spirits sunk down to my heels. Oh, how I longed for the heather hills of Scotland, where fleas never dance, nor mosquitoes ever sing! "I now felt somewhat like a cat in a strange garret. I was loath to go down stairs, not wishing to disturb the family. I had a small box filled with books; I thought, to pass the time, I would open the box, and lay the books out to air. On the top lay a small pocket Bible, in two volumes; it was placed there by the hands of my pious father when he packed the box. This self-same Bible is now in my hand. I opened the book to see its condition, thinking it might be mildewed, having been fourteen weeks in the hold of the vessel. My eye fell on the words 'My son.' I was thinking of my father, and I fancied I heard his voice. I read with astonishment to the end of the chapter; on looking up, it was the third chapter of the Proverbs." During this recital, Mr. Paine sat on one side of the table, I on the other, directly opposite. He listened with marked attention. Said I, "Mr. Paine, this Bible is now in my pocket, and if you wish, I will read the chapter." "Do, if you please," he replied. Observe here, that as they had no Bible at Carver's, I generally put mine in my pocket when I went to see Mr. Paine, for in discussions he was very apt to misquote the text. While I read, he listened with his eyes fixed on my face. When I had done, "Now," said I, "Mr. Paine, suppose yourself in my situation, having just stepped out into the world for the first time, from the cottage in which I was born, a poor boy, set down among strangers, without a friend to counsel or direct, sick, sore, and discouraged, with only three cents in my pocket; now, sir, inspiration aside, do you think that words could have been put together more suitable to my case? You can think as you please, and I have the same right; I looked on that chapter as a message from heaven; a chart, compass, and pilot, to guide me through the breakers ahead. Its immediate effect was, to ease my aching bones, to cool my burning temples, and to raise my drooping spirits. I grasped my nail-hammer, and sallied forth in the strength of this chapter, to breast the storms of life." I stopped; he rose from his seat, laid his hand on my shoulder, with a smile, "Ah," said he, " thou art a young enthusiast." Said I, "Mr. Paine, you call this all delusion, and what if it is? it is a very innocent and a very comfortable delusion. You burn our Bible, and give us a blank book in its place." —Grant Thorburn. VOLTAIRE AND ROUSSEAU. BUNGENER, in his recent work on "Voltaire and his Times," has presented the following striking contrast between him and Rousseau : In their whole character and movements we see the same diversity, the same contrasts. The one does his best to add to the influence of talents that of position and riches; the other glories in being nothing, and in having nothing. Voltaire speaks of " my chateau," and is none the prouder at bottom; Rousseau complains of the high price of bread, and you can see pride peeping through the holes in his mantle. They both spend their lives in complaints-the poor man, of his voluntary poverty, the rich one, of his failing health, still endurable after living eighty years. But Voltaire passes jests on his maladies, even when real; Rousseau would fain that the whole human race should weep with him over his, even when imaginary. Often, moreover, they both make themselves ridiculous-the one by his seriousness about trifles, the other by his levity on the gravest subjects. But the latter, with his inexhaustible malice, is sometimes kindly; the former, with his universal philanthropy, has always some gall in his ink, and sometimes a good deal. Even when he is in the right, his tone is that of a sophist rather than of the man who is him- | to hate you. He is, on the whole, self convinced; Voltaire, even when in the wrong, is natural, and, in some sort, candid; you find him lie, and that often; but he does not mix up with his lies fervent apostrophes to truth and virtue. He makes victims, and boasts of doing so; Rousseau tries to make them, yet, to hear him speak, you would think there is no victim but himself. He loves to say and to believe that he is surrounded with enemies-he makes it his glory to agree with nobody; and Voltaire, on the contrary, loves to repeat that everybody is of his way of thinking, except some downright fools, to whom public reason will soon have done justice. An independent and great lord, he is thankful for the services of the smallest persons; Rousseau, on the contrary, needs help from everybody, and you cannot be of use to him, but forthwith he sets himself not so good as his writings; Voltaire is often better than his. The same diversity, in fine, appears in the influence which they proceeded, in parallel lines, to exercise on the epoch in which they lived. Voltaire carried opinion along with him; but as he taught men only to deny, and preached, in fact, no system, he had not, and could not have, disciples properly so called. Rousseau had disciples, and even enthusiastic ones. To say the truth, he