dear native land. Though severed from thee voluntarily, willingly, cheerfully, yet do we love thee still; thy Sabbaths hallowed by the voice of prayer and praise; thy Christian ordinances blessed with the Spirit's power. Oh, when will China, the home of our adoption, be thus enlightened, and her idol temples turned into sanctuaries for the living God? Affectionately,

ELIZA J. BRIDGMAN.

Original.

MINISTERING SPIRITS.

LINES WRITTEN FOR A LITTLE GIRL BY AN EPISCOPAL CLERGYMAN.

DO ANGELS minister to me

Can such a wonder ever be?

Oh, sure they are too great;

Too glorious with their raiment white,

And wings so beautiful and bright,
Upon a child to wait.

Yet so it is in truth, I know,
For Jesus Christ has told us so,
And that to them is given
The loving task to guard with care
And keep from every evil snare
The chosen ones of heaven.

And so if I am good and mild,
And try to be a holy child,

My angel will rejoice;
And sound his golden harp to Him
Who dwells among the cherubim,

And praise Him with his voice.

But if I sin against the Lord,

By evil thought or evil word,

Or do a wicked thing;

Ah! then what will my angel say?

Oh, he will turn his face away,
And vail it with his wing.

Then let us pray to Him who sends
His angels down to be our friends,

That, strengthened by his grace,
I may not prove a wandering sheep,
Nor ever make my angel weep,
Nor hide his glorious face.

Original.

A TEMPTATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

Not long since, in one of the cities on the Atlantic seaboard, there was a lad employed in a large jewelry establishment. A part of his duty was to carry letters to the postoffice, or to the mail-bag on the boat, when too late to be mailed in the regular way. On one occasion, after depositing his letters, he observed a part of a letter, put in by some other person, projecting above the opening in the bag. Seizing the opportunity he extracted this letter without being seen, and took it home. On examination he found it contained a draft for one thousand dollars. Forging the name of the person on whom it was drawn, he presented the draft at a bank and drew the money, and very soon afterwards proceeded to a distant western city.

After a little while, the draft was missed and inquiries made. It was found that this lad had been near the mailbag on the day when the missing letter had been put in it, that he was unusually well provided with money, and that he had suddenly disappeared. Officers of justice were commissioned to find him. They soon traced him to his new residence, charged him with his crime, which he at once confessed, and brought him back to meet the consequences of a judicial investigation. After a short imprisonment he was released on bail, but still held to answer, and thus the case stands at present. He must of course be convicted, but whether the penalty of the law will be inflicted in whole or in part, it will be for the Executive to say.

Meanwhile the circumstances suggest some thoughts which may be worth the reader's attention. This lad was a member of a Sunday school, but irregular in his attendance, and this latter fact may in some degree explain his wandering from the right path. He might, indeed, have been a punetual attendant on his class, and still have fallen into this gross sin, but it is not at all probable. And it is curious and VOL. III.-NO. I. -2

instructive, that wherever any inmates of prisons, houses of refuge, or other places of the kind, are found to have been connected with Sunday-schools, it is nearly always stated in accompaniment that they attended only occasionally and rarely.

Again, how much weight is there in Job's remarkable expression (ch. 31: 5), I have made a covenant with my eyes ! The eye, the most active of our senses, is the chiefest inlet of temptation, and hence the apostle John specifies "the lust of the eyes" as a leading form or type of ordinary sins. The lad in the case before us allowed his eye to dwell on the letter, until the covetous desire to appropriate it had grown into a fixed purpose. Had he made the same covenant as Job, and turned his eye resolutely away as soon as he felt the first wrongful emotion in his heart, the result had been widely different. But he rather imitated the unhappy Achan, who, in recounting his sin, says, "When I saw among the spoils a Babylonish garment and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold, then I coveted them." A fool's eyes soon lead his hands astray.

Here also we see the deceitfulness of the heart. A mere boy of fifteen years, of good ordinary training, at least in part connected with a Sunday-school, and not prompted by any urgent bodily necessity, commits a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment. Had any one foretold to him a week before even the possibility of this occurrence, how indignantly would he have spurned the very thought! That he should become, and deservedly so, the inmate of a felon's cell-how monstrous the supposition! Yet so it came to pass. The heart is deceitful above all things, and he who trusts in it is "cursed." Multitudes find their own case the renewal of Hazael's experience. When Elijah told him the enormities he, when on the throne of Syria, would practice, he exclaimed-" Is thy servant a dog that he should do these things?" He was not then, but he afterwards became just such a dog.

But if the heart be deceitful, sin is scarcely less so. When the poor boy first clutched his prize, as he esteemed it, he

promised himself nothing but pleasure and profit, but how miserably was he deceived! After he had converted the

draft into money, and thus rendered its return impossible without detection, he saw his guilt in its true character, and for many nights tossed in torment on a sleepless bed, while at last he was made to take his place along with hardened convicts in a city prison. Thus it always is with sin. Like the book the apostle ate in vision, it is sweet as honey in the mouth, but bitter in the belly. Like the wine Solomon describes, it may sparkle in the cup and shoot up its bright beads on the surface, but at the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. The experiment has been tried times without number, from the beginning in Eden down to our own day, by communities and by individuals, but invariably with the same result. The way of transgressors is hard, however it may seem to them who are entering upon it a path of primrose dalliance. And surely "whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise."

Finally, how needful is it to pray-"Lead us not into temptation." Snares lie all around us, whether old or young, and it is vain to seek an entire escape from their intrusion. The lad we are considering had not gone out of his way to meet the temptation by which he fell. On the contrary, he was doing his duty, he was just where he ought to have been. Yet there the adversary found him, and there he finds every man. The very fact that one is in a lawful place and condition is apt to throw him off his guard. There is but one safeguard under grace, and that is habitual watchfulness. Without this the strongest may fall-with it, the feeblest may stand firm. O for such a deep and abiding conviction of the keenness of temptation and the dreadful evil of sin as to lead all to cry mightily unto God, and at the same time be strenuous in effort themselves—to pray and also to watch.

Original.

MEMOIR OF MRS. VAN LENNEP.

THE following review, written by Mrs. D. E. Sykes, of the Memoir of Mrs. M. E. Van Lennep, we deem among the finest specimens of that class of writings. The remarks it contains on the religious education of daughters are so much® in point, and fall in so aptly with the design of our work, that we have obtained permission to publish it. We presume it will be new to most of our readers, as it originally appeared in the New Englander, a periodical which is seldom seen, except in a Theological Library.

An additional reason for our publishing it is, our personal interest both in the reviewer, who we are happy to say has become a contributor to our pages, and the reviewed-having been associated with the mothers of each, for a number of years, in that most interesting of all associations, "The Mother's Meeting."

For eleven years, Mary E. Hawes, afterwards Mrs. Van Lennep, was an attentive and interested listener to the instructions given to the children at our quarterly meetingsand it is interesting to know that her mother regards the influence of those meetings as powerfully aiding in the forma tion of her symmetrical Christian character.

An eminent painter once said to us, that he always disliked to attempt the portrait of a woman; it was so difficult to give to such a picture the requisite boldness of feature and distinctness of individual expression, without impairing its feminine character. If this be true in the delineation of the outer and material form, how much more true is it of all attempts to portray the female mind and heart! If the words and ways, the style of thinking and the modes of acting, all that goes to make up a biography, have a character sufficiently marked to individualize the subject, there is a danger that, in the relating, she may seem to have overstepped the