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"Now is the accepted time" "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth."-Think of His words-"I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me."

I have told you of God's mercies that you should be thankful for them, and that you should show your gratitude by giving Him your heart, loving Him because He first loved you. But there is something else I want you to think of. I want you to remember that God sometimes shows His love to us by taking away our mercies, and that we have cause to thank Him

"Alike for what His hand doth give,

And what it takes away."

You may not see how this is now, but one day you may have to learn the lesson, and oh! I trust that when that day comes, you may be able to say, "Even so Father, for so it seemeth good in thy sight." And if God by taking away your mercies teaches you to love Him, then I know you will be thankful.

There is yet another lesson I want you to learn from the remembrance of God's mercies, and that is, that they should lead you to think of those who have fewer mercies than you. God has not given to all alike and I will tell you why I think He has not;-that those who have much may have to give to those who have little. And so God may make a little boy or a little girl that has many blessings a messenger of mercy to those who have but very few. The little maid that waited on Naaman's wife was God's little messenger of mercy-a ministering child-to the captain of the host of the King of Syria; and all his life long Naaman and his family had to thank God for what that little girl had said-"Would God, my master were with the prophet that is in Samaria! for he would recover him of his leprosy." And oh! if any should have to thank you for telling them of a cure for a worse disease than that from which Naaman suffered-the disease of sin-how happy you would be!

Dear young friends-Think of God's mercies, and ask God to bless your thinking. Call upon him who has said, "Ask and ye shall receive," to give you His Holy Spirit, that you may be able to say, not only in words but from the heart, "Father, I thank Thee." "Such goodness, Lord, and constant care,

A child can ne'er repay;

But daily shall it be my prayer,

To love Thee and obey."

W. H. ALBANY,

A CHRONOMETRICAL CHART OF THE HISTORY

OF ENGLAND.

An attempt to teach history by what geographers call "projection" is certainly a novelty even among the phenomena of modern education. This, however, is the object of the "Chart" abovementioned. It is a map, not of a country, but of a period. Mr. Nasmith's fundamental idea is that the abstract symbolism of numerals by which we express what we call "dates" fails to yield any sufficient notion of chronology to the minds of the young or uninstructed. A child may be taught to repeat that Richard III. was killed in 1485, and Charles II. restored in 1660, without acquiring any accurate impression of the chronological relation of the two facts. That is not the way in which we learn that Durham is in the north of England and Hampshire in the south. We get that knowledge from a map by the aid of locality, and Mr. Nasmith conceives that chronological knowledge may be imparted in like manner. With this purpose in view he takes a certain period of time, being that which coincides with the ascertainable history of this country, and frames it, as it were, in a plane five feet square. This quadrangular surface is to represent 1860 years, or the interval between the beginning of the Christian era and the time up to which the chart is brought. This is the postulate. It remains only to treat this space as any representation of territory would be treated in an ordinary map, and to divide it into shires or shares. For symmetry's sake, the chart is supposed to contain a round 2000 years, the odd 140 years required to complete the 20 centuries being left, as we may say, unsurveyed. There is no difficulty now in dividing the surface of the chart into parts or squares, nor in subdividing these again, until we get certain measured spaces representing centuries, and certain smaller ones representing years. Time thus becomes expressed by locality. Early times are in the north of the map; late times in the south, and a square of time to the west is earlier than a square on the same line to the east. We read the chart, in short, as we should read any other page, beginning at the top and going from left to right.

The next aid, and a very important one, is that of colour. We have all been taught that the first inhabitants of England were independent Britons. Then came the Romans, then the Saxons, then the Danes, then the Normans, and with these and after these a succession of dynasties enduring to the present day. Let the times of the Britons, then, be coloured green, those of the Romans brown, those of the Saxons blue, those of the Danes orange, those of the Normans drab, those of the Plantagenets yellow, those of the Lancastrians and Yorkists shaded pink, those of the Tudors green,

those of the Stuarts pink, and those of the House of Hanover red. Here are very plain distinctions, and we can tell one division of history from another by the colour as easily as we can distinguish a pink Kentucky from a blue Tennessee on a map of the old United States. Now, let us suppose this chart hung up against a wall, and showing clearly and visibly certain great divisions representing centuries, certain smaller divisions representing decades, and certain still smaller divisions representing years. First there will be the teaching of the colours. We observe, for instance, that the great square which by its place in the map must represent the 12th century, is coloured irregularly, half drab and half yellow, and that the yellow colour is then continued over the next two great squares, representing the 13th and 14th centuries. This tells us plainly enough that the Normans began the 12th century for us, that they were succeeded in about the middle of it by the Plantagenets, and that the Plantagenets reigned all through the 13th and 14th centuries. Similarly the green colour, covering the whole of the great square, or century shown by its position to be the 16th, identifies that shire of time with the Tudors, while a certain white enclavé, or district, in the very middle of the Stuarts' pink division, gives us an unmistakable notion of the Commonwealth. By going nearer to the map we shall discover specifications corresponding to those of villages, hamlets, or tumuli, on the map of a country-viz., the principal events of successive years, laid down duly in their successive small shires, and so, in short, we have our Chronometrical Chart of the History of England.

