BLESSING LITTLE CHILDREN. "Suffer the Little Children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."-MATT. x. 14. LOVE Divine its word hath spoken; Hath its life expressed : To the earnest, seeking spirit, It hath given a test, Of its heavenly rest. Oh the blessing, the rich blessing! Is it thine, and mine? Who are they, the true recipients Of the Love Divine? Little children, little children! Not in years alone Little children in the spirit, These He calls his own. Little children, like the flowers, Everywhere abound. Little children, like the sunlight, Circle earth around. Little children, God's best blessing Unto human love. They are, too, the blest partakers, Of the home above. Earth forsakes them, earth disowns them, Earth forgets its crown, But the Love Divine receives them, Names them as its own. Have ye love, like little children? Do your angels, near the Father, See his face alway? Then are ye within the kingdom! Hold the blessing up! This the "mystic hydromel" In life's golden cup. 'Twas o'erturned when Eden's exiles Closed the garden door, But refilled again for ever, With a new, divine elixir, Emanating power, Circling life with noble meaning, And angelic lore, When the Holy Dove descended, Upon Jordan's shore. Little children, young and aged, Bear the blessing up! Pour around the life elixir From your golden cup! Little children! the redeemers Of a fallen earth. 'Tis through you the Master's kingdom Hath its second birth. Little children, young and aged, Bear the blessing up! Pour around the life elixir From your golden cup! Love is the divine restorer Love is the eternal childhood; Hither all must come, Who the kingdom would inherit, Of the Heavenly Home. R. THE FIRST PRINTED BIBLE. THE fall of Constantinople, in 1453, drove from the academies of the Eastern metropolis numbers of learned men, bearing with them those manuscripts of the classic authors which had been rescued from the Turks. Most of these scholars repaired to Italy, where, on account of the enthusiasm for learning, then prevailing there, they were hailed with delight. It was the age of Cosmo de Medici; and the agents of that indefatigable patron of learning brought to him thousands of ancient manuscripts, many of them unknown to Italy; while his transcribers were equally diligent in multiplying copies of these precious records, or in translating them into Latin or Italian. There it was that the tediousness of this most tedious method was severely felt; and it may not be too much to suppose that many an ardent mind sighed for the discovery of some process, by which the multiplication of copies of the classics might be more quickly performed. The history of the world seems to prove, that whenever the great body of mankind begin to realize their need of an important object, some happy genius either invents it himself, or points the way to its invention. Such was the case at the time of the great revival of learning, in the fifteenth century. Transcribers were too few for the work before them; a German mechanic, named Guttemberg, gave to literature and to the world the art of printing. John Guttemberg was born at the village of Sulgeloch, near Mentz, in 1397. He was apprenticed to some mechanical employment, and passed his youth in the city of Mentz. He there became implicated in an insurrection of the citizens against the nobility, and, to avoid the vengeance of his adversaries, fled to Strazburg. Here, for a long while, he pursued those mechanical employments for which his genius seems to have been peculiarly adapted; and it was in this city that he first made his great discovery. At that time, one of the most popular sources of amusement was playing cards. The demand for these toys led to inventions by which they could be rapidly multiplied, at a cheap rate. In Guttemberg's time, the usual method was that called stenciling; where a card or thin sheet of metal, pierced with the device to be represented, was laid on paper, and rubbed with a brush containing some kind of color. This crude method gave rise to a neater, on which may be said to have been founded the discovery of wood engraving. The required figure was outlined on the smooth surface of a piece of wood, which was afterwards cut away so as to leave only the lines in relief. This made rapid progress. Afterwards the printing was effected in the same manner that wood engravers now take proofs-that is, by blacking the block, placing one side of the paper upon it, and then rubbing the other side with some smooth surface. Pictures of saints, and representations of the legends of the church, were executed in a series of blocks, and bound up into a book -thus forming another step in the grand process of modern printing. One of these was called the Biblia Pauperum, on each of the blocks of which a passage of Scripture, or some other illustrative sentence, was appended-the whole cut out of solid block. All this process of gradual improvement Guttemberg had been watching with the eye of genius. He first occupied himself in cutting block-letters, and afterwards sawed them from the block, so as to combine them into different words. The application of this fortunate idea was the birth of printing; but, simple as appears the |