the highway. Be solid as well as earnest, instructive as well as impassioned.

I am thankful to say that among us, as a church, this state of things is largely realized; our most zealous brethren are the most attached to the old, old gospel; they are as enthusiastic as the Salvation Army, and as true to the old faith as the stanchest of Calvinists.

Often, when I get letters concerning our evangelists Fullerton and Smith, I meet with the remark, "Your brethren preach the truth as fully as if they were pastors, and yet they exhort the people with all the freeness of Evangelists." This is what I desire: I would see the doctrine of the Calvinist associated with the fire of the Methodist, and the holiness of the Puritan. I thank God that you, my brethren, know the difference between thunder and lightning, between beating a drum and breaking a heart. Make all the stir you please, but do not forget that clap-trap has nothing in it, and that shouting is not grace. The gospel truth which is communicated is the true means of blessing, and not the excitement which may go with it. Dust will rise as an express train rushes along the metals, but the dust is not what the traveller admires, or the engineer depends upon. By all means give us truth red-hot, but mind that it is truth, or you cannot expect the Lord to bless it. Let us all be anxious to know more and more of Christ personally, and to be filled more and more with the divine Spirit, without whose aid all our teaching will be in vain. Unless we are made partakers of the fiery energy of the Holy Ghost, the best instruction we can give will be cold, and lifeless, and powerless to affect the hearts of men.

As for me, I beg a special interest in your prayers that I may be sustained in the tremendous work to which I am called. A minister must be upheld by his people's prayers, or what can he do? When a diver is on the sea-bottom, he depends upon the pumps above, which send him down the air. Pump away, brethren, while I am seeking for my Lord's lost money among the timbers of this old wreck. I feel the fresh air coming in at every stroke of your prayer-pump; but if you stop your supplications, I shall perish. When a fireman climbs upon the roof with the hose, he can do nothing if the water is not driven up into it. Here I stand, pointing my hose at the burning mass. Send up the water, brethren! Send up a continual supply! What will be the use of my standing here with an empty hose? Every man to the pump! Let each one do better still, let him turn on the main. The reservoir is in heaven; every saint is a turn-cock; use your keys, and give me a plentiful supply. What I ask for myself, I seek for every true minister of Christ. Let not one be left to himself. We all cry with one voice, "BRETHREN, PRAY FOR US."

Thus, with a church with its steam up, sowers with their baskets filled with precious seed, and officers of the Lord's army supported by a valiant soldiery, all things will be ordered as they should be, and we shall see greater things than these. Only let our dependence be wholly fixed upon the Lord our God; and because it is so at this moment, LET

US PRAY.

Book Exterminators.

FROM the earliest days of books there has existed a disposition to burn such as contain obnoxious opinions; but though Christians : and pagans may have favoured this method of putting an enemy out of existence, it was not until the intolerance of Popery had become fullblown that this form of persecution became public and general.

The works of heathen writers were sometimes destroyed by the authorities for very trivial reasons.

Diocletian is regarded as the first who burned the Scriptures.

When, later on, Constantine embraced Christianity, he assumed such an uncompromising attitude towards those who differed from the orthodox standards that the works of Arius were burned, and the possession of them was made into a capital offence.

At one time Christian authority ruled that pagan books might not be openly circulated; and in the Dark Ages, just before Chaucer and Wickliffe appeared on the scene, even Aristotle was forbidden to be read except at the universities.

The crusade against books was not a very serious matter, however, until the Inquisition was established, in the twelfth century, to battle, on behalf of the Papacy, against progress and liberty.

In the era of the Reformation nothing was so much dreaded by the papal party as the press; and indeed, it is well known, that had not this all-powerful engine of war been available for the wholesale scattering of books and tracts among the people, the victory could not have been gained by Luther and his companions. In London, during the reign of Elizabeth, John Day, the chief Protestant printer, was located in the rooms over and about Alders Gate, and this John Day had for his assistant no less a person than John Foxe, the martyrologist, whose great work dealt a more deadly blow at the papacy than any other uninspired book. He had in his time seen many a bonfire of Bibles and other gospel books.

