phraseology something which exactly answers to his own state and circumstances.

Nor is the Bible less a mirror in its reference to the saints of God. Take the words of Moses when presenting us with the character of Enoch: "Enoch walked with God." (Gen. v. 22.) A world of instruction is conveyed to us in these words; a living, speaking representation of unfeigned piety. Turn to Abraham, when his faith was most severely tried by its divine "Author and Finisher." "Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son." (Gen. xxii. 10.) Here is that plain record of acquiescence in the will of God, which finds an immediate response in every believing soul; and which volumes of the most striking phraseology could not more effectually set before us. Look also to the two natures of which the servants of the Lord are conscious, to their conflicts, their joys, their sorrows, their hopes, and their endurance unto the end; and every Scripture image relative to these great matters will be found just and powerful. For instance, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." (John iii. 6.) "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness. of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Ephes. vi. 12.) "The disciples were filled with joy, and with the Holy Ghost." (Acts xiii. 52.) "Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. vii. 24.) And " Rejoice in the hope of the glory of God." (Rom. v. 2.) Who that happily possesses one spark of divine grace, and lives in any conceivable degree the life of faith, does not instantly perceive that here is his own experience; that here he himself stands forth amidst all that is humbling or elevating, saddening or rejoicing, distracting or composing, in his present pilgrimage and warfare?

Here again we are overpowered by the multitude of texts which exactly suit the subject. I shall content myself with a few respecting the love of the believer to his God, his Saviour, and his brethren. "We love him because he first loved us." (John iv. 19.) "Lord, thou knowest that I love thee." (John xxi. 15.) Again, "As I have loved you, that ye also love one another," (John xiii. 34); and " Charity never faileth." (1 Cor. xiii. 8.) Who that has these great Christian principles planted in him by the Holy Ghost, sees not his own likeness, as far as he is renewed by grace, in these parts of Revelation, while he meditates with shame and sorrow that the resemblance is not more complete? Or who among the saints of God does not unceasingly pray that he may daily find in Scripture more and more of holiness, as possessed and realized by himself?

The most devoted and most consistent follower of Jesus Christ will carefully use that "mirror," which the word of God contains. Such a one, being daily taught how corrupt and frail is man, even in his renewed state, and consequently how much he fails in his best endeavour to fulfil "the perfect law" of God, continually tries and proves himself by that unerring rule. Thus, at the conclusion of the day, he sees reflected, in some part or other of the Scripture, his sins, whatever they have been, whether in deed, or word, or thought. Like David he then beseeches God, "Cleanse thou me from secret faults;" and the result of his self-scrutiny and prayer is a growing sense of his entire dependence upon Him who loved us and gave himself for us, and who alone can save us from our sins?

Πιστις.

MILTON'S EMPYREAL HEAVEN.

For the Christian Observer.

MOST aptly has been long and popularly affixed to the statues and portraits of the bodily lineaments of Milton-for who shall sketch the outlines of his rapt and mighty mind?-his own sublime and solemn words:

Into the heaven of heavens, I have presumed,

An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air.

We had always concluded that the poet had Dante in his mind when he wrote thus; but his study of the School authors would account for his use of the above phraseology; nay, he needed not have gone farther than some of the Puritan and Non-conformist divines, with whose writings he was familiar, to find the above definition of "the heaven of heavens." Brooks, "sometime Preacher of the Gospel at Margaret, Fish Street" the writer of many once celebrated works, in the days of Charles the Second, as 1st. "Paradise Opened, or the Secret Mysteries of Divine Love;" 2. "Precious Remedies against Satan's Devices;" 3. "Heaven on Earth;" 4. "The Unsearchable Riches of Christ;" 5. " Apples of Gold; 6. " String of Pearls ;" 7. "The Mute Christian under the Smarting Rod," (still justly valued); 8. "An Ark for God's Noahs;" 9. "The Glory of Christianity, or Holiness the way to Happiness;" 10. "The Key of Heaven;" 11. "A Heavenly Cordial, (in the time of the plague); 12. "A Cabinet of Jewels ;" 13. "London's Lamentation;' and 14. "A Word in season about the favourable presence of the Lord with his people in trouble," says in the last of these treatises:

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By the heaven of heavens (1 Kings viii. 27) is meant, that which is by the learned called Empyreal Heaven, where the angels and the saints departed do enjoy

There is a goodly pile of these volumes of Brooks's, with other Puritan writings, now lying before us; and much do we delight in many of them; only barring those things, whether in doctrine, sentiment, or diction, which we would were otherwise. But these are not our present subject. One thing we specially mark in such writings their practical tendency. Some men represent the writings of the Puritans as a heap of inflated doctrinal speculations. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Whatever may be their faults, practical godliness breathes throughout them. We take up casually the very first of Brooks's treatises which presents itself, his "Golden Key ;" and opening at the very first page, we find an Epistle Dedicatory to "His honoured and worthily esteemed friend, Sir Nathaniel Herne, Sheriff of London and Governor of the East India Company." And how does this Puritan divine, whom some would account a raving Antinomian, address his friend occupied with busy commercial and municipal duties ?

