its obtainment, the condition of a laborious acquirement, a condition that enhances the pleasure of its use, at the same time that it capacitates for its more ample and perfect enjoyment. To strive for this acquisition, is to own the wisdom of Him who has made labour the law of life, and is an endeavour to fulfil a command which will bring with it the help needful to insure success. Painful may be at first the effort, and slow the progress; but perseverance will make the path plain; the pleasure of acquired knowledge will stimulate to further effort; and finding that knowledge is power, the power acquired from knowledge will enable you to gain more. Elevated in thought, in feeling, in enjoyment, you walk with a more assured step, and look around you with a conscious dignity derived from solid worth achieved by yourselves. You carry your family and your friends with you in your onward march of improvement; and you can do better for them than you could before. You are a better citizen, for you better understand your country's wants, her weal, her woe; and in your sphere, whatever that may be, in working out your own, you work out her prosperity. And you are a better Christian. I have little hope in the progress that is not founded on the faith of Jesus. But, resting on the work that purifies as well as pardons, the enlightened man is the better Christian. To the duties which belong to earth's relationships, he adds those that link him to the Author of his spirit, and will yield him ultimately his Maker's image; when saved and sanctified through the blood of the Redeemer's atoning sacrifice, he shall behold the Saviour face to face, and shall be like him, the reflection of himself, seeing him as he is. My friends, this is no fancy picture. Its realisation is within the reach of all. But to obtain this blessedness in its broadest bounds seek first the kingdom of God. The condemnation in the first instance upon us all, escaped through the justification of faith in Jesus, add the enlargement and enlightenment which patiently acquired knowledge gives. With the wealth of your heads, increase the warmth of your hearts, and so, God guiding you, you will go on to perfection. I say again, this is within the reach of all. Your attendance to-night leads us to believe you intend to strive for it. To do so as it is your duty, so it will not fail to be your delight, and in the end your labour will have its rich reward. "There is scarcely," says Mr. Levi, "a place now that is not within reach of genius and enterprise.' For your own sakes, my friends, join with Mr. Levi and us all in saying, "On then with such institutes as this, let it count among its members men of worth, men of piety, men of talent, men of industry, and men of mind, and it will ever be remembered as a source of gratification to those who have been connected with it from the infancy of its formation!" F. Miscellaneous Papers. (Original and Selected.) IRELAND AND IRISH PRESBYTERIANS, THE following able and interesting paper was prepared by Dr. Edgar for the late celebration of the Tricentenary of the Reformation, but the lateness of the hour prevented it from being read. The paper is very valuable, and we think many of our readers will thank us for giving it a place in our columns.— 520. 1,580 pupils, 1,400 are Romanists; in one district, 5,000 Romish youth have been our scholars; and of 1,440 in another, 870 were Romanists. Our chief agency is that which God has chiefly blessed, the preaching of the Gospel. In 1859, our mission aided 36 congregations; 16 of these in Popish districts, have 70 hearers each, and connected with them are above 30 preaching stations, at distances of from 3 to 20 miles. Some of their members travel to and from church 30, 36, and 40 miles. Two members of a church live 43 miles apart. In ConThe Irish Presbyterian Church consists naught, we had last year 19 congregations, of two churches, united in 1840, when they with 43 preaching stations, and about 2,000 had 430 congregations. Last year it had hearers; our missionary staff consisted of Its collection for Home Missions 23 ministers, 20 Scripture-readers and colwas, in 1840, £2,022; and in 1859, £6,160. porteurs, and the teachers of 56 day and The population has since decreased, but Sunday-schools. At our Union in 1810, our congregations have increased by 90. we had 6 congregations in Connaught,—we Of 53 congregations, fruit of our mission have now 19; in 1840, no mission station, shortly before 1856, 41 are in Romish -now 43; in 1840, two congregations paydistricts; and in most of them Scotchmen, ing stipend,-now all; in 1840, no Sundaywho would have been without Christian school,-now 26; in 1840, subscriptions to ordinances, are most useful members. The our missions £35,-last year £156; while Church's agents are teachers, Scripture- in a few years we have built there 11 readers, colporteurs, and ministers. Our church long worked Irish schools, and much that is true or poetical might be said for them. The Irish language has many charms for the Irish people; yet our church closed her Irish schools in 1854. We could not get Protestant teachers of the Irish language. Respectable Romanists would not bear scorn and hate for our pay; the whole system moved in stealthy secrecy, and tempted to falsehood and fraud. We still preach in Irish to the old, who know it only; but Irish