was with His earliest Church. The Church of the apostles was a Church of the poor; of silver and gold it had none.

I. This is mere history; it lies upon the surface of the New Testament. But notice the marked connection, in this and other passages, between the preaching of the Gospel to the poor and the gift of the Eternal Spirit. Such a purpose, in so great a gift, looks, at first sight, like an unnecessary expenditure of force. Why, men may ask, should this Almighty Visitor be thus associated with such a humble effort? Why should the Spirit not reserve Himself to dissipate the objections of the intellectual, or the fastidiousness of the highly born, or the pride of the wealthy? Poverty without a faith and rule of life, poverty without any illuminating principle to turn it to moral account, may well appear to be almost unmitigated misfortune; for poverty does not of itself promote either religion or any of the higher interests of human beings. It may do good to those of us who, through no merit of our own, have entered upon life under very different circumstances, if we forget for a few minutes the ancient East, and contemplate some of the most obvious results of poverty in the lives of many thousands of our countrymen.

1. A first effect of poverty, then, is the confiscation of a poor man's best time and thought, from sheer necessity, to the task of providing food and clothing for himself and his family. Who does not see how this liability must clog and depress the human spirit; how it chokes up the avenues through which even natural light and heat penetrate within the understanding and the heart?

2. Another effect of poverty is that it often blights those domestic scenes of happiness which prepare the way of religion in the soul. In the natural course of things, kindliness, courtesy, refinement, are the products of home life; the home is the centre and the manufactory of these natural graces. Many of us must have visited cabins in which a numerous family inhabits a single room; in which the young, the aged, the sick, the hale, the parents and children, herd together by day and by night; in which the mother, who should be a presiding genius of kindliness and of cleanliness, is the representative of ill-humour and of

dirt; in which all that protects ordinary intercourse against coarseness, and ordinary tempers against irritation, and average health against disease, and modest efforts to improve against brutal interference, is too often absent; in which all is so crowded that there is no room for delicacy, for reserve, for the charities, for the proprieties of common life.

3. The worst result of poverty is that it often destroys selfrespect. Poverty of course is and means a great deal more than has thus been stated. But at least let us bear in mind that it involves, very commonly, the exhaustion of life by mechanical work, the degradation of character in the home, and in the usual expedients to escape from it, and the loss of self-respect, and of all that that loss implies, through the continued, unappeased, ever-increasing envy of the lot of others Not that poverty has not produced its heroes, who have vanquished its disadvantages with stern determination. We have here to consider, not the splendid exceptions, but the average result.

But for more important results a higher force is needed; nothing less than the Christian faith itself. The faith of Christ reverses the disadvantages of poverty with decisive force. It acts upon poverty not from without, but from within; it begins not with legislation, but with hearts and minds; not with circumstances, but with convictions. When this faith is received, it forthwith transfigures the idea of labour: labour is no longer deemed a curse, but a discipline; work of all kinds is sensibly ennobled by being done with, and for, Jesus Christ; and by this association it acquires the character of a kind of worship.

II. From what has been said it will have been inferred that the work of preaching the Gospel to the poor is very far from being either commonplace or easy; let us briefly notice two mistakes which have been made in undertaking it.

1. It has failed sometimes from a lack of sympathy with the mental condition and habits of the poor. An educated man looks at his religion, not merely as a rule of thought and life, but as a theory or doctrine about the Unseen, about the universe, about human nature.

But it is not this way of approaching or exhibiting Christianity

which wins the poor. In the questions which are debated between Revelation and particular schools of criticism, or mental or physical science, the poor have generally no part. The poor need religion, not as additional material for speculative enterprise, but as a friend who can help them along the road of life, and through the great change beyond it. For them life is always real. Its hopes, its misgivings, its joys, its heartaches, its catastrophes, its dim sense of the seriousness of being where and what we are, and of the possibilities before us, are quickened by poverty. The poor man, if religious at all, must believe in One who is not less an object of affection and obedience, than the most awful and sublime of intellectual truths. And therefore, in order to win the poor, religion must ever study to be such as she was on His lips who spoke in parables and simple sayings, and who taught all who listened as they were able to bear it.

2. The other mistake referred to has lain in an opposite direction. Men who have sympathised warmly with the mental difficulties of the poor have endeavoured to recommend the Christian faith, sometimes by making unwarranted or semilegendary additions to it, and sometimes by virtually mutilating it.

