the lamb nature is to be born and perfected, till we be all "re-born, angels of one age, the age of love and truth."

Many beginnings are, as any one one might know they must be, preludes and failures; they are "lighthearted" beginnings, there is too much unthoughtfulness and heedless boast in them. And some that are to be hailed gladly lead to grief. Who is not born to some pain and labour? Yet it is good to be born, good for all, as we hope.

Let Christ's birth hallow all births and make them hopeful, and make us wise in our hope for them, and make us to see the hope within hope, the life within life.

It is in the very midst of the Christmas festival that our New Year begins; and we must, then, begin the year in a Christmas spirit, and let the last half of this Christmas be fit match for the first half of the next.

There are beginnings we may make at any time, and others for which times come, and we may lose them altogether or must wait for their recurrence. But we may begin again the Christianization of ourselves and of the world, and must not despair. Christ foresaw wars, and declared that the first effects of his religion would not be peaceful. Certainly the results of Providence must be very great when we consider the sorrow and sin that introduce them. They will be great. I think our special mission as Christians is to lessen and suppress the causes of war, and to maintain the subordinacy of all material arms, and implements, and successes, to moral ones.

Even now it seems to me we are, in talking of the present war, confusing things. Is it patriotism that makes the French maintain the struggle? As against German wish for territory, alleged to be for defence, the French have no just word to say, their own avowed purpose and former history being considered.

This is no proof that the Germans are right, only that the French have no special right to complain of the wrong. The French army is now hanging on Haman's gallows. It was erected high and with much boast, for the enemy-itself is a victim thereon. But were not a magnanimity possible, that the French cannot claim? That is the question indeed. Yet German difficulties are greater than thought; and because the Germans have been drawn on and compelled to be so successful, we ought not to turn against them so utterly as some are doing, and forget the untruthfulness, and insolence, and unreasoning vain-glory of the French.

And yet how much honour and truth, yes, and courage and love, there are on both sides. And if the medical neutrals are on both sides, whatever may be their personal sympathies, and care for the wounded in common, shall there not be pulpit neutrals too, if we are active in desire for the ultimate welfare of both sides, and recognize the present sufferings of both, and desire to do honour to what worth there manifestly is in both?

Would that our working classes were more thinking classes and more godly classes! I believe we must reach a deeper faith in God if we are to have peace on earth and in England. Festivities of Christmas avail little without sacrifices of Easter; nor will sweet pensive sentiment avail if we do not our part to live the good life for which we honour and love the departed. Whatever war-tools a nation may need to use, it is by the contentedness, the instructedness, the domestic truth and comfort, the kind-mindedness of its people, that it alone can develop greatness.

What if we had a palace thus inscribed, temple-like, "To all the glories of England," and there were only pictures of war therein, and trophies of war's victories? "What," it might be said, "these your only

glories? all your glories? have you no others?" Our engines and machines of so many kinds, these are not our glories, except in part! Homes round factories, not factories without homes; people that are honest and faithful, as well as clever and strong -these are glories! The translated Bible is a glory; Newton the discoverer, Milton the singer, Shaks"historian - these are peare the glories! Docks and shops have their glory; big bales and crowded shop windows mean much; but people to whom the outside of the head is more than the inside, and the outside of civilization more than its brain and heart, will not continue glorious, if indeed they or their fathers have ever been glorious.

I think a too general prosperity is injurious; and to call a prosperity that is in some sense ours general, is but illusive. The good of all in their proportion, the proportion of their need, and worth, and ability, is to be the general aim-the aim and wish of statesman and preacher. But if we get rich, or are said to be all getting so, and care less for questions of international justice, and questions of spiritual truth and intellectual forms of happiness, it will go ill with us. But is this the case? We may believe not, and yet feel it wise to take heed that it be not.

This recent Christmas of ours, and again throughout Europe too, has been an especially winterly one. We have had our winter beauty, and winter vigour, and winter amusement. Our winterly climate is not as it formerly was; and it is, considered apart from the calamities of the time, rather exhilirating to see the earth "vested all in white," and to feel the (tous) playful bite of the wintry wind. But a snowy battlefield, and a wounded man with only frost to close his wounds, and the bite of the wind after the thrust of the sword, or when the man is famishing, these are sad things to think of.

All, however, is of the oldest of the old cruel fashions of the world; and we will hope and pray for some spiritual coming of Christ in His peaceful and peace-giving power; and will believe in a world of spirits as well as of men, that is a present world, not a future one merely, though it be by us unseen; and will hope for the Christianizing of many who have lived in an evil, but not wholly evil, way here, and for the reconciliation and mutual comforting of those who here even died bitter foes.