is dying, and should die. English is the language of our pulpit and our schools. Our system of colportage was commenced by Dr. Carlile at Birr, in 1845; and in two years an agent sold 1,240 Bibles and extracts. As our chief end is not to sell books, but to gain access to Romish minds, and thus win souls, our joy is to hear that in one district 660 houses are open to us; in another, 4,000 Romanists have been conversed with; in a third, 10,500 spiritual visits have been paid. The Presbyterian Church uses education as a chief means of reform, in her Irish Home Mission, with great success. Some of our daily schools are literary, some industrial, all scriptural their end and essence being to train children for Christ. In 36 schools with churches and 10 manses,-our resolve being such were they who died or fled. What is Ireland now? In 1848-49, there were above two millions of paupers in Ireland, nearly one-third of her people. In 1857, our workhouses contained only 57,000, onefourth the number of 1852; and in 1859, only 33,796. The first year of our General Assembly, 23,200 were convicted in Ire the big box, the cabin's choicest furniture, while their squalid hovel, once a shelter and a home, lay a ruin. But the day of vengeance came, and wretches, maddened by merciless ejectments of wives and children from their own homes-poor and miserable, no doubt, yet still their own loved homesconspired for assassinating the whole class to whom they imputed wrong. This was Ireland; two years before, 1,100 were transland's shooting season with a vengeance, ported, and 154 hanged. In 1854, 4 were not of grouse on the wild moor, but of men hanged, in 1856, 3. The 23,000 criminals of the highest station, on the highway, in of 1840 had fallen, in 1856, to 4,000. For their own demesnes, or in the bosom of their each million there are three times as many families. A party went to shoot a man, and capital convictions in England as in Irenot finding him, they murdered his wife and land, and twice as many for crimes punished dying child. The Rev. Mr. Lloyd was shot by transportation and penal servitude. In returning from church in open day. Of 1848, convictions in Ireland were as 1 to nine magistrates at one time on the Cashel 449 of the population; in 1858, they were bench, four of themselves, and the fathers as 1 to 1,795. Never in the memory of or brothers of five others, were all shot man was there such a decrease of crime in dead. All this was evil, but God overruled Ireland as at our late assizes. I pass over it for good. The state of Ireland was so the great reformation in agriculture, railvery bad that neither God nor man could ways, manufactures, with a single reference bear it. Some were nuisances, hopelessly to the introduction of the sewed muslin useless and vile; earth swallowed them. manufacture to Connaught, by the ladies Many emigrated who had prevented pro- united with me in the Belfast Connaught gress; they were pests at home; their loss Association, This, with the reading of was gain. These exiles of Erin left their Scripture and religious teaching in our country for their country's good. This ap- schools, is one of the most interesting plies to only some of those whose cold events in our country's history. Our hearths are now covered by the young grass pupils-nearly all the poorest of the of southern and western pastures. The poor-soon earned £25,000 a-year; and famine killed old prejudices against emi- many of them, enlightened by the Gospel, gration, and many who would have lived and freed from Popery, are now in Britain lazy, stunted, starving at home, found them- and America, as well as at home, adornselves thriving amid the life and liberty of ing the doctrine of God their Saviour. On the fresh young world of the west. A mem- Ireland's mission sphere a wondrous change ber of a family gathered as much as paid her has come. In six of her counties, and in passage her earnings, likely, at the Pres-74 towns, with an average population of byterian Industrial School, where she learned to disobey her priest, and fly from his persecuting rage; she saved enough in the land of the dollar to send for a brother, and he for a third; and soon the whole family of wretched squatters, who had starved on wild kale, and boxty, and sea-weed, in a Connaught bog, found themselves ruddy, fat, and fair, near some Lowel factory, or away beyond the Alleghanies, with flourish ing crops of their own, and a joyous world before them. Many of the emigrants were those whom the missionary's Bible had enlightened, converted, and saved. I had delightful meetings with some of them in America. They had learned to detest the Popish mass, and the priest detested them; they had broken away from the slavery of Rome, but they felt and feared her iron grasp; their souls longed for Protestant light and liberty; and away they went, with glad hearts, to the land where Popery is dying fast as the aged die; and since Washington's spirit bade them welcome, they have never entered a chapel door. Such was Ireland when our mission began; 25,000, there was not, in 1849, a single bookshop. In 1859, nine and a third million of letters were delivered in Ireland; in 1856, forty-two millions. In 1840, the National Schools had 232,000 pupils; in 1858, 803,000, the most of these being poor Romanists, with well qualified teachers, and the best school-books, under