nations, which has not some notion of a Deity, and a worship corresponding to that notion. The atheist replies that this impression is the result of education. But how is it to be explained that this belief of childhood clings so tenaciously to the heart, when many other convictions have been effaced?

And why is it that so many who profess to be atheists at death confess there is a God, and are full of horror at the thought of him? An intelligent, but irreligious young man was suddenly brought to a death-bed, and among his last words were: "I have tried to disbelieve a future hell; how vain the attempt! Now I know I shall eternally perish." Instances like this might be multiplied. Another | cried out in his last hours, "Until this moment, I believed there was neither a God nor a hell; now I know and feel that there are both, and that I am doomed to perdition by the just judgment of God." Thus this idea of the Deity asserts its place in the minds of those who have tried to obliterate it, and wrings an unwilling confession that the boast of a lifetime was a delusion.

But who has ever heard of a dying Christian declaring that there is no God, and that his faith is a delusion. Infidels have often recanted on their death-bed; but the first instance has yet to be recorded, wherein a believer on the Lord Jesus Christ confessed in his dying hour that he had trusted in a lie.

There is a God. This we believe. But faith is not a cold and empty conjecture. "It is then we have faith, when the will of God is made known to us, and we embrace it, so that we worship him as our Father. Hence the knowledge of God is required as necessary to faith." | (Calvin.) But who can find out the Almighty ? He has revealed what we are to believe concerning him, and what duties he requires of us. That revelation is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, "which are able to make us wise unto salvation." It is therefore the duty and inalienable right of every one to "search the Scriptures." No man must come between our minds and the Bible.

In a letter to his son, John Quincy Adams writes: "I

have many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once a year. My custom is to read four or five chapters every morning, immediately after rising from my bed. It employs an hour of my time, and seems to me the most suitable manner of beginning the day." The celebrated Dr. Johnson counselled a young man, "Read the Bible every day of your life." When the Scriptures fully translated into their own tongue arrived at the Hervey Islands, a public meeting was held. One of the natives at the close of his speech declared, "My brethren and my sisters, this is my resolve the dust shall never cover my new Bible, the moths shall never eat it, the mildew shall never rot it, my life and my joy."

The mandate, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," requires that we should love God supremely. Many things we may love with moderation, and seek after earnestly; but when our attachment to them becomes so strong, and our pursuit of them so ardent, as to interfere with our duty to God, we are then guilty of practical idolatry. Whatever alienates the heart from our Maker, and weakens our affection for him, usurps his throne and receives the service due to him alone.

A celebrated authoress of the present day reports a sermon of Wesley, as narrated by an English servant-woman: "He said we are all born idolaters, no better than the heathen, unless we love God. And then he went on to say what were our idols. At first I thought he was going to let us off easy. For he spoke of the rich man worshipping his riches, and I thought of the old miser at Falmouth, who counts out his money every night; and then he spoke of the great man worshipping his acres, and I thought there was a hit at our squire. And then he spoke of the foolish young girls making an idol of their ribbons. And then he told of husbands and wives making idols of each other, and mothers of their children; and then I thought of all of you, Mrs. Kitty. I wished that master and you and missis had been there to hear."

“Then the parson, after all, said nothing that suited you particularly, Betty?"

"Mrs. Kitty, he made me feel I was no better than a natural born heathen, and that the idols I had been worshipping, instead of God, were things an Indian savage would have been ashamed of."

"What were they, Betty?"

"Why just my dairy, and my kitchen, and myself, the very pats of butter, which must be better than any in the county, and the stone floor I've been as angered to see a footmark on as if it had been the king's footstool. But the Almighty never made us to bury our souls in pats of butter and pans of milk, and forget him."

The objects of idolatry are as diverse as the objects of human pursuit. The penurious and the generous, the affectionate and the selfish, the rich and the poor, may easily find an idol. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve."

With peculiar impressiveness these words, "I am the Lord thy God," fell upon the ears of the people gathered before Sinai. And amid the world of pleasure, or in the busy rounds of earthly cares and pursuits, these words are repeated in the soul, "I am the Lord thy God;" remember me. Are you making him your God? Do you so confide in him and serve him that you can say, He is mine? He was your father's God, he was your mother's God; is he yours?

