GOD'S CARE FOR THE SMALL AS WELL AS FOR THE ABOUT the time of the invention of the telescope, another instrument was formed which laid open a scene no less wonderful. This was the microscope. The one leads me to see a system in every star. The other leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught me that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people and of its countries, is but a grain of sand on the high field of immensity. The other teaches me that every grain of sand may harbour within it the tribes and the families of a busy population. The one told me of the insignificance of the world I tread upon. The other redeems it from all its insignificance; for it tells me that in the leaves of every forest, and in the flowers of every garden, and in the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds teeming with life, and numberless as are the glories of the firmament. The one has suggested to me that beyond and above all that is visible to man, there may lie fields of creation which sweep immeasurably along, and carry the impress of the Almighty's hand to the remotest scenes of the universe. The other suggests to me, that within and beneath all that minuteness which the aided eye of man has been able to explore, there may lie a region of invisibles; and that could we draw aside the mysterious curtain which shrouds it from our senses, we might there see a theatre of as many wonders as astronomy has unfolded, a universe within the compass of a point so small as to elude all the powers of the microscope, but where the wonder-working God finds room for the exercise of all His attributes, where He can raise another mechanism of worlds, and fill and animate them all with the evidences of His glory. By the telescope we have discovered that no magnitude, however vast, is beyond the grasp of the Divinity. But by the microscope we have also discovered that no minuteness, however shrunk from the notice of the human eye, is beneath the condescension of His regard. Every addition to the powers of the one instrument extends the limit of His visible dominions. But by every addition to the powers of the other instrument, we see each part of them more crowded than before with the wonders of His unwearying hand. The one is constantly widening the circle of His territory. The other is as constantly filling up its separate portions with all that is rich and various and exquisite. In a word, by the one I am told that the Almighty is now at work in regions more distant than geometry has ever measured, and among worlds more manifold than numbers have ever reached. But by the other I am also told, that with a mind to comprehend the whole, in the vast compass of its generality, He has also a mind to concentrate a close and a separate attention on each and on all of its particulars; and that the same God who sends forth an upholding influence among the orbs and the movements of astronomy, can fill the recesses of every single atom with the intimacy of His presence, and travel in all the greatness of His unimpaired attributes, upon every one spot and corner of the universe He has formed. They, therefore, who think that God will not put forth such a power, and such a goodness, and such a condescension in behalf of this world, as are ascribed to Him in the New Testament, because He has so many other worlds to attend to, think of Him as a man. They confine their view to the informations of the telescope, and forget altogether the informations of the other instrument. They only find room in their minds for His one attribute of a large and general superintendence, and keep out of their remembrance the equally impressive proofs we have of His other attribute, of a minute and multiplied attention to all that diversity of operations where it is He that worketh all in all. And when I think that as one of the instruments of philosophy has heightened our every impression of the first of these attributes, so another instrument has no less heightened our impression of the second of them—then I can no longer resist the conclusion, that it would be a transgression of sound argument, as well as a daring of impiety, to draw a limit around the doings of this unsearchable God-and should a professed revelation from Heaven tell me of an act of condescension in behalf of some separate world, so wonderful that angels desired to look into it, and the Eternal Son had to move from His seat of glory to carry it into accomplishment, all I ask is the evidence of such a revelation; for let it tell me as much as it may of God letting himself down for the benefit of one single province of His dominions, this is no more than what I see lying scattered in numberless examples before me, and running through the whole line of my recollections, and meeting me in every walk of observa tion to which I can betake myself; and now that the microscope has unveiled the wonders of another region, I see strewed around me, with a profusion which baffles my every attempt to comprehend it, the evidence that there is no one portion of the universe of God too minute for His notice or too humble for the visitations of His care. TRACES OF OCEAN.-(HUGH MILLER.) WAS it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighbouring wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began where has it not been uttered! There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals-shells and fish, and the stony coral-that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air; where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The elegies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mist-wreath ; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been-the devourer of continents, the blue foaming dragon--whose vocation it is to eat up the land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion; and his nummulites and fish lie imbedded in great stones of the pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths to awaken no more, and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to roll its waves, every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, "when the fountains of the great deep were broken up," "A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe." Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognised, that we are so expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the renovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and eternal, that "there shall be no more sea?" or are we to regard the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic, the pictured shape, of some analogous moral truth?"Reasoning from what we know,”—and what else remains to us !-an earth without a sea would be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without life-a dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the telescope reveals to us in the moon. And yet the Ocean does seem peculiarly a creature of time, of all the great agents of vicissitude and change the most influential and untiring; and to a state in which there shall be no vicissitude and no change, in which the earthquake shall not heave from beneath, nor the mountains wear down and the continents melt away, it seems inevitably necessary that there should be " no THERE is no art or science that is too difficult for industry to attain to; it is the gift of tongues, and makes a man understood and valued in all countries and by all nations; it is the philosopher's stone that turns all metals, and even stones, into gold, and suffers not want to break into its dwelling; it is the north-west passage, that brings the merchant's ship as soon to him as he can desire. In a word, it conquers all enemies, and makes fortune itself pay contribution. ENERGY (SIR T. F. BUXTON.) THE longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great A pur and the insignificant, is energy, invincible determination. pose once fixed, and then death or victory. That quality will do anything that can be done in this world; and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities, will make a two-legged animal a man without it. ON FAME. (OLIVER GOLDSMITH.) AN alehouse keeper near Islington, who had long lived at the sign of the French King, upon the commencement of the last war with France, pulled down his old sign and put up the Queen of Hungary. Under the influence of her red face and golden sceptre, he continued to sell ale till she was no longer the favourite of his customers; he changed her, therefore, some time ago, for the King of Prussia, who may probably be changed in turn for the next great man that shall be set up for vulgar admiration. I must own I have such an indifferent opinion of the vulgar, that I am ever led to suspect that merit which raises their shout; at least I am certain to find those great, and sometimes good men, who find satisfaction in such acclamations, made worse by it; and history has too frequently taught me that the head which has grown this day giddy with the roar of the million, has the very next been fixed upon a pole. As Alexander VI. was entering a little town in the neighbourhood of Rome, which had been just evacuated by the enemy, he perceived the townsmen busy in the market-place in pulling down from a gibbet a figure which had been designed to represent himself. There were also some knocking down a neighbouring statue of one of the Orsini family, with whom he was at war, in order to put Alexander's effigy, when taken down, in its place. It is possible a man who knew less of the world would have condemned the adulation of these barefaced flatterers; but Alexander seemed pleased at their zeal, and turning to Borgia his son, he said with a smile, "You see, my son, the small difference between a gibbet and a statue." If the great could be taught any lesson, this might serve to teach them upon how weak a foundation their glory stands which is built upon popular applause; for, as such praise what seems like merit, they as quickly condemn what has only the appearance of guilt. Popular glory is a perfect coquette; her lovers must toil, feel Y |