mises, and have not left the worth of sixpence in the dwelling-house. They have even torn down the shelves and presses that had been securely fixed to the walls. Straw, with broken dishes, pieces of paper, and other rubbish, covered the floor. A piece of the late Mrs Paton's piano lay in one of the rooms, and one side of the printing-press I saw outside. The thatch had not been removed from the dwelling-house, but I fear it, too, will be taken. It is not difficult to give you an inventory of all that remains at Port Resolution. The bare dwelling-house, two rooms without the roof, a goat-house, the boat minus all her appendages, the wall plates of my house, two boxes, and a few pieces of old wood, parts of the church. You would require to see the place to be able to realise the all but clean sweep that has been made. The harbour people say that the bush people did the mischief. Had we heard the story of the bush people, they would have laid the blame on the harbour people. I have no doubt some of the property, personal and mission, is still in the hands of the natives, but the bulk of it, I fear, has been traded for tobacco and pipes. The most of the books have been brought to this island, a few dishes, &c., but only a tithe of the whole. We know not what has become of all the clothing and ironmongery, of which articles Mr Paton had not a little. A few natives followed us as we walked over the desolations, and coolly asked us if the house was good or not.

We saw but few of the people. Nowar, one of the chiefs, requested a passage to Aneityum. It was in his house that Mr Paton remained for some time before quitting Port Resolution. With him on board we set sail for the other side of E the island. He says that it would not be safe for teachers to return to Tanna just now. There will be some prospect of their being left unmolested if the people had left off fairly the war, and begun to plant. We arrived at Black Beach in safety, and lay there two days. As you remember, we removed the teacher from that station in the end of last year. We parted on good terms then, and were glad to find on this visit that no material change had taken place in their feelings toward us. The people were engaged preparing for a feast, but seemed glad to see us. But for the feast, the chief would have accompanied us to Aneityum. He says that he wishes teachers from this island. They were fighting at no great distance; and just the day before we arrived, the natives of a place quite near Black Beach got hold of a Mare man belonging to a sandalwood ship's boat, and must have killed him, as he was not again seen.

We left Black Beach on a Monday forenoon, and made Aneityum on the Wednesday evening. We came home by the lee or west side of Tanna, as I was anxious to see the whole island in its breadth and length. I was greatly pleased with the appearance of the west side. It is a most lovely island, and what groves of cocoa-nuts and yam plantations! On the Tuesday morning we had beat up to the south end of the island, where Mr Matheson had his station, We were close in shore about sunrise, but could not make out the dwellinghouse. Its whited walls were formerly a conspicuous object. The natives must either have destroyed it, or else the grass, which rushes up here with great rapidity and to a great height, must have shut up our view. I trust that the latter is the case. The chief of the place told Mr Matheson before leaving that they would not destroy his house, but would leave it to rot, rot, rot.

So far as we could learn, the Tannese are in good health. Yams are abundant, except at the harbour, but cocoa-nuts are scarce. Food is much more plentiful than we expected after the hurricane.

We have received no tidings from Fate, or Epii, or Sante, from the teachers on them. We know very little about the state of Eromanga. The natives were fighting on the east of the island some two months ago. Things were quiet about Dillon's Bay, according to the latest accounts. The John Knoz will probably visit that island in July, to take home some of the Eromangaus who came here after the massacre, and to see what can be done for the resuming of the work. If the way seems clear, a couple of teachers may be located at Dillon's Bay by the John Williams in September. With best wishes, I am, yours, &c.

Rev. J. KAY.

Jos. COPELAND.

THE

REFORMED PRESBYTERIAN MAGAZINE.

DECEMBER 1. 1862.

"I SPEAK OF THE THINGS.... TOUCHING THE KING."-PSA. XLV. 1.

AN APPEAL TO THOSE WHO ARE OUT OF CHRIST AND "WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD."

We have now reached the closing month of the year, and adhering to a custom which we believe has been found useful-that, namely, of giving the opening paper in the Magazine a practically religious aim, we wish before the year has passed away, to have a few solemn, earnest words with our readers. We have looked for a brief and memorable text; one which, we trust, will be duly and seriously pondered by those whose peace is not yet made with God. There are but three words in it, and yet within the same compass of speech it would be difficult to find words that are so replete with solemn meaning. We shall not set them down yet, but glance first at the circumstances in which they were spoken, arriving thereby at the words themselves.

