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been reading with great attention, and which contains some of the most pernicious statements couched in the highest style of poetry, as well as in the most subtle argumentative prose.

Clemens. But how do you conclude it has had any effect upon him?

Tacitus. From a conversation which he held with a friend the other evening, when he advanced arguments of a destructive tendency in the most specious manner.

Clemens. Have you any objection to repeat them?

Tacitus. None whatever, to you, or to any one who would not be likely to be carried away by mischievous sophistry; but I should be very reluctant to state them to the young and the unwary. You would scarcely credit it, that one of the positions advanced, was calculated to break up the bonds of society, and to destroy the fondest connexions of human life.

Clemens. No wonder you grieve; have you noticed any objectionable results ?

Tacitus. I have. After telling me he had read the work, I asked him if there were any harm in it? He replied there was not. I shewed him many places which I had marked, where the Deity and religion, the Crucifixion and a future state, were treated in such a manner as could not be credited, unless it were seen and read; and thus I convinced him of the evil he was cherishing.

Clemens. How lamentable! I pray earnestly that our heavenly Father may henceforth be the Guide of his youth.

Tacitus. Amen! from my heart; especially as his opinions are, I fear, operating on his conduct. A sullen gloom seems to have settled on his countenance, a reluctance to perform the duties of his station manifests itself almost every day; and an eagerness to seek inferior society and loose company, betrays him into many a shuffling subterfuge.

Clemens. I am astonished. If he be not reclaimed from such folly, he will be a lost young man, even as to this world. Surely it is to such, that Divine wisdom says, “For all these things, God will bring thee into judgment!"

Tacitus. The talent he has always shewn for argument and reasoning is thus turned by him to the worst purposes, and this leads me to enforce the necessity, on the part of parents, of fortifying the minds of their children with some of the principal

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arguments, at once plain, simple, and powerful, on which Christianity rests.

Clemens. Decidedly: it is too much the custom among the professors of religion to take things for granted, and to require their children to assent to all they tell them, without giving any satisfactory reason, so that when these defenceless young minds fall into the company of the infidel and the immoral, they find they have no reason to give for the hope that is in them.

Tacitus. True. Nothing can be more in point; we cannot expect the inexperience of youth to act with the decision of maturer years; I will mention an incident highly creditable to the commercial body. An individual among them declared himself a professed infidel; the rest, as with one heart, shrank from any contact with him, and insisted that either he or they should retire into another room, a course which evinced their proper regard both for religion and morality.

Clemens. But what plan have you adopted as to Horatio?

Tacitus. I have lent him a concise work, containing some valuable arguments for the truth of Christianity; I have pointed him to the abandoned course of almost all infidels, as a warning against their principles; I have shewn him that the advice of Christian friends to their young relatives, is intended for their souls' best interests; and lastly, I have proved to him that the Christian has a double advantage, namely, that if the infidel be right, the Christian will be as well off at last as he; but if the Christian be right, he has a heaven for his portion; but what will the infidel have? "A certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries!"

"Should all the forms that men devise,

Assault my faith with treacherous art;
I'd call them vanity and lies,

And bind the gospel to my heart."

Bellevue.

E. L. C.

THE LILY GATHERED.

POOR Ellen is no more! but she died happily at the early age of fifteen years. Her kind mother burst into tears when she called yesterday, as she entered our door, For this is the last

house that Ellen was in, except her own, whence she was taken to her last home. But when Mrs. P. saw the flowers in our vase-the last she ever culled on earth, the last she ever presented to any one living, the last her hands ever touched-she could refrain no longer, but burst out into the most lamentable sobbings, which continued for some time. And then she told the ground of her hopes. On Saturday, when she had but a slight sore throat, and with no prospect of any thing serious, and not the least apprehension of her keeping her bed, Ellen told her mamma, that she felt an unusual load on her mind, and the thought of her sins was heavy on her; and she asked whether she thought the term "Whosoever," as used by our Saviour, could include her? and if God should take down her earthly tabernacle, whether there would be any hope of her finding acceptance with him?-whether, if she fell down at the foot of the Cross, the blood of Christ would find its way to her? After expressing her anxiety about her soul's salvation, her mother prayed with her. When she had finished, Ellen said, "My dear mother, you have prayed with me, but you have not asked me to pray." Her dear mother was surprised, and almost fancied it ominous. However, they again kneeled down, and Ellen prayed for some time, as if she had been an experienced Christian of long standing, when she remarked, that she did not know what to do with her burden of sin; her mother reminded her of Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim, dropping his burden when he came in sight of the Cross: "O yes," said Ellen, "I must get rid of it there. The Cross only will give me ease."

