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Charity Rewarded.

E are usually agreed that true charity is its own reward, but our French neighbours think it necessary to offer a prize for the highest form of this virtue. The selection is entrusted to the executive of the Academie Française. The religious bodies of France conduct, perhaps, more charitable organizations than even we do in England, as our institutions, although they are, of course, the outgrowth of faith, are not so directly associated with religion as are those of our neighbours across the Channel. The prize to which we have made reference, however, is never awarded to any association; to these, if judged worthy, the Government accords permission to canvass for subscriptions; without such authorization no society can solicit help in France.

The recipient of the prix de vertu last year was a remarkable woman, Mademoiselle Clementine Ryder, in whose veins some English blood is found. She was born in Dieppe, in 1830, and was the eldest of a very poor family of twelve children. Having obtained an education for herself by some means, which did not transpire in the President's eulogy of her, she acted as teacher to the other members of her family. After spending her teens amid great sacrifices, she, at the age of twenty, entered the service of a rich family as a governess. Her position now was quite luxurious in comparison with her previous life; but while faithfully performing her duties to her protégés, she gave a full range to the spirit of charity which had grown up in her breast while she had exercised her talents as "little mother" to the helpless members of her own family. As each interval of leisure presented itself, she used it by slipping away to visit the sick at their homes. Her knowledge of who were sick, and where they lived, seemed to be almost an inspiration. Soon she was found in the hospitals; and as those whom she sought to relieve increased, her limited means admonished her to stay her hand from the farther development of her good work. But no, she burned with love to the less fortunate partakers of our common humanity, and, relinquishing her situation, she began literally to beg for her helpless charges. She begged alms from door to door; her poor ones were fed and comforted while she herself often suffered severe pinches of hunger and want.

After about a quarter of a century of such work, she gave ample proof that the zeal which her heart excited was wisely directed by that intelligence of mind which afterwards strongly marked her character. She reasoned that, while it was quite right to assist misery after it had developed, it would be still better to turn her attention to its prevention. She bent her energies to gathering up the waifs and gutter children, who, born amid vice and misery, are abandoned with less consideration by Gallic sinners than with us, though, alas, we have no room to play the Pharisee in this matter.

In 1877, she opened a home of refuge for poor homeless children in old Amiens. We use the word "opened," as she could not, in the legitimate use of the word, be said to have founded it, for she was herself without resources; and while we use the good English word "home," we must assure our readers that it was only an old shop, in

such a condition that it could not be let for business purposes. Here, however, with loving compassion, she brought two little unfortunate children; soon others followed, until this little abode of love became too strait for the comfort of its inmates, and its limited resources pointed to its soon being closed. But no, the moving spirit of this home of charity, from the moment of her first acquaintance with the members of her little family, had inoculated them with her own spirit of self-sacrifice. They learned soon to share their bed-coverlets with the new comers, and the crusts, too, were divided with the greatest delight. Little by little the work grew, and the shop gave place to a home worthy of the name, and instead of a dozen infants, Mlle. Ryder soon had twenty, thirty, and then fifty little ones, to care for, feed, clothe, and instruct. The latter duty was to her of the greatest importance. It was the object of her solicitous care to develop to the utmost the character of the children under her charge. Some one may ask, "How did she provide for the material wants of her ever-increasing family?" The answer is known to none but our heavenly Father. All that was visible of the machinery was the hand-cart, which might have been seen calling at the bakers' and provision shops, or at the houses. of charitably-disposed persons, gathering the gifts from the kitchens, or buying at the shops odds and ends of provisions at cheap rates. The rest is a secret.

To-day, seventy little ones are under her care, and she is nearer to financial ruin every day in proportion to the increase of her charge; but she labours on, looking for fresh outcasts to care for. It is not abandoned children alone, of whom she may hope to be relieved in due time, and who may probably be future helpers in her good work, that she gathers within her asylum. There are the vicious, the incurables, those whom their parents cannot feed, those whom the homes of the Sisters of Charity reject, and whom the schools will not have. In fact, her home is the very forlorn-hope of the old city of Amiens and its environs. There are children in crèches, not deposited for the day alone, but absolutely dependent upon the solicitude of Mlle. Ryder.

Her love to her motley family is not lost; they delight to call her "mother." Their poor bodies receive attention and kindly care from her loving hands; she animates their spirits, and seeks to enter their hearts; she washes their tongues from moral filth at the same time that she laves their bodies. After this peep at her modus operandi, we are not careful to enquire further as to her religious beliefs than the slight glimpse that the President of the Academy gives us, in his briet epitome of her teaching, and her own lucid exposition of the "new commandment." She presents before her foster-children the Almighty as "good, just, and loving"; and while she teaches them carefully by lessons, she adds her powerful example by way of the most effectual enforcement of them.

Such is the recipient for 1884 of the Montyon prix de vertu, from the Academie Française, which is valued at three thousand francs. That prize is a fitting public recognition of her noble self-sacrificing work.

W. L. LANG.

Dr. Candlish.*

OBERT SMITH CANDLISH was one of the most distinguished

men that ever reflected lustre on his native Scotland. Great as he was, both as a preacher and a theologian, his name will chiefly live in history as one of the master-builders who laid the foundations of the Free Church. His two principal colleagues in this business were Drs. Chalmers and Cunningham, the first having died in 1847, the last fourteen years later. While the army of secession was composed of hundreds of devoted men who loved the church better than their manses and stipends, the three above named were the generals who led the way, and to whom under God the victory was due.