He says:

"Let it be the top of your ambition, and the height of all your designs, to glorify God, to secure your interest in Christ, to serve your generation, to provide for eternity, to walk with God, to be tender of all that have anything of Christ shining in them, and so to steer your course in this world, as that you may give up your account at last with joy. All other ambition is base and low."

It

This is bringing practical godliness at once to men's business and bosoms. was not going "about it and about it ;" but entering into its most intimate recesses. How men would be astonished to see a London clergyman now-a-days addressing Sheriff Laurie, or Sir J. Hogg, Chairman of the East India Company, in this plain fashion, without circumlocution or apology, as if to the busiest merchant or statesman, "to glorify God, to secure his interest in Christ, to serve his generation, to provide for eternity, to walk with God," and the other duties abovementioned, were, without question, the most important occupations of human life.

the glorious and beautiful vision of God; and it is called the heaven of heavens, both because it is the highest, and doth contain the other heavens within its orb; and also by way of excellency, as the most holy place in the temple is called the holy of holies, because it far surpasseth all the rest in splendour and glory.”

Of these two reasons the latter is simple and satisfactory; but as for the former, about the chrystalline sphere which contained all the others in its orb, the figment was the invention of the ancient astronomers, to account for the complicated motions of the heavenly bodies, and we may feel confident was not intended by Solomon in the passage referred to. It is very doubtful whether Milton himself believed this doctrine of "cycle and epicycle; orb in orb;" for he had studied the writings of Galileo, whom he had the courage to visit in the prison of the Inquisition; and though he describes the Copernican system only hypothetically with "What if," (Paradise Lost: Book VIII.) yet he evidently felt its superiority to the Ptolemaic, which he gravely ridicules, while he intimates that "the sedentary earth" might "better with far less compass move." He however uses the machinery of the concave sphere system for poetical effect; as where he makes Satan arrive at the extreme concentric orb which formed the barrier of the universe, at an immeasurable distance from the "luminous inferior orbs" of the earth, the sun, the solar system, and even the fixed stars.

The fiend walked up and down, bent on his prey;

Alone, for other creature in this place,

Living or lifeless to be found was none :

None yet; but store hereafter from the earth

Up hither like aerial vapours flew,

Of all things transitory and vain, when sin

With vanity had filled the works of men.

They pass the planets seven, and pass the fixed,
And that chrystalline sphere whose balance weighs
The trepidation talked, and that first moved;
And now Saint Peter at Heaven's wicket seems
To wait them with his keys, and now at foot
Of Heaven's ascent they lift their feet; when lo,
A violent cross wind from either coast
Blows them transverse ten thousand leagues awry
Into the devious air; then might ye see
Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost
And fluttered into rags; then relics, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,
The sport of winds all these upwhirled aloft
Fly o'er the back side of the world, far off,
Into a Limbo large and broad, since called
The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown
Long after, now unpeopled and untrod.

The "heaven of heaven," the Empyreal, the dwelling of the blessed, was far beyond this "starry sphere." Neither modern astronomy, nor Scripture simplicity, has banished these poetical figments from popular language; and hymn-writers still speak of heaven as a place "beyond the starry sphere.”

ON THE LORD'S DAY OPERATIONS AGAINST THE NEW

ZEALANDERS.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

IN your remarks last month upon the victory over the New Zealanders, you do not mention that the final and decisive attack was made

upon them while they were unsuspecting and defenceless; being engaged in worshipping God upon the Lord's Day, and not expecting that Englishmen and fellow Christians would take advantage of them under such circumstances. The newspaper account says, that we "took advantage of their negligence;" I should rather call it their misplaced confidence. I incline to write upon the subject more strongly than perhaps would be considered "expedient," (that convenient word) or "charitable," (that abused word);-but I content myself with stating the naked fact, leaving the comment to others.

AN OLD FRIEND OF NEW ZEALANDERS.