a system whose great worth the people prize, and which exercises most salutary influence on the public mind. I don't claim for Presbyterians all these reforms; they arise from many causes and agencies, but the Presbyterian Church is one of these, one highly distinguished and honoured. In two spheres Presbyterians are regenerators of Ireland, her soil and her people. Figuratively and literally, they are making her the garden of the Lord. For three years the Commissioners of Encumbered Estates sold onetwelfth part of Ireland, and they received for sales, till August 1859, £25,000,000 sterling. They thus drove out 1,081 of Ireland's old landlords, who were replaced by 4,213 others, nearly 3,000 of whom did not pay above £2,000 each. Though these were chiefly Irish, still two most valuable have come out of her, some are adorning the classes of Protestants became landholders, -the purchasers of estates, and large farmers, who are mostly Scotch Presbyterians. About a thousand of them are blessing Ireland with their intelligence, capital, and religious influence. Of the former class, the most eminent is Allan Pollock, Esq. Thirty years ago the districts owned by him were the seat of a Ribbon conspiracy, savage crimes were frequent, and all around there was a reign of terror. Men went armed in vain along roads, where "Pass if you can" was the watchword; robbery and murder were too strong for law; at length a magistrate, having trained his tenants, hunted down the ruffians with such vigour, that at one assize seventy-three of them were convicted, many of them hanged, and the rest transported. Famine and pestilence hurried away many, and a miserable remnant dragged out life in horrid hovels earning from fourpence to sixpence a day, and even that not regularly. Mr. Pollock, though subjected to litigation, injustice. violence, wrought a great reformation by his courage, generosity, and wisdom. By draining, subsoiling, manuring, building a hundred miles of stone walls, and fourteen great farm-steadings the roof of one of which covers two acres-in short, by expending on wise and profitable improvements about a quarter of a million sterling on estates which cost a quarter of a million more, and employing for farming a capital of £95,000, he has not only doubled the crops, and prepared immense remunerative farms, but contributed largely to a new era in Ireland's history, and set in motion a train of happiest influences, which will spread and descend as a heritage of good to sons unborn. The chief blessings conferred on Ireland by Presbyterians are on her people. In famine we saved many from death, and when their priests thrust them cruelly away in the day of sickness and sorrow, we drew them to us with deeds of kindness and words of truth and love. One of our number has expended for their good £18,000. We give them free education, introduce manufactures, and enable them to support themselves; we provide cheap books to satisfy the thirst for knowledge we have created; we give wide circulation to the best of books-the Book of God; our missionaries are among them as ambassadors of Christ, with all the power and love of Christian truth and character. Here we build a school-house, there a church; perhaps in the very cockpit where the cocks of two counties fought, the handler of these cocks is now an elder of the church. We have shed enlightenment and independence among those still in communion with Rome. Of many true people of God who Gospel of Christ at home, and large numbers in Britain and America, while others have carried their faith and enterprise further away, like one noble man, who was once a dark and cheerless Papist, then a hopeful convert, afterwards a Presbyterian elder where once he adored the wafer; and now, prosperous and influential, a patriarch of eminent Christian worth in New Zealand. In all this we are fellow-labourers with brethren in Scotland, England, and America, who generously aid us; for they know that every convert from Rome in Ireland is a blessing to themselves, salt cast into the bitter spring, purifying the stream of emigration. We owe very much to the Christian zeal of holy women not of our Church, who patronise our schools, befriend our agents, and greatly benefit our cause. One of these, pre-eminently active and successful, has long been the sole conductor of the Clogher Missionone of the most interesting and effective missions of all the west. A mission thus sanctioned by intelligent women must be a mission, not of compulsion or deceit, but of light and love. Our missionaries carry on no fierce controversy, provoke no party spirit, use no terms of insult. They enter as friends the poor man's home; they speak boldly, as they ought to speak, yet in tenderness and love. Although a Romanist may, for fear of the priest's curse, prevent them praying in his cabin, yet he receives them kindly; and if a present or entertainment is given in honour of the missionary, he is among the first to subscribe and attend. Our mission in the west has round it a peculiar glory as a student's mission, begun, conducted, and supplied with missionaries by our candidates for the Presbyterian ministry. A noble training school is this for the students themselves, and for the missionaries, and a glorious means of fostering and spreading a missionary spirit, among both ministers and people, that will live