sharp stroke of the voice. Speak with strong inflections; and be sure that the waves of voice at the end of assertions are downward, not upward. Let there be vivacity and sparkle in the voice. Make the voice glad when the thought is so. Be pathetic in manner only when you are uttering pathetic thoughts. When the thought is solemn and impressive force the voice down on a monotone, and do not permit it weakly to effuse itself in semitones. In a word, let your matter dictate your

manner.

Our Young People.

BY REV. T. FELTON FALKNER, M.A.

To the pastor of a flock zealous for his Master's cause, mindful of his Master's charge, must come full often, and at times with terrible intensity, the sense of his responsibility as to the younger members of the community over which he has in God's providence been placed. No lovelier task (and none, be it told, more difficult) is there among the sacred duties of the Christian pastor than that of teaching Christ's little ones, of directing the course of home teaching, of superintending that of the Sunday-school and the Bible class, of planting in young and receptive minds the seed of the Word which is able to make them wise unto salvation. Sacred task, and yet how fraught with difficulty! In these days, when children, precocious beyond their years, know more of evil at nine or ten than their grandfathers did at nineteen or twenty-the devil-sown crop of worldliness and sin soon goes far toward choking the good seed sown with such anxious and prayerful solicitude-surely we may well tremble for our sons and daughters.

It is not, however, so much during the period of their stay under parental control, or under tutors and governors, that our anxiety is at its height; so long as the character-forming is allowed to go on in the midst of a pure, refined, cultured circle whose atmosphere is

charged with a spirituality itself heavenborn, all is well. But it cannot ever be thus. The time must come, in most homes at least, when the young plants must be moved away to bloom and thrive and fruit elsewhere, to be a blessing or a curse in a locality other than that which gave them birth. Then comes the test; then the trial of their grounding in the faith; then alike the hopes and the fears of those who trained them; then, most of all, the putting forward of earnest prayer that God's ever-watchful eye may be upon them, that He may never leave them nor forsake them.

How much, may we not fear, do the terrible proneness of our younger brothers to fall, the appalling aptitude of our sons and our pupils to succumb to the influences of moral corruptors and of atheistic reasoners, not owe firstly to our neglect of enforcing the fundamental principles of our Christian faith, and secondly, to our well-nigh universal custom of losing sight of those whom we have taught from their earliest days directly duty or the force of circumstances removes them from our midst !

To the former of these duties, the neglect of which is most assuredly so disastrous to the future of our sons and daughters, it should not be necessary to refer; but the fact that there is, beyond dispute, an inability among the rising generation, who stand, as it were, upon the threshold of citizenship in our towns and of the government of our country, to give a solid reason for the faith that is in them, tends to direct our thoughts seriously to the question of the religious education of the young. Why is it that in these days, when the light of revealed truth shines out more brightly than ever, our young men are so ready to follow the ignis fatui of free thought, positivism, and the like, until they flounder and perish in the dank morass of utter hopelessness? Surely there must have been something faulty, terribly faulty, in the teaching of either parents or pastors, or possibly

of both! The good seed is, we know, ever the same; but the soil is more or less congenial in proportion to the care and preparation bestowed upon it; and it cannot be denied that in many, very many cases the home cultivation is sadly neglected. So it would seem that it is largely to the want of prayerful training on the part of mothers and fathers (more almost than on that of pastors and teachers) that the carelessness as to religion and want of stability, even when religion is professed, are to be attributed. To parents the souls of their little ones cry aloud for that which they, if not alone, at any rate best, can teach them; that preparing of the young heart for a reception of Divine truth such as may ensure its springing up and yielding, through a life of useful devotion to God's service, fruitsome thirty, some sixty, some an hundred-fold.

True it is that precepts of ordinary morality and the duty of religious performance are impressed upon our young people in many cases; but how are they impressed? on what grounds are they taught? Are they not based rather upon the requirements (exacting enough at times) of custom and respectability than upon obedience to and affection for

a

faithful Creator," who is also a loving Father? Do we, in teaching children how to refuse the evil and choose the good, teach them to make their selection according to the standard of God's law and the still small voice of conscience, or by the false standard of this world's usage and the uncertain rule of expediency? When we tell them that to steal is wicked and wrong, do we tell them, further, that it is so because it is a sin against God, and not merely because it risks detection, punishment, and disgrace? When they learn from us that it is disgraceful to lie, it is a part also of the lesson that it is disgraceful because it is a dishonor done to the God of Truth, and not only, or chiefly because it is ungentlemanly and perils the reputation for integrity and honor?