Our own days are not without abundant evidence that the advent of a new preacher, possessed of deep earnestness, having himself profound convictions of the truth, and speaking that truth fearlessly and boldly, is sufficient for a time, at least, to excite public attention, and to gather round him crowds actuated by a great variety of feeling and motive. As it is in our own age, so it was in the age when John the Baptist commenced his public career. A new preacher had risen, a man of mark, who had a message from God, and who, undaunted by the frown of the powerful, and unmoved by the sneer of the ungodly, commenced his ministration with the text, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at hand." The district in which his labours were carried on was but thinly inhabited; whatever of an audience might be wanting from this cause was abundantly made up by the great crowds that poured forth from the city of David, and its neighbourhood, to hear the preaching of this stern prophet. His very garb adds to the curiosity which is felt to see and hear him; he is not clothed in soft raiment, but with camel's

hair, and has a leathern girdle about his loins; it is said, too, that he partakes not of delicate fare, but that locusts and wild honey satisfy from day to day the cravings of nature. The excitement spreads rapidly from the lower to the higher ranks of society, till at last even the Pharisees and the Sadducees come forth to hear him. What burning words of power this new preacher utters, and how straight they shape themselves for the hearts of his audience! This, in truth, is no reed shaken with the wind, as Sadducee and Pharisee alike find, when he thunders forth in their hearing the words, "0 generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the WRATH TO COME ?" These, then, without farther preface, are the three words on which we wish you to think. More than eighteen hundred years have passed since John the Baptist uttered them by the banks of the Jordan, and yet they have not for human hearts lost either their force, or their meaning, or their reality.

Take note of this, that there can be, and there is, wrath in the mind of God against sinners. It is a common expression in our modern religious phraseology, that "God hates sin, but loves the sinner." We shall not say but that there is a sense in which the expression may be true, or at least so capable of explanation as to be made to approximate to the truth; but like not a few expressions of a similar nature, its looseness is calculated not only to give us wrong impressions of the holiness of God, but may lead at the same time to an undervaluing of the magnitude and evil of sin itself. The moment you separate sin from the person committing it, you come into the region of abstractions, and your ideas and perceptions of it become proportionately vague and shadowy. If we find God himself asserting that he views with anger and indignation the ungodly and rebellious, it is not for us to shrink, either in thought or speech, from declaring the truth. Knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men that there is no folly or madness under heaven so great as this of braving the wrath of a holy God. "I myself," he says, "will fight against you with an outstretched hand, and with a strong arm, in anger, and in fury and in great wrath." The voice of God is echoed and re-echoed by the voice of an awakened conscience. What made the Chaldean monarch quail and tremble till his knees smote against each other-what caused the boisterous merriment of the banqueting-hall to cease, and arrested the winecup that night in its course, if it were not the sure consciousness of the WRATH TO COME? Did the cry from the three thousand on Pentecost" Men and brethren, what shall we do"-arise from the perception that in God there was and could be no wrath against sinners? Or did not conscience whisper within each breast that the great God, whose Son they had taken, and with wicked hands had crucified and slain, might at that, or any other moment, pour out upon their guilty heads the vials of his wrath? Your own consciences must resolve these questions as in the sight of the Omniscient. Could you go on for a series of years setting at defiance the commands of a just government, trampling under foot the laws of a munificent prince, and suppose it possible that no indignation would

be manifested against you-no day of reckoning in which you would be called to account? There is, we shall grant you, a case in which such a thing could be conceived of as possible. If you had clear and infallible proof that your powers of rebellion rose superior to the power of your lawful prince to inflict the merited penalty, then you might afford to smile at the threatened wrath. But in the case of the impenitent sinner, the cherishing of such a thought is infatuation. The arm which supports the universe, the arm which has in it Almighty strength, is not to be braved with impunity; that Omniscience which "spies out all your paths" is not to be evaded, and hence the madness of ignoring the fact that there is wrath in God.