R. S. Candlish was born in Edinburgh in March, 1806, and at five weeks of age he suddenly lost his father, who was a teacher of medicine, and otherwise a most accomplished man. The family originally came from Ayrshire-" the land of Burns "-and James Candlish was one of the poet's trusted and valued friends. Like his afterwards celebrated son, James was at one time intended for the Church; but, said he at the time, "I hate hypocrisy, and consequently feel great reluctance to preach doctrines I do not believe." He appears to have devoted his whole attention to science, and to have considered himself happy in possessing a wife, who as a village beauty, and one of "the six belles of Mauchline," who "were the pride of the place and the neighbourhood a'," lived in Burns's immortal verse. The poet's "belle," who survived her partner for about fifty years, and made her home in the house of her son, Dr. Candlish, is still remembered by members of St. George's Church as "a lady of stately and somewhat majestic presence, grave and reserved in manner, although always kindly and courteous." Industrious and high principled, she abhorred debt, and was ready to suffer any hardship in order that her sons might have a creditable start in the world. She was well rewarded in after life for all her pains, although James, her eldest son, the hope and pride of the family so long as he lived, died prematurely in 1829.

Mrs. Candlish and her eldest daughter kept a school at Glasgow, and Miss Duncan, one of the pupils, sketches the future Free Church Doctor as he appeared at eight years of age :-"While the girls were engaged at needlework little Robert always sat on a low stool beside his mother, doing sums of arithmetic, of which occupation he never seemed to tire. He was never sent to a public school. His mother and eldest sister gave him all the instruction he required until he was too far advanced for them to carry on. His eldest sister's love for her little brother was very tender. She watched over and took an interest in everything he did and said. I remember her often saying how much she felt hurt at the remarks people made about him when she went out with him and an old nurse, Jenny, who came with his mother and young family to Glasgow. He was a peculiar but interesting-looking child. His delicate, fair complexion, his large forehead, and eyes with very long eyelashes,

"Memorials of Robert Smith Candlish, D.D., Minister of St. George's Free Church, and Principal of the New College, Edinburgh." By William Wilson, D.D. With concluding Chapter by Robert Rainy, D.D. Edinburgh: A. and C. Black. 1880.

and the rest of his body being so small, made him so peculiar-looking that people often stopped and asked whose child he was." Still a child of thirteen when he entered the University, he took his M.A. degree long before he came of age, and before he commenced his studies in the

Divinity Hall. After leaving college he resided for some two or three years at Eton, in charge of Sir H. H. Campbell, one of the tutors. As a young man Mr. Candlish is sketched by a friend who knew him well. He" was fond of some athletic exercises, and excelled in them. I can attest his expertness in swimming and rowing. His skill in the latter

was acquired chiefly at Eton, and, at least to me, it appeared very remarkable-probably all the more remarkable that I had once a pretty strong pull against him on the lake of Lochnaw, and was utterly discomfited and subdued." The same witness, Mr. Urquhart, also expresses his belief that from "very early years" R. S. Candlish "had walked with God in the spirit of adoption."

The low state of religion in Scotland at the beginning of the present century, is well known, and illustrations of the wide-spread degeneracy might be quoted from many independent witnesses. Good Dr. Duff's investigations in Aryshire taught him that Burns's descriptions, too often taken for caricatures, were drawn from the life. That great missionary once said, "Having thrown off the fear of man, and, alas! to some extent the fear of God, Robert Burns satired this state of things in their gross literality with all faithfulness. Hence not a few who were godly men declared to me their conviction that the descriptions given in The Holy Fair of scenes at the administration of the Lord's Supper were not exaggerated; and the same was asserted of some of what were reckoned his objectionable minor poems."

In one of the most interesting passages of the biography now before us Dr. Wilson refers to the causes which seventy years ago promoted the reaction against Moderatism, and consequently led to the revival, of which the Free Church is the direct outcome. First were the Lives of Knox and Melville, by Dr. M'Crie, works which, through being extensively read, dealt a deadly blow at "the Moderatism which had so long cramped and stifled the religious life of Scotland." Then came the pulpit and platform work of the great evangelical teacher, Andrew Thomson, who preceded Dr. Candlish as minister of St. George's parish, and who is thought to have turned the tide in Edinburgh in favour of evangelical religion. Then, thirdly, we have to include Dr. Chalmers, who after beginning as a Moderate became one of the most powerful witnesses for the simple gospel which Scotland has ever seen.

Licensed to preach in 1828, Mr. Candlish commenced ministerial life in the following year as assistant to Dr. Gibb, of St. Andrew's, Glasgow, a pastor of the Moderate standard, but who was not in the least aggrieved by the better teaching of his youthful colleague. After the death of the Doctor, in 1831, Mr. Candlish found another situation under the more eccentric, but still Moderate, Mr. Gregor, of Bonhill. This pastor was a man whom we should call a "character" on this side of the Border; for while he abounded in pungent and witty sayings, he was anything but "moderate" in the demands he made upon his colleague's powers. His notion was that a co-pastor should do all the work, and he excused himself from ever preaching in his own pulpit by asking, "What is the use of keeping a dog and then barking yourself?" On some occasions, as Dr. Wilson remarks, "his statements were often remarkably felicitous and beautiful." In fencing the communion table, according to the Scotch method, he once said, "If you cannot come with assurance come for assurance." After a brother minister had occupied his full share of time in preaching, Mr. Gregor reminded the audience that they all knew of "the great difference between the length of a sermon and the strength of a sermon." To a probationer whose manner of expression was slovenly, notwithstanding that his sermons had much in them, he