is in Jesus, in the love of it," with simplicity and earnestness, has acquired a secret that keeps him quiet, humble, patient, meek, affectionate, and holy, in a turbulent,' angry, and unholy world. Who indeed is he that overcometh that world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John v. 5). Now "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. x. 17). I have thus, how briefly and imperfectly soever, under the few heads suggested by my text, endeavoured to shew that the bible in itself, being an inspired composition, is thereby endued with an influential bearing, close and direct, upon the affections and conduct, as well as on the profession, of all who really study it, or listen to it with any willingness, even a passive willingness, to profit by it. This is not to deny (God forbid that it should) that, even where there is an unwillingness, where there is opposing prejudice, benefit may be and often is received. But I enter not on that ground now. I have in view the case of that vast majority, in one country at least, who have a general notion, though an inert one, that the bible is from God, and that they ought to listen to what is in it. And the object of what has been adduced is to enforce the importance of bringing it more and more largely and directly in contact with their hearts and minds, through their eyes and ears. It should not be used as a mere repository of texts, to be called up when wanted, as proofs of doctrines. Neither should it be represented as a volume, so full of difficulties, that the simple-minded should not be trusted with it in their hands, without some oral guide or written accompaniment. Nor, again, should a spurious reverence (if the expression be not too harsh) for its sublimity be inculcated, to the exclusion of that genuine veneration for its intrinsic and experienced power and comfort which they know "in" whose "heart" it is received, "in" whose "mouth" "speaking out of the abundance of the heart" (Matt. xii. 34) it is honoured sincerely and unassumingly. God has brought "it very nigh to let neither superstition, nor indolence, nor an erring timidity put it far from us! Very difficult it is, I am aware, to urge a great principle, which one fears that men encumber too often with qualifications, and at the same time to avoid the appearance of depreciating much that is effectually auxiliary to it. In advocating the pre-eminent employment of the bible itself, the comparing of scripture with scripture, as the heaven-sent and self-applying directory of our own religious studies, and fundamentally the best schooling we can help to give to others, it us: may be feared by some lest a slight is cast on creeds and catechisms, articles and homilies, or devotional manuals, such as our blessed book of common prayer. The very reverse is the case. Those invaluable aids (I speak of such as our church recognizes) to the understanding and to the memory, to the judgment and to the heart, fail of their efficacy, and are despised by myriads, because they "know not the scriptures "; because they have so cursory an acquaintance (at best) with the bible, from which they are drawn, and on which they are framed. Who does not know how dull a thing it is to read a mere table of contents prefixed to a book? But study the book, and then refer to the table, and see whether it call not up topics of interest, freshening them to the recollection, and fixing them in it? Only the enumeration must be truthful and genuine; and if in the author's own words it will be the more effective. There is much practical wisdom, as well as a careful proportion of subjects, in our church's injunction that her little ones be taught, as soon as they are able to learn, "the creed, the Lord's prayer, and the ten commandments," of which the two latter are portions of the word of God itself, and the first is collected immediately from it. That they "be taught" implies, however, that they must have teachers, sound and duly commissioned teachers, parental, sponsorial, ministerial. To return, and to conclude. The bible, as those who are most grateful for it will most readily own, is but the instrument of God's Holy Spirit. And it is not an instrument that will act mechanically on the soul: there must be prayer, continual prayer, as the bible itself teaches, for its progressive operation upon us. But it is the record, and the only record, of what God has spoken to man. And he has willed that it should be a plain, open, inviting, and accessible record: "It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it "(Deut xxx. 12-14). We have considered how these words unfold its internal evidence, its innate credentials. Shall we not resolve to study that evidence thoroughly, that we may adduce those credentials promptly and prominently in the coming struggle with unbelievers, who will mock-ignorantly it is true-but still who will mock at all testimony of human authority 2 to its inspiration, but will not so well be able to scoff at their own consciences, when smitten by this simpler, nearer, closer proof, the self-witnessed authority and impressiveness of the bible in itself. So, "when the enemy", whose name is Legion, "cometh in like a flood, "the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him." leaning on his arm, and that he himself was once in almost the same position as that now occupied by prince Albert. The scene was very touching to a reflective spectator, and could not fail to suggest many reflections on the inevitable exposure of men in the loftiest stations to the keenest sorrows that befall the human lot. Possibly their sorrows are the keener for their elevation. As the royal party withdrew from the building, it gratified me to observe the practical bias of prince Albert's mind. He made a pause behind the rest, to examine a small cottage grate with & THOUGHTS AND WORDS IN THE CRYSTAL