than to step back from my present place in the world, and not to rise to a higher. Still there are works which (with God's permission) I would do before the night cometh: but, above all, let me mind my own personal work, to keep myself pure, and zealous and believing, labouring to do God's will, yet not anxious that it should be done by me rather than by others, if God disapproves of my doing it.

"I have lost a deal of time," said the The Bible. learned Salmasius on his death-bed. "If I

had one year more I would spend it in reading David's Psalms and Paul's Epistles."

World.

Christianity has been charged with fixing Love of this its canon against the enjoyment of even harmless temporal pleasure. Such may, perhaps, appear upon a hasty view to be its occasional tendency; but, assuredly, if that pleasure by attaching us too much to the things of this world, and consequently diminishing our zest for spiritual holiness, tempts us to rob God of our allegiance, it is anything but harmless.

Shuttleworth.

Bible.

Even when we are making the most real Study of the progress in spiritual improvement and knowledge, we most appear to ourselves to retrograde; our knowledge appears to melt before us as we advance, our difficulties to accumulate. . . . . We begin experimentally

Shuttleworth.

Scriptures-
How to be read.

Shuttleworth.

Conscience.

to find that the most really cogent proofs of our religion are to be met rather by the moral conviction of a well-regulated heart, than by the acuteness of the head; and that the trials which they afford are rather to be overcome upon the knees in prayer, than surmounted by the arguments of the learned.

The only true safeguard against the tendency (to substitute the ingenuity of the intellect, for the unsophisticated fervour of the heart) is by constantly measuring and remeasuring our progressive growth of opinion by the original and infallible standard of Scripture; by keeping the sentiments, the language, the theory and harmony of revelation, not in detached passages and in disjointed inferences, but as a consistent and symmetrical whole, uniformly before our minds. Then only can we succeed . . . in making general approximation among the whole body of Christians to the "unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."

Conscience, as its compound title denotes, is comparative knowledge. It is the judgment which a man passes upon his own actions compared with some law. Remove all law, and you take away all conscience. For where there is no law, there can be no transgression, no judgment. Without a law superior to conscience therefore, there can be no such

thing as conscience at all, for conscience is a private personal principle which must necessarily be submitted to some law of God, real or supposed; as its ultimate rule the law of the Christian is the revealed will of God, the conscience of a Christian, consequently, is that testimony which the mind bears to the conduct, when compared with that revealed will. Hence it is, that Conscience the vicegerent of God, carries a divine authority with it, because it has a divine word or precept to support it. No greater mischief has been done in the world, than from the want of a proper distinction having been made between conscience, and a mere confidence of opinion or persuasion.

If the Jews had tested the Saviour by the written Scriptures, would they have rejected him? Yet they pleaded conscience-but it was a wrong term-ignorance or selfishness were the true name.

Bacon says all ignorance is forgetfulness; and to him St. Paul's words agree when he says of the heathen, that they would not retain God in their knowledge, hence their false gods. His revelation dates back to the Fall, and before that, His law was written on man's heart. So there is no nation or people who have not some remains of His law for them written on their hearts, by which their consciences accuse or excuse themselves and one another.

Daubeny.

Eloquence of
Pitt.

Quarterly
Review.

Freedom of
Thought.

Sir J.

Mackintosh.

Religion in
Humble Life.

Shuttleworth.

Permanent
Influence of
Writers.

To be plain, with dignity-to be practical, yet broad-is the eloquence most adapted to gain its ends with the audience addressed by Pitt. There is not a trace in Demosthenes of what in our own closets we most admire in Burke.

From the taking of Constantinople to the Reformation is the age of invention and progress,-gunpowder, the compass, printing, the opening of our planet by Columbus and De Gama, the discovery of discoveries, the parent of all future discoveries and the guardian of all past, the discovery that every man has a right to think for himself, the emancipation of the human understanding under the appearance of a controversy about 'justification by faith,' by Martin Luther.

A poor man earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, yet going through his career of humble duty with cheerfulness, regularity, and piety, affords, perhaps, the most exquisitely touching portraiture of the Christian character which the imagination can contemplate.

One successful profligate writer may spread poison through the minds of successive generations; and one whose pen has been dipped in the pure spring of divine wisdom, may be comforting the afflicted, and exciting the fervour of true devotion in thousands of bosoms,

many ages after his own removal from the earth.

If at any time men of tender consciences, in their aspirations after some ideal perfection, be tempted to swerve from the Church of England, let them study the writings of humble, simple-hearted, stedfast Bishop Ken (stedfast, because humble and simple-hearted), and they will find solid arguments to preserve them from "widening her deplorable divisions," and inspiring them with his firm resolves to "continue stedfast in her bosom, and improve all those helps to true piety, all those means of grace, all those incentives to the love of God," which He has mercifully afforded to them in her communion.

In order to peace of mind, we should learn to view everything on its best side, and in the fairest light. Where nature has bestowed this turn of thinking, it is an inheritance beyond all outward possession; and where it is wanting, it should be studiously sought as the most valuable acquisition of reason and philosophy; still more should we seek it as a fruit of that divine charity which thinketh no evil, believeth all things, and hopeth all things.

Shuttleworth.

Church of
England.

Ken's Life, by
Anderson.

Charity of
Judgment.

Bates.

Non est Religionis religionem cogere. Ter- Toleration. tullian.

the

Christianity is a delicious fruit that attracts eyes of those who choose to view it; but