between inclination and duty, have then ceased or become feeble, and are more easily governed. Our impulsive projects, hopes, and activities, have subsided into sober reasoning and experienced judgment. The world around us has lost much of that enchantment which so much fascinates in its first novelties, and in the delusive expectations which it excites. What we have ardently wished, we have by that time attained, or have relinquished as either unattainable or undesirable. The mind is, therefore, less agitated and deceived; so much of its term of existence here has been passed, that our common sense counsels us to look more steadily on our next state of being, and to be doing whatever will most tend to make that safe and comfortable to us.

But when these feelings and thoughts really predominate in our mind and occupy our attention, in any proportion to their just claims upon us, and to their insuppressible importance, then every year of added life brings with it the opportunity, the scene, the incitation, and the means for the further improvements which we need, and which will be so richly profitable to us hereafter, as we enlarge their amount; no one can live longer with these ideas and on these principles, but he will have reason to perceive and to acknowledge that every additional year has been a paternal benefaction to him.

Such results will give longevity an utility, and a charm, which will make it one of the noblest blessings we can receive. The parable of the "Talents" intimates that the greater improvements we acquire and use in this life, the grander will be the benediction conferred in the next.—TURNER'S ‘Sacred History.'

Superfluous.
Repeat.

THE LORD'S PRAYER.

Paternoster.
Contradict.

Devout.
Construct.

Committed.
Gifts.

THE remark may seem superfluous, but it is not so. The Paternoster is not, as some fancy, the easiest, most natural, of all devout utterances. It may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learned by heart. Men may repeat it over ten times in an hour; but to use it when it is most needed, to know what it means, to believe it, yea, not to contradict it in the very act of praying it, not to construct our prayers upon a model the most unlike it possible-this is hard; this is one of the highest gifts which God can bestow upon us; nor can we look to receive it without others that we may wish for less; sharp suffering, a sense of wanting a home, a despair of ourselves.-MAURICE On the Lord's Prayer.'

THE proper work of man, the grand drift of human life, is to follow reason (that noble spark kindled in us from heaven; that princely and powerful faculty which is able to reach so lofty objects, and to achieve so mighty works); not to soothe fancy, that brutish, shallow, and giddy power, able to perform nothing worthy much regard. "We are not" (even Cicero could tell us) "born for play and jesting; but for severity, and the study of graver and greater affairs." Yes, we were purposely designed, and fitly framed, to understand and contemplate, to affect and delight in, to undertake and pursue, most noble and worthy things; to be employed in business, considerably profitable to ourselves and beneficial to others; we do, therefore, strangely debase ourselves when we do strongly bend our minds to, or set our affections upon, such toys.

Especially to do so is unworthy of a Christian; that is, of a person who is advanced to so high a rank and so glorious relations, who hath so excellent objects of his mind and affections presented before him, and so excellent rewards for his care and pains proposed to him; who is engaged in affairs of so worthy a nature and so immense consequence. For him to be zealous about quibbles, for him to be ravished with puny conceits and expressions, it is a wondrous oversight and an enormous indecency.

He, indeed, that prefers any faculty to reason, disclaims the privilege of being a man, and understands not the worth of his own nature; he that prizes any quality beyond virtue and goodness, renounces the title of a Christian, and knows not how to value the dignity of his profession. It is these two, reason and virtue, in conjunction, which produce all that is considerably good and great in the world. Fancy can do little, doeth never anything well, except as directed and wielded by them. Do pretty conceits or humorous talk carry on any business or perform any work? No, they are ineffectual and fruitless; often they disturb, but they never despatch anything with good success. It is simple reason, as dull and dry as it seemeth, which expediteth all the grand affairs, which accomplisheth all the mighty works, that we see done in the world. In truth, therefore, as one diamond is worth numberless bits of glass, so one solid reason is worth innumerable fancies; one grain of true science and sound wisdom in real worth and use doth outweigh loads, if any loads can be, of freakish wit. To rate things

otherwise, doth argue great weakness of judgment and fondness of mind. So to conceit of this way signifieth a weak mind, and much to delight therein rendereth it so; nothing more debaseth the spirit of a man, or more rendereth it light and trifling.BARROW'S 'Sermon against Foolish Talking and Jesting.'

