FACTS AND COUNSELS.

DR. MURRAY'S HABITS OF STUDY.

The

THE late Dr. Murray, of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a few years since was at a clerical conference, where each minister told for the benefit of the others his own experience in the matter of composing sermons. The doctor said that he spent usually the entire mornings of five days, never less than four days, in the composition of a sermon, and that he was never without at least three finished sermons ahead. It is a recorded fact that after his death there were found in his desk no less than four finished sermons, fully written out, which had never been preached, besides a fifth sermon already on the stocks. I am informed that he has, at times, had as many as eight sermons ahead. doctor, moreover, was abundant in other labors of the pen. He wrote several books. He wrote many popular lectures and addresses. He wrote almost every week an article for the New York Observer, filling from one to two columns of that paper.. He was a frequent attendant upon ecclesiastical councils of various kinds, and upon literary festivals. Yet he never seemed to be in a hurry, never pressed for time. He had all the comfort of a gentleman of leisure. It was simply because he early formed, and ever adhered to, the habit of being beforehand with every engagement. I knew him well, and I had from his own lips the circumstances in which he began his ministerial career. Immediately after leaving the seminary heentered upon an important charge at Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania.. He told me that on his first Sabbath there he exhausted his. entire stock in trade, so far as written sermons went. He had gone to the place with nothing prepared but his presbyterial trial pieces, and he had used those all up the first week of his ministry. On the Monday morning following, the first thing after breakfast, he went to his study and put his next sermon on the anvil, and hammered away at it the entire morning, and he continued thus to work at it every day, and to the exclusion of every other thing, until the sermon was completed. He settled this irrevocably and unchangeably as his method of procedure, and he kept it up through life. It was the same with every other professional engagement. He never allowed himself to drift along till near the time when any public duty was to be performed, and then turn in with frantic haste to make his preparations. He pursued no such spendthrift course

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as that, but, on the contrary, was always in ample time. He lived intellectually on the right side of his income. The consequence was he was never hurried, never anxious, never thrown out by unforseen accidents. The habit gave him a feeling of ease and independence that shone forth in his very face.--John S. Hart, LL. D.

WORKING UNDER DISADVANTAGES.

WHо shall reckon up the countless circumstances which lie like a depressing burden on the energies of men, and make them work at that disadvantage which we have thought of under the figure of carrying weight in life? There are men who carry weight in a damp, marshy neighborhood, who, amid bracing mountain air, might have done things which now they will never do. There are men who carry weight in an uncomfortable house: in smoky chimneys: in a study with a dismal look-out: in distance from a railway-station: in ten miles between them and a bookseller's shop. Give another hundred a year of income, and the poor struggling parson who preaches dull sermons will astonish you by the talent he will exhibit, when his mind is freed from the dismal, depressing influence of ceaseless scheming to keep the wolf from the door. Let the poor little sick child grow strong and well, and with how much better heart will its father face the work of life! Let the clergyman who preached, in a spiritless enough way, to a handful of uneducated rustics, be placed in a charge where weekly he has to address a large cultivated congregation; and with the new stimulus, latent powers may manifest themselves which no one fancied he possessed, and he may prove quite an eloquent and attractive preacher. A dull, quiet man, whom you esteemed as a blockhead, may suddenly be valued very differently when circumstances unexpectedly call out the solid qualities he possesses, unsuspected before. A man, devoid of brilliancy, may on occasion show that he possesses great good sense; or that he has the power of sticking to his task, in spite of discouragement. Let a man be placed where dogged perseverance will stand him in stead, and you may see what he can do when he has but a chance. The especial weight which has held some men back-the thing which kept them from doing great things and attaining great fame-has been just this: that they were not able to say or to write what they have thought and felt. And indeed a great poet is nothing more than the one man in a million who has the gift to express that which has been in the mind and heart of multitudes. If even the most commonplace of human beings could write all the poetry he has felt, he would produce something that would go straight to the hearts of many.-Country Parson.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.

Victoria Her character has

We have been looking at a photograph of Florence Nightingale, taken for Queen Victoria. It was a gift of one queen to another. The recipient was the sovereign of Britain; the giver is the " queen of hearts" the world over--the most popular woman on the globe. Neither of these two foremost women of our time are beautiful according to an artist's canons. has grown stout, florid, and matronly. ripened, too, into nobleness. Dr. M'Leod, of Glasgow, one of her chaplains, spent a week with her at Balmoral, and after many free familiar conversations with her Majesty, expressed his surprise at her mental vigor and reach of thought. He said he always knew his Queen had a good heart; he did not know that she had so vigorous a mind.

Florence Nightingale is younger than her royal sister of Windsor Castle, having just completed her fortieth year. Judging from the photograph, she is slight in person, and has a quiet, kindly, old-maidish face. She is just such a woman as the Creator would make for such a mission of benevolence. She is no bewitching Hebe, stealing young officers' hearts by diamond eyes and cherry lips; nor is she a hard-featured "Sairey Gamp," with sleeves and dress tucked up, and going about her work with the rueful alacrity of an undertaker. Her face is a trifle sad, but beaming with benevolence. After all, as Mrs. Primrose says, "what is good-looking but looking good?"