Here, too, is a thought worth pondering in this connection:—that the place of all others to which we are commanded to point the poor trembling penitent for the richest display of love and mercy, is the very place to which we must bring the impenitent and heavendaring, that they may learn to fear and stand in awe. These darkened heavens, that trembling earth, these riven rocks, what do they proclaim? If you say that imagination may cause inarticulate nature to speak any language it pleases, that the words uttered in such a case only reflect the thoughts of the interpreter, then listen to words which are articulate enough :-" Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow; smite the shepherd." O how gleaming, and sharp, and terrible that sword of almighty God! How deep it cuts, piercing to the very heart! Are more words wanted? What means this utterance coming from Gethsemane: "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me;" or this other, coming from the cross of Calvary: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" As they pass from the lips of the great sufferer every impenitent sinner may tremble, for they have this meaning the God who so unsheathed the sword of his justice against his own Son, will not spare you the God who witnessed the death of Christ on Calvary, and the agony of Christ in Gethsemane, is a God who is angry with the wicked every day. This Jesus Christ of Nazareth has himself summed up in one brief sentence the whole force of our argument. Passing through the streets of Jerusalem bearing his heavy cross, with few to pity him, and many thousands who strove to make his great grief greater still, his eye rests upon certain daughters of Jerusalem, whose tears were flowing as they gazed upon the sad scene. He whose last thought was ever of himself, his first for others, puts to them the solemn question, "If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" Was he cast into that great furnace of affliction-was it necessary that he, the Son of God, should endure all its scorching, though to him, unconsuming flames; what then shall be done with him whose heart rejects all this divine love, makes light of all this agony of suffering, and soul-travail, and closes up and hardens against God and Christ? Is not this a legitimate question for such to put to themselves-If God spared not his own Son, but gave him up to the death, that he might be a just God, and the justifier of

him that believeth in Jesus, who is there among the despisers and rejecters of such a Saviour that he will spare?

WRATH TO COME! Does not that say that this terrible wrath of God has not yet been fully revealed? Sentence against an evil work may not be executed speedily, but the inference on the part of the ungodly is a terribly mistaken one when they conclude that therefore it never will be executed. That folly is not by any means new in the history of the world; on the contrary, it is very old, and was at one time as widely spread as the members of our race, with the exception of a very few. During all the years that the ark was building, that preacher of righteousness, whom God raised up to bear witness for himself, laboured by word and deed to convince the world of the wrath of God against sinners, but in vain. His words were met with scorn and mockery; the work on which he was so long employed formed the subject of many a taunt and jeer; and as the years passed, and all things remained as they were from the beginning, men became more confident than ever that the wrath of God might safely be treated with contempt. The Lord, however, was not slack concerning his promise, as some men counted slackness; the windows of heaven were opened, the fountains of the great deep were broken up, " and the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished." The cup of the Almighty's wrath seems to men long in filling up, longer still in flowing over, but that wrath will not always be spoken of as-TO COME. We behold at this moment a God who is even now suffering with the impenitence of the human family, but the question is, "Will he always so suffer? will that divine forbearance last for ever?"

In all the writings of the apostle of the Gentiles, there are no such terrible words as these which he sent once in a letter to Rome: "After thy hardness and impenitent heart, thou treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God." Little does that toiling man whose only thought day by day is how he may augment his hoarded wealth, imagine that as the hours pass he is storing up another sort of treasure. That giddy worldling, whose sole joy is placed in the vanities and pomps of time, little thinks that he is adding every moment to the amount of another treasury, which will one day fill his soul with inextinguishable anguish. And the poor, no less than the rich in this world's goods, are many of them filling up that terrible treasury; every careless, impenitent, hardened sinner of whatever rank, of whatever country, is, in short, adding to the terrible store. "O) that men were wise, that they would understand these things, and consider their latter end!"

Revolving in our minds the causes which may have led men in the past, and which are leading men in the present to trifle with these solemn considerations, it has sometimes occurred to us to wonder if these words "TO COME" may not have had something to do with an infatuation which can scarcely be accounted for. It is wrath, they say, but it is wrath to come; and who knows but by some happy chance, by some unforeseen turn in the chapter of accidents,