model of an improved chimney. His well-known PALACE. BY THE REV. JOHN EAST, M.A., Rector of St. Michael's, Bath. No. I. THE THREE QUEENS. IT was a bright midsummer morning when I entered the Crystal Palace at its opening hour, chiefly with the hope of seeing, for the first time in my life, our beloved and justly popular sovereign. Her majesty was walking in the fine arts department, leaning on the arm of Leopold, king of Belgium, whose young daughter accompanied our princess Alice. Prince Albert was also there. Pleasant was it to look down from the gallery and watch the queen's movements. To me at that moment she was the most interesting object in that scene of ten thousand wonders. She leisurely passed from object to object with tranquil but lively emotion, making frequent inquiries of, and remarks to the attendant exhibitor, in a manner which, while it left him perfectly unembarrassed, could not let him forget that he was waiting on a queen, and that queen his own. There was a simple dignity in her every step and movement, but not the slightest affectation of greatness. She was quite at her ease, while she seemed to enjoy a placid consciousness that she was really the monarch of the people who had raised and filled the wonderful structure above and around her. Not seldom must another grateful recollection have presented itself to her mind during her frequent visits there, that her own prince consort had mainly originated the whole scheme of the Great Exhibition. In one part the marble statue of a child, in mournful and prayerful attitude, met and arrested the eye of her majesty. It represented an orphan. I observed the queen turn, and draw the two royal children, who followed close behind her, to notice the figure. King Leopold was then a second time a widower; and his motherless daughter was with him in deep mourning. The remembrance quickly crossed my mind of that dark day in November, in the year 1817, when, in the quiet retreat of Claremont, he had first been bereaved, and England had lost her then brightest star of earthly national hope, her princess Charlotte. In that royal mourner's mind, whose countenance too clearly betrayed his inward sadness, the thought must often have arisen, that his first love and bride was the heiress of the brilliant crown and mighty throne now possessed by her who was | attention to things affecting the home comforts of the labouring classes justly claims for him the title of "the poor man's prince." On the following morning, soon after the admission hour, with some of my family, I was in the south-eastern gallery, near the transept. We were watching for the expected appearance of the queen among the artificial flower-stands in the opposite gallery. She was soon in sight, with her noble husband and a few others, walking with quiet step, and investigating the productions of ornamental art in a department where the hand of man has so closely imitated the hand of nature, as to produce all but life. I pointed out her majesty to a plain man who was standing at my side, and waiting to catch his first glimpse of his sovereign. He seemed to me a mechanic, in his best clothes, from one of the northern counties. On perceiving at a distance the object of his anxious inquiry, he looked intently across, as people say, "with all his eyes." After garing eagerly for a few seconds, half breathless with admiration and surprise, he exclaimed to me, 66 Why, she is not a bit afraid of us!" I smiled, and said, "And what is there in you or me, y friend, for our good queen to be frightened at Again he gazed, and with increased astonishment added, "Well, what confidence she has in us! How confidently she walks about!" I then made some remarks on the personal character of her majesty, and her strong claims upon the respect and affection of her subjects. To these remarks he readily assented, while he moved on to keep the object of his admiration, and probably of he new-born loyalty, as long as possible in sight. There could be little doubt that this man returned to his distant home and daily toil with a very different impression of royalty from what he ha before. The confiding ease and freedom from state exhibition thus occasionally, and, we might say, even frequently evinced by the sovereign, has produced the happiest effects upon multitudes. Guards and armies may surround and defend a throne; but affection, and a grateful sense of the personal worth, as well as princely qualities of its occupant, are its best security. Without any courting of popularity, the queen of England bas effectually gathered it around herself and her family. Men of all nations, living under every form of civil government, from the most perfect democracy to the most absolute despotism in their own countries, must have been filled with greater and more abiding wonder at what they saw in England, of the union of the greatest amount of personal and national freedom, with the undisputed authority of a monarchy in the person of s female sovereign, than at all the productions of art in the Great Exhibition. The head of a mighty nation, as safe, and as much at her ease, amidst crowds of her subjects of all ranks, as in the guarded retirement of her palace, must have presented to men of other lands a rare spectacle. Many a devout foreigner, as he quitted our shores, would be inclined to apply to this nation the valedictory words of Moses, addressed to the people of Israel just before he ascended Mount Nebo to die, "Happy art thou, O Israel! who is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord, the shield of thy help, and who is the sword of thy excellency! And thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places." seemed as if she could not for a moment forget At a later hour I observed from that same gallery the movements of another personage of once lofty rank-once a queen, the queen of an ampler