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multiplication of efforts like her own. Miss Bremer called upon her; and while she was obliged to listen to a confession that all her novels were unknown, the distinguished writer carried away the Hamburg Reports, which proved to be receipts for a similar work in Stockholm. Of course she did not pursue her work in Hamburg altogether unimpeded, but every year brought her more affection and confidence. "Blessed are they," she exclaims in one of her letters, "who suffer from home-sickness, for verily they shall be brought home." She speaks of her departed friends and of the tears of longing desire for the reunion. She died in 1858, after a life of holy, indefatigable toil; then, for the next few days, the inanimate body lay strewn with flowers, with deep peace on the wasted features and clear brow. Even in death she desired to preach she wished to combat the prejudice of the poor against a pauper funeral, and she desired, both by word of mouth and in writing, to be buried as a poor person. Her coffin was made of four black boards, and carried by two appointed pauper-bearers, on the pauper's bier, to the churchyard, and set down on the church path. Here it was soon covered with flowers and garlands. Troops of friends, rich and poor, streamed out of the city and the suburbs; the pastor Rautenberg, her own friend of many years, and the friend and fellow-student of her beloved brother, early removed, Gustavus, spoke to the multitude from the text, "I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee." Then eight brethren of the Ranhehaus advanced and took up the coffin, carrying it to the old tomb of the Sieveking family, all the children chanting as they went, "My life is hid with Jesus." Amidst the nodding of trees and the twittering of birds that April spring morning, they left to slumber till the morning of the resurrection one of the most beautiful illustrations of modern womanhood.-Eclectic.

TEACHING THE GOSPEL.

THERE is this peculiarity about the gospel doctrines, they are not to be learned or taught from books; they can only be understood and made intelligible by personal experience. Such of them as had become true and clear to myself individually, I was able to treat of 80 as to secure the attention and sympathy of the children.— Rev. Dr. Büchsel.

GOING HOME.

"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God." (Mark x. 14.)

THEY are going-only going-
Jesus called them long ago;
All the winter time they're passing
Softly as the falling snow.
When the violets in the spring-time
Catch the azure of the sky,
They are carried out to slumber
Sweetly where the violets lie.

They are going-only going-
When the summer earth is drest,
In their cold hands holding roses
Folded to each silent breast:
When the autumn hangs red banners
Out above the harvest sheaves,

They are going-ever going

Thick and fast like falling leaves.

All along the mighty ages,

All adown the solemn time,
They have taken up their homeward
March to that sercner clime,
Where the watching, waiting Angels
Lead them from the shadow dim,
To the brightness of His Presence
Who has called them unto Him.

They are going-only going-
Out of pain and into bliss;
Out of sad and sinful weakness
Into perfect holiness.

Snowy brows-no care shall shade them,
Bright eyes-tears shall never dim,
Rosy lips-no time shall fade them;

Jesus called them unto Him.

Little hearts for ever stainless,—

Little hands as pure as they,一

Little feet, by angels guided
Never a forbidden way!
They are going-ever going-

Leaving many a lonely spot;

But 'tis Jesus who has called them,

Suffer and forbid them not.-Lyra Anglicana.

THE INTERNAL EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY.

Speech of the ARCHBISHOP OF YORK, at the Annual Meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

LORD SHAFTESBURY, my lords, ladies, and gentlemen,-I owe you a most sincere apology for appearing before you totally unprepared. I was sitting this morning in my room, hoping to devote an hour to putting down some thoughts that might be worthy of so great and grand an occasion as this, when I received a message that the meeting was not in the afternoon, as I had supposed, but in the morning, and immediately hastened here. I appear before you, but I must confess totally unprepared to address you. Still, it would go hard with one if he were not able to say a few words upon an occasion of this kind, when the question before you is, how we shall best make the Word of God known to and circulate it amongst the nations of the earth. I would fain have shrunk from rising at all; but it would have been a dereliction of duty in a minister of Christ, especially at the present crisis, if he had shrunk from saying God-speed to this society in the presence of so many Christian people gathered here together. About the only preparation available for me is this little paper put in my hands, and it announces that forty-three millions of copies of the Word of God, or of part of the Word of God, have been circulated since the beginning of this society. A good deal has been said about arithmetic, but you will find it very hard to realise the immense amount of good that may have been done under figures so great as these. Put the case that only one serious reader has been found to every thousand copies, and that that reader has received benefit therefrom, then we have 43,000 souls benefited by the operations of this society. Nay, put the case of only one in a million, then you have if I may be permitted to suppose such a case-forty-three persons reclaimed, saved, brought to the knowledge of God by the operations of this society. It is quite absurd to suppose that they have been so few, for every copy of the Scriptures circulated by the society has, at least, a chance of finding many readers, and we may well employ our minds in endeavouring to ascertain or to suppose the inestimable amount of good that has been done to human souls by this society since its commencement. These copies of the Holy Scriptures have been circulated among, let us say, three classes of people. First, they have brought great comfort to those who have found God already. Many a poor man and woman has had put into his or her hands gratuitously, or for a few pence, the Word of God, which will be a consolation to him or her every day during the rest of their pilgrimage on earth. The second class in whom we are interested consists of those who are simply living carelessly and for this world. To meet the wants of this class, you put into the rooms of hotels and railway stations, and you send forth into cottages, the Word of God, which has thus a chance at least of being read by these people. I maintain, as the noble Chairman has so well urged, that the Bible carries its own evidence with it, and that we want