We did not overlook the circumstances above alluded to;-nay we had penned, and sent to press, a paragraph upon the subject; but we withheld our remarks upon finding that Colonel Despard's official dispatches do not bear out the previous unauthenticated newspaper account, that the attack was made while the New Zealanders were assembled for divine worship. Colonel Despard only says, that they had betaken themselves to a place of security, to be out of the reach of cannon-balls and explosions. If it shall appear, when fuller accounts arrive, that the Natives were at worship, and that the English knew it, we shall not want words to express our opinion both in regard to the transaction, and to the official suppression of the real circumstances. But in the absence of the exact facts, we forbear any remark, as we cannot tell what might be a work of duty, necessity, or charity, in order to prevent further bloodshed. One thing, however, is to our minds clear, that the Natives, both Christian and heathen, ought throughout the whole struggle, and in all the transactions of the British authorities with them, to have visible evidence that Englishmen "Know how to make a Sunday;" to the want of which hallowed knowledge, that enlightened and patriotic New Zealand Chief, Duaterrâ, long ago ascribed the moral and physical degradation of his people. England owes all its successes in New Zealand to the blessed labours of men who themselves remembered the Sabbath-day to keep it holy, and taught the natives to do so. We have no doubt that the Chiefs would have readily entered into a truce that neither party should raise or repair works, or carry on active warfare, on the Lord's Day. In case of such a truce being violated by the natives-though they have never proved themselves trucebreakers-the consideration would occur, What was our duty in consequence? but this question does not at present arise; though we have formed an opinion upon it, as respects the whole conduct of war by a Christian army, and taking into view the promises and providence of God.

The chief difficulty which presses on our minds in reading the published statements is, that when the fortress and entrenchments of the refractory parties had been so far disabled, that an attack was determined upon, the plan of operations was altered at the suggestion of some friendly Natives, and the inference is, that the intelligence conveyed by them was, that a favourable season for the assault would occur when the people were assembled for divine worship on the Lord's Day. Till however the actual suggestion made by the friendly Natives is divulged, the above is only matter of conjecture, and the conjecture may not be well-founded. The spirit of wisdom, justice, moderation, and humanity displayed by Governor Grey, in his dealings with the Natives, would lead us to the most favourable interpretation of any unexplained circumstance.

THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY'S OMISSIONS AND ALTERATIONS IN ADAM'S PRIVATE THOUGHTS.

For the Christian Observer.

THE recent allusions in our pages to Adam's Private Thoughts have led one of our Correspondents to suggest to us to collate the Religious Tract Society's exemplar with a genuine copy. We have often expressed our opinion respecting alteration or omission in the reprints of deceased authors by Tract Societies; and have offered some hints as to the cases in which it appears allowable, and when not; adding our strong conviction that the mutations should never be such as to deceive the reader respecting the real opinions of the author. Our remarks gave offence to many persons; and we were told, that the judgment of "the religious world" was decidedly adverse to our opinion. The verdict went against us; and we will not attempt to disturb it; we discharged our conscience, and can now without unhallowed compromise afford to be silent.

Without therefore arguing the principle, we will merely mention as a fact, that Adam's Private Thoughts are not printed fully, or unaltered, in the Religious Tract Society's Editions. We were not aware of this till we were requested to ascertain the point. The title-page is the same as in the genuine editions; but we observe a N.B. at page xv. of the Preliminary Chapter (which we should have overlooked, had not our attention been specially directed to the point): "N.B. In this Edition a few of the least important passages are omitted." What are "the least important passages," is a question of opinion and taste; and as the notification is made that such omissions there are, the reader is apprised, and must judge for himself. It should have been added, in order to make the notification adequate to the facts, "And some altered" or "amended;" for such is the case.

The last four or five chapters being very short, we will mention the omissions in these, without attempting to collate the whole volume. It should be premised that Mr. Adam's published Thoughts were so carefully weeded by his original Editors from everything that might be offensive to any class of Evangelical Christians, that it would be difficult to find a book written by a clergyman which required so little the pruning hand of the Religious Tract Editor. Some of the passages omitted are quaint, far-fetched, in ill-taste, or relate to circumstances about the writer's health, and other details which certainly are not "important,” except for the remarks to which they give rise. In justice to Adam, it must be remembered that the Thoughts were strictly private notes, never intended for publication.

In the Chapter on Prayer we observe only one omission; namely, of a few words which we will print in Italics, and which the Tract Society doubtless considered "not important," though as they were Adam's words, expressing his opinion of the Anglican Prayer-book, and do not occupy much room in a chapter of more than thirty paragraphs, they might as well have been left to the judgment of the reader.

"The great mistake of prayer is, not praying as poor and destitute creatures, but thinking that we are and have already in some good degree what we pray for. See a notable instance of this in Lord Bacon's prayer, Tatler, No. 267. The Liturgy is formed upon a different plan, and puts us on a better method."