the God of their salvation. If I should never appear before you again, as I never expect to do, oh! that I may hear of blessings, even to the utmost bounds of the eternal hills, resting upon you and your Connaught mission. (The rev. gentleman resumed his seat amid loud and prolonged applause.) The Letter Box. THE WAY My dear young men and women, nay, boys and girls, let me address you in the name of that great and eternal God your Saviour, at whose awful tribunal you and I must soon give an account of our conduct. And oh! may the Almighty Spirit of all grace rivet in your conscience and heart the truths you are to hear. 1. Seriously ponder that you have souls, immortal souls!-souls to which the whole world, nay, ten thousand worlds, are not comparable in value; souls that are capable of enjoying an eternal God, as their all in all; souls which are to enter, ere long, into an eternal state of inconceivable misery or blessedness. If you be blessed with parents, masters, or friends, that care for your souls, readily receive their instructions, and imitate their example. Never hazard your salvation by throwing yourselves into a graceless family for the sake of a little more gain. If parents, masters, or friends appear unconcerned for your souls, do not therefore madly throw them away into everlasting damnation. But improve your wretched situation as an excitement to fervent wrestling with God in prayer to pity your case-your most deplorable case. 2. Think in what state you are in already, while without Christ-guilty before God-condemned by Godhaving no holiness, no hope, and without God in the world. Your heart is already filled with the seeds of every sinful lust, and fearful plague. Your past life has been spent in sin. Eternal destruction is ready at your side. God is angry with you every day; his wrath abideth on you; his sword is drawn, and his bow bent, and arrows set to destroy you. Even while I speak, hell stands open to receive you, TO WISDOM. and devils stand ready to drag you into everlasting fire. Why then sleep? Why be careless? Why be merry? Why be mad in such a condition ? 3. Remember that the sins of your youth, which perhaps you look upon as mere trifles, mere gaiety or sport, are fearfully criminal before God. They proceed from your deceitful and desperately wicked heart; from your carnal mind; enmity against God. They are a most treacherous rebellion against his laws, holy, just, and good. They are committed against God's authority over you, and against all his warnings, counsels, promises, threatenings, mercies, and judgments. They are committed against all the peculiar kindnesses of God, in preserving and providing for you, while you could not help yourselves. They are committed against all the peculiar promises of God to young ones. They are a most perverse abuse of that peculiarly precious season of life in which you ought to prepare for future usefulness. They mightily increase and strengthen the habits of sinful corruption in you. They pervert the use of your tender affections in opposition to God and his ways. They are committed upon small temptations. They have the most mischievous influence on all others around you, in enticing them to, or hardening them in, sin. They do dishonour to God, as if he, his promises, laws, mercies, and judgments were unworthy of your early regard, and did encourage you to sin. They defame your parents, masters, and friends, as if they had agreed to train you up for the devil. They draw down reproach upon yourselves which you must bear, either in deep convictions or in everlasting punishments. They forfeit for you the promises of long life and pre sperity. They expose you to fearful judgments in this life, and to the eternal damnation of hell in the next. Are these light matters? Will you reckon them light in the agonies of death, at the tribunal of Christ, or amidst the flames of hell? with a kindness of youth, a love of espousals to him! What tasteless and insipid things are all the mad revels and fashionable diversions of our frothy youth, compared with this! How profitable and safe in Christ, whether you live or die! How fair you then stand to be much acquainted with Christ, much loaded with his benefits, and much honoured by him before you die! 5. Listen how kindly the great God your Saviour addresseth you, as it were by name: "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”"Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth."-"Oh taste and see that the Lord is good."-" Come, ye children, hearken unto me, I will teach you the fear of the Lord."—" My son, give me thine heart."-"O daughters, hearken and consider: forget thy father's house and thine own people: so shall the King greatly desire thy beauty. He is thy Lord, worship thou him.""I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving-kindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know the Lord." 4. Think of what inexpressible advantages you now have for promoting the salvation of your souls. Now, you have no such hindrances from Christ as many others have. You have no perplexing cares of families, farms, or merchandise no infirmities of old age. You have no such strengthened habits of evil, no such seared consciences, as you may soon have. Now you have the most precious opportunities of enjoying the most sweet and tender communion and fellowship with Christ, and his Father, and the blessed Spirit, which can be expected upon earth. Clear discoveries of an infinitely gracious Redeemer, and express declarations of his redeeming love meeting with young and tender hearts-make a very heaven upon earth. It is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven, in which they see God in Christ, face to face, and are preserved. Come, my dear young friends," and thus taste and see that the Lord is gracious and good, and that they who trust in, and enjoy him, are blessed; that Jesus Christ is most sweet, yea, pleasant, altogether lovely, the chief among ten thousand. How delightful; how transporting, to have young and tender hearts and affections, by the all-powerful influences of his redeeming love shed abroad in them, all inflamed "Thy Maker is thine Husband.”—“I am the Lord thy God."—"I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people."