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nothing more than to bring the eyes of a man and the pages of the Bible into contact, in order that the mind may take in what is so powerfully written there, and that he may be saved. There is also a third class in whom we are interested, and it would be wrong to pass over them at the present time. I refer to those whose faith has been disturbed with reference to the historical value of the Word of God. And now perhaps some of you will tell me, "This is the time to hold your hand. Here is a book against which plausible objections may be made; let us by all means get it up with notes, and let us have a whole park of artillery against infidelity bound up with it, and sold with every copy of the Bible." No; we will send out to these men also the Bible simply as it is, because I am convinced that even here the Bible and the miracles of the Bible are their own evidence, and will convince a man if he will but open his eyes and his ears to see and to hear. say the miracles of the Bible; I do not mean by that the feeding of the five thousand or any one of those that are usually called miracles. To my mind the greatest miracles in the Bible are, first, the person of the Lord Himself; secondly, the doctrines which our Lord has taught to man; and thirdly, the spread of Christianity in the world under circumstances so adverse. First, as to the person of our Lord Himself. I am not speaking now with reference to those who have already come to know Christ. It is a great blessing that the four Gospels and all that is in them should be put into the cottage, that the poor Christian believer may have, so to speak, for his or her companion to the end of time that pure and beautiful and sinless life, and may have, as it were, the light of His presence constantly shining upon them. But that is not what I mean now. I would say to any man who doubts, "Here you have before you the history of Christ, told with a distinctness, with a minuteness such as I do not think any other history ever has equalled." There is not one of us that cannot say that he seems almost to see the very face of Christ and to hear the very sound of His words as he reads upon the page of Scripture what is there written. I would say to the man who doubts, "Whence does all this come? Who invented it? Will you tell me, if it is not a revelation from God, whose revelation was it? Was it reserved to the very worst and last days of Judaism, when Judaism was at its very lowest, to be the soil out of which the fairest flower that ever humanity has produced was to bloom and grow?" I say the thing is impossible. For eighteen centuries people have been writing works of fiction and history, and the human mind has been stimulated by every ambition and hope of gain to invent and describe beautiful characters: but I defy any one to quote any single fiction which has at all approached the facts of the history which we have in the Gospel. So if it should happen-which is not very likely that the skirts of those doubts have swept across the soul of any one here, I would ask him or her to consider this point well. To my mind the great evidence of the truth of Christianity is Christ. Here is Christ. Here is His pure and sinless character. Here is a man totally devoid of what we call ambition-swayed by none of the common motives of humanity-not praised, for there was hardly one of His countrymen that did not blame Him to the utmost-and here He is steadfastly

pursuing through His whole ministry one particular object, which He describes as His Father's work and His Father's business. Here is a man devoid of a great many of those weaknesses which, in some respects, constitute our interest in human heroes, for I leave it to you to say whether the attempt to describe a man as a perfectly good man does not end in making him somewhat insipid. But no one ever said that of what is written in the Gospels. These are only a few points gathered up roughly at a moment's notice, but you can fill up the sketch yourselves. If you have any friend who doubts the truth of the Bible, open it to him and refer him to the Divine person who is described there. Say to him, Believe in this man, because here you can see and know what He is. Again, this is true as to the second miracle I referred to-the doctrines of our Lord. No one who has read on the subject can doubt that these did not spring out of those things which were current in Judea at the time. They could not have been invented at that time without the author of them being made known and manifest. I would try any religious book by this standard: how near does it come towards bringing me down on my knees before God under a profound sense of sin? Now, was that the tone of feeling in Judea at that time? Do you think that the Pharisees preached that first and foremost? I take it that no man learned humility and a sense of his own sinfulness from the standard books of that day. Or take, again, our Lord's relation to the Old Testament. The Old Testament, taken by itself, does undoubtedly contain this difficulty-that you find a description of a glorious kingdom that was to come, and yet you find a description of evil triumphing over good, and of the Messiah oppressed and despised. I do not know any other way to unlock this difficulty except that given us by the Lord Jesus. But with that all is explained. I mean His triumph over sin, by which suffering and subjection are made to appear temporary, and are doomed to close with the resurrection-day, when the kingdom of glory shall begin. Once more, with regard to the third miracle-the spread of the Gospel itself. There are many among you, I have no doubt, who are able to say: "Notwithstanding all the objections against the Bible which are plausible and well put, it is idle to tell me that there is nothing in that power which has actually changed my heart, and changed my life, and made me love the things I did not love, and hate the things which once I loved." That mode of argument is perfectly fair. Now, follow it out in the page of Scripture-what do you find there? If you find a parcel of cowardly men, who fled from our Lord's side, suddenly turned into bold, open, faithful preachers of the Gospel of Christ, either we must believe that that was so, as it is told us there, or we must disbelieve it. If we disbelieve it, whence came the Christianity that exists at the present day? If we believe it, whence came the power that these men suddenly acquired? One way or another we have you. It must either be that the Spirit of God gave these men a power and an influence which they had not before-and that is the written account as we have it-or that we have before us the Christian Church of this day, with its missions, with its Bible societies, with its millions of devoted men and women, seeking only other people's good, and all this golden chain resting upon-nothing! I wish, my friends, it had been

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