FACTS, HINTS, GEMS, AND POETRY. The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much perfection. As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges, and so it empowers it. Goodwill makes insight, as one finds his way to the sea by embarking on a river. I have seen scores of people who can silence me, but I seek one who shall make me forget or overcome the frigidities and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter Giotto, Vasari tells us, renewed hearts, because he put more goodness into his heads. To awake in man, and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action, that is the only aim. "Tis cheap and easy to destroy. There is not a joyful boy or an innocent girl buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all the street full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine. The cynic has only to follow their hint with his bitter confirmation and go home with heavier step and premature age. They will themselves quickly enough give the hint he wants to the cold wretch. Which of them has not failed to please where they most wished it? or blundered where they were most ambitious of success? or found themselves awkward or tedious or incapable of study, thought, or heroism, and only hoped by good sense and fidelity to do what they could and pass unblamed? And this witty malefactor makes their little hope less with satire and scepticism, and slackens the springs of endeavour. Yes; this is easy; but to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men. Facts, Hints, Gems, and Poetry. Facts. ICEBERGS. DR. HAYES measured an immense iceberg which had stranded off the little harbour of Tessuissak, to the north of Melville Bay. The square wall which faced toward his base of measurement was 315 feet high, and a fraction over three quarters of a mile long. Being almost square-sided above the sea, the same shape must have extended beneath it; and since, by measurements made two days before, Hayes had dis covered that fresh water ice floating in salt water has above the surface to below it the proportion of one to seven, this crystallized mountain must have gone aground in a depth of nearly half a mile. A rude estimate of its size, made on the spot, gave in cubical contents about 27,000,000,000 of feet, and in weight something likę 2,000,000,000 of tons! Though often dangerous neighbours, the bergs occasionally prove useful auxiliaries to the mariner. From their greater bulk lying below the waterline, they are either drifted along by FACTS, HINTS, GEMS, AND POETRY. the under-current against the wind, or, from their vast dimensions, are not perceptibly influenced even by the strongest gale, but, on the contrary, have the appearance of moving to windward, because every other kind of ice is drifted rapidly past them. Thus, in strong, adverse winds, their broad masses, fronting the storm-like bulwarks, not seldom afford protection to ships moored under their lee. Hints. Better suffer for truth than prosper for falsehood. Repent-The best time is now; the best place is here. The beauty of holiness, like the sun, is seen by its own light. The only way to be permanently safe is to be perpetually holy. The smile of God, and the peace of conscience, will more than counter balance a universe of frowns. If we stand, Christ must be our foundation; if we would be safe, Christ must be our sanctuary. There is no coming to the fair haven of glory without sailing through the narrow straits of repentance. We often omit the good we might do in consequence of thinking about that which it is out of our power to do. What need a child fear, though the house be full of rods, seeing that not one of them can move without the Father's hand. When you send up your prayers, be sure to direct them to the care of the Redeemer, and then they will never miscarry. Christianity has given to truth a dignity independent of time and numbers. It has required that truth should be believed and respected for itself. We have had a great many translations of the Holy Scriptures; the best of all would be their translation into the daily practice of Christian people. Gems. Sanctified afflictions are like so many artificers working on a pious man's crown to make it more bright and massive. This life is like an inn, in which the soul spends a few moments on its journey. To speak truth and to do good is to resemble in some sort the Deity we worship. The heart of a wise man should resemble a mirror, which reflects every object without being sullied by any. Many calumnies are injurious even Like the after they are refuted. Spanish flies, they sting when alive, and blister when dead. Words are little things, but they sometimes strike hard. We wield them so easily that we are apt to forget their hidden power. Fitly spoken, they fall like the sunshine, the dew, and the fertilizing rain; but when unfitly, like the frost, the hail, and the desolating tempest. Youth scatters its affections with a liberal hand, like a young heir, ignorant as yet of the value of his possessions. Some one has said of those that die young, that they are like the lambs which Alpine shepherds bear in their arms to higher, greener pastures, that the mothers of the flock may follow. Poetic Selections. THE MASTER'S PRESENCE. How wash the sacred feet? In them ye have Me still!" Our hands to tender care; POETIC SELECTIONS.