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It is, indeed, a happy thing if we can excite such affectionate confidence in our scholars' minds as shall induce them to come, alone, to us, and take our counsel on the intimate things concerning their souls' salvation. But let us not think we cannot most usefully and powerfully deal with individual cases and peculiarities, even whilst in the midst of the class, where no names, dates, or places can be safely alluded to. Our remarks may appear to be of the most general kind, and yet the conscience of one amongst our half-score of hearers may be startled with a directness and pungency of application that shall touch it to the quick, and drive that soul forward till it finds rest in Christ.

Again: knowledge of the circumstances, employment, and personal incidents of our pupils may furnish us with the happiest figures and illustrations. In Leeds, we must not draw our similes from seafaring life, any more than we should try to render truth perspicuous to a group of sailor lads by reference to scribblers and carders, power-looms and mungo. And so with individuals as well as classes. If a teacher does not even know the trade or occupation of his scholars, or anything of their habits of life, how many opportunities he loses of finding striking homely analogies that would stick in their minds like burrs; and, on the other hand, how much time he may waste in metaphors which, by their unfamiliarity and strangeness, darken instead of illumining his theme, and are little better than explanations given in an unknown tongue.

Again: it is our wish to inculcate on our scholars that true religion will impenetrate the whole daily life, with all its little round of duties. How can this genuine and practical piety, and the contrasted consequences of its presence and of its absence, be effectively exhibited to a lad by one who does not really know what that lad's daily life is, what are his most prominent duties and temptations, or how his religion, if he had it, would specially manifest its presence?

Once more: the knowledge we are now recommending will do much to determine our selection of lessons for the Sunday school; or, at least, supposing the lessons fixed by external authority, to which we think it right or expedient to yield, it will materially modify our course of thought and manner of exposition, and will give life and point and vigour to those personal appeals and close searching questionings which must form a part of all impressive instruction in God's Word.

Lastly, let us encourage scholars to name from time to time what they consider important branches of religious doctrine and practice; what truths they are in the habit of hearing impugned, and what they wish to be explained and illustrated; what difficulties they meet with; what are their own special religious needs, feelings, hopes, doubts, and desires. By thus occasionally taking our cue from them, we shall awaken fresh interest, secure attention, and find a readier entrance for Scripture truths into their minds.-Union Magazine.

AN INFANT'S IDEA.

"BRING me my bonnet, mother," said a very little girl, when on the bed of death; "bring me my bonnet directly, mother." "But what do you want with your bonnet ?" said the loving mother. "Oh! Jesus is come to take me to heaven," she replied, and immediately expired. The little one had been instructed in the infant class of the Independent Sunday School at Thame. And may we not hope that the promise of Scripture, "Those who seek me early shall find me," was realised in her experience?

WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH YOUR VOICE? A MINISTER, while attending church in a strange city, was struck with the surpassing sweetness of the voice of a young lady who sat near him. Being afterwards introduced to her, he inquired whether she loved the Saviour? She replied, "I am afraid not." "Then, my dear young friend," said the minister, "what will you do with that voice in eternity? shall it be spent in uttering the wailings of the lost for ever?"-American Messenger.

THE CHILD IN HIS COMING INTO THE WORLD. THEN those strange contradictory circumstances in the scene itself. The infant in the stable, unattended by even the humblest circumstances of comfort, yet with the splendour of a heavenly herald-a lavish and magnificent example of the glory which He might have had about Him if He would-the star shining in at the humble door lighting His earliest footsteps in the world. And thither

came the wandering princes-men whom Herod even now had received with honour-to pay their homage to the King new born, in the awed and marvelling presence of Mary and Joseph, that Jewish man and maiden, poor but princely, to whom it pleased the Father to confide His Son. They came, these wise men, skilled in all the learning which their age and place could give, laden with such gifts as might propitiate kings, to bow before a child -a child poorly born of the holy but narrow Jewish race, which knew little, and despised what it knew, of the wisdom of the Gentiles. So far as human perception went, a scene more anomalous never presented itself to the common eye-uniting, as it does, bare poverty, humbleness, and limited knowledge, with wealth, distinction, and wisdom, and placing the lower in the higher place. Who can suppose what might be the thoughts of Mary and of Joseph, seeing this first testimony to the Son of God and Son of man? What a course of glory and triumph must their uninstructed thoughts have predicted for Him whom, in His cradle, these princely sages came from afar to worship? The light had but begun to shine, and already its dawning warmed the hearts of distant Gentiles; already the outer world sent in its dutiful homage and offering; and what glorious issue must lie before the man, when already the hoar wisdom of these antique ages worshipped upon its knees before the child!