God will not, that is clear, let life go on in an easy way, as a mere wilful play of "I like this, therefore I will do it." He can judge two nations as well as one-nations out of the war as well as in it. And there is no escape from dishonour and folly except through trouble; and we must be earnest about good, and in a strenuous intelligent way, else we cannot remain secure, or remain so, caring much for our own life.

Think of this for a Christmas-day -instead of the lion and the lamb lying down together, men sit down together to eat of dog and wolf, of rat and camel, all manner of foods clean and unclean, specially the latter, because that chiefly is accessible. A Paris banquet truly! figuring what has been many a day, spiritually, the fare of many a Parisian.

O for a good Christmas in 1871 ! and for many new beginnings, in a wise hope and with a heavenly song, of great Christian effort.

But big things begin in small ways often. Acorns yield oaks; the sub-structure enlarging as the superstructure requires that it should, and the former nourishing as well as supporting the latter. So should it be with Christian growths. Christ's "little flock" of real, healthful sheep may begin now-at any time-to feed and to move over the fields in the hope of the promise, "It is my Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom."

I WALKED ten miles this morning along a hard frosty road, to see if I could at all recover from the nervous exhaustion caused by past labour and anxiety; and, as I walked, two thoughts came to me of a consolatory and friendly aspect. They may have a message for you as well as for me, and therefore I will tell you what they were.

As I walked I could not but observe that the beautiful crystals of ice and snow had fallen as abundantly on the hard road, where they were trampled under foot of man and beast, as on the neighbouring fields, where every blade of grass was clothed by them in an armour of dazzling lustre. And I remembered how, often, in my prayers for myself and you, when I was asking for blessings that imply perfection of character and aim and motive, I had checked myself, as though such blessings were beyond the scope and need of creatures so weak and sinful as we are. And I asked myself, Why should you do that? Why should any man do it? Consider these delicate crystals which you are crushing beneath your feet.

Each is most exquisite, each perfect, in its fragile loveliness, each finished and brilliant as a gem, though they have fallen and were to fall on the hard bare road. Must not He who made them, and spread them here, love perfection for its own sake? Are not all His works, save only man, already perfect? And is not man also His handiwork? Must He not, then, desire and intend that man too should be made perfect? But if that be His wish, why should it not be your wish? if that His intention, why not your prayer? Why fear to crave, why hesitate to

ask, perfection for the imperfect ? You are only asking what He means and longs to give.

:

But

This was my first thought with a friendly face and the second was like unto it, and grew out of it. I had glowed with admiration at the generous munificence of God in lavishing the delicate wonders of His skill on the hard barren road, and a little marvelled, perhaps, that He should waste them there. now the question came, Are they wasted after all? What becomes of them? When the sun shines upon them with a too fervent heat, they melt. What the road needs, that it keeps. What it does not need drains off into the neighbouring fields, making them more fertile. Is there any waste in God's lavish gift of rain, frozen or unfrozen ? Does not every flake, every drop, subserve some useful purpose? Yes, even those which remain on the road and are trodden into mud! Is not even the mud scraped from the road by human labour, and then, with fresh labour, strewn upon the fields, to give them an added fruitfulness ? And why should any spiritual influence, any spiritual gift, be wasted because it falls on hard and barren hearts? How know you what good

it may do even to them? And why, if they are past bearing, may it not flow off from them, in more ways than you can trace, to neighbouring hearts, in which it will nourish peaceable fruits of righteousness?

These were the thoughts my morning walk brought me; surely very friendly consolatory thoughts. May they prove as comforting to you as they did to me!

THIS white-headed old man, the quaver in whose voice suggests weakness rather than dignity, very well remembers during this period. For the importance of what he remembers he does not vouch; that must rest with the reader. The quality of things remembered will depend very much upon the observer. A foolish man will remember trifles and follies; a reflective man will find more in what he sees than other people; an exact man will relate in due order and perfection of detail all he names; a mere curiosity-monger will retail, not so much what is interesting or valuable, as what is odd; and a sensible man will have preserved the kernel, as it were, of what he has seen, and throwing the husk away, invite you to share in his retrospective dessert, not pressing you overmuch to partake of all, but bidding you welcome to anything to your taste, and begging you to leave without hesitation what is disagreeable. This is the course the writer begs you, gentle reader, to take on this occasion.

There was a Latin motto current in the days of Roman decadence, as follows: "Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur cum illis ""The times are changed, and we are changed with them." An historical truism this, as applied to nations, often involving neither praise nor reproach; an ignoble excuse when adopted in explanation of inconstancy or degeneracy in individuals. Religious communities are neither nations nor individuals; but, in proportion to their extent and age on the one hand and their freedom on the other, may claim the immunity of neutral phenomena, or lie exposed to the just inflictions of criticism. The action of retrospect in a mind fully sensitive to moral principles is seldom

free from either blame or regret, or from congratulation and gratitude, as it pursues the history either of persons or communities for any considerable period of time.

