sinful worms of earth rest thankfully contented. The angels are ministering spirits; and their Master and ours came also "to minister." It is well to note these things: men are apt to adopt, without sufficient consideration, the notions of those who have perhaps borrowed from preceding writers, and amongst them framed systems in which the plain word of Scripture is less prominent than are their own glosses upon it.

But whatever discoveries are reserved for the period when we shall know even as we are known, the present is a time to make use of what God has distinctly I declared to us. We are in the world; in that field where the devil is now plentifully sowing, and carefully fostering his tares, for the twofold purpose of diminishing the Lord's harvest, and heaping up fuel for the unquenchable flames, in which the only solace of his own torments will be the sight of myriads suffering with him. His great seed-time is while men sleep they will awake but to find the strong hands of God's angels binding the weeds for their final doom. This is a solemn thought for those who are appointed to watch the field; for kings, and persons in authority; for bishops, and ministers of religion ; for parents, and the heads of every household; for all, in fact, to whom is committed the oversight of any fellow-creature. When they slumber at their posts, the enemy steals along, and injures their master's property, for which they must give account to him.

Another point where Satan must be met and resisted is chiefly personal; each individual must look to himself. The seed of the word being sown by the

great Husbandman, the devil is sure to come and endeavour to take it away, ere it can sink and be rooted in their hearts. He knows how needful is prayer, with meditation, to render effectual that precious seed; and by a multitude of devices, he will seek to divert the mind from such indispensable exercise. In this quarter the angels cannot oppose him; they are not authorized to interfere, nor permitted to bear a part in the mighty work of man's regeneration, conversion, sanctification: there God alone operates. Jesus is the author and the finisher, and only on him can the soul lean for help against the mighty. The wisest and most faithful of God's servants cannot always discern a blade of wheat from a tare: they are told both must grow together until the harvest; lest in attempting to root out the weeds they pull up the good plants also; the reapers, with whom is discernment for the task, will come forth at the appointed time, and effect the separation, but though they can gather in the whole harvest without letting fall a single ripe grain, still they have nothing to do with the seed-time, or with the secret growth of the plant. They cannot hinder the choking of the word by worldly cares and pleasures; they cannot cause that to take root which falls where no depth of spiritual susceptibility exists; they cannot wrest from Satan's grasp what he has snatched away from the heedless hearer; nor can they impart fertility to the heart of man, that it should so receive and retain as to bring forth fruit. So wonderfully has our gracious Lord guarded this and every other doctrine from abuse, that no humble,

believing hearer need fear for a moment to be led into error by conceding to the subject of these imperfect pages that prominence to which it is entitled, as occupying a very important place in the revelations of God.

We sometimes have the counsel gravely given to leave these things to learned men as being too high for simple minds. The seventy disciples whom our Lord sent forth, we are told, returned to him with joy, because even the very devils were subject unto them through his name. They were simple, unlearned people, who, fully believing all that he had said, instead of setting down to hold a learned disquisition on the nature of evil spirits, went and acted upon what he told them, commanding the devils in his name. He answers their glad communication by telling them that he beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven; he invested them with unlimited control over "all the power of the enemy," and, after cautioning them not to rejoice so much in this supernatural gift as in the knowledge that their own names were written in heaven, "In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight." Luke x. 21. With this encouragement before us, with a perfect consciousness of being a mere babe in worldly wisdom and worldly prudence, and simply believing that every word spoken of God is true, we have fulfilled our task; may it be as profitable to the soul of the reader,

as the writer feels it has been to her own, while with the Bible, and nothing but the Bible, to guide her, she has endeavoured to trace the outlines of what can never be perfectly filled up, until the veil of mortality is withdrawn, which now withholds our eyes from contemplating in all its wondrous details, the mysterious world of spirits.

CONCLUSION.

"WATCH."

"DELIVER us from the evil one," is the prayer which our Lord has instructed us to put up; and it is much to be regretted, that we are accustomed to use a different form of expression, calculated to withdraw our attention from the great personal adversary, and to present to our minds a vague notion of evil in general. Whatever isolates man, separating between him and the rest of God's creation, is inimical to his best interests. He looks on the inferior animals, and forgetting in how many respects their natural sensibilities resemble his own, he becomes their cruel oppressor. He dooms them to protracted hunger and thirst; he overworks them, until every sinew of their exhausted frames is wrung by the anguish of intolerable fatigue; he breaks the endearing ties by which the Lord of all has seen good to sweeten their humble existence; and standing on a haughty eminence of superior intellect and conscious immortality, he degrades some of the most marvelous of God's works, using them as mere tools for the supply of his artificial wants, the gratification of his avaricious propensities; until the whole