life, even more than your words, declare your real principles.

6. While it is very desirable that you should, by firm reliance on the atoning blood and precious righteousness of Christ, get rid of that 'fear which hath torment,' yet some fears are salutary. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life to depart from the snares of death.' You cannot fear God too much. Sanctify Him and make Him your dread. Nor can you be too much afraid of sin. Nor can you be too fearful of being left by God to the deceitfulness of your own heart. Many of our fears are the means of our preservation. Be not high-minded, but fear.'

7. Never trifle nor jest with sacred things. It is profaneness. It must harden the heart. It cannot fail to induce a sad confusion of mind. You cannot be too solemn and reverent when you speak or think of divine things. Never smile at a witticism on divine things. Some wits are madmen.

8. Try to do something every day for God; nay, live to Him every hour and moment. Be always trying. He who never fails, will never succeed. There is no good horseman who has not been often thrown. There is no good swordsman who has not been often disarmed. There is no good Christian who has not often wept at the failure of his devices for the glory of God and the happiness of man. Keep trying.

9. Beware of superstition, fanaticism, melancholy, and a morbid conscience. All these are foes to piety. I mention them together, because they are often united. If any thing be not sin or duty in God's Word, make it not such in your creed. Beware of sleepless nights and nervous prostration. Be not righteous overmuch.' Nature is feeble. Lay not upon her heavier burdens than the Lord has done. Fanaticism is a wild-fire that will destroy intelligent piety.

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10. Think much of the goodness of God, and especially of his mercy to you. Christ is full of grace and truth. Do not forget the bright view of things. This will furnish one of the best means of estimating your responsibility, and one of the best stimulants to exertion in behalf of a perishing world. If you have no pity for the heathen, you are no child of God.

11. If favoured with high religious joy, and seasons of sweet communion with God, boast not. Vain glory is the bane of communion with God. When Moses' face shone, he covered it with a veil. Some things in religion are best known only to God and our own hearts.

12. Avoid all conduct of a doubtful kind. Many consciences are defiled by yielding to fashion or importunity, not

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only against convictions, but even against doubts. God never shuts us up to the necessity of doing a doubtful deed, whereby guilt may be incurred. We always sin when we do an act the lawfulness of which we are not clear about. Go not into the twilight. Live in the sunlight of Bible truth.

13. Waste not your time in idle fears and thoughts of the future in this world. To you the future may be very short, The things you most fear will probably never disturb you. If evils come, they will probably be such as no foresight of men can anticipate. Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in Him; and He shall bring it to pass. Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him.'

14. Love all who love our Lord Jesus Christ. Love them tenderly. Bigotry and a narrow mind are great sources of misery, and great sins also. No man is more to be pitied, no man is in greater danger, than he who rejects those whom Christ receives, or who says to any child of God, 'Stand by thyself, I am holier than thou.' You have joined the Church you prefer. That was right. But remember that there are some people in all branches of the true Church of Christ, who please the Lord better than some in the branch to which you belong.

15. Be ever ready to give a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear; but avoid angry controversy. It is unfriendly to growth either in knowledge or in grace. Friendly discussion of even religious doctrine is often useful. But you are yet a private and a feeble Christian. You are not now set for the defence of the gospel.' A feeble defence is often worse than none. Be sure that you understand a matter before you decide upon it. He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and a shame unto him.'

16. If you shall fail of eminence in a life of piety, it will probably be as with most others, by inattention to comparatively little duties and little sins. It was the little foxes' that 'spoiled the tender grapes.' All defections begin with little things. Nothing is positively of little importance, which effects the honour of God and the safety of the soul.