And perhaps with the wise men, perhaps before them, came another embassage from the antipodes of the human race; the shepherds from the plains, peasants of Judea, homely men of Judah and of Benjamin, knowing the laws of their nation, and the promises of their faith, but doubly excluded from other knowledge-bearing no tribute, unless there might be truly the lamb which the old painters bring in on the shoulder of one of the simple worshippers-shepherds fresh from the moonlight fields, the open country, where the sky was still a-glow with a remembrance of the scarce departed angels. One does not know which is most touching-the wise men travel-worn and laden, laying down their wisdom, in a profound and marvellous humility, before the feet of the infant who was to be the wisdom, the power, and the salvation of our universal race; or the shepherds, ignorant and wistful, scarcely noting from the other lights of heaven that steadfast star which shone upon the place where "the young child was," bearing still in their startled ears an echo of the angels' song, and knowing only that this was the Son of David, who, by some

mysterious means, should restore the kingdom to Israel. But the double group of worshippers is singularly symbolical of all the after progress of the Gospel-that Gospel which, with a divine equality, touches the heart of the monarch on his throne, and the beggar by the waysidewhich enrolls at once the noblest intellects and the most feeble, and brings wisdom and ignorance, science and simplicity, the one as bare of self-importance as the other, to an equal meeting at the Redeemer's feet. To make the difference greater, the one band were far-travelled, strangers in Jerusalem, bound to depart again to their undiscovered home; the others were at the very door, watching their sheep within sight of the walls of that city of David to which their angel-visitors pointed them the way. These two groups, representatives of two grand sections of humanity, dividing the world between them, stand in our recollection on either side of the Holy Child -they gave Him welcome to the sacred country, consecrated by His own sufferings, and to the wide, dark, heathen world, lying unseen and overclouded, far beyond the limits of Israel, which He had come to save.

If any one had endeavoured from this beginning to make a fictitious Gospel, how strangely different from the real one it must have been! One can imagine the sublime romance which a human imagination would have made of the tale, how the divine infant should have grown, not perhaps into the vulgar glories of rank or empire, but into such solemn, universal, and marvelling veneration, as our own superior knowledge tempts us to suppose we should render to Him now-how every word falling from His sacred lips should have been treasured up in the hearts of the whole people-how all the youth of Judah, a voluntary guard of honour, should have spent their lives, man by man, ere harm or reproach came near the Son of Davidand how, if He must die, He should have died at last by some sudden and fierce assault of barbarians without, who never had an opportunity of looking upon His holy countenance. But the real story changes, out of the first solemn morning of rejoicing, with a sad and humiliating revolution. He who, in His cradle, had charmed the subtle souls of the Gentile sages, and the ruder senses of the peasants of Judea-He whom Simeon and Anna hailed in the temple-had to fly straightway by night and suddenly towards the dark old land of bondage, the Egypt from which His mother's race had been deliveredhad to fly, strange change, from angel's song and the

prayers of the righteous, with the shriek of murdered children and the mother's agony ringing afar upon His ear! Sweet martyrs! Innocents beloved of God !-dying for Him unwittingly and unawares dying for Him, in their tender unconsciousness of good and evil, as true a martyr's death as Paul or Peter! Was it of little import in the sight of God that Rachel cried for her children with a voice that would not pause for comfort? Many a Rachel since has echoed that outcry, many a heart fainted in that dismal agony, watching the cruel hand of death how it came upon her child; but God knows how many a hundred years it is since Rachel forgot all her grieving, or maybe even rejoiced to recall it, when she found the little ones again, safe, every blessed head, at the feet of their Lord in heaven. Courage! We who have lost, like Rachel, shall by and by, like her, receive again.

But it is a strange reverse of the picture from that audience in which a fond fancy might have seen the whole world represented, an impressive and solemn guarantee of all honour and reverent appreciation to the newly-come deliverer. When this grand ceremonial was over, the dark world beyond, the unquiet sea of human passions, rose up envious and blasphemous against the hope of Israel. It was nothing to Herod that this hope was the sole remaining glory of his people. He, poor wicked fool, thought only of the peril to his petty tributary crown. There was not in his monstrous sin a single spur even of ambition, nothing but what was mean and ignoble-fear of his own miserable importance, fear of some one mightier than he taking the sceptre out of his grasp. That was human too; after the opening scene which shews us the loyal spirits of the race doing their homage, to turn over and find the disloyal and malignant gaining his momentary triumph, sending far away from him as effectually as he could the only possible helper who in heaven or earth could deliver him, and staining his own soul, name, and history with the most revolting of crimes, in order that by that means the unfortunate wretch, fit type of his race, might get banished out of his sight, killed, if it could be, all hope and possibility of a higher life; for the miserable murderer knew the Scriptures, and knew that it was Messias the prince whom he meant to kill. It does not seem a singular or unexampled instance either. We kill no innocents now-a-days, but we very often do everything we can, not excepting some little sin, such small matters as a lie or a fit of passion, to get Christ as far away as possible,

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