European realm, and a far more populous nation. It was the widowed consort of Louis Philippe. There was more of majestic dignity in her bearing and gait than in Victoria's, and far more stir accompanied her movements. The ex-queen of the French had come from that scene of mournful associations before mentioned, Claremont. In that abode, thirty-four years ago, death had cut off our youthful and beloved Charlotte from empire; and there too, quite recently, the same last enemy of kings had sealed the deed of revolution, and consigned to a village tomb, in a foreign land, the dethroned and fugitive monarch of France. Tall, and of commanding attitude, in deepest mourning, with a countenance which seemed as if it had long been a stranger to smiles, the aged and widowed queen went through the splendid hall of nations in melancholy contrast to her younger sister-queen. They had met in the brighter days of the former, on the shores and in a rural palace of France, where Louis Philippe, in Few crowned heads seemed to have deemed it bis grey hairs, had lavished even affectionate hos- becoming of their dignity to appear as exhibitors pitality upon the youthful sovereign of Albion. in that hall of nations. Victoria of Britain there That hospitality might have been her snare had presented to the view of all spectators some costly it been renewed. A French and bigoted popish and beautiful works of art, worthy of possession court was not a safe place for a British protestant by a queen. The Sublime Porte (or the grand queen. The exquisitely beautiful portraits of Vic-sultan), through the central committee of Contoria and Albert, executed on Sevres china, as a present to them from Louis Philippe, not long before his fall, were standing among the most conspicuous objects at the entrance of the foreign part of the nave, adjoining the transept, and had been passed by the aged wanderer. The contrast between these two royal ladiesbetween the ex-queen of the French, a fugitive, a proscribed exile, a widow of nearly fourscore years, and our own beloved, cherished, happy, and powerful Victoria, was intensely great. It could not but be deeply felt, and cannot soon be forgotten. stantinople, gave evidence by its thirteen hundred contributions, most intelligently arranged, of its desire to be seen among the nations emerging from the barbarism which its very religion had stamped upon it for ages. The stern despotism of Russia preserved its dignity while it manifested its commercial ambition, by sanctioning the display of extensive contributions from sources marked imperial. In one brilliant and conspicuous place in the eastern nave, crowds gazed in admiration on dazzling gems catalogued as "a set of jewels belonging to her majesty the queen of Spain." But some who admired, observing that the exhibitor was not her Spanish majesty herself, but Mr. Lemounier, 6, Place Vendome, Paris, shrewdly suspected that these said splendours of Spanish royalty were actually in pawn. The ex-queen, now passing under the title of the countess de Neuilly, had with her a large party of attendant princes and nobles, the former being her own sons, whom the revolution of February, 1848, had cast down from the heights of ambition. I saw her enter and go round the richest divisions of the French department. Though every and the most polite attention was paid to her by the various French exhibitors and French police, yet the many unmistakable signs that she was there encompassed by the splendid wealth not of regal, but of republican France, and that those There was, however, another royal name found exhibitors and those police, once the subjects of among the thousands of exhibitors which met my her husband, were now the vassals of another and glance, and stirred many thoughts in relation to meaner sceptre, and that sceptre wielded by a the two queens whom I had seen perambulating hand formerly engaged in feeble rivalry for em- the crystal palace. The contributions arrived late pire, while Louis Philippe lived, and imprisoned for the attempt, had an evident effect upon her spirits. No expression of pleasure relaxed the fixed gloom of that melancholy countenance. She in the season, and their description did not appear in the earlier editions of the official catalogue. I saw them in the small department assigned to the Society Islands. They were seventeen only in number, but they were all of a peaceful character. They included no rude weapon of war. Their exhibitor was thus designated, "her majesty Pomare, queen of the Society Isles." while the Roman-catholic priesthood of France threw the weight of their influence into the scale of the revolutionary republic which destroyed the monarchy. The very throne, whose occupant had been the tyrannical tool of that priesthood in subverting the protestant throne of Otaheite, was burnt amidst shouts of savage exultation, resembling in satanic spirit, and the same in language, as had startled the mountain echoes of Otaheite in the massacre of its defenders and the overthrow of its native sovereignty. a Could the good queen of England pass without sigh; and, if she saw them, could the exiled queen of the French pass without a pang of mor tified ambition, the simple but characteristic cou tributions to the Crystal Palace, inscribed as sent by "her majesty Pomare, queen of the Society Isles"? Such have been my thoughts and words respect ing the three queens whose names were connected with the Great Exhibition of 1851. One of the first results of papal gratitude for the Emancipation Bill*, as it was extravagantly called, which granted to Romanists what Romanists in power never granted protestants, equal political rights, was to mark the foreign protestant missions for proselytism. Devoted, self-denying men of the London Missionary Society had laboured with manifest blessing from God and abundant success in the Society