and thrive evermore. Our Home Mission has helped Foreign Missions, and has been helped by them. In proportion as our Church is missionary, our Church thrives; and as our Church grows in size and spiri tual strength, the strong beating of her great warm heart sends life and vigour through all her members-away to the humblest prayer-meeting, round the rushlight on the one stool of the poor inquiring Romanist's dismal lonely home, cut in a bank of the endless Erris bog. What Presbyterians made Ulster, they will make Munster and Connaught too. Revived, regenerated Ulster will break forth on the right hand and on the left, and all Erin shall see the salvation of God. Revived Ulster has converts from Rome, first fruits of a glorious harvest, over all Saint Patrick's land, for what old Bishop Donatus sung of "Her fruitful soil for ever teems with wealth, An island worthy of its pious race In war triumphant and unmatched in peace." great centre, of the world. You will see, mingling with the multitudes crowding over its arches, the Jew, the Turk, the Arab, the Persian, the African, the Hindoo, the Chinese-indeed, the representative of every nation under heaven known to the world of commerce. It was our great privilege and joy to spend a Communion Sabbath with Dr. Hamilton, in his church in Regent Square, and he told us after the service that there were at the Lord's Table that morning, Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Italians, Hindoos and Kurds, English, Irish, Scotch, and Anglo-Saxons from America, all taking of the same bread and wine, and looking to the same Saviour for salvation! And it made us feel as if the day of Pente, cost had returned-the day when there were assembled in Jerusalem Parthians and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in DR. MURRAY-the "Kirwan" of the New Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, York Observer who lately visited this in Egypt, and in the parts of Lybia about country, makes the following remarks upon Cyrene, strangers of Rome, Jews and prose the Moral Greatness of London, in a re-lytes; and when they all heard in their own cent communication to that paper, We tongue, the wonderful works of God, it was happened to be among the "Christian a mingling on earth, like unto that mingfriends who accompanied the Doctor through the Seven Dials, and therefore beheld the sad scenes he so graphically describes: MORAL GREATNESS OF LONDON. -- This London is a great, vast city, and nobody, save those who have spent weeks in traversing its "magnificent distances," in walking its broad and narrow streets, in viewing the evidences, everywhere to be met, of its great wealth and squalid poverty, and who have pushed their wretched way by day and by night along its crowded thoroughfares, and over its great bridges, can have any sufficient idea of the adjectives great and vast, as applied to it. It is as large as three cities like New York. Its palaces are splendid. Its princely mansions are very many, as the aristocracy have their residences here, in order to bask in the light and sunshine of the Court, Its merchants and bankers are many, wealthy, and generous in their benefactions. Its churches are numerous, and range from St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey to the most uppretending chapel of the Wesleyan, in which God is worshipped with less pomp, but with equal acceptance. Its humane and philanthropic institutions are pumberless, in which provisions are made for the ignorant, the poor, the fatherless, the widow, the degraded, the vicious; and there are those who work and manage them with true-hearted loyalty to God and to man. Nor can you stand on London Bridge for half an hour between the noon of day and the noon of night, without having pass before you the evidence that it is one of the great centres, if not the ling of the saints in heaven, redeemed from every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb! It is the And if to all this we superadd the influence going out from London into all the earth, it will give us a yet more extended idea of its greatness and vastness. centre of the political influence which, more than any other, rules in the old world. England has its dependencies everywhere. Not a tithe of its subjects reside in the British Isles. The sun never sets on her dominion. The British lion has gone to regions of which the Caesars had no knowledge, and which the Roman eagle, in its loftiest flights, never saw. And the influence which directs Britain and all her dependencies, and which gives shape and direction to the counsels of emperors, kings, and cabinets, reside here. The British Parliament is omnipotent within the British Empire. The House of Lords is a small body, the House of Commons is not a large one. The British Cabinet is made up of a select few, and is usually controlled by one mind, like that of a Peel, a Derby, or a Palmerston ; and when that one mind can carry with it Lords and Commons, its decisions are felt from the rising to the setting sun. Palmerston or Russell speak, Napoleon stops When weaving his web of destiny, and the Pope will stop mumbling a mass, and the Russian autocrat will rise respectfully to hear. makes but little matter who is king or queen in England; whether the crown is worn by a man, or his wife, or a boy. The prime minister is the king for the time It |