A family of cold hearts and chill intercourse is always an unwelcome scene. But how sad is it to review the homes of an entire continent, and see that, as they pass by, not one exhibits a board garnished with its happy circle; to see every man, like an irrational animal, eating silent and lonely; no daughter by his side, no wife before his eye; to see every wife humbly attending at the beck of her lord, his neglected slave! So it is in India. Perhaps only a week ago that couple became united for life: no matter, this great gulf lies between them. Perhaps they have spent half a century in union: no matter, the ice that parts them may not yield, either before the ardour of youth or the mellowness of age. "What woman would think of eating till her lord had had his fill?” asks the author of the Padma Purâna; and the same authority graciously says, "When he" (the husband) "goes abroad, if he bids her go with him, she shall follow." And follow she does; but accompany, never. The woman who would dare to walk side by side with her lord, would be thought as much out of her place as a fishwoman at a royal drawing-room; and the man who would allow his wife to take his arm, would be universally scouted as a weakling. No, no; she must "follow," and that at a respectful distance. The same vehicle on which the dignified person of her master is borne is forbidden to her, except in case of a very long journey, when necessity steps in to humble pride. (To be continued.)

CORN RIOT IN 1800.

SHALL I ever forget that night at Sheffield, in the latter end of October, 1800? What a dark, dismal evening it was! How low, heavy, and black, hung the leaden clouds, suspended over all that country of iron! We dined at a place called Black Barnsley, upon such iron food as the best inn of the place afforded, in a little, black, gloomy, dirty room, looking upon a grim, narrow, dismal street. After dinner we went on to see Lord Fitzwilliam's fine place, and, as we entered the park, met his lordship, in the uniform of the corps of Fencibles he commanded, galloping out of his park, followed by his orderly. We saw the house, and the beautiful grounds; the groups of deer, the groves of trees, the magnificence, the repose of the scene, undisturbed by what was going on so near it. We then took our way to Sheffield, ignorant of what was before us. I was a child small enough to stand up in front of the carriage then. As we proceeded, mysterious questions were put by the post-boy to the people he met on the road at the turnpikes. "Are they out?" "Which way are they coming?" All agreed "they were out; "but which way they were coming, no one seemed to know. The road lay pleasantly enough at first, through broad highways, between tall hedge-row trees and fruitful fields; but soon we began to enter what seemed to me a pandemonium. Tall, dark, terrible-looking buildings, whose huge chimneys vomited forth torrents of smoke; steam-engines roaring and hissing; blackened walls, blackened houses, blackened people; the dark, lurid, heavy sky; the mysterious terror of-I knew not what-which seemed to fill every one; my little heart was trembling with vague apprehensions. Suddenly, in a large, open court before one of these awful, lofty, black buildings, looming high against the sky, stood a gibbet, a black, inky-black gibbet, and upon it was hanging the body of a man, of the murderer, black as the beam from which he hung. We were so near, I could distinguish his hat, his dress.

It is forty-seven years ago; but I see it as plainly now as I did then. So do I still see those streets of Sheffield, which we soon afterwards entered, filled with a dark, thickening sea of faces, heads of ruffian-like men, shocking-looking women, boys, and children, all squeezed together in a dense, confined mass, shouting, screeching, howling, threatening, as our post-boy, with much precaution, endeavoured to make his way through the swaying, heaving multitude. We turned into the principal street: there sat a detachment of Lord Fitzwilliam's Fencibles, in their scarlet jackets and small compact helmets, immovable as statues, in the midst of the agitated and threatening throng. Further on, the Oxford Blues (I believe they were mounted on heavy black horses) were seen drawn up, wearing large three-cornered hats, with immense cockades of black ribbon, long blue coats turned up with yellow, huge heavy boots and yellow leathers: they sat with an aspect still more imposing, in the same motionless attitude of military discipline; the people surging in thick masses around them, and completely filling the street. The inn-yard into which we drove was filled with these black heavy horses and their awful-looking riders. I have never since seen any regiment which appeared to me to carry so imposing an appearance. I remember now the terror these enormous black horses filled me with, as they pushed up and down close against the carriage. It was getting late, and there was no moon. But I see now the landlady, a pretty, genteel-looking young woman, pressing behind the horses' heels, opening the door of the carriage, and saying that she did not think it safe for ladies and children to stay in the town that night, and recommending us to go on to Chesterfield. Horses were immediately put to the carriage, and, without alighting, we once more drove through the crowd, saluted with oaths and curses, shrieks and howlings, as the carriage made its way along. From Norman's Bridge, or the Modern Midas.

THE STRAIT GATE.

"Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life."