To the question-How will this teaching answer? experience must furnish a reply; but we think the more the eye is thus used the better. A pupil or student, however careless or however dull, could never fail to carry away with him the general appearance of a large coloured surface always before him. He would recollect it as he would recollect the pattern of the paperhangings or the position of the clock in the schoolroom. He would remember that in the chart of history yellow came before green, green before pink, and pink before red. He would probably be able to say that blue was at the top and red at the bottom, with the other principal colours between them. Yet, if he could do all this, and simply connect these half-a-dozen colours with a half-a-dozen names, he would have got an elementary notion of English chronology. If he could go further, and recollect in which small subdivision of each great square he used to find a certain event characteristically denoted he would know all the dates of importance in the history of England, and be able to take a survey of the whole period besides.-The Times.

Reviews.

CAUSE AND PROBABLE RESULTS OF THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA. Facts for the People of Great Britain. By William Taylor, of California. pp. 30. THE AMERICAN WAR. By Newman Hall, LL.B. pp. 31.

THE first thought which occurs to the mind in reading the titles of these pamphlets, is as to the propriety of our noticing them at all; the subject being one which is alien from, and opposed to, the principles advocated in the "Teachers' Magazine." Our Christian brethren in America, however, enter so heartily into this horrible war, and express so much surprise that their feelings are not reciprocated here, that we have thought it our duty to read these little works, and will venture to state to our readers the results of that perusal. Mr. Taylor thinks that the Lord had at least two ends to accomplish by this war-the one, a severe chastisement of the American nation for national sins; and the other, the final overthrow of the "institu tion of slavery." He traces the origin of the war, so far as human instrumentality was concerned, to the increased anti-slavery feeling springing up in the North-the evidence of this in the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency, and the apprehension of the South that slavery would be abolished throughout the whole Union. The larger part of his pamphlet is taken up with a delineation of the evils attending the existence of slavery in America. It is not necessary that we should enter into this question. The minds of British Christians have been long made up on this subject, and it has been their often reiterated complaint against their American brethren, that there could so seldom be obtained from them any decided expression of sentiment upon this subject. They would go so far as to say that they did not like slavery-that they wished it did not exist among them; but when pressed upon the subject of its abolition, they generally evaded it by stating that we were not sufficiently acquainted with the difficulties attending the question. Probably we were not sufficiently considerate of those difficulties, and expected too much from our brethren; and we only mention it as an instance of the intensity of the abhorrence which is here felt against slavery. No one who was present at the Anniversary of the Sunday School Union when William Knibb, to whom may be greatly attributed the abolition of slavery in the British West India islands, met in Exeter Hall the Rev. Dr. Tyng, of Philadelphia, who deeply interested the meeting with an account of his Sunday school, can forget the scene. Mr. Knibb, who followed, said: "The Rev. Dr. has stated, that in his school there are to be found the young and the old-the poor and the rich-would to God, he could have added, the black and the white are there also." The outburst of enthusiasm which attended this expression was overpowering, and it was long before the quiet of the meeting could be restored.

The pamphlet which bears the name of Newman Hall consists of a lecture delivered by that highly esteemed minister to working men in October last. It is written with that clearness which might be expected,

and proposes "briefly to trace the course of American history in relation to the present war, and then to reply to the questions-Had the South a right to secede? Is the North justified in waging war to restore the Union? How far is the question of Slavery mixed up with the quarrel? On which side should the sympathy of England be enlisted?"—p. 3.

The history, although brief, gives a very distinct and intelligible narrative of the events which have led to the war, and may be usefully read by all who desire an acquaintance with those events. The question whether the North was justified in waging war to restore the Union, would depend on the previous one, "Had the South a right to secede ?" Mr. Hall thinks they had not; but we are not so clear on this subject. He tion very fairly, but has failed to convince us. He urges that

argues the ques

"The claim of an integral part of an empire, when union appears to itself no longer desirable, to secede without the general consent of the empire of which it forms a part, is destructive to all nationality."

And that,

"If a province may do this, so may a county, so may a town. Scotland, Wales, Ireland, might severally separate from Great Britain; then Yorkshire, or Surrey, or this borough of Southwark!"—p. 11.

But the Federation of the United States cannot surely be with any propriety called an empire; nor can the relation of the several States to the whole be compared to that which subsists between the provinces of an empire and the supreme Government. However inconvenient such a system of government may be, we are inclined to think "that the several States composing the Union retain their individual sovereignty-they have their local governors and parliaments, and as by their own decree they originally joined the Union, so, by a reversal of that decree, they may separate.”

But Mr. Hall admits, and which of course the United States cannot from their own conduct towards Great Britain deny, that "where there is no constitutional right of secession, there may be a rational right of rebellion!" and he proceeds to argue that the Southern States have no grounds on which to justify a rebellion. Here again we are unable to follow him. It is now admitted that the object of the North was to destroy slavery, and that Mr. Lincoln was elected on that principle. Now, it must be remembered that the Southern States believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that slavery is indispensable to their existence; and one of the terms of the Union was, that the general Government should not in any way interfere with the domestic institutions of the several States composing that Union. They believed that the general Government was proceeding to do that which the terms of Union forbade, and it is now avowed (that such was the design; and whatever opinion we may form of the expediency of their secession, we cannot but feel, on looking at the matter from the Southern stand-point, that even if there was not a constitutional right of secession, there certainly was what Mr. Hall calls "a rational right of rebellion."

But although we are thus compelled to differ from our author as to the abstract right of the South to secede, and consequently as to the corresponding abstract right of the North to wage war to prevent such secession, we are glad to find that we are at one with him as to the inexpediency of the

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