In 1770 the General Baptist New Connexion was formed; in 1870 a century has written its changes on the men, the manners, and the opinions which now represent it. At the time first named the flames of martyrdom had been extinguished in England about a century. The last victims of polemical zeal were the witches.* Loyalty (by which was meant passive obedience to the reigning monarch) and religion were considered one and the same thing. Physical force, generally in its rudest form, was the agent by which the religious and civil institutions of the country were maintained. The sentiment of devotion to this cause was frequently expressed in Parliament, and on the magistrates' bench, by a popular couplet :

"While I can handle stick or stone

I will support the church and throne."

Parliamentary elections were managed by the combined power of mobs, bribery, and oppression, openly exercised, without an apology and without a blush. The landlord oppressor, or the proprietor of the rotten borough, justified himself by what he conceived a self-evident maxim of right: "May I not do what I like with my own?"† A contest for a county seriously endangered the pecuniary fortunes of a candidate, and a succession of them was the certain ruin of the richest family. The time of the clergy was spent between the duties of companykeeper to the squire or lord who was patron of the living, and the gaming

*The last were executed about 1664. Baxter joined in the persecution of them, and Sir Matthew Hale pronounced their sentence.

+ Duke of Newcastle. First Reform debate in the House of Lords.

table and the hunting-field. The readers of the novels of Smollett and Fielding will form an idea of their morality, and will see that drunkenness, profane swearing, and debauchery were habitual amongst them. Industry, especially in the rural portions of the country, was not the systematic thing we now see it. Whitsun-ales, cock-fighting, bull and badger-baiting, occupied much of the Sundays and week-days of the people. Of holidays there were between thirty and forty in the calendar, sustainable by statute. The journey from Edinburgh to London was six days by royal mail. To read was a rare attainment. Burke reckoned that there were only eighty thousand readers in England in his day. Writing was an art practised only by professed scholars. Robinson Crusoe was the youth's great book of travels; but whether it was fact or fiction was doubtful to the majority of its readers. Pilgrim's Progress was read in hundreds of pious and humble homes with a reverence almost equal to that paid to inspiration. Almanacks were invariably emblazoned by illustrations of the direst portent, and their predictions most anxiously studied, and the verifications afterwards industriously sought for. The belief in lucky and unlucky days was universal. No sailor would embark on a voyage, no servant would go to a fresh place, on a Friday. Dr. Johnson always on crossing the threshold of a house for the first time put a certain foot first, and wetting the tips of his fingers touched the door-posts on either side. "Paradise Lost "" was the great classical poem of England; and Dryden and Pope, with Milton, were the three great English poets. Shakespeare, chiefly by the agency of Garrick, was just beginning to be appreciated and to be popular. Johnson was finishing his great dictionary. Robert Burns was at the plough. Literature at large was looked upon by religious people as

a Pagan field of recreation. Serious persons read "Young's Night Thoughts" and "Hervey's Meditations." The ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau were beginning to seethe in the French mind, and prepare the ferment of the great Revolution. The name of Buonaparte had never been heard in Europe; the men who bragged of battles, whether in alehouse or Parliament, talked of Prince Eugene and the great Duke of Marlborough. Steam-ships and mitrailleuses were equally undreamt of, and every English boy implicitly believed one Englishman to be equal to six Frenchmen. Yet the element of utility was beginning to make its throbs felt through society; and this not so much through the lucubrations of Adam Smith and Bentham as by the practical application of the discoveries of Black, Leslie, and Davy, in reference to heat, the gases, and oxidation. At length mechanical ability linked discovery with production. Arkwright, Peel, and Strutt made the cotton manufacture one of the great staple trades of England. In 1792 the great burst of the Revolution came. Europe shook with the explosion. Monarchy was swept away, tradition was laughed at, and philosophers and tailors made constitutions and moral systems afresh every morning. Then came reaction, and Trafalgar, and Waterloo. In the meantime Sunday schools had been instituted, started by one Robert Raikes, a Nonconformist of Gloucester. The millions became readers. "The rights of man," which the French Revolution had dragged in their infancy through the gutter, stood upon their feet a promising and stalwart youth, and demanded reform. The "Times" "newspaper became the wonder of the world; James Watt produced the steamengine and George Stephenson the locomotive. Civilization and Liberalism, for a time, meant the same thing; and Lord John Russell stood on a pinnacle whose pedestal was the