Miss Nightingale is the founder of our modern sanitary system, and did more than any one else to put it on the basis of Christianity and practical common-sense. So sensible an enthusiast has scarcely ever been known. Of English ancestry, she was yet born under the sunny skies of Italy, and received her name of Florence from the beautiful city of her birth. Her father's name was Shore, but he adopted the name of his grand-uncle, Peter Nightingale, on inheriting his estates. Florence's grandfather, Hon. William Smith, was a co-worker with Wilberforce in Parliament in the abolition of West India slavery. Reared in wealth, with elegant mental culture, she evinced an early passion for caring for the sick, and her favorite books were those which treated of hospitals and institutions for the infirm. One of her earliest ideas was that Protestanism needed some counterpart to the "Sisters of Charity" in the Romish Church. Accordingly, she went as a pupil to Pastor Fliedner's "school of deaconesses 19 at Kaiserswerth, on the Rhine. In 1854 the sorrowful tidings of the sufferings and barbarities in the Crimean Hospitals reached England, and aroused the intensest feeling of the British nation. Mr. Sidney Herbert proposed to Miss Nightingale that she should go thither with a staff of nurses. She took forty-two ladies with her; fifty more soon

followed, and of these, like many of our own heroines in hospital duty, a large portion belonged to the refined ranks of society.

With Florence Nightingale's beautiful work of philanthropy at Scutari all our readers are familiar. How she revolutionized the hospitals; how she brought order out of confusion, carelessness, and chaos; how she won the poor wounded soldiers' hearts that one of them said that he kissed her shadow as it fell across his pillow; and how she stood up for twenty hours each day with a kind word and a smile for every sufferer; all this the world knows by heart. Her love-labor of two busy years at Scutari cost her her own health; she came home a broken invalid, never to regain the bloom and vigor of her early days. The queen sent her an autograph letter of thanks, with a costly diamond; the soldiers offered to build her a monument, which she declined; and a quarter of a million dollars was raised to found an institution for training nurses under her direction.

Miss Nightingale's home is among the emerald hills and leafy lanes of Derbyshire. She has employed her leisure hours in writing the admirable "Notes on Nursing," a capital volume, that appeared three years ago. This work ought to be in the hands of every nurse in our national army. It would do us all good to read it, and to listen to such considerate hints as the following passage contains; for who of us is not sometimes called to the ministrations of the sick-room? In replying to the petulant charge that the sick or wounded might have "more self-control," good, gentle Florence says:

"Believe me, almost any sick person, who behaves decently well, exercises more self-control every moment of his day than you will ever know till you are sick yourself. Almost every step that crosses his room is painful to him; almost every thought that crosses his brain is painful to him; and if he can speak without being savage, and look without being unpleasant, he is exercising self-control.

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Suppose you have been up all night, and instead of being allowed to have your cup of tea, you were to be told that you ought to 'exercise self-control,' what should you say? Now the nerves of the sick are always in the state that yours are in after you have been up all night."-P. 35.

Miss Nightingale is deservedly severe on the evil practice of worrying the sick and wounded with needless calls and exacting talk. "I hope you are none the worse for my call,” is the frequent apology of such do-no-good intruders. "No real patient," observes Miss Florence, "will ever say 'Yes, I am a great deal worse,' even though such untimely visits have sometimes been followed by a night of delirium."

A few months since Miss Nightingale addressed a letter to Lord Stanley on the sanitary condition of the army in Indie

In this letter she makes one most important declaration, which we commend to our American officers, and not to them only, but to the whole nation. She says, "The long cherished idea as to the necessity of ardent spirits for the British soldier is thoroughly exploded. A man who drinks tea or coffee will do more work than a dram-drinker, though considered sober." Well spoken, good angel Florence! we would go a long way to kiss the hand that wrote these few weighty words. Her testimony on such a point is worth the "deliverances " of a score of synods and conventions.

TRIUMPH OF ARNOLD AND WORDSWORTH.

REV. F. W. ROBERTSON, M.A.

It was my lot, during a short university career, to witness a transition and a reaction, or revulsion, of public feeling, with respect to two great men whom I have already mentioned and contrasted. The first of these was one who was every inch a man-Arnold of Rugby. You will all recollect, how in his earlier life, Arnold was covered with suspicion and obloquy; how the wise men of his day charged him with latitudinarianism, and I know not with how many other heresies. But the public opinion altered, and he came to Oxford, and read lectures on Modern History. Such a scene had not been witnessed in Oxford before. The lecture-room was too small; all adjourned to the Oxford theatre; and all that was most brilliant, all that was most wise and most distinguished, gathered together there. He walked up to the rostrum with a quiet step and manly dignity. Those who had loved him when all the world despised him, felt that, at last, the hour of their triumph had come. But there was something deeper than any personal triumph they could enjoy; and those who saw him then will not soon forget the lesson read to them by his calm, dignified, simple step--a lesson teaching them the utter worthlessness of unpopularity, or of poplarity, as a test of manhood's worth.

The second occasion was when, in the same theatre, Wordsworth came forward to receive his honorary degree. Scarcely had his name been pronounced, than from three thousand voices at once, there broke forth a burst of applause, echoed and taken up again and again, when it seemed about to die away, and that thrice repeated-a cry in which

"Old England's heart and voice unite,

Whether she hail the wine cup or the fight,

Or bid each hand be strong, or bid each heart be light.'

There were young eyes there filled with an emotion of which they had no need to be ashamed; there were hearts beating with the proud feeling of triumph, that, at last, the world had recog