—"I will say, it is my people; and they shall say, the Lord is my God.”—Mark x. 14; Ecel. xii. 1; Pså, xxxiv. 11; Prov. xxiii. 26; Psa. xlv. 10, 11; Hosea xi. 19, 20; Isa. liv. 5; Exod. xx. 2; Psa. 1. 7; Jer. xxxi, 31; Zech. xiii. 9.-J. Brown. there may be thoughtless writing as well as thoughtless reading, and that there is really no necessary connection between this process and the recollection of the substance of any given subject. In the days of Locke, the YOUNG MEN,-Many attempts have been made to aid memory, but with very little success. Among other methods, it has been recommended to write that which it was sought to impress, on the ground, that this would compel the mind to deal with the sub-keeping of Common-Place Books was ject word by word, and that the whole would be kept longer before it. It seems to have been forgotten, that much in vogue as a superior plan of assisting memory. This plan, however, in the opinion of Johnson, consumed tionable definition than when he said, "The art of memory is the art of attention." This is actually the case, as is well known to every man who attends to the working of his own mind; men who dream when they read, whose eye is exercised rather than their intellect, who do little more than pass through so much type, and who proceed precisely as the studious man does when he wishes, through the aid of reading, not to excite the brain, but to stay its tumultuous action. Such men must not be astonished, if they find it difficult, on finishing a book, to remember much of its contents. A traveller passing through England, not outside the coach, gazing towards every point of the compass, comparing all that he sees with his guide-book, but inside, and there with his eyes mostly closed, and ofttimes asleep, neither reading nor observing, could not, with reason, complain that he had seen very little of the country, and could give but an imperfect account of it. Knowledge is not to be had on such conditions. The habits of the sloth form the cha time without assisting memory. He held that what is twice read is better remembered than what is transcribed, and he therefore thought it folly to copy from books which a reference enables us to consult at will. Gibbon agreed with Johnson. He tried the plan according to the method of Locke, and laid it aside from experience of its disadvantages. Whenever the particulars are scattered and multitudinous, it seems convenient to collect the fragments into a single heap; and yet Southey's conclusions were nearly coincident with those of Johnson and Gibbon. It was a lesson, he said, he had learnt at no little price, that the time it took to make extracts from a borrowed book was worth more than the cost of the work. What was worse, he discovered too late that the system he pursued was ruinous to memory. There is no faculty of the mind more sharpened by use, or more blunted by inaction. Henderson, the actor, repeated to Dugald Stewart, after a single reading, such a portion of a news paper, that the metaphysician thought it marvellous. "If, like me," said Hen-racter of the sloth. It is with literaderson, modestly, in reply to the exclamations of surprise, "you had trusted for your bread to getting words by heart, you would not be astonished that habit should produce facility." What Henderson would have committed to memory, Southey committed to his manuscript volumes, and trusted to them so exclusively, that at last he retained nothing beyond general impressions. Want of practice was not alone the cause of the defect. His appetite for knowledge exceeded his or any other man's digestion, and he would have recollected more had he read less. Our rough forefathers were sensible of the truth, and sometimes stamped the body to assist the mind. There were parts of France where it was customary to whip the children at an execution, that they might never forget it. Cellini, in his boyhood, was summoned suddenly to see a salamander in the fire. While he was watching it with wonder, his father gave him a tremendous box on the ear. "Now," said he, "you will always remember that you have seen a salamander." ture as with labour; it is "the hand of the diligent that maketh rich;" "he that deals with a slack hand shall be a poor man;" our advice, then, to you is, Put soul into the service! Read as if you were to review the book in hand! So read, that when you have got through, you can recite its substance from beginning to end, setting forth, with tolerable accuracy, its scope and object, arguments and illustrations, and giving an opinion upon the whole with the reasons. Will it be said, This is hard work? To be sure it is; and from this arises the value of it. If men will only while away time, when they read, it is utterly impossible they can be permanently profited. It cannot be too deeply impressed on young people, that the power of attention is one which admits of indefinite improvement. We know the case of a young man, who acted upon this conviction as follows: His practice was to take Johnson's "Rambler," reading a paper, with the utmost attention he could command, then closing the book, to recite what Johnson never gave a more unques-ever he could remember of the sub stance in his own words. He then returned to the paper again, going through it with equal care as before, noting what he had taken and what omitted; again closing the book, he recited the substance; and once more he repeated the process. Three perusals from the first enabled him to bring forth the essence of every paragraph. This method he prosecuted for months, with the utmost regularity, and the most intense assiduity, until a single perusal sufficed to enable him to rehearse the essence of any paper, however difficult; and we vouch for it the exercise has ever since been of signal service to him. The young man who will do this will acquire the power of dealing with a subject in a manner of which, without experience, he can have no conception. This young man's exercise was known to a fellow student, whom it greatly amused and interested; one day, that gentleman, determined to test him with one of the most difficult passages in Dr. Reid's "Philosophical Essays;" himself selecting the passage, and giving it to the party, saying, "Read that, and give me the book." It was