Her parents, without the consolations of religion, would be inconsolable. They had thought it necessary sometimes to check her unbounded spirits, and to correct some untoward ways, and now they shrank from the thought that they had ever spoken an unkind word to her, and this made the scene doubly affecting. There were the parents begging forgiveness of their dying child; and there was death's victim entreating pardon of her weeping parents! "Ohl" said Ellen, throwing her arms around her father's neck, "I love you, my dear papa; you cannot tell how much I love you." But the dear girl had no fearful or anxious desire to live. Addressing her beloved mother, she said, "I have been to heaven just now, my dear mother, and I have seen Jesus,

and he seemed to receive me with a welcome, which he alone could give; and I shall soon be there!"

The flower continued to wither from Saturday, Nov. 12, 1842, till the following Monday morning, and then faded away! But though she blooms no longer here, she now forms one of the flowers of Paradise. It was her privilege to be piously instructed at home, and to be educated where God is known and honored. Parents cannot but weep at the removal of such a child from their caresses: but oh! what a source of gladness, that their departed one is with God! R. C.

THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE FISHERMEN. Theodoret, who was born at Antioch about 386, and made Bishop of Cyrus, in Syria, in 420, in reference to the contempt expressed by the heathens for the Holy Scriptures, says—“ He will compare the most celebrated law-givers of the Greeks with our fishermen and publicans and tentmaker; and show the difference; for the laws of the former were forgotten after the death of those who enacted them; but the laws delivered by fishermen have flourished, and prevailed, and been received, not only by Greeks and Romans, but also by Scythians, Persians, and other barbarians: and, indeed, the doctrine of the divine oracles is worthy of God, and approves itself to the judgment of wise and thoughtful men. There is much more reason to hearken to the apostles and prophets, than to Plato; for in them there is nothing impure, nothing fabulous and incredible; nothing but what is worthy of God; nothing but what is holy and useful : between Moses the lawgiver, and David, and Job, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and the whole choir of the prophets; and between Matthew also, and John, and Luke, and Mark, and Peter, and Paul, and the whole college of the apostles, is a full agreement: they all teach the same doctrine; there are no differences among them: and they teach things useful to all, for men and women, and people of every condition; what ought to be done, what should be avoided: which must be approved by all reasonable men; for religion is the concern of all. Indeed, the heralds of truth, the prophets and apostles, were not masters of the Greek eloquence; but, being filled with true wisdom, they have carried

the divine doctrine to all nations, Greeks and barbarians; and have filled the whole world, the dry land and the sea, with writings, containing instructions relating to religion and virtue : and now all men, leaving the dreams and speculations of the philosophers, nourish themselves with the doctrine of fishermen and publicans, and study the writings of a tentmaker. The seven wise men of Greece are forgotten; nor do the Greeks themselves exactly know their names; but Matthew, and Bartholomew, and James, yea, and Moses also, and David, and Isaiah, and the other apostles and prophets, all men know as well as they do the names of their own children.-Macardy's Synopsis.

SCIENCE REDUCED TO STERLING.

To meet the sordid upon their own ground, whilst many scientific facts are only curious, not a few are valuable in a pecuniary point of view. Ignorance of the principles of geology has often led to a ruinous expenditure of money, which a slight knowledge only, of those principles would have saved. Lime has been actually imported at considerable expense, and landed on a limestone rock, which required only calcination to make of it a better material than the one so obtained. Ruinous borings for water have been carried on, which the mere inspection of a geological diagram would have proved to be useless, as they have turned out to be. Coal works were erected some years ago near Hastings, at a cost not only of thousands, but of tens of thousands, because a scanty seam or two of spurious coal had been found there, which the geologist would at once have known was in no way allied to genuine coal, or indicative of its propinquity.

We are not all men of money: many are disposed to look at geology in a purely scientific, or even a poetical aspect, and feel interested in it for its own sake. The earthquakes, the convulsions, the stirring incidents, far more tremendous than any in these latter days, which the study discloses-the thoughts that we are actually standing on the lumber of demolished worlds-that volcanoes and other agencies have overturned mountains by the roots in this our own country, and that deluges carrying all before them, have denuded portions of it, are surely in themselves of

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