Book-burning was common on the Continent in the century preceding that of the Reformation; for in 1416 we find John Huss calling on his friends not to be alarmed or discouraged because the wicked had decreed that his books should be burned. The heroic Reformer then goes on to show that it is characteristic of Antichrist to seek to destroy what is written for the enlightenment of the people of God. "Remember how the Israelites burned the preachings of the prophet Jeremy,' he adds, "and yet they could not avoid the things that were prophesied in them; for after they were burnt, the Lord commanded him to write the same prophecy again, and that larger. . It is also written in the books of the Maccabees, that the wicked did burn the law of God, and killed them that had the same. Again, under the New Testament, they burned the saints, with the books of the law of God. The cardinals condemned and committed to the fire certain of St. Gregory's books, and had burnt them all, if they had not been preserved of God by the means of Peter, Gregory's minister."

In the transition times of Henry VIII., the warfare against the books was for a while maintained with great vigour; yet while the Bishop of London issued his proclamation, and the Government itself prohibited

the reading of dangerous productions, the aggressive party dared to scatter a work like "The Beggar's Supplication" about the streets of London. Tract distribution was no child's play in those burning days; yet it was done. Tyndale's translation of the New Testament was more dreaded than any other work; and it is well known that the purchase of his Testaments in order to burn them enabled the printers to issue a new edition. "It is the Bishop of London that hath holpen us; yea, he hath bestowed among us a great deal of money upon New Testaments to burn them," said a confederate of Tyndale to Sir Thomas More. "Now, by my troth," cried the latter, "I think even the same; for so much I told the bishop before he went about it." The endeavour to gag the press, and to hinder the flying abroad of its enlightening productions, was as idle as the attempt to stem the tide of the sea.

The Reformation was promoted by agents who undertook work similar to that of our present colporteurs; but then both the books and their purveyors were ever in danger of the fire. In connection with the atrocities committed in the way of religious persecution against Merindol, Foxe tells a remarkable story of a travelling bookseller, who in passing through Avignon was arrested by order of a conclave of bishops who were opposed to the Reformation. Indeed, the martyrologist says that there were two booksellers in the street, one of whom traded in licentious wares, and was liberally patronized by the prelates, while the other sold Bibles in French and Latin. The latter was arrested, and condemned to be burned; and the sentence was carried out within a few hours, the martyr suffering with two of his books hanging about his neck. The papacy declared a war of extermination against the printing-press and its issues, and nothing was so dreaded as the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue. The times were so utterly corrupt that anything which pandered to vicious tastes, but that which condemned the lives of wicked ecclesiastics was dreaded, and therefore opposed.

But books have not been vanquished by burning; for history testifies that again and again this method of attempting their annihilation has brought confusion upon the heads of those who tried it. Indeed, the blazing book-fire might often be accepted as the emblem of victory by the author who penned the pages. Phoenix-like, new life arose from the ashes. Take this example :

Francis Johnson, son of a mayor of Richmond, in Yorkshire, and born in 1562, was nearly of the same age as Shakespeare. While studying at Cambridge University, in the latter years of the reign of Elizabeth, he brought trouble upon himself by making public his preference for Presbyterian government. Such an offence in those days could only be atoned for by a public recantation; and being too stout-hearted to satisfy his enemies to this degree, Johnson was expelled from his college. He was once or twice imprisoned, and seems only to have escaped from his persecutors when he contrived to settle at Middelberg, in Zealand. When comfortably located, over an English Church, in that old town, we grieve to say that the refugee became a persecutor, and displayed great ability in scenting out heretical books. Liking to know what was going on at the English printinghouses, he discovered that a work by Barrowe and Greenwood-"A

Refutation" of a book by M. Giffard, which the latter had directed against the Nonconformists of England-was in course of preparation, and the result was, that Johnson sold his services to the English ambassador. According to an old chronicler of the Pilgrim Fathers, this Presbyterian refugee became the willing instrument in the business of seizing the books, and of seeing them duly burned; "the which charge he did so well perform, as he let them go on until they were wholly finished, and then surprised the whole impression, not suffering any to escape; and then, by the magistrate's authority, caused them all to be openly burnt, himself standing by until they were all consumed to ashes."