could hardly have any other, for there is no middle course with him; people love him, or they hate him; he is lis tened to as an oracle, or thrust off as a fool. Voltaire, on the contrary, will be found to have influenced even those who detested him—that clergy whom he lashed, those old magistrates who would fain have had it in their power to burn him along with his books. Popery. PROTESTANTISM v. POPERY. THE following letter, from a gentle- the enemy is doing his work-not man residing in the neighbourhood openly, not boldly-not in a manner of Dover, will be read with deep in-guard-no visible attempt at concalculated to put a father on his terest, as showing how insidiously Popery is working among us, in how many disguises it is dressed up, and trol- but by those underminings which gradually sap the foundation of all that we value most dearly. From sad and recent circumstances, I feel I am acting an honest part in addressing you. The fires of my own domestic hearth are extinguished; and I, an old man, am left to deplore the apostacy of a child on whom my heart doted, who was like the child of the Patriarch, the only one left of her mother; me have they bereaved of her. Fathers! I tell you, that it has now come to my knowledge that every artifice is brought into operation to pervert the minds of your daughters. Your railway-trains, your steam-packets, your places of amusement-no matter how remote the district in which the you reside, your very firesides of which the dearest ties of earthly abound with agents from Rome. life are snapped in sunderAnd will these agents leave a stone pure, the open-hearted, generous unturned to work out the purposes mind, contaminated by the first for which they are sent by him practice of deceit, in order to carry whose name is Antichrist? Rely out the system of perversion? not upon affection. Filial duty, under the guidance of the priest, has no hold within the heart. Almost the first text the intended victim is taught is, 'That he who leaveth not father nor mother, for My sake, shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven.' This is the one on which my unhappy child excuses herself to me, and from which she extracts temporary consolation. Oh, sad perversion of the holy text! And yet, it is one which the Church of Rome, in common with other Christian sects, may appropriate to herself. She whom I deplore, had never deceived me her heart was knit with mine; but in an ill-fated hour the Jesuit crossed her path, saw her tractability, her pliant mould; and, step by step, unperceived by me (for secrecy, as to her movements, was enjoined on her), she fell into the meshes so skilfully, so fatally prepared for her. Can that religion be right, to embrace the principles "I call on you, ye Protestant fathers, to be on your guard! I tell you there is not a Puseyite preacher in the land but is a Romanist in disguise! And if you value either political or spiritual freedom, suffer none such to hold communion among you. If ever there were a dead letter in our laws, surely that which followed the celebrated Durham letter, and about which the time and talent of the nation was so much engrossed-surely that is one! If ever the lion were bearded in his den, it is now, when the feelings of our once Protestant England are outraged by every act of contempt and contumely on the part of the Romish Church! My case may soon be yours. Your wives and daughters are assailed by a power you do not see; but which, unless you are up and stirring, will eventually destroy all you hold most dear." The Letter Bor. VICES OF THE TONGUE. THROUGHOUT all ages and coun- the heart. The soul of gossip is a tries, the vices of the tongue have been matter of observation and lament to both saints and sages. All mankind have, in their turn, been sufferers from its unbridled course. There is no single subject on which the Book of Psalms and of the Proverbs display so much vehemence of denunciation and severity of reproof. The evil still continues, and obtains even where it is least to be expected, among people professing godliness. The habit of gossipping, is a habit that degrades alike the intellect and contemptible vanity that imagines itself, or at least would have others imagine it, superior to all that it finds of evil and absurdity in the characters of those whom it passes in review. A very little observation will serve to show any one that everybody sees his neighbours' faults, while very few open their eyes upon their own; and that not unfrequently a person condemns with the utmost vehemence in others precisely the same follies and vices in which he himself habitually in dulges. Those who study their own characters with most care, and who best understand themselves, are apt to say least of the characters of their neighbours: they find too much to do within themselves, in curing their own defects, to have time or inclination to sit in judgment upon the defects of others. surely as the clumsy war-club of savage lands was invented from the same impulse and wrought with the same intent as the graceful blade of Damascus. Its source is