this body forms, in fact, a most important element, and comprises many of the teachers and helpers of both sexes, who make application and receive their cards of admission, exactly like the rest; and when they remove to other spheres of Christian labour, are glad to keep bright the chain of connection with the mission Church of Shoreditch. Of those who have

taken an active part in the work, there are at this tine two Missionaries in China, and one in India, and also a young married couple about to embark for the mission field of South Africa.

The gathering of a visible Church, whether from the elements of social degeneracy in the crowded lanes of London, or from the heathen of Africa or Asia, exhibits certain features of similarity. There are conditions to be met which do not coincide with those to which we, who represent the re-constructions of the past, are much accustomed. To build from the ruins of former edifices is not just the same thing as to labour in the quarry or the brickfield for the very materials with which to build. Those materials when put together may, however, result in a structure exhibiting both solidity and proportion. The young Church will indeed be strong if founded on the Rock of Ages-in so far as it is composed of the true "children of God, by faith in Christ Jesus; " but such a body requires both the moral and material help of those to whom larger gifts have been intrusted.

The Society of Friends is ever foremost in answering to a special appeal. Shoreditch, indeed, has not in relation to us, the "distance" which "lends enchantment to the view," and it is not of Shoreditch alone that we would speak. The Friends, or congregations connected with them, are making efforts to found these mission Churches among the heathen abroad, as well as at home. These efforts present problems of great interest, yet unsolved; but the

question which first arises is this: whether we who are admired for liberal response in cases of special need, are also capable of that persevering self-sacrifice and continuity of effort, which are needful, and now, peculiarly needed, to sustain and to expand that which is already founded.

GLIMPSES OF A NOBLE LIFE.*

IN the year 1791, in a little German town, a son was born to Heinrich Bunsen, a poor, worthy, intelligent man, who had known much of strife and trouble. It was to a somewhat sedate home-his half-sisters being almost women-that the radiant beautiful child, fit to be the inmate of a palace, came like a ray of sunshine. The father, in his note-book, after recording the boy's birth and baptism, adds the prayer-“ O, God, guide him by Thy grace, and let him grow up in Thy love and fear and in all virtue, to the joy of his parents, Amen!" How fully this petition was fulfilled even the suppliant's heart of hopeful love perhaps could not wholly comprehend until the day when father and son met face to face with God. Years of happy study were passed in that healthy phase of German life in which intellect goes for much and outward show for little.

The time came when, scantily provided with the small store which self-denying love had accumulated for the purpose, he set out for the University, to be there, as in all other places where his lot was cast, "blest and a blessing." Long after, when he had a European reputation, he referred to "the serious calling of which I was conscious when, poor and unprovided,

* Memoirs of Baron Bunsen. By his Widow, Frances Baroness Bunsen. London: Longmans, 1868.

The writer has by no means lost sight of the review of this work which appeared in the Examiner of Seventh and Tenth Months, 1868, to which this slight sketch is sent as a postscript, adding a few lines of more directly personal narrative.

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unknown and disregarded by the world, I strode forth, with the wanderer's staff, joyfully into the regions under the blue sky, as my blessed never-forgotten father, with upraised eyes, pointed it out to me on our parting in 1809, saying, Behold the heavens are blue everywhere.'" At the University he showed that moral courage which is so full of promise for a man's maturer life. It was long remembered there how he rose and walked out of a lecture-room as the only protest he could make against the irreverence with which sacred subjects were being treated by the lecturer. Besides giving collegiate instruction he acted as tutor to a young American, so that he was able to obtain means for pursuing his studies and assisting his half-sister Christiana, eighteen years his senior, who, meeting in Holland with losses she was too proud to make known to her family, had been driven to accept the generosity of friends. He not only supplied all that she needed, but by degrees refunded all that she had received, reproaching her for her unwillingness to take the aid "which you would a thousand times over have furnished to me, had you been in a condition to do so, without saying a word or listening to a wordhow can you make a distress of such things?" With a view to his historical and theological investigations, he was at this period adding to his stock of languages, which included English, French, Italian, Danish, Icelandic, Persian and Arabic, besides his Hebrew, Latin and Greek; and these acquirements were only means to an end.

In 1816 he went to Rome with an Englishman who needed his instruction in French, &c., travelling thither in company with the great historian Niebuhr, who was appointed Envoy Extraordinary to the Pope by the King of Prussia. From Rome he writes to Christiana: "For about eight days I have almost been a little in love. Be not alarmed; only a little, and

without consequences. He had become acquainted with an English family, and with the eldest daughter he liked “to discuss and dispute." He soon became aware of the portentous growth of this little unalarming love, and, as a matter of honour, he drew back, feeling as though it would be treachery to engage the affections of the well-born, well-dowered English girl. But Niebuhr told her father what he thought of Bunsen, and her mother desired that the poor German student might renew his intercourse with them on the only terms on which it was now possible to their daughter or to him. And so Frances Waddington took to herself such a crown of wifehood as queens might have proudly left their thrones to wear; and though the fact that her husband's memoir is edited by her causes some things to be left unsaid, yet written plainly on its pages we read the measureless love and confidence with which the heart of her husband safely trusted in her, and the respect which he felt for her judgment and intellect.

They were married in July, 1817. The following passage in his private memoranda marks the opening of the ensuing year:-"Grant me above all things truth inwardly, for without that I cannot behold Thy truth. . . . Forasmuch as Thy truth is the truth, man need not on the way to it be terrified by any truth." His habitual labours were those of an intellectual Hercules. He lived as it were ten lives in less than seventy years. Genius, the finely tempered and large nature, the power of "being happy," were all his; and knowing that those so gifted have an equal power to suffer, we should wonder how he could extract so much joy from existence if we had not the key to the secret in his abiding Christian faith that he was

Cared for, watched over, beloved, and forgiven."

In the words of the Times reviewer, "Not only do we