There can hardly be a doubt that at this time Johnson acted conscientiously; but, nevertheless, as a lover of books, his heart so far relented at the sight of the auto da fe that he saved two copies-" one to keep in his own study, that he might see their errors, and the other to bestow on a special friend for a like use." Little did he know what he was doing, or what convincing arguments the blazing books contained. On reaching the seclusion of his study Johnson sat down to read, and soon found that the arguments of his persecuted antagonists were stronger than his own convictions. The struggle in his mind was short if violent; for when he once perceived what he thought to be the truth, Johnson was not a man to hold back. Now came the time for self-sacrifice, and he willingly made it. He left his charge; he took ship for London; he visited Barrowe, the chief author of the burned book, in the Fleet Prison, and became one of the persecuted party. The proscribed book had answered the end for which it was written; it had proved stronger than the fire.

In taking a rapid glance at the history of the world, we shall see that false religious systems have ever been the greatest enemies of books, and have waged against them the most relentless warfare. When the people began to emerge from the shades of the medieval age there came forth a host of books specially prepared for their enlightenment. In the course of about seventy years after the invention of printing, less than forty publications are said to have appeared in Germany; but after the religious awakening of the Reformation had set in, about five hundred works, a proportion of which were, of course, only tracts, appeared in one year-1523.

The book-fires, which continued to blaze both in England and on the Continent, were in themselves among the finest possible testimonies to the vitality of the movement which they were intended to check. From first to last an incredible number of works were reduced to ashes, and, alas! the books were often used as fuel for burning those brave men who had written or sold them.

Gaspard Tauber, of Venice, was himself an author as well as a trader; and having been detected in the act of disseminating Lutheran literature, he was urged to recant at Vienna, and thus escape the penalties of the capital offence. Instead of recanting, however, the accused bookseller stood unmoved before his enemies; and long after his body was consumed, his brave words lingered in the memories of the citizens as living testimonies to the truth for which he had suffered. At Bude, in Hungary, the spectacle was also witnessed of a

colporteur and his stock being consumed together in the same fire; but still candidates for the work of colportage were forthcoming, and the leaders of the great movement never despaired of victory.

Naturally a kind-hearted man, and much less disposed towards persecution than Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey was always averse to the policy of burning individuals, but the destruction of mere books never troubled him. After the Cardinal's death, we find that one Thomas Sommers was arrested, and committed to the Tower, where he eventually died, for having proscribed books in his possession. Several others were accused at the same time; and the judgment of the Cardinal was, that all should ride from their prison-house with the books hanging about them, and having a copy in each hand, until they came to Cheapside, where a fire would be ready to receive the forbidden volumes. Having picturesquely trimmed the clothing of the other merchants with books, the attendants were about to wait upon Master Sommers, when he objected to their civil interference. "No," said he, "I have always loved to go handsomely in my apparel;" and taking the books and opening them, he bound them together by the strings, and cast them about his neck-the leaves being open like a collar. Sommers was ordered to throw a New Testament upon the fire; but three times in succession he had the courage to throw the volume beyond the flames.

If an unfettered press is one of the greatest blessings of a free people, books, in a general way, are our very good friends; and any system which aims at their wholesale suppression, or in any manner tends to their more limited production, stands condemned before the world. While Paganism, Mahometanism, and Romanism have carried on this insane warfare, Protestantism has ever proved itself to be the friend of learning, stimulating the diffusion of books.

Even in the age preceding that of the Reformation, Romanism as represented by Pope Paul II. proved itself to be opposed to popular enlightenment. At about the time of his accession to the see of Rome an academy was founded for the promotion of the study of local antiquities and philology; but caring nothing about learning, nor wishing to have about him the books in which learning was enshrined, Paul II. scattered the scholars with a rude hand, torturing some on whom he could lay his hands. Their Academy was proscribed. Printing was then only just invented; and this was the way in which arts promising to diffuse knowledge were hailed by the occupant of "the chair of Peter" at Rome. Roscoe correctly styles Pope Paul a "haughty and ignorant priest"; and speaking of a much later date, the historian adds, "Nor is it to be denied, that in almost every other city of Italy, the interests of letters and of science were attended to with more assiduity than in the chief place in Christendom." Is it otherwise today? There is a magnificent library in the Vatican which, under certain conditions, the pope has opened to historical students; but the socalled Eternal City is not a centre of literary or educational enterprise. A course of historical reading soon begets dissatisfaction with the pretensions of the pope.

It is a curious fact that the Reformation, which in the sixteenth century so mightily stimulated the book-trade, has ever since proved itself to be the best friend of printing. As long ago as 1734, a London