17. Be stedfast. A miserable changeling in the days of bloody Mary, said that he was a willow, not an oak. I hope you will be an oak, not a willow. He whose heart and purpose have no stability, is not fit for the kingdom of God. The

the greatest man in his dominions, Admiral Coligny, and when his courtiers were overcome with the scent of the decaying body, declared that the smell of a dead enemy was sweet to him. He had acted so because the Church of Rome had taught him so to act. He had done so for Catholic purposes, and was impelled by Catholic regulations directed to Catholic ends; and if the Grand Duke of Tuscany, at the present day, performed the same tragic drama, he but proved himself the legitimate successor of a king who had acted under the guidance of Pope Pius V. If the governor of the Low Countries had boasted of having brought, within a short time, 18,000 sufferers to a violent death; if he had done that under the instigation of the same Pope Pius V., and had himself officiated at the martyrdom of some of the disciples of Jesus Christ, he (Mr B. Noel) asked whether that governor promised, as he had been, eternal happiness, by the saintly Pope of that day, was in a position in any respect different from that foreign potentate who was now under the guidance of the Romish Church, and against whose late acts they had assembled to protest. But it might be said that Pope Pius IX. was a bigot; he was; but let them remember, that for his bigotry and his intolerance the Catholic Church had sainted him. If Pius V. for these saintly atrocities had been deemed worthy of canonization, by what better road could Pius IX. hope to arrive at sainthood than by directing the Grand Duke of Tuscany to immolate, upon the altar of bigotry, as many of their Protestant brethren as came within the reach of his power?

CAPTAIN TROTTER. He would detail to them some of the facts which had been brought under his knowledge during his recent mission to Florence; for he believed that the more individual facts were brought home to their feelings, the more would they be inclined to enter upon an energetic course of action. He came there, not to tell them what Rome had been two or three centuries ago, but what she was at the present day; and he believed he could state facts which would rouse them, not to bitter and angry feelings against Romanists-God forbid that he should excite any such feeling-but to a determination to use every effort in their power to overthrow a system fraught with so many evils. He would tell them Rome was at present the same that she had been centuries ago, not only in forms and in doctrine, but in her deadly enmity to the truth of God. He believed that there were thousands of Roman Catholics who were ignorant alike of the working of their own religious belief, and of the true character of Protestantism; and he hoped that meetings such as that

might have the effect of inducing many Roman Catholics to consider calmly and impartially the ground on which they stood. Let him remind them that there were at present going on in the sister kingdom circumstances, as regarded the spread of God's truth, exceedingly similar to those which were going on in the kingdom of Tuscany. He rejoiced to have that opportunity of speaking of the great work which was at present being accomplished by the Irish Society. There were at this moment thousands in Ireland leaving the religion in which they had been bred for the simple faith of Christ, and reading that faith in his Word; and there were in Tuscany at this moment not less than 20,000 individuals who within the last three or four years had been brought by the perusal of God's Word to distrust the Roman Catholic faith, and who were determined on searching the inspired writings for the true religion, although he could not say that they had as yet actually embraced the doctrines of Protestantism, It had been stated that there were not many Bibles in Tuscany, but he differed from that statement, and although great pains had been taken by the police to find out and to destroy the Bibles, he believed that many of them were still in existence, and were deeply cherished by their owners. The Protestants of this country had reason to feel ashamed at their indifference to the Divine Word, when they considered with what profound devotion it was received by their oppressed brethren in Tuscany. One gentleman in that country had told him that he had no opportunity of reading the Bible, except by getting up in the night when his servants were asleep, and when his movements could no longer be watched by the spies at the other side of the street. In the middle of the night he rose with his wife and children, and then read to them the Word of God as the only means of instructing them. The poor Midiais were persons of a respectable class; they had been highly esteemed for their devout and consistent Christianity; they had been regarded with great affection even by Roman Catholics, on account of their modest and amiable deportment. But their condition was at present most deplorable. During a period of ten months previous to their condemnation, they had been shut up in a prison with the lowest and most degraded classes in Florence; and the husband, as they had already been informed by Lord Cavan, had, since his condemnation, been denied the privilege of having his watch, to the sound of which he was anxious to listen, for the purpose of relieving his painful solitude. The husband and wife were at present separated from each other, but they were upheld by the

