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How gracious and condescending is the declaration of God to Jacob! how much adapted to excite his confidence and dispel his fears! "I am the Lord God of Abraham, thy father, and the God of Isaac; the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed." What an honorable genealogy! The God of his father and grandfather; and, above all, his own God! Children are well and nobly descended when they have pious ancestors, in whose blessings they are more or less partakers. A still more interesting part of this promise is the assurance of the presence of God, "Behold, I am with thee; to guide, preserve, supply, and bless thee, and will keep thee in all places whithersoever thou goest: for I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of."

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The mind of Jacob was deeply impressed and affected by this vision. He awoke, but not in terror, with a solemn pleasing awe. Surely," he exclaimed, "the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. How dreadful is this place; this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!" God sometimes favors his people with unexpected visits, to renew their strength and excite their desires after himself. In his dreary, solitary abode, he found a Bethel: there he reflected on the goodness of God; there he received exceedingly great and precious promises; there he entered into a fresh engagement to be the Lord's; there he determined to erect an altar to God, who had thus appeared unto him; and there his grateful heart entered into a covenant to devote a tenth of his property to him, who gave him all. Such effects will follow when Bethel services and Bethel seasons are sanctified. The world will sink into nothing, and God will be all in all.

R. C.

Penryn.

RESPONSIVE SONGS OF THE ARABS.

ABOUT Sunset we left the rich banks of the Nile, and entered again upon the pathless desert. We could not observe so much as one foot-print of man or beast upon the smooth sand. Soon we came upon the sea shore and rode along the margin, the waves washing the asses' feet while the moon rose to light us on our way. At one point, our drivers being weary, proposed encamping for the night; but Ibraim advised us to advance a little farther.

Upon this, the young Arabs proceeded without a murmur, and in order to cheer the way, commenced a native dance and song. One of them advancing a little before the rest, began the song, dancing forward as he repeated the words, when the rest following him in regular order, joined in the chorus, keeping time by a simultaneous clapping of hands. They sang several Arabian songs in this way, responding to one another, and dancing along the firm sand of the sea shore, in the clear, beautiful moonlight. The response, the dance, and the clapping of the hands, brought many parts of the word of God to our minds. We remembered the song of Miriam at the Red Sea, when the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances; and Miriam answered them—that is, Miriam sang responsively to them and also the song of the women of Israel after David's victory over the giant. They answered one another as they played, and said, "Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands." The words of the psalmist were likewise brought to mind, O! clap your hands, all ye people: shout unto God with the voice of triumph;" and again, "Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills be joyful together-or, in full choir." The responsive form of the 136th Psalm, and others of a like kind, was fully illustrated by this interesting scene.-Mission to the Jews.

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LEARN ALL YOU CAN.

NEVER repress the inquiries of a child, when they admit of simple and satisfactory answers, even though you do not see any immediate use in the information you are thus communicating. The same principle holds good also with persons of riper years: let them learn all they can, whatever station in life they may be destined to occupy. I once knew a weak-minded grandmother who happened to be sitting by her grandchild when he made his first attack upon English grammar. He had stumbled through the words "Syntax" and "Prosody," with some difficulty; when, animated by his success, he went back in his lesson, to lay siege for the fourth or fifth time to the more refractory polysyllable, "e-ty-mo-lo-gy." With the foolish fondness for which many grandmothers are remarkable, she D d

peered over her spectacles at the little fellow for a few moments, and then taking the book from him with a look of mingled pity and contempt, exclaimed, “ Never mind it, Georgy; don't ye try again; I war'nt ye, ye'll never have to go to any of those placesSyntax, or Prosomy, or any one of 'em."

Are there not hundreds of parents who act as injudiciously, in restricting the requirements of their children to those branches of education which in their narrow view seem alone to be necessary for enabling them to get through the world, as the phrase is; as if knowledge were of no use when it could not be turned into pounds, shillings, and pence. Taking only this beggarly estimate of learning, even, how often are they mistaken! A little practical information, picked up by chance as it were, will often outweigh the most laborious scholastic acquirements.