These considerations, then, may lead us to reflect that the connexion implied in the text between the presence of the Spirit and the task of evangelizing the poor, is not, after all, so surprising. To be sympathetic, yet sincere; true to the message which has come from Heaven, yet alive to the difficulties of conveying it to untutored minds and hearts; sensible of the facilities which a few unauthorised additions or mutilations would lend to the work in hand, yet resolved to decline them,— this is not easy. For such a work something higher is needed than natural quickness of wit or strength of will, even His aid who, as on this day, taught the peasants of Galilee, in the upper chamber, to speak as with tongues of fire, and in languages which men of many nations could understand. And the effort for which He thus equipped them continues still; and His aid, adapted to new circumstances, is present with us as it was with them. Never was that aid, never was this work, more needed than in our own generation. ANALYSIS BY THE EDITOR.

Suggestions for Science Parables.

"Two worlds are our's, 'tis only sin
Forbids us to descry,

The mystic Earth and Heaven within,
Clear as the sea or sky."

PERSISTENCY OF FORCE;

REUNION AND RECOGNITION IN HEAVEN.

"Because I live, ye shall live also."

THE late Bishop of St. David's, Dr. Copplestone, was asked what were his views of the doctrine of "recognition in heaven." In his reply, whilst admitting that it is not explicitly taught in the New Testament, yet affirmed that it is implied and assumed throughout. The analogy he draws is alike true and forcible. "It is, I am aware, hazardous to reason from physical to spiritual laws of being; but I am struck by an analogy which seems to favour the belief, which cheers so many bereaved hearts. The great physical doctrine, on which men of science appear to be either quite agreed or rapidly coming to an agreement, is that of the conversation or (as it has been proposed to call it) persistency of forces, or force. No force is ever lost, but only passes into a new form. Motion becomes heat. When the fall of the hammer is arrested by the anvil, there is a sudden cessation of a more or less rapid motion; but it is invisibly prolonged by an inward vibration, which changes the temperature of the anvil, and which, if iron was sensative, would be accompanied by acute pain. Then, I would ask, are not love and friendship forces? Very real spiritual forces, which, in the present state, subsist (persist) through all the changes-outward and inward-of our mortal life. Is it to be thought that they are more liable to perish than those which are employed in making a horseshoe? And, if they are indestructible, can it be conceived that they are to remain for ever without an appropriate object?"

In support of the Bishop's view we may add, referring to the motto at the head of this article, that our everlasting union with Christ is the pledge of the renewal and perpetuation of Christian fellowship. "The fact that the soul-life took root in the same soil, was nutured by the same joys and sorrows, and hardened amid the same struggles, will supply a common ground on which friends in heaven, once friends on earth, may meet again, and feed the life to come with storied memories of the old life that has for ever passed away, or, rather, has flowed into their perfect life." T. BROUGHTON KNIGHT.

Selected Acorns from a Stalwart Oak.

BISHOP THIRLWALL.

"The smallest living acorn is fit to be the parent of oak-trees without end." -Carlyle.

THE LONELINESS OF WOE.-"The afflicted one stands within a circle of images and feelings of his own, which, painful as they may be, he would not part with for worlds. Any attempt to draw him out of that circle can only inflict a useless annoyance."

JUDICIOUS COMFORT.-" Every judicious attempt at consolation must, I think, set out with a full acknowledgment of the right, the value and dignity of the sorrow, and then go on to show that it is only the shady side of a great privilege and blessing, from which it can only be separated by mental abstraction."

ALIKE AND EQUALLY SELFISH.-"Selfishness is one common property of human nature. The difference between a good and bad man is not that the good man is the less selfish of the two, but that he is able to control, by higher motives, or by the force of benevolent affections, the selfishness to which the other yields."

OLD AGE.-"The decline of life can never know again the freshness of the spring, but it may have its Indian summer, even more delicious in its deep calm, its magical colouring, and its mysterious loveliness.”

SIN AND REPENTANCE.-" Have you considered the infinite difference between sin as a particular act, and sin as a state or habit of which THE sin is mere sign or effect? And then what can it avail if THE sin should be forgiven, blotted out, annihilated and forgotten, so long as sin is the cause, the root, the fountain remains?

MORALITY AND THE BRUTES.—“The brutes are sentient machines, they are governed by unvarying instincts; they perform animal functions which they have in common with man; but they are not capable of actions to which, without any abuse of language, we can ascribe any moral quality. Does a clock deserve credit for veracity when it shows the exact time of day? Is the bee doing right when it extracts honey from the flower? Is the cat doing wrong when it plays with its mouse?"

BRISTOL CONGREGATIONAL INSTITUTE.

T. BROUGHTON Knight.