caused you to believe in Jesus,-this is the life which will go to heaven; and if you have not this, then you do not possess the life of heaven, and dead souls cannot enter there. Only living men can enter into the land of the living. "As we have borne the image of the earthy, so also shall we bear the image of the heavenly." Even now the heavenly life heaves and throbs within us.

man.

But oh! how

I think it may also be inferred from all this that the life which Christ gives His people is an energetic life. If the spiritual life is poured into a man, it raises him above his former state, and lifts him out of the range of merely carnal comprehension. He himself is discerned of no "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." You cannot expect the world to understand this new life. It is a hidden thing. It will be a mystery to yourselves, a wonder to your own hearts. active it will be! It will fight with your sins, and will not be satisfied until it has slain them. If you tell me you never have a conflict within, I tell you I cannot understand how you can have the divine life, for it is sure to come into conflict at once with the old nature, and there will be perpetual strife. The man becomes a new man at home; his wife and family observe it; he is a different man in business; he is a changed man altogether, whether you view him in connexion with his fellow-men or with his God. C. H. SPURGEON.

ON MODERATION.

BE moderate in your expectations. When your state is flourishing, and the course of events proceeds according

to your wish, suffer not your minds to be vainly lifted up. Flatter not yourselves with high prospects of the increasing favours of the world, and the continuing applause of men. Say not within your hearts, My mountain stands strong, and shall never be moved. I shall never see adversity. To-morrow shall be as this day, and more abundant. You are betraying yourselves; you are laying a sure foundation of disappointment and misery, when you allow your fancy to soar to such lofty pinnacles of confident hope. By building your house in this airy region, you are preparing for yourselves a great and cruel fall. Your trust is the spider's web. You may lean on your house; but it shall not stand. You may hold it fast; but it shall not endure. For, to man on earth it was never granted to gratify all his hopes; or to persevere in one tract of uninterrupted prosperity. Unpleasing vicissitudes never fail to succeed those that were grateful. The fashion of the world, how gay or smiling soever, passeth, and often passeth suddenly away.

By want of moderation in our hopes, we not only increase dejection when disappointment comes, but we accelerate disappointment; we bring forward, with greater speed, disagreeable changes in our state; for the natural consequence of presumptuous expectation is rashness in conduct. He who indulges confident security, of course neglects due precautions against the dangers that threaten him; and his fall will be foreseen and predicted. He not only exposes himself unguarded to dangers, but he multiplies them against himself. By presumption and vanity, he either provokes enmity or incurs contempt.

The arrogant mind and the proud hope are equally contrary to religion and to prudence. The world cannot bear such a spirit, and Providence seldom fails to check

it. The Almighty holds with displeasure those who, intoxicated with prosperity, forget their dependence on that supreme power which raised them up. His awful government of the world has been in nothing more conspicuous than in bringing low the lofty looks of man, and scattering the proud in the imagination of their minds. Is not this the great Babylon which I have built by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty? Thus exclaimed the presumptuous monarch, in the pride of his heart. But lo! when the word was yet in his mouth, the visitation from heaven came, and the voice was heard: 0 Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; thy kingdom is departed from thee. He that exalteth himself shall be humbled: and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. A temperate spirit, and moderate expectations, are the best safeguards of the mind in this uncertain and changing state. They enable us to pass through life with most comfort. When we rise in the world, they contribute to our elevation; and if we must fall, they render our fall the lighter. DR HUGH BLAIR.

THE MARTYRS.

THIS writer shows mercy neither to the living nor to the dead, provided only they have the original sin of being Scotch. The very martyrs, to whom we owe much of that freedom in which we now rejoice as a cherished birthright, whose memories are dear to every man who is capable of appreciating high principle, patient endurance, unconquerable faith, and by whose humble graves the soil of our country is consecrated and hallowed,—these very martyrs he has tried to rob of their peculiar honours, and

to lower in the estimation of the people for whose liberties they fought and died. He might have spared us this outrage at least on our feelings. Even if he had been at once a native and a resident of England, it was in miserable taste to leave his subject for the purpose of heaping insult on ancestors whom we venerate. But it is intolerable that this should be done by one who has voluntarily migrated into our land, has sworn allegiance to that polity for which our martyrs struggled, and is eating, at this very moment, the pleasant fruits of that plant of renown which they rooted with their hand and watered with their blood. He represents them as men mistaken in the work that God required of them; and as falling like Homer's heroes rather than Christ's confessors, prophesying retribution, and denouncing judgment, against their oppressors! Oh, it is easy for those whom their forefathers have left nothing to fear, and nothing to suffer from the oppressor's arm, for whom the battle has been won, and the yoke broken, and the blessing secured, and to whom has descended the privilege of living secure and dying in peace; it is easy for such to talk of the failings and aberrations that occasionally mingled with the virtuous achievements by which this great deliverance was wrought out, and to illustrate them with a careless mixture of Christian and classical allusion; but it is base-base beyond endurance-thus to requite the doings and the sufferings of those ancient worthies, who, at the expense of their lives, asserted for their posterity that precious freedom without which all other possessions are poor and unsatisfying!

DR ANDREW THOMSON.

L

THE POWER OF PRAYER.

CHILD of God! pray on. By prayer thy hand can touch the stars, thy arm stretch up to heaven. Nor let thy holy boldness be dashed by the thought that prayer has no power to bend these skies, and bring down thy God. When I pull on the rope which fastens my frail and little boat to a distant and mighty ship, my poor strength may not draw its vast bulk to me, but I draw myself to it—to ride in safety under the protection of its guns, and enjoy in want the fulness of its stores. And it equally serves my purpose and supplies my needs, that prayer, although it were powerless to move God to me, moves me to God. If He does not descend to earth, I ascend to heaven.

Child of God! pray on. Were it indispensable for thy safety that God should rend these heavens, it should be done

-a wondering world should see it done. I dare believe that; and "I am not mad, most noble Festus." Have not these heavens been already rent? Eighteen hundred years ago, robed in humanity, God himself came down. These blue skies, where only larks now sing and eagles sail, were cleft with the wings and filled with the songs of His angel train. Among the ancient orbs of that firmament a stranger star appeared, travelling the heavens and blazing on the banner borne before the King, as He descended on this dark and distant world. On Canaan's dewy ground, His lowly bed, the eye of morning saw the shape and form of the Son of God; and dusty roads, and winter snows, and desert sands, and the shores and very waves of Galilee, were impressed with the footprints of the Creator. By this manger, where the kingly babe lies cradled-beside this cross, upon whose ignominious arms the glory of the universe is hung