knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fulness of God."

We ought also frequently to reflect on those particular tokens of favour and love, which God has bestowed on ourselves; how long he has borne with our follies and sins, and waited to be gracious unto us; wrestling as it were with the stubbornness of our hearts, and essaying every method to reclaim us. We should keep a register in our minds of all the eminent blessings and deliverances we have met with; some whereof have been so conveyed, that we might clearly perceive they were not the issues of chance, but the gracious effects of the Divine favour, and the signal returns of our prayers. Nor ought we to imbitter the thoughts of these things with any harsh or unworthy suspicion, as if they were designed on purpose to enhance our guilt, and heighten our eternal damnation. No, no, dear reader, God is love, and he hath no pleasure in the ruin of his creatures; if they abuse his goodness and turn his grace into wantonness, and thereby plunge themselves into the greater depths of guilt and misery, this is the effect of their obstinate wickedness and not the design of those benefits which he bestows. A. J.

THE COFFEE PICKERS.

AT the beginning of this year (1837) some opposition was manifested, especially by a gentleman who said that he could not sleep, for all the people on the estate were bawling "salvation" until three o'clock in the morning, and he insisted upon these things being discontinued. I advised the people to go to the houses most distant from the manager's, and there they have had no interruption. It is, however, due to that gentleman to say, that though he was much prejudiced against myself and against religious instruction, yet the good conduct of his people has since led him to be entirely favourable to both. He is erecting a large school-house on the estate, and he told me the other day that its great prosperity was entirely owing to the people attending in the house of God where they were taught both to be sober and industrious. He also exerted himself to obtain subscriptions.

The following triumph of Christian principle will afford pleasure:-At the commencement of our last coffee-picking, a neighbouring manager came to me one Saturday afternoon,

and said he wished to ask, if I had any objection to the people picking coffee on the Sabbath under peculiar circumstances. He said the proprietor and himself had been greatly disappointed in people to help them to get in the coffee crop, and unless their own people would work on the sabbath for wages, the estate would suffer great loss. Still he knew that unless I was favourable, it would be in vain to put the question to the people. I answered, that as the proprietor and himself were such kind friends to me, and to the good cause in which I was engaged, no one would rejoice in their obtaining their crop more than myself; but my invariable rule was to state, that works of necessity or mercy only must be performed on the sabbath: with the actual necessity and extent of such necessity I had nothing to do; still should he and the people think it necessity to work on the sabbath, it would be my duty to warn them against making a necessity of selfishness, or making selfishness necessity. He went away and told the people he had been to the parson, and the parson said they must work if it were necessary. However, the people said it was not necessary, and refused. Afterwards the manager came again, and begged I would tell the people that it was really necessary that they should work on the sabbath. I told him I could not swerve from the rule I had laid down for my guidance in such cases, and therefore he must excuse my interfering at all.

A few weeks passed, and on the Saturday there was a tremendous shower, with very high wind, and the people knew that if they did not go and pick the very ripe coffee early on Sunday morning, by Monday it would be lost. They therefore went, and soon returned with their full baskets. They were all called up to the door of the proprietor's house, and money, and rum, and tobacco being brought for them, they with one voice begged the head-man to say to the proprietor and manager, that in consequence of its being a work of necessity they went to work on God's day, and that, therefore, they would not receive one stiver of money, one drop of rum, nor one leaf of tobacco. The gentleman went away quite astonished, and never afterwards asked the people to work on the sabbath-day. It is the first time any people in the neighbourhood have worked on the sabbath-day since I have been amongst them, and I do

think it will be the last. The gentlemen were not at all offended either with me or the people, and one of them told me since, Sir, we never thought the S- -t people had such a religious principle. The truth is great and must prevail. REV. S. HAYWOOD.

THE FATHERS.

THE ancient fathers of the Christian church may be read with benefit, in various ways; their persons ought, in general, to be venerated; even their supposed mistakes are entitled to our candour: but they have no authority over our creed, any more than we have over the creed of our remote posterity. We are, therefore, [when they are referred to for decisions] cited before a tribunal, the authority of which we disclaim: we are to be tried by a jury, every individual of which we challenge, and against whom we can bring most valid exceptions. So little agreement in sentiment is found among these fathers, that it would be a very easy task to bring together a long catalogue of their mutual discordances; and so inaccurate were they, as to historical facts, that it would be equally easy to make a long list of their most undeniable mistakes. Their comments upon the Scripture were often such as would be almost universally rejected, nay despised, in these days. They were uninspired men, and fallible as others are: few of them had enjoyed the benefit of a religious education, or been trained up in any learning which did not rather disqualify than prepare them for theological studies. Copies of the Scriptures were not then multiplied as they now are: few of the fathers were capable of studying the original of the Old Testament, and some were unacquainted with that of the New. What those who perhaps had conversed with the apostles, or who lived soon after, learned from this source, more than we have in the Scriptures, must be preserved by recollection, and communicated by tradition; neither of which are greatly to be depended on, in respect of controverted points of theology. Criticism, especially Biblical criticism, and the skill and habit of exactly weighing the true import of every expression, and the grammatical meaning of every sentence; and deducing conclusions from it by logical rules, were comparatively little known among them. Thus (except as they learned any thing from the uncertain source of tradition, or unless they were divinely inspired,) they had fewer helps, by far, for understanding the Scriptures, than moderns have; to whom the multiplication of books by printing, and the ease and readiness with which any man communicates his sentiments to great numbers, and with