done, and the result filled him with astonishment. It is well known that Napoleon, from his boyhood, was intensely devoted to mathematical study, and that this discipline was subsequently of inestimable service to him in managing the affairs of his mighty empire. Lord Holland, in his "Foreign Reminiscences," lately published, has the following passage: "Napoleon's powers of application and memory seemed almost preternatural. There was scarcely a man in France, and none in employment, with whose private history, character, and qualifications he was not acquainted. He had, when emperor, notes and tables, which he called the moral statistics of his empire. He revised and corrected them by ministerial reports, private conversation, and correspondence. He received all letters himself, and, what seems incredible, he read and recollected all that he received. "He slept little, and was never idle one instant when awake. When he had an hour for diversion, he not unfrequently employed it in looking over a book of logarithms, which he acknowledged, with some surprise, was at all seasons of his life a recreation to him. So retentive was his memory of numbers, that sums over which he had once glanced his eye were in his mind ever after. He recollected the respective produce of all taxes through every year of his administration, and could at any time repeat any one of them, even to the centimes. Thus his detection of errors in accounts appeared marvellous, and he often indulged in the pardonable artifice of displaying these faculties in a way to create a persuasion that his vigilance was almost supernatural. In running over an account of expenditure, he perceived the rations of a battalion charged on a certain day at Besançon. • Mais le bataillon n'etait pas là,' said he, 'il y a une erreur." The minister recollecting that the emperor had been at the time out of France, and confiding in the regularity of his subordinate agents, persisted that the battalion must have been at Besançon. Napoleon insisted on further inquiry. It turned out to be a fraud, and not a mistake. The peculating accountants were dismissed, and the scrutinizing spirit of the emperor circulated with the anecdote through every branch of the public service, in a way to deter every clerk from committing the slightest error, from fear of immediate detection." The Fragment Basket. FALLING FLAT ON THE PRO- A NEGRO in Virginia, who was remark from all gloomy fears in regard to his eternal state, was once addressed on this wise: "You seem to be always comfortable in the hope of the Gospel. I wish you would tell me how you manage it, to keep so steadily in this drew through the back-door to the house of a neighbour, saying as she ran, "He shall not get me this time." The minister came in disappointed. He bethought himself, however, of a method of reaching the fugitive, and picking up a Bible, turned down a leaf at that passage, "The wicked flee when no man pursueth," and requested her ARIOSTO'S inscription over his door, in mother to hand it her when she should Ferrara, was: "Small, but sufficient for me." Moderation in secular affairs is a Scriptural injunction: "Let your conversation be without covetousness, and be content with such things as ye have." The prophet's residence was similar to the above: "A room on the wall containing a bed, a table, a stool, and a candlestick." How rare the jewel of Christian contentment! Alas! what immense sums of money are expended for elegant houses and expensive furniture, while the claims of the Saviour are forgotten or disregarded. How few reflect on the small house to which the body must soon be committed. Let us learn to moderate our desires respecting earthly grandeur, and let the great, the constant inquiry be, "How shall I best glorify God and benefit my fellowmen?" Soon will the voice be heard: "Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayst be no longer steward!" WHICH IS THE RIGHT MINISTER? THE late Rev. S. Pearce, being one week-day evening in town, and not engaged to preach, aɛked his friend where he could hear a good sermon? Mr. S. mentioned two places. "Well," said Mr. P., " tell me the characters of the preachers, that I may choose." "Mr. D.," said his friend, "exhibits the orator, and is much admired for his pulpit eloquence." Well," said Mr. P., "and what is the other ?" Why, I hardly know what to say of Mr. C.; he always throws himself in the back ground, and you see his Master only." "That's the man for me, then," said the amiable Pearce; "let us go and hear him." 66 A THOUGHTLESS YOUNG LADY. A MINISTER once called to converse with a family on the subject of religion. A gay young lady perceiving him, with return. She returned in triumphant glee after the preacher had left the house, joyous in her thoughtlessness, when her mother showed her the passage. She looked at it; her countenance fell. The thought struck her that she could not flee from God, from whose searching eye not the remotest distance nor the deepest darkness could hide her. Deep convictions succeeded to serious reflections. She now sought the minister, and with weeping eyes made her apology to him, which was rather an humble confession than an apology. "Make your confession to God," said the pastor. "Who am I? You have given me neither offence nor injury. But you have greatly injured God and offended your Saviour, and to him you must go." THE HAPPY DEATH-BED. "IT was in the Sunday school," said a scholar of a Sunday-school, in Kent, to her teacher, a short time previous to her departure, "I learned those truths which now make me happy; you often prayed for me, and tried to make me happy, and I thought you would like to know of my happiness; I thought it would encourage you and reward you for trouble." your "And what makes you so happy?" said the teacher. "O!" said the little girl, "I have a prospect of heaven before me, and I know I shall soon be there." The teacher said, "Do not be too dear." confident, my "How can I," she immediately replied. "when Jesus has said, 'Thy sins are forgiven thee?' I have been a great sinner, but my sins are pardoned through Jesus Christ, my Lord and Saviour." She died in the fifteenth year of her age, and is now enjoying the happiness of which she had so sweet a foretaste. |