truth of God. He was heard to say that in consequence, no doubt, of the representations which had been made on their behalf, the officials of the prison had been led to treat them with greater kindness. He should add, however, that they were still exposed to cruel rigours. Rosa Madiai, who was suffering from a spinal complaint, had been removed to a cell so damp that the shoes on her feet had become mouldy. In that cell, as it had been described to him-for the members of the deputation, with the exception of Lord Roden and the Count de Gasparin, had been refused admittance to the prisonthere were a stool, a bench, and a bedstead, but each of those articles was kept in its place by a chain, and they were placed so far from one another that the prisoner could not at any time avail himself of the advantage of a double support. He would relate to the meeting a circumstance in which he believed they would take a deep interest. The poor persecuted Protestants in Florence had been told that on every Saturday evening, between the hours of nine and eleven o'clock, their brethren, throughout Europe, would unite with them in prayer; and although they could not meet themselves to pray, they would expect that at that time the prayers of their fellow-Protestants in other lands would be offered up in their behalf. It was a significant fact that the old guillotine which had been put aside at Lucca had been cleaned up and brought to Florence, and that in the month of December last an executioner had been appointed, and was at present ready to employ the instrument against the poor Bible readers in that city. A policeman was stationed at the door of every foreign Protestant place of meeting in Tuscany, and if any native of the country entered such a place he was immediately brought to justice. In fact, the people of that country were forced to continue Roman Catholics, or else to submit to the most rigid persecution. But whom did the advocates of the Romish system rely most upon as regarded their expectations in this country? They relied most upon the Puseyites and High Churchmen of England. They did not rely on the barefaced aggressions of Popery only, but they calculated that their work would be best done by those who were spreading Popery through the Church of England itself, by means of the chosen ministers of that Church. He believed that people in this country who did not belong to the Romish connection marked their books with crosses, and doves, and bleeding hearts. Now, these things were the end of the wedge, and ought not to be countenanced. In some of our churches he found the clergymen assimilating themselves as

much as possible, in their dress and ceremonies, to the priests of the Roman Catholic religion. What was the meaning of all that? Surely such things could not tend to the spread of true Protestantism. The week before last he had entered a Protestant place of worship in a large town not fifty miles from London, in order to see, as he had been told that he should see, the minister and the members of the congregation bowing to what was called the altar; and there he had found the minister dressed, with very little exception, in the same manner as a Roman Catholic priest. Let them open their eyes in time; let them not go to sleep upon that matter. Mere talking would not put down Romanism or Puseyism. That could only be done by energetic work. He had not himself sought to become a member of the deputation to Florence, but he would bless God to the end of his life that he had been selected as one of its members. He would never forget their last meeting, and the prayers which had been offered up in three languages. There had first been a prayer in English by Lord Roden, then a prayer in French, and then a prayer in German : and all present had felt the event as a most happy and holy one. He would mention a fact which had recently taken place in Florence, and which showed how unchanged the dark spirit of the Romish Church still continued. A young woman of a distinguished family in that city had returned home from a convent, where she had been educated for some years; and her brother, having observed on a table a letter addressed by her to her confessor, had taken it up without any particular object, and, after having read a few lines, his eyes were riveted on certain words which appeared to him almost diabolical. These words were to the following effect: -'Do you suppose, that after having been under your instruction so many years, I have not been able to deceive my mother?" It appeared that the priest had trained up this young lady to worm out the secrets of her own family, and to find out if the Protestant faith was spreading among its members. How awful was such a circumstance! Another remarkable case had

been mentioned to him. A poor man, who had been a Roman Catholic, had been led by reading the Word of God to become, so to speak, a Protestant, but his wife still continued attached to the faith in which she had been reared. The husband told her not to state in the confessional what were his religious opinions, whereupon she said that the coufessional was like the tomb, which speaketh not. She had made known to her confessor the belief of her husband, and the result was that he had been seized, and the public did not know