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barred from the Bible, banished from the house of God, and cut off from the consolation of prayer, he is a vagabond going to and fro on the earth, seeking rest, but finding none.

I wish, Richard, that I could speak more kindly to you. I wish that I could do you a service; but how may this be? I can rebuke you, I can pity you, I can pray for you; but I cannot comfort you. While you pursue your drunken course, you will only go on from bad to worse; you are hastening to a dreadful precipice, a gulf of unfathomable misery.

It may be, Richard, that sometimes you take up a book and read, though it be to your own condemnation. I will therefore leave you a tract, "What do you get by Gin-drinking?" and may He who, at the eleventh hour, spoke peace to the dying thief upon the cross, reprove your backslidings, heal your diseases, forgive your sins, and bestow upon you the riches of his mercy. No power, but the power of God, can reclaim you; no grace, but the grace of the Redeemer, can save you; but as the mercy of God endureth for ever, he may yet snatch you as a brand from the burning; he may yet make a saint of the sinner, renewing you by the power of his Holy Spirit, and preparing you by sanctified affliction for his glory.

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CALL ON A SUNDAY SCHOLAR.

Now, Alfred, if you will reach me the reward book that was given you yesterday, I will put your name in it, according to my promise. You can find me a pen and ink, I dare say. Mind and do not shake the table. Your pen is not the best in the world, but yet I have inanaged the matter pretty well, and that flourish at the bottom makes it look very smart. Let it be kept clean, and get all the good out of it that you can it is a capital plan to make the best of everything.

A schoolboy once told a Christian parent that he had obtained two prizes at school for his attainments; "and now," said he exultingly, "I have only one prize more to get, and then I shall be satisfied." "You are wrong there, Edward," replied his father; "for there will then remain another prize to obtain of greater value than all the others put together, and you must not rest satisfied until you have got that—' the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus,'" Phil. iii. 14.

Now I hope, Alfred, that as you have been a busy bee at school, you will gather honey from this anecdote. Reward books are excellent things in their places; but if you had all that have ever been printed in the world, they would

do you but little good, unless you could look forward to "the reward of the inheritance" in heaven, promised to all the followers of Jesus Christ. To this, then, let your heart be directed.

Press boldly on, though all rewards are given,

To win, through Christ, the great reward in heaven.

CALL ON A CHARITABLE NEIGHBOUR.

Mrs. Rollins, you will excuse my calling in upon you, to put you on your guard against two or three persons to whom you exercise great kindness. You take them to be in real want; but if they are in want, it is not so much on account of their poverty as their waste and intemperance.

It would ill become me to stop the current of your charity, which I believe runs pretty freely to the habitations of the poor. I only want to direct it in a channel where it may do more good, and benefit persons more worthy of assistance. For your great kindness to the poor in this neighbourhood, I thank you; and I trust that He who has disposed your heart to relieve the distresses of others, will abundantly bless you in your basket and your store, in your going out and coming in. It is a mercy to have the

means, and a still greater mercy to possess the desire, to relieve affliction and want. Active benevolence towards mankind, done from a proper motive, is the very soul of thanksgiving to God; for it is not knowing, or talking about his commandments, but doing them in a spirit of love, that is most acceptable to him. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world," Jas. i. 27.

Twice have I seen that man with the leathern cap and the old great coat, who calls upon you so frequently, reel out of a gin-shop, using language that would shock you. Now, I know it is not your intention that your money should be spent in gin. The three lads without shoes and stockings, who come begging at your back-door, shivering as though they have the ague, are three of the most graceless young scoundrels in the whole neighbourhood. I gave one of them shoes, and the other two stockings, but they never wore them; and yesterday I saw them all together, laughing and grinning as they ran off with their hands filled with fruit from an old woman's stall, which they had wilfully upset. But of all the impostors that ever abused kindness, that Peggy Lucas is surely the worst. have made diligent inquiry about her, and find

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her to be a liar, a thief, and an abandoned drunkard. She carries about songs and books of an improper kind, and makes up a tale to suit every kind of customer she happens to fall in with. I used to think her husband a proper object to relieve, but I find that he and she are both alike—not a pin to choose between them. Frank Lucas stopped me the other day, after he had been drinking too freely; he put on a hypocritical air, and told me that he had neither tasted bit nor drop the whole day; and when I gave him to understand that I had no money to spare to a drunkard, he swore he had borne his poverty long enough, and that he would make quick work of it, and put an end to his misery at once in the canal. I ventured so far as to let him have his own way; but in spite of his determination to destroy himself, he convinced me yesterday, by another application, that he is much more attached to begging than to drowning.

There is in the white cottage, in the garden at the back of the brewery, a poor, honest, industrious woman, struggling hard to support a large family; sickness is now in the house, and my heart aches for the poor woman, whom I know to be a deserving creature. Now, Mrs. Rollins, I thought it would be no difficult matter to persuade you to give up the man in the

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