THE tenth commandment is comprehensive, and recapitulatory, as it were, of the rest, concerning our neighbour, prescribing universal justice toward him (whence St. Mark, it seems, meaneth to render it in one word, by deprive not or bereave not your neighbour of anything); and this not only in outward deed and dealing, but in inward thought and desire, the spring whence they do issue forth (for from the heart, as our Saviour teacheth, do proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false-witness, blasphemies). We are obliged to be so far from depriving our neighbour of any good thing belonging to him, that we are not so much as to wish or desire it; not only to abstain from injurious action, but to repress covetous inclinations: wherein is also implied, that we should have a delight and complacence in our neighbour's good; not envying him any enjoyment; being in our minds content with the portion God pleaseth to vouchsafe us; and entirely trusting in him, that he will supply us with what is needful or befitting to us, without the damage of our neighbour. Thus God's law is, as St. Paul observed, spiritual; not only restraining exterior acts, but regulating our inmost thoughts, quelling all inordinate appetites and affections of heart within us; the which may be extended so as to respect not only matters of justice toward our neighbours, but all objects whatever of our practice; so as to import that which in the Christian law is so frequently enjoined us as the life of our religion; circumcising our hearts, crucifying the flesh with its passions and desires, mortifying our earthly members, putting to death by the Spirit the deeds of the body, putting off the old man which is corrupted according to the deceitful lusts. Thou shalt not unlawfully or irregularly desire, doth, according to the spiritual intent, import all this.

I have done and shall only add, that the sum and end of these and all other good laws, of all religion and all our duty, is (as we are often taught in the New Testament) comprised in

those two rules, of loving God with all our heart, and loving our neighbour as ourselves; seriously and honestly attending unto which, we can hardly fail of knowing what in any case our duty is. It remains that we employ our best care and endeavour on the conscientious practice thereof; imploring therewith the assistance of God's grace, and that good Spirit which God hath most graciously promised to those who duly ask it, by which alone we can be enabled to keep God's commandments: to Him be all glory and praise.-BARROW's 'Exposition of the Decalogue."

"EXAMINE," says Mr. Hume, "the religious principles which have prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men's dreams; or, perhaps, will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational." "To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be;' that the whole is greater than a part;' 'that two and three make five,' is pretending to stop the ocean with a bulrush." But what is the inference to which we are led by these observations? Is it, to use the words of this ingenious writer, "that the whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery; and that doubt, uncertainty, and suspense appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny concerning the subject ?" Or should not rather the melancholy histories, which he has exhibited, of the follies and caprices of superstition, direct our attention to those sacred and indelible characters on the human mind, which all these perversions of reason are unable to obliterate; like that image of himself, which Phidias wished to perpetuate by stamping it so deeply on the buckler of his Minerva, "Ut nemo delere posset aut divellere, qui totam statuam non imminueret." In truth, the more striking the contradictions, and the more ludicrous the ceremonies to which the pride of human reason has thus been reconciled, the stronger is our evidence that religion has a foundation in the nature of man.

When the greatest of modern philosophers declares that "he

would rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without mind," he has expressed the same feeling which, in all ages and nations, has led good men, unaccustomed to reasoning, to an implicit faith in the creed of their infancy; a feeling which affords an evidence of the existence of the Deity, incomparably more striking than if, unmixed with error and undebased by superstition, this most important of all principles had commanded the universal assent of mankind. Where are the other truths, in the whole circle of the sciences, which are so essential to human happiness as to procure an easy access, not only for themselves, but for whatever opinions may happen to be blended with them? Where are the truths so venerable and commanding, as to impart their own sublimity to every trifling memorial which recalls them to our remembrance; to bestow solemnity and elevation on every mode of expression by which they are conveyed; and which, in whatever scene they have habitually occupied the thoughts, consecrate every object which it presents to our senses, and the very ground we have been accustomed to tread?

To attempt to weaken the authority of such impressions by a detail of the endless variety of forms which they derive from casual associations, is surely an employment unsuitable to the dignity of philosophy. To the vulgar it may be amusing, in this as in other instances, to indulge their wonder at what is new or uncommon; but to the philosopher it belongs to perceive, under all these various disguises, the workings of the same commor nature; and in the superstitions of Egypt, no less than in the lofty visions of Plato, to recognise the existence of those moralities which unite the heart of man to the Author of his being.STEWART'S Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. 1. "So that no one could erase or tear it away without destroying the whole statue."

IN prophetical history we cannot trace the minute circumstances which may accompany certain important events, as we can do in relation to the occurrences of past ages, when related by credible historians. We can perceive only some of the grand leading features of those future scenes which are portrayed in the writings