THE gate which leads into the way of life is strait: it is difficult to find. This difficulty arises from a variety of circumstances. The gate is presented in only one place; namely, the Gospel of the grace of God. A man may explore the whole creation, and not find it; he may exhaust the strength of his reasoning powers, and not discover it; he may search out the treasures of human learning, and not know it. This may seem a very obvious truth; and so it is to those who have learned it; but how often do men weary themselves in search of life from the sources now mentioned, in utter ignorance that there it never can be found! But it is not every one that turns to the word of God that finds the strait gate. There are many things in the Scriptures which a man may in some sense know and believe, while he continues to walk in the broad way which leadeth to destruction. He may, for example, know something of the law of God, and say of its precepts, with the young man in the Gospel, "All these have I kept from my youth up." He may be acquainted with the ordinances of religion, and yet, like the Jews, go about to establish his own righteousness, and not submit to the righteousness which is by faith. He may even attain a kind of knowledge of the Gospel, but, like the Galatians, mix with it his works of law, and thereby spoil both it and the law, and make void the grace of God.

But it is possible for an individual to arrive at correct views of the way of salvation by Jesus Christ, so correct as to escape detection by the most keen-sighted and experienced of the servants of God, and yet not find the strait gate. We are called here to deep thoughts of heart. Truth is one, error is many. In this case there are infinite chances that a man shall go wrong, to one that he shall go right. We may be told, that the source of all the difficulties is the blindness and corruption of the human heart: and we most readily admit the fact. But does not this just serve to present the difficulty in a still stronger light than that in which we have exhibited it, and to prove that it requires the interposition of Divine power to guide any man to the strait gate? The Spirit of Christ alone can subdue this perverseness, and pour the light of heavenly truth into our darkened understandings. How many have toiled for years in the deepest anxiety to find the strait gate, and yet did not succeed, till the Lord was pleased by his grace to open their eyes, and in his light to let them see light! The glory of Christ the Saviour can be seen only in the light of the Spirit the Comforter. "He shall receive of mine, and show it unto you."-No. IV. of Free Church Tracts.

REVIEW.

The Congregational Lecture, Twelfth Series. The Revealed Doctrine of Rewards and Punishments. By Richard Winter Hamilton, LL.D., D.D. 8vo. pp. xvi, 555. Jackson and Walford.

THIS volume treats on a deeply-serious subject, and with deep seriousness do we intend to consider it. Referring to what is of universal concernment, it must deserve either this, or abandonment to oblivion. We almost forget the author, in the greatness of his theme. It may be called a political book, as exhibiting the highest polity conceivable, that in which the supreme Lord and Lawgiver is contemplated in connexion with the exercise of the dominion to which he has subjected mankind. In nothing is the exalted position of man on the scale of created being seen more clearly and impressively than in this, that he is a fit and evidently-adapted subject of such an administered rule. It is indubitably the highest point of human nature, towering above all else, and requiring that all else be subordinated to it. It has sometimes been questioned whether the complete idea of that divine image in which Scripture so explicitly declares that man was created, includes his sovereignty over his earthly (and manifest) inferiors, though most assuredly he was created in such direct reference to this, that it governed his original construction, and from the first entered into it; but it is beyond all doubt that the possession of this divine resemblance, most true, however modified by the circumstances of derived and finite being, was absolutely necessary to constitute him the proper subject of a government administered on the principles of such law as, while it declares the divine will, expresses and illustrates the divine nature. In both cases, man is magnified by God. Greatness is exhibited in relationship to creatures as their Sovereign, and still more so in relationship to the Creator as his subjects. It is this which gives to immortality the

