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of Saumur, and contributed to develop in that town the religion of Christ, we have the pleasure of announcing to you that the candlestick so long since removed, is replaced in the same city! The pastor Duvivier, obliged for the sake of his health, to suspend his numerous duties in the church over which he is placed, and to confine himself to preaching alone, requested permission to profit by his leave of absence, to go and preach the gospel at Saumur. The following is the account which he has given us as regards his arrival in that place :

“I entered upon my functions on Sunday, the 20th of March, at noon, but as the newspapers which ought to have announced our worship, were not published until that very morning, we had only from seventy to eighty auditors. At seven o'clock in the evening the room was full, and I had the pleasure of preaching the word, to a great number of attentive, and well-disposed persons. On Easter-day the attendance was much greater than the preceding Sundays, and there were at least 300 persons in a room which could scarcely contain 100 conveniently; and yet silence and good order were maintained through all the service, which was two hours long. We had about twenty communicants at the Lord's table. At night the room was as full as in the morning, and the word of God was listened to with the same interest."

At the present time, therefore, as in the days of Henry IV., the faithful preaching of the truths of salvation is heard at Saumur; and we have good reason to hope, that shortly the Evangelical Society of France will be able to rebuild there, if not the church at Porte du Bourg, at least a convenient place for the worship which has been thus established.

The commencement of this station is not the result of a headlong enthusiasm, excited by the historical reminiscences to which attention has been directed. M. Morache, pastor at Tours, earnestly advised us to this step, in consequence of the reports made by a colporteur, whom we had placed at his disposal. The following is what our brother wrote to us in the month of June last :

According to the intentions which I had communicated to you, I went to Saumur with the design of establishing a station connected with the Evangelical Society of France, and I preached there last Sunday.

"It was with a lively emotion that I preached the word of God in a town where it had not been proclaimed for more than 250 years; and in one rendered illustrious by such precious remembrances. Oh, that the Lord would re-establish there, as elsewhere, the desolate walls of Sion! I found at Saumur, a considerable number of protestants, who gladly united together at my invitation: still all were not present at the service, because many were ignorant of my presence in the town. Contrary to that which is but too common elsewhere, the protestants whom I invited, or with whom I conversed after sermon, did not appear timorous; they all manifested a desire to see the worship established among them, and expressed the sorrow they felt at being in a state of religious destitution. God appears, there, to favor the establishment of the gospel in a town from which he had permitted it to be banished for many years. Culpable should we be, did we not eagerly avail ourselves of the way which he lays open before us. The Evangelical Society of France in particular will acquire new claims upon the gratitude of the churches, in restoring to the protestants of France the church of Saumur."

A favorable answer has been made to so interesting an appeal. The town of Angers was, at the same time, recommended with equal warmth, since in that place some movements indicative of spiritual life were evinced by the reading of the Bibles distributed by the colporteurs; and the society has been equally willing to send there an evangelist, in order that these "tokens for good" may be nourished and developed.

In truth we cannot but be struck by these simultaneous efforts for the evangelization of Saumur and Angers, since the historical details we have just cited, transport us to a period when there were simultaneous efforts to check the progress of the truth in these cities.

Is not this a reproach sufficient to excite our faith, and to make us consider the Evangelical Society of France as one of the many powerful means which God employs in our days, to re-establish his kingdom in those very places where it appeared to have been the most violently shaken ?

S. T.

THE GREAT ADVENTURERS.

WE are apt to attach a good deal of importance to the first discoverers of any country; the first leaders in any enterprize; the first adventurers in any new undertaking. There is a charm about the little words, "first and foremost," which we are all ready to acknowledge, even where it implies no merit at all, but appears to belong accidentally, or even of necessity, to certain persons or things. The name of Adam has come down to us associated with a degree of importance second only to that which led our ancestors in the dark days of mythology and superstition, to raise him to the rank of a hero or demi-god, mainly because he was "the first man that God made, and the father of us all.” We look upon Abraham with reverence, as the first, or father of, the faithful; and even on Jabal and Jubal as men of some account, as the inventors of those peculiar arts with which their names stand associated in the Bible. Every one acknowledges the claims of Newton to our gratitude and respect, as the first to unfold, satisfactorily, the magnificent laws of attraction and gravitation. The name of Bacon, the father of inductive philosophy, and the first practical demonstrator of physical truths, claims, and receives from all, the award of enlightened admiration; and those of Copernicus and Galileo demand our veneration, when we look at them as the first effectually to dispel the errors of earlier astronomy, to bring new worlds within our reach, and to open to our astonished gaze the precision, order, harmony, and love, which reign throughout our own and other planetary systems. We look upon those early navigators who first ventured beyond the pillars of Hercules, tempted the perils of the loud Atlantic, and circumnavigated Africa, with the same regard; and even entertain a lofty opinion of the old Phenicians, who trusted the waters of our own channel in their adventurous traffic for tin with the rude and reckless aborigines of the British isles. It does not indeed seem a necessary ingredient in this admiration, that such discoveries or adventures should have served any useful purpose; it is enough that they stood first and foremost in their several departments, and that their leaders or authors possessed the claim alone of having broken up new ground, or introduced some new thing to the notice of succeeding generations. The first äeronaut, foolish and unprofitable as his

