A false report reaching his mother that her husband had been converted to the Romish Church, and was determined to take his son with him, she felt constrained to place the lad, then in his fourteenth year, somewhere in Saxony, and he became a page at the court of the Lord Duke Weissenfels. There, although exposed to manifold dissipations and temptations, he evinced much steadfastness of soul, and a mind well grounded in the word of God, especially during a time of very severe illness which seized him there. Even at that period the young Bogatzky began to clothe his prayers in the garb of rhyme. At length the father demanded his son, with a view to place him in the Austrian service; but the son happily had the firmness, in a mild and gentle manner, to refuse compliance. With a thankful heart he accepted the help of the pious Earl Henry XXIV., of Reuss Eostritz, to enable him to prosecute his foundation studies. After arduous preparations, he entered the University of Jena, in the year 1713, and removed to that of Halle in 1715. Auguste Heinrich Franke, the founder of the well-known "Orphan House" at Halle, and his colleague in that institution, exerted their attractive power, in its full strength, upon the young man; and two family circumstances occurred to induce him to exchange the study of law for that of theology, in the year 1710. These were the death of his beloved mother, and the complete estrangement of his father, who would never pardon his refusal to enter the military profession. But the high love and admiration with which he pursued his studies in Sacred Science were not supported by his bodily health, and being thus compelled to renounce the intention of becoming an ordained pastor of the Lutheran Church, he left Halle in 1718 and retired to Silesia. Notwithstanding this, his lifelong impulse to edify mankind found him ways and 'Tis dark, all dark! we strain our eyes but see no gleam of light, And shudder as around us rise the spectres of the night. Like a young child that stands in dread before a darkened room, And fearful, shrinks from entering for the silence and the gloom Until it holds its father's hand! then, though all still be drear, It enters with glad confidence and knows no thought of fear; So we upon the threshold halt, of this new year, to-night, Fearing to enter in alone, wanting a guide, a light; Till Jesus comes and takes our hand, and holds it in His own: "I will go in with thee, my child; thou shalt not walk alone, For I will go before thee; whate'er the darkness be My light shall shine upon thy steps; fear not, and follow Me." And shall we fear while holding to the hand of such a Guide ? With childlike trust we'll cling, and press more closely to His side. He knows it all; our New Year's path is all mapped out above, Planned with a wisdom infinite, with tender watchful love. We have also been accustomed, at this time, to chronicle something of the past year's history of our religious Society. Notably amongst these records we would place the First-day School Conference, held at Darlington in the autumn. Many of its details have already been recorded in our pages, and our reason for again alluding to it at this time is because we believe it was an occasion of no small import to the future wellbeing of our Body, and that the ground then occupied and the seed then sown is destined to bring forth fruit after its kind. It touched upon some of the most vital points of our organic action, and we look forward hopefully, though somewhat anxiously, for the development of these questions during the coming year. The Conference on the subject of the Queries has also been an important feature of the year that is past. Whatever may be the immediate result of its labours, we feel that the Queries in their present stereotype form cannot endure through the many sweeping changes which are being made around us. It will be in vain for some well-concerned Friends to maintain that the reading of these same words periodically and the answering of them in set words is accompanied with life to the hearers. The "tendency of the age" is against it, and the voice of the Society pronounces it to be inefficacious, and a prolonged occupation of time which might be more profitably spent. In our apprehension the doom of the Queries was sealed when the legal minds amongst our predecessors resolved that all answers to the Queries should be couched, as far as possible, in the same words, and each Query should be virtually repeated in every answer from every meeting. . All well-wishers to our Society must feel the great importance of the questions asked; and had meetings been left at liberty to reply to them in the way they felt would best convey a true knowledge of their condition to the superior meetings, the deadness induced by reiteration and the vagueness of indefinite words might have been avoided, and instead of weighing verbal niceties we should have had a valuable summary of what each meeting felt to be its religious state in relation to the various subjects alluded to. We trust, however, that when the day arrives in means to do so. He applied to the Consistory of the Church for permission to act as a missionary visitor. and in this capacity laboured chiefly in the families of the Silesian nobility, testifying the word at every opportunity on his travels in a most zealous manner. In the village of Glauch he helped to found and erect an Orphan House; and, during his abode there, he married a lady named Fels, with whom he had had previously spiritual intercourse. In spite of many griefs, they lived together in much peaceful happiness, from 1726 to 1732. She left him two sons, who, by the liberality of noble friends, were educated in well approved institutions. It is to be understood that Bogatzky had almost entirely consumed his always small means by his unbounded benevolence. Having resided, from the year 1740, at the court of the Earl of Saalfield, he left his situation there in 1746, after the death of that pious nobleman, in accordance with the advice of his spiritual counsellors. And now the younger Mr. Franke received him into the Orphan House at Halle, where he laboured in an earnest and edifying manner until his peaceful close. Bogatzky's name is best known in connection with his "Golden Treasury for the Children of God," which, since the year 1749, has been sold in innumerable editions. His poems were first printed in the same year in a collection entitled, "Experience in Godliness in several Spiritual Hymns." They are like their author, the man himself, captivating us by their ardency and purity, rather than by the sparkling of high endowment. The somewhat bombastic strain of the Silesian poetry of that day is sometimes too observable; but the sweet simplicity of the writer always breaks through, like the moon through the clouds. W. E. GLADSTONE ON RITUALISM AND RITUAL. Ir is not our purpose, in the few remarks that we propose to make on the above subject, to follow W. E. Gladstone throughout his argument. Still less is it our intention, tempting as such a course might be supposed to be, to send forth a pæan of self-gratulation on behalf of our Society, at our unique exemption from those difficulties of Ritual, which our author indicates with relentless logical acumen, as characterising alike the religious gatherings of Papist and Protestant, Presbyterian and Nonconformist. For ourselves, indeed, such congratulation were impossible, for we have long ago discerned, even in the Society of Friends, those difficulties as to Ritual which we have formerly had occasion to indicate by the phrase, "The Formalism of Informality." That is the point at which we stand, or perhaps stood some ten years back. But our object on the present occasion is rather, paradoxical as it may seem in the presence of an article showing such careful thought as does this of W. E. Gladstone, to point out what, after all, seems to us the really superficial view that our author has taken of the subject. If, indeed, he had made the key-stone of his argument, that which instead he only uses as a copingstone—the demand of the Apostle "that the Church may receive edifying "—he would, in our judgment, have written a paper far more satisfying the philosophical claims of his subject. Instead of this, he has approached it with an assumption as what acceptable worship is, and then pressed ritual C |