Or, again, the performance of relig ious duties; on what do we base our obligations here? Do we take or send our children to a place of worship for custom's sake, or in obedience to a Divine command, "Ye shall keep My Sabbath and reverence My sanctuary"? In all these things its teaching is useless and fruitless unless the lesson be based on religious and not on worldly grounds. It is the house founded upon the rock, the Master tells us, that stands when tempests rage, while that upon the shifting, uncertain sand totters, sways, and falls; and so surely these excellent precepts implanted by every wise parent in the hearts of his children must be deep set on that foundation other than which can no man lay, which is Jesus Christ, "if they are intended to stand foursquare to every wind that blows," to withstand every storm that they may have to encounter in this world.

But given a youth of godly parentage, educated in the fear of the Lord, sent forth from the home of his childhood and the seat of his early education to fight life's battle amid the din and confusion of some vast city, or scenes hitherto by him undreamed of, what can be done for him? Doubtless he goes forth accompanied by sincere wishes for his preservation from evil and for his prosperity in life, and prayers are offered up to the throne of God on his behalf; but can nothing else be done? It seems to me that when a lad slips his cable and leaves the safe anchorage of his own home, that the agent should advise some one at the port whither this fair craft, with a full cargo of human hopes and fears, of passions and caprices and weaknesses, and an immortal soul, is bound, that he may watch his interests on arrival. Here, I submit, we grievously fail in our duty toward our youths, and herein, to a greater extent than we are apt to think, we suffer loss in our Church, and permit (or, I should say, cause) those who should prove pillars of it to be but tottering supports to the outside of the

fabric, if they be not loose timbers, unsound and fruitful of decay.

There are yearly poured into the great workshops of the world thousands and tens of thousands of young men full of physical strength, of ambition, of enthusiasm. They find their way into our large merchant's offices, banks, counting-houses, and stores, or go to swell the number of our soldiers and sailors, artisans and laborers, there to come in contact with others senior to them in age and in wickedness, who will soon find and take opportunity to present to them sins hitherto unknown in a guise subtle and attractive. Friends these lads have not in this new sphere -save those they make for themselves -no kind adviser; "no man like minded who will naturally care" for their state; and what wonder if a false step (c'est le premier pas qui conte) be made, so false as to make it difficult if not impossible to recover? In these days of church organizations, societies, guilds, brotherhoods, etc., for binding together Christians of all sorts, it might be made well nigh impossible for a lad or youth to be lost sight of. Every member of a congregation is known (surely we may assume that) to the pastor or minister, and it should be a point of honor with those who are responsible to the Great Shepherd not to let one of His flock depart to any other congre gation or place without sending after him or with him a letter of recommendation to some Christian worker in that congregation or place, who would, for Christ's sake, befriend the stranger on his arrival, so that no lad could say, as many, alas! have said and still are saying, "No man careth for my soul." Of the prevalence of this neglect there is ample proof. The writer has had spiritual charge of a place through which pass annually some eight hundred young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. These youths remain in the place for about six months, previous to going to their duties, during which time they are undergoing a strict training which taxes

their powers of endurance, both moral and physical. Drawn from all parts, leaving, in most cases, comfortable homes, coming to enter upon a life full of danger to body and soul, they would, one would think, be objects of solici tude to those among whom they had grown up-sufficiently so, at least, to ensure a line being sent to the clergyman to enlist his sympathies and secure for them a warm welcome; but no! In only a very few cases was this donenot for one in a hundred! And as I came to know them all, I found how lamentable had been the neglect in those very points to which I have alluded, of these souls for which Christ died; how many of them had never been under religious influences at all, never having learned the simplest rudiments of Christianity.

I am led to think that this is not an unfair criterion of the condition of the young men of to-day; and what, if it be not altered, will be the end of it?

I stand sometimes at the gates of a vast factory, whence, just at closing time, there pours forth a stream of boys and men of all ages between fourteen and sixty, and I wonder how they stand -not on the muster-roll of their employers, but on the books of the Great King, and if in them marked "indifferent" or "bad," how far the fault is their own and how far that of those who were responsible for their early training.

Brothers, pastors, and parents, let us look to it. Babes in Christ are crying to us for the sincere milk of the Word; our youths must graduate in the school of the Holy Spirit of God, and it behooves us to see that they are supplied with that which shall "stablish, strengthen, settle" them. The pros

and

perity of nations depends upon it; much remains to be done, done by the parent, done by the school, done by the college, done by the Church. All honor and praise to young men's societies, classes, guilds, brotherhoods, and institutes for good work already done; but to produce a perceptible result existing

agencies must be multiplied forty-fold to carry on the work initiated in the home and the Sunday-school.

Some Historic Facts on Liturgics.

BY PROFESSOR E. J. WOLF, D.D., GETTYSBURG, PA.