vanity; its end to make self seem great by making others seem little. It is a weapon that, however, skilfully wielded, always cuts both ways, strikes. Of all the powers of wit, sarcasm is the lowest. There is nothing easier than ridicule; nothing requiring a weaker head or a colder heart. The sincere lover of truth will never be found habitually indulging either in gossip or sarcasm; for those who are addicted to these vices never tell a story simply as they heard it, never relate a fact simply as it happened. A little is added here or left out there to give the story a more entertaining turn, or the satire a keener point. As the habit grows stronger, invention becomes more ready and copious, till at length truth is covered up and lost under an accumulation of fiction. It is impossible to indulge habit-wounding far more deeply the hand ually in this vice without weakening that grasps it than the victim it the powers of the intellect. The heart never suffers alone from the indulgence of any wrong passion. The intellect and the affections ever sink and rise together. Where the love of gossip becomes a confirmed habit, the mind loses its power of accurately appreciating the value of character of distinguishing truly between the good and bad. The power of discrimination is weakened and impaired, so that no confidence can be placed in the opinions of the mind in relation to character or life. In addition to this, we must bear in mind that all the mental power we bestow in criticising or ridiculing our fellow-beings is just so much taken from our mental strength, which we might have applied to some useful intellectual exercise. The strength of the mind is no more indefinite than that of the body. We have but a certain limited amount; and all that we apply to idle or bad purposes is just so much abstracted from the good and the useful. Sarcasm is a weapon we are almost sure to find constantly used by the gossip; and whether it be shown in the coarse ridicule of the vulgar, or the keen satire of the refined, i: springs ever from the same source, and is directed to the same end; as FRIENDSHIP. POETS have, in every age, sung the honours of friendship; while philosophers have taxed their powers to display its principles, and their eloquence to set forth its claims. One of the finest things that ever emanated from the genius of Cicero was his "Old Age and Friendship." It may be useful to suggest one or two things as guides in the choice of friends; and we trust that they may be of some benefit both to the young before alluded is of a still higher kind. It needs a knowledge of human nature, as well as disposition to do us good. It needs a refined sense of the proprieties of life; and while the sterling good sense must not be wanting, it adds the nice perception which tact, and close observation, and experience only can impart. We scarcely need say, that it is only one who reposes a firm faith in the mercy of God, and in the Gospel of Christ, whose own breast is under the influence of devout and virtuous emotions, who can answer to our idea of a friend. From that best of Comforters, the Divine Spirit, flows the balm of consolation, which, in the days of dreariest ad and to those of more advanced life, to parents and to children. Sincerity is a cardinal quality in a friend or companion. A candid manifestation of one's self, a frank and generous disposition, ready to admit or impart reproof, never seeking for faults, and never forgetful to correct them. Discrimination of character is yet another desirable trait in a friend; making distinctions where they exist, and none where they do not; careful in weighing the evidence, and faithful in rendering the verdict. Counsel from such a friend is worth having, for it is not to every one to whom we can thus commit, as it were, our conscience. Cordial sympathy with us in the great revolutions of life, and so far as may be, too, in every-versity, may cheer the heart, and day events; yet delicately leading out into other channels and monotonous feeling, and by the warmth of a kind heart melting down the selfish hardness which shuts us out from the participation in the thousand alleviations of misfortune and sorrow-this is a rare excellence in the true friend. There are many who can sit down by us, catch the mood we are in, rejoice in our joy, and weep when we weep, and it is often refreshing to feel such a sympathy. But that to which we have inspire a ready acquiescence in the Well deserves the name of Friend; Costly, free, and knows no end. Religion itself is just friendship: Abraham was called the "Friend of God;" and all his true descendants are entitled to the same appellation. But if friends of God, they are no longer enemies of one another! The Counsel Chamber. APPEAL TO THE YOUNG. THE famous American preacher, the Rev. S. P. Davies, at the close of a New Year's Sermon, from Rom. xii. 2, thus addressed the young people of his flock: "I beg leave of my promiscuous auditory to employ a few minutes in addressing myself to my important family, whom my paternal affection would always single out from |