by the evening train on the date first mentioned, after kindly adieus from many friends, and made the usual night journey to London, which needs no description. Spending the next day, Tuesday, in the metropolis, in the completion of various arrangements, we started on Wednesday morning for Paris, by way of Dover and Calais, reaching the French capital the same evening. Here we lingered also for a day, which is now memorable, considering what has since befallen that gayest and most beautiful of cities, and the country of which she has been the pride. I had seen Paris only once before, and that when the marks of the bullets were still visible from the Revolution of 1848; when trees of liberty,' recently planted, were a feature in her streets and squares; and when the words, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,' were everywhere conspicuous. Now we saw her in all the glory of what was destined to be the closing year of the Second Empire, in a great measure reconstructed, with her miles of splendid boulevards, with the cipher of

Napoleon on all her public buildings, with every appearance of enormous wealth, and with all her endless contrivances for the amusement of her equally busy and frivolous population elaborately organized. What a change has since passed over the spirit of her dream! The Bois de Boulogne is stripped of its trees, and has become a vast cattle-pen for the herds on which the city hopes to live out the siege; the gardens of the Tuileries are a park of artillery; the ramparts, that looked so green and pretty, are bristling with cannon, and lined with the breasts of armed men; the theatres are hospitals; every citizen who can carry a weapon is a soldier; the Emperor is at Wilhelmshohe, and the King of Prussia is at Versailles; and all the world waits for the opening of the last act of a drama which has already well-nigh taken away its breath. It was something to have seen Paris just at the beginning of the last epoch in her chequered history, and to have seen her again on the eve of the great events which have since brought that epoch so suddenly and disastrously to a close.

We left the gay city the next evening after we had entered it, Thursday, en route for Marseilles. The greater part of our journey was by night; and my chief recollection of it is a confused idea of whirling past dimly-lighted stations, with half-frozen Frenchmen dozing about them, and occasionally stopping at one of larger size, such as Dijon and Macon, at which muffled passengers would appear, looking for places, and carrying in the chill of the night with them among sleepers in the carriages. For it was intensely cold; and in these regions of the sunny south, when King Frost does get a chance of briefly establishing his reign, he seems to enforce it with a rigour scarcely known in our own northern clime, where any season he is at liberty to be as rigorous as he pleases. In the grey dawn of the morning we reached Lyons, the great manufacturing city of France, and the centre of its reddest Republicanism, finely situated at the junction of the Saone and the Rhone-a kind of overgrown Paisley, though with a magnificence which the modesty of Paisley will not pretend to rival, and with exquisite surroundings. The railway onwards from Lyons affords frequent views of the majestic Rhone, flowing through its rich and fertile valley, with a fine range of mountains on the west, and away in the east the towering Alps. In favourable weather Mont Blanc may be descried; but on this particular morning we strained our eyes in vain for a glimpse of the snowcrowned monarch. The river, too, as we saw it, was struggling with masses of ice; and the whole landscape had only a wintry beauty, though this is not to be despised. By and by groves of olive-trees began to attract our notice, indicating how far south we had come; and early in the afternoon we had our first peeps of the Mediterranean, as we neared the rocky bluffs which, in the neighbourhood of Marseilles, gird in the Gulf of Lyons. We were soon at Marseilles itself; and, on leaving the train and emerging from the station, we were struck with the change of temperature. We seemed, in the course of a few hours, to have passed from mid-winter into early summer. The sun was shining brightly, the pure air was genial, and even warm, and everything around us was suggestive much less of January than of May. From that afternoon we had no more reason, in our travels, to complain of cold. We had fairly escaped from the northern winter, and had reached a latitude where what is called winter is so mild and pleasant, that then, of all seasons, it seems a luxury to live.

Marseilles, lying 534 miles southward from Paris, on the Gulf of Lyons, is the great commercial seaport of France, and the principal port any where on the Mediterranean. It is a large, and in many parts a fine city,