IMPELLED by the pleasant trade breezes our ship glided steadily through the smooth waters. At a quarter to eleven o'clock the bell rang for divine service, the ensign being thrown over the capstan, which served as a reading desk, extra stools from the cabin and a few raised planks, in addition to the fixed seats on deck, affording accommodation for the audience.

The burnishing up of the motley group for these religious services was amusing to notice-the superior attire of the gentlemen, the more decorative toilette of the ladies, the clean duck trowsers of the seamen who, as they came on to the quarter-deck, displayed varying attempts at distinction with their many hued neck-kerchiefs and emphatically brushed hair.

Six bells (eleven o'clock) struck by three sharp quick tinkles and three slower heavier strokes, indicated that the hour of wor

ship had arrived, then perfect silence and attention ensued, the only wandering eyes on board being those of the helmsman alternately watching the compass and the topgallant sails, his orders being to mind his weather helm, and keep the sails easy full during prayers, and the chief officer occasionally glancing to windward to espy any sudden squall stealing over the waters. The notes of the Morning Hymn rising from the mixed voices were mellowed by the surrounding sea.

"Hark! how it grows more strong;

And now it steals along,

Like distant bells upon the lake at eve."

The lessons, Genesis, chapter 1, and Psalm 107, and prayers ended, the minister announced his text, Psalm 104, verse 25th"This great and wide sea."

and continued-All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for rebuke, exhortation, and instruction in right mindedness; and the humble attentive soul, however disturbed and distressed, may always find therein rest, consolation, and light, for truth, duty, God, beam forth from every page, even as this everliving sea, whether tempest-tossed or placid, unceasingly reflects a bright joyous track, direct from every watching eye to yon glorious sun above us.

In the spirit of the principle thus laid down, it has appeared to me that I could not more suitably assist your meditation on this our first service on shipboard, and cause us to feel at home with one another and with the surrounding element, than by a short review of those scripture passages wherein the great ocean, upon which we are being wafted far from our native land, occupied the writer's mind either as the direct subject of his pen or by way of illustration; and I shall endeavour to draw therefrom, as we glide along the sacred page, some lessons which in after life may be attended with mental profit whenever our present voyage may recur to your thoughts.

The Waters of Life." This great and wide sea;”—the all pervading character of water, and the origin of its teeming life, are set forth in terse, noble, simple language in the opening of the world's history; and how enlarged does the meaning of our first lesson become when read in the light of the investigations of science.

Before man was created the waters of the globe were crowded with living beings, so numerous that the shelly coverings of the frail bodies of one small section now compose thick layers of the earth's crust, known as the chalk formation; the Almighty architect of the universe causing the globe in its progress to its present state of a suitable home for man to assume the conditions of fit residence for innumerable forms of vegetable and animal life. And to such as may fear lest their reverence for the scriptures might be placed in jeopardy by the encouragement of this enlarged belief in the antiquity of God's works upon the earth, we would say, "Ye do err not knowing the Scriptures, neither the power of God, with whom a thousand years are as one day."

And as the earth's sphericity and its motion were equally at the time of their announcement contrary to the religious opinions of the age, and yet are now admitted and received by the most devout, so the doctrine of the gradual building up of this ever fresh and verdant home for man will be ere long cordially embraced by the good, who will then read with a deeper feeling of loving awe, that " Of old hath he laid the foundations of the earth."

The inorganic remains of the multitudes of creatures formerly existing on the globe now inhabited by man, afford intensely interesting objects for study by the microscope, which has opened to our view another world of the Creator's wonderful works, and a very slight acquaintance with the discoveries of that instrument causes the inquiry, "Where is the dust that has not been alive?" to cease to be regarded as a poetical exaggeration. And if the inspection of a beautiful simple flower gave courage to the lonely

traveller in the African desert, teaching him a lesson of the all pervading present providence of God, so should the studies of the geologist enforce the great idea of its continuity. "To day, yesterday, and for ever the same." "I am that I am." "With me there is no variableness or shadow of turning."

The Waters of Death.-Pause we now over the 8th chapter of Genesis, and note with what quiet grandeur the event of the Deluge is related.

True, the whole account has been scoffed at as improbable, nay as impossible, as a myth, an invention of the writers of the Scriptures; the objectors forgetting that the great object of the Bible is not to give details of natural philosophy, but to instruct in moral duty; nevertheless, whenever the relation of great events was necessary to the purpose of the writers, the narratives were artlessly, boldly, woven into the texture of the history, though the delineations might be sometimes only dimly given, just as a painter indicates distant objects, however grand and important, by a few suggestive strokes, reserving higher elaboration for the nearer and more immediate subject of his picture.

These objectors have also for the most part entirely overlooked the fact that traditions of this sublime catastrophe are widely spread. Plato mentions the great deluge in which the cities were destroyed, and useful arts lost, and suggests that there was a great and universal deluge before the particular inundations celebrated by the Greeks; and Ovid's description of Deucalion's flood is minute in its harmony with the Scriptural account. Lucian also mentions more than once the great deluge in Deucalion's time, and the ark which preserved the small remnant of human kind; referring to the wickedness and profligacy of the former generation, for which reason the earth gave forth abundance of water, great showers of rain fell, the rivers increased, and the sea swelled to such a degree that all men perished.

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Similar traditions abound in the East, as also in the interior of Africa, and in the South Sea Islands, all bearing a striking resemblance to the narrative of Moses.

Still stranger than the mythical theory, is the fact that the advance of science should in a few years have taken the deluge out of the category of impossible catastrophes, and by diminishing its proportions in comparison with the overwhelming changes geology announces as having occurred in our globe, has reduced it to an ordinary process of nature, a thing of naught.

We hold to the truth of the record that it was easily possible to him "who taketh up the isles as a very little thing," that, however partial or local it may have been, the deluge was co-extensive with the then diffusion of the human family, that it was not in the ordinary course of nature, that it was a direct interposition of God, and would learn from it to revere his justice, and adore his love, arching all being as the bow in his cloud. Connected with this event we may notice that the first ship, "Noah's Ark," of whose construction we have any account, was probably larger than any which will ever again be built. The directions for its erection were explicit, though simple. "Make thee an ark of gopher wood, rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch; and this is the fashion thou shalt make it of; the length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, and the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits, with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.” Estimating the cubit to have been eighteen inches in length, the capacity of the ark must have been about 40,000 tons; and in this huge vessel, "when the water prevailed exceedingly upon the earth," Noah, and they that were with him, rode safely above the swelling waves until the flood assuaging, the ark rested upon the mountains of Ararat.

The Waters of Retribution. Within the limits we have prescribed to ourselves the next memorable occurrence related in the Old