which they may be examined, confirmed, or refuted, is, to the sincere inquirer after truth, an inestimable advantage to which the fathers were strangers. Most of them had been brought up in heathen notions, or had imbibed the notions of the philosophers, of which they retained a considerable proportion after their conversion; and with which some of them, as we shall see, exceedingly corrupted Christianity. They did not observe the apostle's caution, "Let no man spoil you, through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." They were in general men of great earnestness and piety; some of them had much learning of various kinds (for that time), and brilliant talents; but few of them possessed that stock of theological knowledge, and that quick and accurate judgment on disputable points, by which the least shade of difference is promptly and exactly perceived; and by which men, through exercise and habit, discern good and evil, as “the ear distinguishes sounds, and the mouth tastes meats."

Indeed, it seems highly probable that the Lord, foreknowing how prone men, in subsequent times, would be to over venerate the uninspired writers of the primitive church, and to make them even the rivals of his holy oracles—a kind of authoritative exposition of them-was pleased to counteract this tendency, by permitting it so to come to pass, that we no sooner leave the apostolical writings to open the books of these ancient fathers, than we seem, as it were, at once got into another climate; and the inferiority of their productions strikes our minds, in proportion as we enter into the spirit and views of the Divine word, and relish and delight in it.

The difficulty also of distinguishing the genuine writings of the fathers from the works falsely ascribed to them, and from the interpolations which have been made in them, is allowed even by the most zealous assertors of their claim to our almost implicit credence. If then we would know what primitive Christianity was, we must go to earlier times than even those of the most ancient fathers of the Christian churcheven to the times of the apostles, and the writings contained in the New Testament. THOMAS SCOTT.

REDEEMING THE TIME.

BEING invited by a friend in G- to spend there a few leisure days during the year, I accepted the offer, and a beautiful autumnal afternoon found me far from the busy cares and turmoils of London, partaking of the rural frolics of my friend's group of merry children. If the careless gambols of the little ones with their donkey or dog, or sometimes bringing in their baskets full of pretty wild flowers; now their little

wheelbarrows laden with the produce of their garden or orchard, or else their laps full of the gleanings of the wheat and barley field: if their happy faces were different to the careworn countenances I had left behind, surely the landscape itself was not less a contrast to the smoky crowded streets of the metropolis. A level mile was not to be found, except on the tops of the beautiful hills-hills once selected as the encampments of the Romans in Western Britain. Still less could they rest on a barren spot, for cattle grazed even on the steepest declivity. Here and there pretty white cottages, each encircled by a small but well-cultivated garden, were seen from the top to the bottom of the hill side, and there an overhanging beech wood surrounded some gentleman's residence, whose parks or fields reached to the bottom of the vale. Here a rough free-stone quarry diversified the view, and there, glistening through the trees, racks of scarlet cloth showed the employment of the inhabitants of this beautiful spot, so varied and enriched by nature's God, that as the eye gazed on all around, the mind might be forgiven the thought, can these days be evil”—can sorrow enter here. But a sound at once startled all around: the village bell tolled, and its sad knell was too well calculated to dissipate such a delusion. "Man is born to trouble," even here.

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"Who's dead?" cried one little girl. "Nobody near here," said another, "for nobody in this village has been ill.” "No," said the old woman, who was just driving the cow to be milked, "no miss, it is old Mrs. Clarke, who used to live here by-gone days, but she died a long way off, and her sons are bringing her all these seven miles to be buried." Look, the funeral is coming; may I go and see it?" said one child, and my curiosity being roused, I agreed to take them; for I always delight in visiting a village church-yard; and slowly winding down a hilly road, a mile off, we perceived it, and a quarter of an hour more found me along with it at the churchyard gate.

The clergyman was an aged godly man, who had preached in this and the adjoining parish, for thirty-four years, the words of eternal life to perishing sinners, and the Lord of the harvest had given him many seals of his ministry.

The funeral was just entering the gate when an unexpected delay took place. According to the law that had come into force respecting registrations, the certificate of the deceased's death was required. The attendants were come from a lonely spot between the hills, and knew not the requirements of the new law, and therefore were not provided. The shades of evening were drawing around, and the funeral group, about twenty-eight in number, perplexed and wearied, were loudly murmuring at their disappointment. Surely the solemnity