HAVING read with much interest Professor Painter's admirable paper on “Liturgics" in the November REVIEW, I beg leave to correct a false impression which a few lines in that paper are calculated to make upon some readers. "Historically considered," the Professor says, "worship will be found to have lost in spirituality as it gained in claborateness of ceremonial." And, again, "The world will never be converted by fixed forms of prayer nor by the men that habitually use them.” He thus reaffirms an outworn assumption that spirituality and missionary zeal are inconsistent with prescribed forms, giving to our Quaker brethren the palm both for earnest piety and missionary activity. It is not an unheard-of thing for men to find "historically considered" results that are in direct opposition to each other. Liturgics offer, it seems, an instance of this. The third century is usually and correctly credited with the elaboration of the primitive forms of worship. And this is interpreted by those who are adverse to "forms" as a proof of the invasion of worldliness. But the Church of the third century happens to have been the martyr Church, offering its worship amid the fires of persecution, thousands of its members sealing their world-conquering faith by their blood. It hardly becomes the men of this worldly generation to call into question the spirituality of the martyrs who did undeniably elaborate the ritual of public worship. Even the claim commonly made that the Reformation was largely or mainly a revolt against the Romish ritual and a simplification of forms, is not sustained by history. The Reformation

was a revolt against error in dogma; error which, it is true, had embodied and intrenched itself in forms; but both the German and the English reformers were content with the exclusion of the forms which contained such error. Luther, who is so often quoted as favoring extreme simplicity, writes, in 1541, "God be praised, that our churches are so constituted with regard to the adiaphora that a foreigner from Spain or some other country, if he saw our service, choir, etc., would have to say that it was quite a papistic church, and that there was no difference, or, at least, very little from what is in vogue among themselves."

One of the most pronounced ritualists since the Reformation was John Wesley. It was his High Church notions" and strict enforcement of ritual which involved him in serious trouble in Georgia. Is the founder of Methodism, then, to be charged with a lack of spirituality and with indifference to the conversion of the world?

The Tractarian movement at an early stage developed into extreme ritualism, and its adherents were stigmatized as Ritualists. We who claim to be thoroughly evangelical may allow no commendation for that movement in the Church of England; but every historian knows that "it has excited a vast churchly activity in every direction; and there is now more life and energy in the Church of England than ever before." And whatever criticism or ridicule we may direct against the ritualists in the Episcopal communion of this country, no one having personal knowledge of them or of their works will charge them with the absence of spirituality or with indifference to missions.

Professor Painter must certainly know what element in the last century made war upon the liturgy in Germany,

Romanizing tendencies, have done more for the revival of Evangelical Christianity in Germany and for its diffusion by

missionary enterprise than any other class that has arisen in the Fatherland for fifty years.

"Perplexed."

IN the October number of the REVIEW “T. M. S." says he is "perplexed" about an apparent historical discrepancy in reference to the length of the sojourn of the children of Israel in the land of bondage and the time of their affliction. Upon a question that has puzzled so many great scholars it may seem bold in a plain pastor to attempt an explanation; but the matter may not be quite so difficult as it ap pears on the surface.

The apostle, in Gal. iii. 17, says that the law was given four hundred and thirty years after the promise was given. This agrees with the statement given in Ex. xii. 40 that the nation came out of bondage four hundred and thirty years after its history had begun in its founder and father, Abraham. A careful reading of this verse will show that it is not here stated that the length of bondage in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years, but that the length of their sojourning was four hundred and thirty years. In other words, we are told that it was four hundred and thirty years from the time that Abraham, in accordance with the call of Jehovah, came a stranger into the land of Canaan, to the time when his posterity, the chosen and promised seed, came out of the bondage of Egypt. The Septuagint rendering of this verse confirms this interpretation, and with this understanding of the passage there is no contradiction between the statement of the apostle and that made in Exodus. The period of affliction is given as four hundred years in Gen. xv. 13-that is, the years in which the posterity of Abraham should be afflicted. Now we fall into error at

once by supposing that this period of affliction is meant to cover only the time when Israel was in Egypt. That time was two hundred and fifteen years. Hence the period of affliction must cover more than that, and the writer of Genesis tells us that this period embraces the whole history of Abraham's posterity from the birth of Isaac to the escape from Egypt, four generations, or a period of four hundred years. If we accept this interpretation, which seems a reasonable one, the apparent contradiction vanishes, and we find that both the apostle and the historical writer of Israel's career are one in their statements, and our difficulty is gone. We get into difficulty only when we try to read into the statement in Ex. xii. 40 what is not stated there-i.e., that Israel sojourned in Egypt four hundred and thirty years, when it is simply said that the days of their sojourn as a called people, beginning with Abraham, up to the flight from Egypt, were four hundred and thirty years: or, when we interpret the days of affliction as simply the time during which they were in Egypt, when in reality it includes the whole period from the birth of Isaac, the period in Egypt being not simply affliction, but bondage, when they "served them." G. W. RIGLER.