infuriate passions, the most unrestrained vice, roar, and riot. The keeper of the "fence" loves to set up in business there-low public-houses abound where thieves drink and smoke-Jew receivers lurk at corners-brazen, ragged women scream and shout ribald repartees from window to window. The burglar has his "crib" in Clerkenwell-the pickpocket has his mart-the ragged Irish hodman vegetates in the filth of his three-pair back. It is the locality of dirt, and ignorance, and vice-the recesses whereof are known but to the disguised policeman, as he gropes his way up ricketty staircases towards the tracked housebreaker's den; or the poor, shabby genteel City Missionary, as he kneels at midnight by the foul straw of some convulsed and dying outcast."*

Such is the condition of the district where the writer, by the sustaining hand of the Lord, was enabled to proclaim the Gospel from house to house, and room to room, day by day, during the past six years. Continually in the midst of fever and infectious disorders, breathing an atmosphere of filth and dirt, and at the time of the dreaded cholera nearly falling a victim to * "Illustrated London News," May 22nd, 1847.

that disease, he was sustained by the good hand of his God upon him for six long years. As is well known to some, grace was given him to relinquish prospects and openings of more than competency, to embark in this Missionary enterprise-this forlorn hope. He has never for one moment regretted the undertaking. A rich reward has been granted. It is a great promise which our Lord Christ makes, that no man shall make sacrifice for his service without being rewarded an hundredfold for that sacrifice, even in this present life, (Mark x.) In the writer it has been amply fulfilled. I have lacked no good thing, my soul has been greatly blessed with Christ's presence, and on carefully examining the large volumes which form my private journals and general records of Missionary labour, I find many cases of persons who appear more or less hopefully to have been brought to a saving knowledge of our Saviour, instrumentally through Missionary visitation.

They have in many instances (some few of which will be detailed) been, humanly speaking, the most unlikely persons, desperate characters, respecting whom the faithless might have seen no hope; but it is a small matter with the

Almighty to apply truth with power to the hearts of the most hardened. He can :

"Speak with a voice that wakes the dead,

And bids the sleeper rise,

And bids his guilty conscience dread

The death that never dies."

It should not, however, be supposed that the results named have been effected without much that is trying to the flesh having been endured. The Westminster Auxiliary, in one of its addresses, remarks very truly:

"It is little known to what an extent of disease, insult, and every kind of outrageous and disgusting conduct, those are exposed who devote themselves to visiting in such districts. It cannot be otherwise. Mr. Walker, one of the Westminster Missionaries, reports that he has seen as many as forty policemen beaten out of a court in which they had attempted to secure a prisoner; and on the writer's district, twenty policemen have been most severely handled whilst securing two prisoners. Both these men are now partially reformed characters, but not converted, and might have been seen at a tea meeting held in the Ragged School upon the writer's district."

I will here narrate a circumstance which much impressed my mind some ten years since, several years previous to my entering the London City Mission. A policeman had been brutally murdered at Spitalfields, and the scene of his murder was described as being one of great violence and criminality. One evening, shortly afterwards, the writer happened to be in the neighbourhood, and observed that a very great disturbance was going on. He was led to dive into the nest of courts and alleys towards the scene of violence, and stopped at a door. A man who was standing there made a remark to the writer, and said, he was once riotous and dissipated, but had learned better now. I inquired how he had become changed. "I have cause to bless God," said the man, who I understood to have become a member of the Wesleyans,-"I have cause to bless God for the visits of a City Missionary." I could not but be forcibly struck with the circumstance of finding the first person I addressed in a most depraved neighbourhood, in the very street, if I mistake not, in which an officer of justice had just been brutally murdered in the execution of his duty-I could not but feel impressed with the circumstance, that the first person I casually

addressed in such a neighbourhood, should prove by his own confession, a convert under the labours of the London City Mission.

A Society so eminently adapted to meet the spiritual wants of the poor, and the sphere of whose labours is the metropolis of the world, the centre of British glory and wealth, should not be so positioned as to be unable, even whilst exercising the greatest economy in the disbursement of the funds intrusted to its care, to employ more than half the number of Missionaries really needed to visit properly the poor of London; and it must be added, for the vast importance of the subject demands the avowal, such a Society would not be so positioned, were the Christian public properly alive to the great responsibility which overshadows it.

Desperate and depraved as the scenes of the writer's labours were, it nevertheless was formerly much worse. The change is in a measure attributable to the efforts of the London City Mission. The improved system of constabulary police, introduced by the late Sir Robert Peel, has also had much to do with the alteration; but we ought to bear in mind, whilst most thankful for the greatly increased measure of order which the