forth in its power and worth. gnaw in turn at the root of the Strange process and strange shrub which serves him for a transformation! Old things have support, The unfortunate man become new. The things once remains there frozen with terror, hated and despised became beau- and seeing no retreat, no means tiful and more to be desired than of safety. Suddenly, on a little all else. The word, the people, branch of a shrub, he discovers the service of God, are all loved some fruit. At that moment he and enjoyed. The ways cf sin ceases to observe the rage of the are forsaken, a new life commen- camel, the jaws of the dragon, ced, and the soul addresses itself and the frightful activity of the to new duties and new enjoyments. mice. He reaches out his hand These are marvels of grace, trophies of that cross, whose riches are untold and unsearchable. toward the fruit, he gathers it, and in the sweet taste, forgets his fears and dangers. 66 Do you ask who is this madman, who can forget so quickly a mortal peril? That man is thyself. The dragon of the stream is the everopen abyss of death. The camel represents The two The Dragon of the Abyss. IMPORTANT and striking truth is often conveyed to the mind by fable, and enforced on the attention with great power, as in the following Eastern story: the sorrows of life. "A man was traveling in mice who are gnawing at the Syria, leading his camel by the roots of the shrub, are day and bridle. Suddenly the animal is night; and in this situation, the seized with a panic of fears; he fruit of pleasure attracts you. raises himself with impetuosity, You forget the anxieties of life, foams and bounds in a manner the threatenings of death, the so horrible that his master aban- rapid succession of day and night, dons him in anguish, and tries to seek the plant of voluptuousto save himself. He perceives ness on the borders of the tomb.,' at a distance from the road a deep stream, and as he still heard the frightful neighings of the camel, he sought a refuge there, and fell over a precipice. But a shrub held him up. clung to it with both hands, and cast on every side his anxious eyes. Above him is the terrible camel, of which he does not lose sight for a moment. In the abyss below is a dragon, who opens his monstrous jaws, and seems waiting to devour him. At the side of him he sees two mice, one white and the other black, who responding with this day? If The Ministry of the Age. No preceding generation of ministers ever saw such a day as this! Such openings for useHe fulness; such calls for exertion; such multiplied and extensive fields whitening to harvest; such abundant and potent means for doing good to mankind. To live now, is a talent put into your hands, for which you must give an account. Have you an ardor of piety, a tone of moral sentiment, a spirit of enterprise, cor 66 not, give yourself no rest till As we came to know her better you, in some good measure, at- we were charmed by her calm tain them all. If an ancient self-poise and her heroic subheathen rhetorician, in giving missiveness to God under sudden directions for the attainment of the shocks of calamity. We could "sublime,?' in writing, could say: not but admire so beautiful a Spare no labor to educate your character. We envied its possessoul to grandeur, and to impreg- sor. We coveted such a spirit nate it with great and generous for ourselves. Ah! we little ideas;" much more may the knew at what a fearful price of same language be addressed to severe chastisements and bitter the gospel minister, in the pre- disappointments; of hopes desosent state of the Church's pro- lated and expectations crossed; gress. Take increasing pains to of faith put to the rack and paget large views of ministerial tience burning bright in seven furniture, ministerial duty, and times heated furnaces-all that ministerial success. Strive to meek loveliness of character had educate your souls to grandeur been gained. So true is it that he of conception and grandeur of who would be "rich towards God" wishes, and hopes, and enterprise must be willing to toil hard, and for the moral benefit of your bear sore afflictions, in order to fellow-men. Aim high. Let win the precious acquisitions. no petty plans satisfy you, either as to acquirement or exertion. Every one of you, however humble his talents, if really disposed to make the most of what God has given him might cause his influence to be felt to the ends of the earth.-Dr. Miller. The Richest Jewel. Five Consciences. THERE are five kinds of consciences on foot in the world; first, an ignorant conscience, which neither sees nor says anything-neither beholds the sins in the soul, nor reproves them ; secondly, the flattering conscience, whose speech is worse than As God reckons jewelry there silence itself, which, though seeis no brilliant which flashes with ing sin, soothes men in the comsuch lustre as the tear of true mitting thereof; thirdly, the penitence. Yet God only know- seared conscience, which has eth what heart pressure as in a neither sight, speech, nor sense, vise, what rendings and ringings in men that are "past feeling;" of soul, what crushing of pride, fourthly,the wounded conscience, and wrestlings in agony may frightened with sin; the fifth is have been needful, in order to a quiet and clear conscience, press out that jewel drop upon purified in Christ. A wounded the cheek of the stubborn suffer- conscience is rather painful than er! We have sometimes met sinful-an affliction, no offence with a person in social circles and is the ready way, at the who possessed a peculiar gentle- next remove, to be turned into ness and docility of character. a quiet conscience.-Kitto. BY REV. SAMUEL COOKE, D.D., DEISM AND CHRISTIANITY COMPARED. YORK. ye believe in God, believe also in me."-ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL, 14:1. "IF ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also," was the declaration of the Saviour to the faithless ones, and when he said of himself, "I came forth from the Father," he announced a truth full of promise to the world. The human mind, in its strivings after the things which are above itself, has made some strange exhibitions of its own capacities, but upon no subject has this strangeness been more wonderfully manifested, than upon that subject which includes the being and the attributes of God. Were it my task to illustrate that awful contradiction in human nature, which at one time proves man to be crazy, and at another time sane, I should appeal, in the first place, to what has been written and spoken concerning the Deity. True it is, that if the world contained no other proof of the great fact of the fall, man carries within him proofs enough, and the denial of that proof is only another form of witnessing to the fact. In the sway and motion of this disjointed being, we read the story of transgression, and when we see how the life here is all conflict with itself, how the parts have turned against, and are acting against one another, the conclusion comes without the seeking, that man was not sent forth in such a form from the hand of God. And again, in view of what man proves himself to be, we hardly wonder that some should take up the notion that God had little to do with his creation-that man had no higher parentage than accident, and has no better destiny than fate. This conclusion, having in it more of the bitter than the other, would have a stronghold, and a wide empire, were it not for those wonderful evidences which prove man's immortality to himself, thus struggling with and destroying the supposition that man was the child of chance. It remains, therefore, after these centuries of speculation, that no theory harmonizes with experience like the theory of the fall of man-that man was made upright, but did afterwards transgress, and that the struggle which ever since he has maintained is a struggle between that original purity and power, and that after sin and weakness. This accounts for the crosses and the contradictions of his nature, the knowledge and the ignorance, the power and the weakness, the truth and the error, the wisdom and the folly, which alternate so wonderfully in his life, and struggle together in the character. We have spoken of man's natural views of the divine Beingviews grounded upon the testimony of the things without, and the things within-nature, and conscience, and experience, all pouring in a testimony to the being and the greatness of the one Invisible. It is true, moreover, that this testimony led those who had no other, to do just what the text asserts-to "believe in God," not always with a true apprehension of his character, but, at the same time, with a fixedness of belief in his existence and presence, which redeems heathenism from some of its absurdities, and which saved man from certain forms of sin. It may be that the words of the text were first spoken to those who believed in God as he was revealed to the Jew, and that the Saviour invites them to believe in him, even as they believed in the God of Abraham and of the Prophets. The faith, too, in himself, to the exercise of which he urges them, was then to do a comforting work, and hence he says, "Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God,-believe also in me." He had told them that he was to go away, and that they would see him no more; and, perhaps, in view of this teaching, the reasoning of the passage is this: "Ye believe in God although he is invisible, and when I also pass into that invisible state, you must believe in me then, even as ye believe in God now. The same laws which apply to the Father in his invisible existence, must be applied to me, after I am taken from the world, and then you must believe in me, although invisible, even as now ye believe in him.” We propose, as our remarks would indicate, to give a broader sense to the words, and to draw from them this proposition, namely, those who believe in God should, for the same reasons, believe in Jesus Christ. This is the point to which we ask your attention. We proceed, then, to remark, that there are many persons living in Christian communities, whose religion, so far as they have any consists in an acknowledgment of the being, the attributes, and the providence of God. They believe that there is a God-that he has power over them, and over all things, that he is infinite in wisdom, and goodness, and knowledge, and truth-that they are his subjects now, and must account to him at the last. They have also some idea of what he will reward, and what he will punish; that his friendship is worth the having, and that in his frown there is a curse. They have reached these truths, as they think, by the light of nature-they are truths which, they say, conscience sanctions and reason approves, and these are the great truths of that natural religion upon which they rest to the exclusion of the religion which is revealed. It will be seen that the Deist occupies a position between the Atheist and the Christian-the Atheist believe ing in no God at all, and the Christian believing in God, not merely as he is manifested in nature, but as he lives and speaks in the person of his Son. Now, as a mere point to reason from, Atheism is certainly better than Deism, if it be the object of both to overthrow Christianity. Atheism, by its wide-sweeping negation, carries down Christianity because it takes every thing else along with it; it leaves you without a point upon which to rest; as exterminating as the two philosophers, whom Pope in his line has helped to make immortal in spite of themselves, one of them denying the existence of the body, and the other the existence of the soul, so that, between the two, there was not much of man left to reason about. Such is the remorseless sweep of Atheism, and it can do more by the simple power of denial, than any thing else with which we are acquainted. The position of the Deist relatively to Christianity, is one far more assailable, and far more difficult to hold. One reason for this is, that the proof by which the Deist demonstrates the truth of his position, is the very proof by which we demonstrate the truth of Christianity. The chain of evidence runs in parallel lines; nay, the two chains so cross and interlock with one another, that one can not be broken without breaking the other. Hence the position of him who attempts to hold together the one, while he himself is striking at the links of the other, is a position of difficulty. If the Deist does any thing more than assume the being, the attributes, and the providence of God-if he believes in God because he has proved all that he believes-then there is not a point in that proof which does not bear directly upon the claims of Christianity. It may be true that many who confess God in nature, but deny him in revelation, confess him upon a kind of wholesale evidence which they have never analyzed, and do not half under stand They behold the great work of life, and conclude that this |