An individual, by one of those accidents so common to the mariner, was wrecked upon an uninhabited shore, and must have submitted to the painful alternative of starvation or death by poison, had not a slight acquaintance with botany, acquired out of school, and with no other stimulus but such as a mind naturally intelligent never wants, enabled him to distinguish, by the character of the fruits and flowers he met with, what vegetable products were injurious, and what might be eaten with impunity. Burnett relates an interesting anecdote of another shipwrecked person whose strength and courage were kept up, when hoping against hope, merely by a knowledge of the same delightful pursuit; his trembling hand, thrust forth in the dark, accidentally laid hold of a plant, which his botanical knowledge assured him never grew under water, and he knew therefore that the rising tide could not submerge him if he kept his head above that spot. Thus satisfied of his safety, he waited till the waves retired, instead of risking his life in some desperate attempt to save it.

Hasselquist, the famous Swedish traveller, has a remark very much to our present purpose. Speaking of the obelisk at Matarée, in Egypt, he says, "I never believed natural history was so useful in the study of antiquities as I experienced : person who is acquainted with birds may see at first sight of what kind those are which are carved upon it. I could know a strix (owl) which stood uppermost on the top of the obelisk; a scolopax

(snipe) much like the pluvialis; an anas (duck); and, what I think more remarkable, could plainly discern the ardea ibis alba (white ibis) in the position it is yet to be seen in all the fields of Egypt, carrying its head high and its tail low."

LETTERS FROM BELGIUM AND THE RHINE.-No. V.

Mentz, August 12, 1842.

MY DEAR H.-You will perceive from the date of this letter that since my last, we have made considerable progress in our journey. We have been privileged to glide through the midst of all the beauties of this far-famed and justly-celebrated river. The most romantic portion of the Rhine is that between Boppart and Bingen, and all travellers have exhausted their choicest epithets, and drawn very largely on their powers of description, in attempting to convey a worthy impression of its surpassing loveliness. Here the river winds its way through a narrow ravine, formed by steep hills, whose verdant sides are shaped into terraces, covered with the clustering vine; turning abruptly, now east, now west, the spectator is presented with a constant succession of beautiful lakes, shut in by a chain of most picturesque mountains, some crowned with wood, others bare and rugged, and terminating in various fantastic pinnacles, "shaped as they had turrets been, in mockery of man's art;" while the monuments of human skill are scarcely less abundant, in the innumerable remains of castles-gray, moss-grown, and ivycovered, that stand as so many evidences of the pride, the power, the wickedness, and the weakness of man. Here, at least, the poet's severity is but too well deserved.

"Beneath these battlements, within those walls,

Power dwelt amidst her passions; in proud state
Each robber-chief upheld his arméd halls,
Doing his evil will, nor less elate

Than mightier heroes of a longer date."

It takes much from the interest with which these ruins are beheld when, guided by the sober light of history, we learn that they were formerly the haunts of banditti, and that Arnaud Walpoden, a citizen of Mentz, first persuaded his fellow-citizens

to form a league of defence with the other towns in the neighbourhood, known under the name of the Hanseatic confederation, which succeeded in protecting the flourishing commerce of the Rhine, and driving these lawless chiefs from their strong holds. In these ruins we find another instance of the sad contrast so continually presented between the works of man and the works of God; in the latter we see reflected only the benignity, majesty, and wisdom of the great Creator; in the former we are constrained to trace the mournful facility with which man can abuse the fairest gifts of providence, and convert that which was intended as a blessing into a curse. But still such a scene is not without its lesson of encouragement; it seems to tell of the perpetuity, the immutability, and the ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness. The evil work of man is in ruins ;—the good work of God, fresh, vigorous, and unchanged, has seen the evil rise, flourish for a time, and then decay and perish.

"Yes, thou, exulting and abounding river!
Making thy waves a blessing as they flow

Through banks whose beauty would endure for ever,
Could man but leave thy bright creation so,

Nor its fair promise from the surface mow
With the sharp scythe of conflict

"A thousand battles have assailed thy banks,

But these, and half their fame, have passed away,
And slaughter, heaped on high his weltering ranks;
Their very graves are gone, and what are they?
Thy tide washed down the blood of yesterday,
And all was stainless, and on thy clear stream
Glassed with its dancing light the sunny ray

Oh! for that happy day when the deep stream of human affection in its course through the vale of time, shall reflect from its unruffled bosom only the bright rays of the Sun of Righteousness!

My last letter was dated from Bonn, and concluded with some reference to the University and its professors. A friend took us with him to one of the class-rooms, where we listened to a lecture by Professor Loebell. His faculty is history, and his subject that morning was a portion of the period of the French Revolution. As the time drew near for the commencement of the

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