There is sweet comfort in this commandment, when to the believer it becomes a promise. It is an assurance of God's protection and love."I am the Lord thy God ;" and what had Israel to fear, though Sinai frowned, and the desert path lay before them? "I am the Lord thy God," is the believer's pledge that he shall never be forsaken. A friend calling on the Rev. Ebenezer Erskine during his last illness, said to him, "Sir, you have given us much good advice; pray what are you doing with your own soul?"

"I am doing with it," he replied, "what I did forty years ago: I am resting on that word, 'I am the Lord thy God; and on this I mean to die." To another he said, "The covenant is my charter; and if it had not been for that blessed word, 'I am the Lord thy God,' my hope and my strength had perished."

THREE PICTURES.

JOME little time since my business led me into a second rate but much frequented thoroughfare, connecting two of the great arteries of London. It was a street moderately respectable in itself, but running for a considerable distance through a very poor

neighbourhood. It was at uncertain intervals intersected by other streets, all of which had a poverty-stricken look, while some were offensively dirty and disreputable. As I was walking along, I saw-some little distance before me, at the end of one of the more reputable of these intersecting streets a private carriage draw up. It became at once a centre of attraction to one of those nondescript crowds which, on the slightest occasion, assemble so rapidly in the streets of London, that you might almost fancy they rose out of the ground. Though I had but a very short distance to walk, when I reached the spot there was the usual assemblage of lazy-looking men, smoking short pipes; dirty and illdressed women, some of whom were nursing babes whom you could only pity; and children poorly fed and poorly clad, with that keen, impudent, wide-awake look that you scarcely ever see except on the London streets.

These were gazing with much wonderment upon the handsome equipage which was standing there; envying the coachman as he sat sublimely on the box, or the footman, who seemed not altogether unconscious of the admiration he was exciting, as he lounged at the carriage door.

My attention was attracted by something very different. As I stood for a moment, influenced by a not unpardonable curiosity, I could see, walking down the street at the end of which the carriage stood, a young lady, elegantly attired. She stopped at the door of one of the houses, at which she knocked, and she was obliged to knock more than once; but at last, after what seemed to me considerable delay, she was admitted, and I saw her

no more.

Her errand, as I gathered, was one of mercy. She was carrying relief and comfort to some old servant or poor pensioner. And I went on my way rejoicing to think that the Lord has many such servants who are doing his work in the great city. There are many who, though accustomed at their own homes to all the luxuries that wealth can purchase, and to all that betokens refinement and culture, deem it a privilege to follow the example of the meek and lowly Jesus, and who, going about doing good, may be often seen carrying light and help and comfort into the dark abodes of those who greatly need all the comfort and help they can get.

When I went home that night and gave myself

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as I am wont to do-to quiet meditation, my thoughts dwelt pleasantly on what was to me a very beautiful picture there with a dark margin of sin and misery. I could see that fair and delicately-nurtured young girl standing patiently at the door of poverty, as the minister and messenger of Christ's love.

By-and-by my thoughts wandered away from this little picture in the streets to another picture which I had seen years before, and which I should imagine has never been forgotten by those who have seen it-I mean the picture entitled, "The Light of the World," by Mr. Holman Hunt.

As some who will read this may have never seen that picture, I will give part of Mr. Ruskin's very graphic description of it. "The legend beneath it is the beautiful verse, Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.'* On the left hand side of the picture is seen this door of the human soul. It is fast barred: its bars and nails are rusty; it is knitted and bound to its stanchions by creeping tendrils of ivy, showing that it has never been opened. A bat hovers about it; its threshold is overgrown with brambles, nettles, and fruitless corn-the wild grass, whereof the mower filleth not his hand, nor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom.' Christ approaches it in the night-time-Christ, in his everlasting offices of prophet, priest, and king.

"Now, when Christ enters any human heart, he bears with him a two-fold light. First, the light of conscience, which displays past sin, and afterwards the light of peace, the hope of salvation. The lantern, carried in Christ's left hand, is this light of conscience. Its fire is red and fierce; it falls only on the closed door, on the weeds which encumber it.

"The light which proceeds from the head of the figure, on the contrary, is that of the hope of salvation; it springs from the crown of thorns, and, though itself sad, subdued, and full of softness, is yet so powerful that it entirely melts into the glow of it the forms of the leaves and boughs which it crosses, showing that every earthly object must be hidden by this light, where its sphere extends."

*Rev. iii. 20.