awful sublimity which, at every contemplation, it is increasingly seen to possess. It is not that man is to be viewed as an intelligent creature, who, though finite, is capable of infinite expansion and improvement: this is an extremely imperfect aspect of the case; a mere broken-off fragment: he stands before us as an intelligent creature who is a moral agent, subjected to a moral administration of rewards and punishments, for the full scope of which only eternity can find room, and in which the highest greatness and brightest glory of the Godhead are manifested. We have often been astonished that men of extensive erudition, and in some respects, if not profoundly, yet accurately, philosophical, while they profess to see so much that they admire in what they term "natural theology," should turn, with a coolness bordering on contempt, from that which is distinctively termed "revealed." In the skill with which material atoms and masses are arranged and moved, they tell us that they recognise a wisdom which excites their highest astonishment, which almost bewilders them; and which, they sometimes add, brings them to the adoration of the great Being in whom, in connexion with such power and goodness, it resides. The vast system of dispositions and final causes, as displayed in this portion of the universe, they perceive and acknowledge. And this, in its entire cycle, is presented in revelation. But a circumference of far wider sweep is likewise found there, concentrical with it, that centre being the throne of the One Living Jehovah, but extending immeasurably beyond it. It is the government of moral agents, exhibiting, therefore, the moral perfections of the Deity. Do they judge thus in ordinary life? Is material skill everything, and moral character nothing? Does the employer look only at the mechanical ability of his servant, and pretermit all notice of honesty and trust-worthiness? Man's highest properties, those by which he is rendered capable of so much that is lofty and noble even in the exercise of the others, are his moral properties. Abstract these, and the mind of a Newton would not take a position more elevated than that occupied by that accurate, unerring geometrician, the bee. No; it is not that the subject is unworthy of attention, but such is man that it has become distasteful and even repulsive to him. He refuses to feel any interest in inquiries which will issue, as he is inwardly conscious, in the discovery of his own condemnation. And yet, (to employ a colloquial, but significant, phrase,) does it not "stand to reason," that the moral government of God, in its actual administration, should furnish at once the worthiest and the most useful study for beings, in whose moral faculties are found their most distinguishing characteristics, their most elevated powers? By the omission of this study, the emotions and affections of our nature remain destitute of their most valuable influence. In so far as it suffers under this omission, the heart becomes, in the profoundly true as well as energetic language of Scripture, "fallow ground," "barren and unfruitful." The highest beauty is moral beauty; the highest grandeur, moral grandeur. The ideas of moral truth, moral rectitude, moral usefulness, immeasurably transcend those which have only material forms for their occasion and object. Nor does it less "stand to reason," however undiscoverable by finite research, that should there be a divine scheme of redemption for those who have fallen under the fearful condemnation of law, it will display all that is glorious in the divine character. It will be the solution of the greatest problem to which the faculties of a rational creature can be applied; a solution by the unaided faculties unattainable, but which, as revealed, both commands their admiration, perinits and enables us to

explore depths of Deity on which even the creation of the universe had cast no light, renders the most awful perfections attractive, and combines them with the most lovely in still brighter manifestations of loveliness, before the splendour of which even angelic nature veils itself, and bows in adoration. Moral power is the very noblest form of power, as delivering from the greatest evil, and elevating to the greatest good. And thus is it that in the sanctuary is seen the beauty of the Lord;" that there he "hath made bare his holy arm;" so that "Christ" is not only "the wisdom of God," but "the power of God."

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And this last expression, especially when taken in connexion with the well-known and profoundly-significant declaration of St. Paul, that "the Gospel," under this very character, that it contains the revelation of “the righteousness of God," is "the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believeth," suggests an additional reason for lamenting the neglect -not to say, the contempt, though its existence is only too much to be feared-to which we now refer. The philosophy which professedly refers to human practice, will always be limited and defective, frequently erring and even dangerous, if it refuses to become an obedient scholar in this school of heavenly wisdom. And most especially will this be the case in all that relates to human jurisprudence, whether in general government or legislation. They who refuse to attend to the objects, methods, and rules of the divine administration, can never either understand the true principles of human policy, or produce any practical good by those which they adopt in the place of them. In our own day, the maxim that "politics have nothing to do with religion,” as it has been sometimes applied, has been productive of enormous mischief. Neglecting, and even despising, the Gospel, the progress of many statesmen has been from blunder to fault, and from fault to blunder. Their whole care seems to be to devise plausible expedients, only to be designated by the phrase which was so great a favourite with Bolingbroke, and which the South-Sea scheme, and its wide-spread ruin, afterwards made so notorious. We are no more fond of magnifying the "wisdom of our ancestors," than we are of depreciating it. They made many mistakes, but they did many great things; and while their errors may often be imputed to the times in which they lived, their excellencies will mostly be found to have had their origin in a correct acquaintance with religious truth. Even they who talk with Clarendon of the great Rebellion, and never speak of Oliver Cromwell but as a hypocrite and usurper, are obliged to confess that our Civil Wars were far different from those of the French Revolution, and that the Commonwealth Protector was in no respect the counterpart of the First Consul and Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. The true science of government, or the science of good government,-they are equivalent phrases,—will never be understood by those who are too proud to study the Gospel. How should they know the proper methods of governing men, who refuse to see how God himself governs them? Can they successfully legislate for men, who know not the laws which God has with perfect wisdom devised, and with fulness of authority established? Can the welfare of society be promoted by those who neither know in what it really consists, nor by what means Omnipotence has appointed that it should be secured? None are really wise for earth, who are not wise for heaven; and they alone are thus wise for heaven and earth, who are taught of God, and who delight to learn those lessons which the Gospel teaches and illustrates.

To these great subjects Dr. Hamilton calls our attention, and that in a