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and over again sentences which are perfectly familiar— which we could repeat almost without misplacing a word? Then we make our prayers very short: always shorter: very short in our closet, alone with our Father who seeth in secret; very perfunctory and heartless in the family, assembled morning and evening: we grow great advocates for extremely short prayers in the congregation gathered in God's house on Sunday. We turn impatient of any service in church unless it be a very short one; and we plead for short services in church by arguments which, if fairly carried out, would lead to no services at all. We come to think there is no good in going to church more than once on the Lord's day; and as for week-day services, we see no need for them at all. We go on to think that there is no use in being so particular in keeping holy God's day as we used to be. No good in making so sharp a distinction between its engagements and the engagements of other days; no reality in what we are told about good men finding that that blessed day worthily spent casts a blessing over all the week. We do not care, as

we once did, about prolonged and careful preparation before going to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; we think we used to be too precise in that matter, superstitiously so. But apart from the question of our not being physically and mentally able to bear long services, long prayers, and long sermons, may there not be some want of heart at the bottom of the charge? Even yet we are able, both men and women, to spend a long time without weariness in engagements we really care for. Our hours of work are very long; specially of head-work. A man will sit at his desk for many hours with his mind on the stretch. We are able to read light books, or even heavy books if not religious, for hours together without

the least flagging of interest. Our amusements sometimes last for a good many hours. Young women not of robust frame are able to go through severe exercise in a heated atmosphere for a great part of the night without complaint. No, we are not so weak, after all. We do not get tired so soon, after all, if it is a thing we care for. Yet we get tired very soon, now, of the worship of God. There is a craving in many quarters that the public services of religion be short-be very short. The prayers must be short; the sermon must be short. Does not this look as if people cared but little for them? Why, my friends, if our whole heart was in God's worship, as it ought, we should not find it a weariness.

DR A. K. H. BOYD.

THE HOPE OF HEAVEN.

WHAT is earthly rest or relaxation, what that release from toil after which we so often sigh, but the faint shadow of the saints' everlasting rest-the repose of eternal purity-the calm of a spirit in which, not the tension of labour only, but the strain of the moral strife with sin, has ceased-the rest of the soul in God! What visions of earthly bliss can ever-if our Christian faith be not a form-compare with "the glory soon to be revealed?" What joy of earthly reunion with the rapture of that hour when the heavens shall yield our absent Lord to our embrace, to be parted from us no more for ever? And if all this be not a dream and a fancy, but most sober truth, what is there to except this joyful hope from that law to which, in all other deep joys, our minds are subject? Why may we not in this case, too, think often,

amidst our worldly work, of the home to which we are going, of the true and loving hearts that beat for us, and of the sweet and joyous welcome that awaits us there? And even when we make them not, of set purpose, the subject of our thoughts, is there not enough of grandeur in the object of a believer's hope to pervade his spirit at all times with a calm and reverential joy!

Do not think all this strange, fanatical, impossible. If it do seem so, it can only be because your heart is in the earthly hopes, but not in the higher and holier hopes-because love to Christ is still to you but a name—because you can give more ardour of thought to the anticipation of a coming holiday than to the hope of heaven and glory everlasting. No, my friends! the strange thing is, not that amidst the world's work we should be able to think of our Home, but that we should ever be able to forget it, and the stranger, sadder still, that while the little day of life is passing-morning, noontide, evening-each stage more rapid than the last, while to many the shadows are already fast lengthening, and the declining sun warns them that "the night is at hand, wherein no man can work," there should be those amongst us whose whole thoughts are absorbed in the business of the world, and to whom the reflection never occurs that soon they must go out into eternity, without a friend, without a home. DR JOHN CAIRD.

THE INQUISITION.

THE blood-thirsty inquisitor, who has grown grey in the service of the Mother of Abominations, who has long made it his boast that none of her priests has brought so many

hundreds of victims to her horrid altars as himself; the venerable butcher sits on his bench; the helpless innocent is brought bound from his dungeon, where no voice of comfort is heard, no friendly eye glances compassion; where damp and stench, perpetual darkness and horrid silence reign, except when broken by the echo of his groans; where months and years have been languished out in want of all that nature requires ; an outcast from family, from friends, from ease and affluence, and a pleasant habitation; from the blessed light of the world. He kneels; he weeps; he begs for pity. He sues for mercy by the love of God, and by the bowels of humanity. Already cruelly exercised by torture, nature shudders at the thought of repeating the dreadful sufferings under which she had almost sunk before. He protests his innocence; he calls heaven to witness for him, and implores the Divine Power to touch the flinty heart, which all his cries and tears cannot move. The unfeeling monster talks of heresy, and profanation of his cursed superstition. His furious zeal for priestly power and a worldly church stops his ears against the melting voice of a fellow-creature prostrate at his feet. And the terror, necessary to be kept up among the blinded votaries, renders cruelty a proper instrument of religious slavery. The dumb executioners strip him of his rags; the rack is prepared; the ropes are extended; the wheels are driven round; the bloody whip and hissing pincers tear the quivering flesh from the bones; the pulleys raise him to the roof; the sinews crack; the joints are torn asunder; the pavement swims in blood. The hardened minister of infernal cruelty sits unmoved; his heart has long been steeled against compassion; he listens to the groans; he views the strong convulsive pangs when nature shrinks and struggles, and agonising pain rages in

every pore; he counts the heart-rending shrieks of a fellow-creature in torment, and enjoys his anguish with the calmness of one who views a philosophical experiment. The wretched victim expires before him. He feels no movement but of vexation at being deprived of his prey, before he had sufficiently glutted his hellish fury. He rises. No thunder roars; no lightning blasts him. He goes on to fill up the measure of his wickedness. He lives out his days in ease and luxury. He goes down to the grave, gorged with the blood of the innocent, nor does the earth cast up again the cursed carcase.

Can any one think that such scenes would be suffered to be acted in a world, at the head of which sits, enthroned in supreme majesty, a Being of infinite goodness and perfect justice; who has only to give His word, and such monsters would be, in an instant, driven by His thunder to the centre? Can any one think that such proceedings would be suffered to pass unpunished, if there were not a life to come, a day appointed for rewarding every man according to his works? BURGH.

THE HATEFULNESS OF WAR.

APART altogether from the evils of war, let us just take a direct look at it, and see whether we can find its character engraven on the aspect it bears to the eye of an attentive observer. The stoutest heart of this assembly would recoil were he who owns it to behold the destruction of a single individual by some deed of violence. Were the man who at this moment stands before you in the full play and energy of health, to be in another moment laid by some deadly aim a lifeless corpse at your

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