-THE CHILDREN'S CORNER. We rather glean Thy harvest We gather from Thy bounty, And when, discrowned and stricken, We deem it highest worship To wash Thy feet with tears. O, ever-present Master! We find, where er we tread, MYSELF. ALL others are outside myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall If I could set aside myself, And start with lightened heart upon God harden me against myself, Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys; The Children's Corner. THE RICHEST BOY. THE papers are writing about a boy now fourteen years old, who is supposed to be the richest boy because he has a deal of money. To our mind the richest boy is the one who is good-hearted, honest, intelligent, ambitious, willing to do right. He is the one who loves his mother, and always has a kind word for her; who loves his sister or sisters, and tries to help them, and regards them with true affection. He is the boy who does not call his father the "old man," but who loves him, speaks kindly to and of him, and tries to help him as the hairs of old age gather fast upon his brow. The richest boy is the one who has pluck to fight his destiny and future. He is the one who has the manhood to do right and be honest, and is striving to be somebody; who is above doing a mean actionwho would not tell a lie to screen himself or betray a friend. He is the boy who has a heart for others; whose young mind is full of noble thoughts for the future, and is determined to win a name by good deeds. This is the richest boy. Which one of our readers is it? This boy we like; we would be glad to see; would like to take by the hand and tell him to go on earnestly, that success might crown his efforts. And if he is a poor boy, we should meet him at the threshold, bid him enter and give him good advice, well and kindly meant. That other rich boy we don't care anything about. MIRACLES AND SCIENCE. MANY a Christian divine would be astonished at the position with which he would have to take up, if he were asked by a Jew to tell him out of the Book of Acts, precisely and exactly how it was that Christian Jews felt themselves authorized to baptize and accept Gentiles as Christians. And many a good Christian, who thinks that he knows all about Providence, would feel himself, as it were, called away into a strange region, if he were asked to explain why God communicated with the Jews through angels, while all the while not a sparrow fell to the ground without His knowledge, nor was there a man even but on his head the hairs were all numbered. If the miracles of the Bible seem incredible to any one, let him bethink himself that he perhaps has never read the Scriptures, for passing the eye over the words is certainly not the same as catching the sense. Many a man has defended the reality of miracles, out of a Bible which was blinded against him by his own unconscious anti-supernaturalism. And many a disbeliever, if he knew the spiritual philosophy involved in the Scriptures, would accept both miracles and doctrine alike, and at once. When the words are read in church, "The word of the Lord came," how few people have ever wondered as to how it came, or as to how Isaiah or Hosea received it! And worse still than this, there are persons who deride the prophets, who yet have never thought, nor inquired, nor even suspected, whether possibly a prophet might not have been an honest man, with some constitutional peculiarity, fitting him for prophecy. And he said, Hear now my words: if there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream." There are many scientific men who would not doubt, for a moment, but that they know proportionately as much about Christianity as they do about science. And yet, out of all their multitude, for one man who could define the nature of prophecy, there must be a thousand utterly ignorant about it, though they know well about chemical affinities as operative on the floor of the ocean, and have curious information as to bivalves, and as to the manner in which flat fish are acted upon by light reflected from below. Miracles incredible as narrated in the Scriptures, it is no MIRACLES AND SCIENCE. wonder that they should have become so, to some persons; because so many connections of probability and credibility have been stripped away from them, or have been at least forgotten. And now for this state of things what is the remedy? It will come not with argument at all, perhaps; nor will it probably result much from any forthcoming information; but it will come with time and the grace of God; and for some persons it may be that it will come in a way not altogether alien to that by which the earliest Christians, on the reappearance of their crucified Lord, were mentally reinstated after their bewilderment. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures." And, indeed, not the Bible only, but even the globe itself, is to a man what simply himself he is ready to have it be. To one man this earth is a heap of dirt in which to work his way; and to the red Indian, uncorrupted, it was a broad hunting-field, on which the Great Spirit showed him favours. To one man it is chiefly of interest as having been once the plaything of natural forces, geologically, the ways of whose gamboling he delights to trace and classify. While in the eyes of another it is like a great egg, with vital powers operative in it and about it, which are instructive to watch. And for still another man, scientifically, it is like a book of common understanding between himself and the Creator. And for still another student of science, the earth, with all its fulness of laws, chemical, dynamic, and vital, is as towards God but "the hiding of His power." And another rarer person still, feels as though continually a voice were calling to him, "The place whereon thou standest is holy ground," because of the heavenly affinities with which the world is wrapped about for believing souls; because of what prayer effects all round the earth; and because of the manner in which the forces of nature concur with spirit for spiritual ends. And to spirits of different orders, it is conceivable that our earth varies still more than it does to the feelings respectively of its own inhabitants. And even of spirits, who have departed from the life of this earth, there is an old philosophy, according to which, for various reasons, one spirit might for a while keep a clear view of the earth and its inhabitants, while another might have lost all sight of it, with his last mortal breath. And it is conceivable, too, that the most familiar spot in this world is what we should not know, if we could look at it through the eyes of a seraph. |