exploits may have been, is looked upon, notwithstanding, with something akin to admiration, as an interesting, because a daring, adventurer into regions hitherto unexplored. Our warmest sympathies went with Columbus, when we read the touching narrative which tells us of the new world he was supposed to have discovered; and we were lost in contemplating the great and noble daring that led him in the very face of mutiny, and distress, and peril, in its countless forms, to buffet with the waves and storms of the Atlantic, determined to give no slumber to his eye-lids till he had planted his foot within the western Indies! But, to us, what was all the wealth he was by this discovery to pour into the treasuries of an implacable and murderous race, who have even here reaped a rich reward for all their atrocities in this territory of crime? And yet Columbus was a great adventurer. And so were those old Northmen who, centuries before his day, had voyaged to the self-same shores, leaving it for tedious and unremitting research alone, to find that they had ever been across the mighty waters which separate the old and new worlds from each other. Yet if these were great-and great they were, unquestionably-of how much loftier praise shall those be thought worthy who had in days of remotest history, transported to the central regions of America, the arts of Hindostan, and reared amidst the woods and plains of Mexico, towns and temples, palaces and sepulchres, of elaborate and gorgeous workmanship, which, even in the present day, strike into the hearts of the beholder the deepest feelings of awe and veneration. These eastern colonists, Benaiahs and Sampsons, though in different spheres, were men of renown, on whom all ages must look with the same feeling of devotion; for though their enterprise cannot have advantaged us who, until the last few years, possessed no knowledge of it, we gladly yield them homage as the first and foremost to tempt the dangers of the trackless ocean, and to plant the arts of India upon untrodden shores.

But the little word "first," stands associated with adventurers of far more noble and majestic character and daring. As Christians, we may consistently look on those of whom we have already spoken, with admiration, with gratitude, with love, with zeal, or emulation, according to the varied character or circumstances with which they stand connected. The Bible allows us to be

"zealously affected in a good thing;" and energy, and enterprize, and faith, and hope, are good. We admire the man who first adventured into the regions of air; we reverence the individual who first proceeding on that fine old scripture rule--" prove all things"-submitted to the test of experiment the fallacies and crooked crotchets of his predecessors; we glory in the greatness of that Tuscan artist who first swept the heavens with his "optic tube;" we love those enterprizing spirits who first trusted the waters of an unknown sea; but we feel a greater love for those noblest of all noble adventurers, the men of whom Paul wrote, -himself a hero among heroes-that they "first trusted in Christ."

And who were these great adventurers? The first-fruits of the Jews, whom God enabled to overcome all opposition, and contumely, and persecution, from their enemies, and all prejudices and hatred in their own bosoms, yielding themselves living sacrifices to the God of their fathers, as they saw his mercy reflected in the face of their long-expected, but hitherto unknown, Messiah. Oh! how the manly heart of Paul must have grown warm within him, when he drew around it his Ephesian converts, and recollected that to them and him the promises were given, and of both, as concerning the flesh, Christ came. Israelites indeed, they had now proved themselves, and true sons of faithful Abraham; and as theirs had been the glory of exceeding zeal for the One true and living God, when the veil was upon their hearts, and the cloud upon their eyes; they were now the foremost to see them done away in Christ, and return to their first love under a ministration so glorious, as to absorb all the splendors of the first covenant, dissolve them into tenderness and love, and inspire them with zeal to "the praise of the glory of his grace." They first trusted in Christ.

They first trusted in him. Then who will be the next? Is there no stimulus to you, dear reader, in this delightful text, "to go and do likewise?" Has he "accomplished the number of his elect," and is there no room for more followers of this noble army. The text puts a plain negative upon such a conclusion, when it shuts us up to the inference, that these adventurers were merely the advance-guard of the church militant; "they first trusted in Christ." Were they Jews, and was their leader who

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