Islands, especially in Otaheite, a beautiful island, unknown to the civilized world till past the middle of the eighteenth century. Its savage race had been widely brought under the most humanizing of all sceptres, that of the Prince of Peace. Christianity and civilization spread from thence over numerous isles of the far south. The Otaheitian church, with the temporal sovereign, Pomare, as its chief convert and presiding head, was the flower of the British independent missions. This was marked for subversion: a decree of the Propaganda, the Romancatholic missionary institution, passed in June, HYMNS FOR THE SUNDAYS IN THE YEAR. 1833, and confirmed by the pope Leo XII., confided to the society of Picpus, a religious association in France, the task of bringing under the power of popery all the isles of the Pacific ocean. They soon sent forth their emissaries, who by fraud and violence effected a landing in Otaheite, contrary to the laws of the country, went through the island proclaiming the protestant preachers impostors, and themselves the ministers of truth. On being ordered and obliged to leave Otaheite, they returned to France, found ready auditors in Louis Philippe and his queen, and called forth the gigantic power of papal France to crush the Christian protestant kingdom of the Society Isles. In the year 1838, this foul outrage upon Pomare and her defenceless island dominion was accomplished, and she had to take refuge on board a British man-of-war, to escape the violence of the French, and afterwards for a while resided in another island. It was always believed that the bigoted spirit of the queen of the French had great influence in carrying into effect that iniquitous aggression. What followed? Within ten years from that time the queen of the French herself was a fugitive for her life from the frenzy of her own revolutionary subjects-was indebted for an asylum to the same nation that befriended, though too feebly, poor Pomare; * I have often noticed and called attention to a curious and painful coincidence connected with the passing of the Emancipation Bill. It is doubtful whether that bill would have ever become an act of the British legislature but for three parties. The independent and congregational dissenters largely promoted the measure, both by petition and by their support in the elections of men as mere politicians, who were pledged to carry that and similar measures. The power of Romanism both at home and in the colonies immediately rose with new vigour, and one of its earliest efforts was to crush by fraud and violence the flower of the independent missions. A second party, who in the house of commons threw the immense weight of their moral influence into the scale, were the excellent Wilberforce and his friends. In the house of lords the same aid was rendered by the truly pious Dr. Ryder, bishop of Gloucester. Who can fail with painful astonishment to observe, how the blighting spirit of popery has descended upon the families of those two eminent men, Wilberforce and Ryder? On which side of the growing conflict between truth and error are their sons and daughters ranged? (SUGGESTED Poetry. BY JOSEPH FEARN. BY SOME PORTION OF THE SEE (For the Church of England Magazine.) ELEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. "If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wealdst thou not have done it? How much rather then when be saith to thee, Wash, and be clean!"—(1st lesson for evening service) 2 KINGS v. 13. WHEN Naaman came to be healed, He thought that Elijah would stand, And he scorned the advice of the seer. Were not Abana's waters as clear?" To give health where pollution had been, The stain from my conscience to blot. There's only one fountain for sin : I am simply to "wash and be clean." To thy blood from this hour I cling: SELDEN was a scholar of high attainments, of whom Grotius said that "Selden was the glory of the English nation." Sensible that his end was approaching, he sent for his friends, primate Usher and Dr. Langbaine, with whom he discoursed concerning his state of mind. He observed that he had his study full of books and papers of most subjects in the world, and owned that, out of the numberless volumes he had read and digested, at that time he could not recollect any passage wherein he could rest his soul, save out of the holy scriptures, wherein the most remarkable passage that lay upon his spirit was, Titus ii. 11-15:"For the grace of God which bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world; looking for that Blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the From "Last Hours of Christian Men; or an Account of the Deaths of some eminent Members of the Church of England;" by the rev. H. Clissold, M.A. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. No. 960, great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works." The import of these verses is the assurance of salvation, through the redemption of Christ, to all who live righteously; a truth which he therefore regarded as the essence of the Christian revela tion*. Reflection: We have here the very valuable testimony of one of our most learned men, that the truths of the holy bible afford the only satisfactory and sure foundation of hope for eternity; and that faith and holiness are essentially necessary if we would be blessed with a happy death and a glorious resurrection. CONVICT SHIPS AND PENAL COLONIES+. THE following report of the state of the "Cadet," which was visited in August, 1847, will convey a tolerably correct idea of the present state of female convict ships while lying in the river. On the 25th of August, two members of the ladies' committee went on board that ship. They Aikin, and Chalmers' Biog. Dict. † From a book we have already noticed," Visits to Female Prisoners at Home and Abroad;" by M. Wrench, London: Wertheim and Co. 1852.-ED. |