every precept of the chapter we have considered. Combining with others like-minded, we know the condition into which they brought France, and how fearful was its succeeding history for a quarter of a century. The reverse of the Apostle's inspired exhortation did not regenerate mankind in a better sense, nor did unaided reason, wrought out by the new lights, present a desirable model for after ages to copy.

But while the horrors of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century were being enacted, there dwelt in a secluded mountain district of Alsace a poor and humble, but remarkably enlightened and loving Christian in the person of Pastor Oberlin.

Few biographies are more beautiful than that which describes his economical, self-denying, laborious, pious care of the rude peasantry who were his charge; and the record of this one man's faithfulness and success in winning over his people to industry, courtesy, and allegiance to Christ in this time of rank infidelity and cruelty throughout France is marvellous. In the very year of Marat's most sanguinary despotism, and of his assassination-1793—it is said of Oberlin, by a visitor there at his home :

During the space of nearly thirty years in which M. Oberlin has been Christian Pastor of this Canton, he has completely changed it. The language is, from an unintelligible patois, altered into pure French; the manners of the people, without degenerating, are civilised; and ignorance is banished, without injuring the simplicity of their character. Many of the women belonging to his parish, trained for the purpose under his paternal care and instruction (and called conductrices), assist him in his occupations. They teach reading, writing, and the elements of geography in the different villages where they reside, and through their medium the children are instructed in many necessary things, but above all have seeds of morality and religion sown in their hearts.

"The excellence of these schools is so well established and appreciated, that girls of the middle ranks are sent to him

from distant parts, and the title of a scholar of Pastor Oberlin is no less than a testimonial of piety, cleverness and gentle manners."

I fear to tax the patience of your readers by extracts from a work well known to many of them, yet I venture on one more :

"During the period of the Revolution, which was at this time agitating the country, and plunging the people into misery and distress, Oberlin was, like the rest of the clergy, deprived of his scanty income.

Soon after its commencement, indeed, it had been agreed by the heads of the parish that a collection of 1,400 francs should be made for him by persons going about from house to house for the purpose, but although their efforts were exercised to the utmost, they could not raise, during the year 1789 more than 1,133 francs, and in the following one not so many as 400. This sum therefore, for two successive years, constituted nearly his sole revenue, for no fees were admitted. My people, he used to say, 'are born, married, and buried, free of expense, at least as far as their clergyman is concerned.'

"At length the reign of terror, which had for the last four years been preparing, by the gradual breaking down of every religious and social tie, raged in all its horror-spreading, like the sirocco of the desert, devastation, famine and dismay.

The Ban de la Roche alone seemed to be an asylum of peace, in the midst of war and carnage.

"Though every kind of worship was interdicted throughout France, and almost all the clergy of Alsace, men of learning (among whom was his elder brother, Professor Oberlin) were imprisoned, Pastor Oberlin was allowed to continue his work of benevolence and instruction unmolested. His house, in fact, became the retreat of many individuals of different religious persuasions, and of distinguished rank, who fled thither under the influence of terror from Strasbourg and its environs, and who always received the most open-hearted and cordial reception, though it endangered his own situation.

"I once,' says a gentleman, who was then residing at Waldbach, 'saw a chief actor of the Revolution in Oberlin's house, and in that atmosphere he seemed to have lost his sanguinary disposition, and to have exchanged the fierceness of the tiger for the gentleness of the lamb.'"

To a Society whose records testify to the preservation of peaceful and unarmed men (trusting in God) in the midst of the warlike Indians of America, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, and in the Irish Rebellion of 1791, the above recital of Oberlin's preservation will be regarded as but another proof of the Divine protection, so often extended to those who have been true to their principles under circumstances in which, to human judgment, destruction seemed inevitable.

I have instanced Oberlin's life as an illustration of the practical working of the 13th of 1st Corinthians, because his biography most remarkably evidences the application of the virtues of the "Charity" depicted therein by the apostle, and exhibits the efficacy of the atmosphere" of Christian love in which Oberlin breathed.

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The other Frenchman I have named, contemporary with the two spoken of, Stephen Grellet, I will adduce as a further illustration of this apostolic teaching.

Who that are old enough to have seen and known him can ever forget him? The high polish of the French ancient noblesse upon the humble-minded Christian Quaker, overflowing with geniality, yet carrying the evidence of simplicity and sincerity in all he said and did. And how he won his way to all hearts personally, and for his Gospel message, with his broken English and quaint loving speeches, hoping that Friends would be pickled in love," in place of " preserved," and tenderly exhorting the little "moutons," as his eye glanced at the children!

Few men have more fully exemplified than he the precepts of this beautiful chapter. The contrasts presented by these three men lead one to think what might be the respective states of human society were

it leavened throughout with the various spirits of which these three are instances.

Imagine all with Marat's spirit. What a cage of tigers would be this world! And how near it in some epochs and countries have mankind arrived. Reverse the picture, and imagine society throughout imbued with the spirit of Oberlin or Grellet, nay, let us ascend far higher, the spirit of Christ, which they but in measure reflected.

War must cease in such a supposition-that great retrograde influence in communities. Drunkenness also, and its various accompaniments; force of every kind, the needs of the prison, the policeman, the infinite guards which society maintains against wrong, the waste of time, of power, of means, in repairing the errors and mischief of the unloving spirit-unloving as regards God and man-would disappear.

One of our ablest geological writers describes the various climates of the earth at different times, under supposed changes of its surface as regards the grouping of land and sea, near the Poles or near the Equator, and he contends that, under certain circumstances, an Arctic climate might extend through what is now the temperate zone, and that under certain other circumstances, the heat of the present torrid zone might be found far northward and southward of its present limits; that thus there might be an extreme winter and extreme summer of our globe. I am not careful to defend the theory; but it illustrates the changes of human society in the diverse conditions, the one in which Divine love rules, the other in which men are grouped under the law of selfishness-God not retained in knowledge, and mankind given up to a reprobate mind.

And how do these considerations of the practical value and beauty of Divine truth appeal to each one of us to let the spirit of genial love, pourtrayed in our chapter, live in his own little sphere!

I will conclude these gleanings with the testimony borne by William Penn to George Fox, showing that in the person of the founder of Quakerism, sharply as he battled for the right, the apostolic "charity" was largely characteristic.

"Civil," Penn says, "beyond all forms of breeding in his behaviour . . . he was of an innocent life-no busybody nor self-seeker, neither touchy nor critical, what fell from him was very inoffensive, if not very edifying. So meek, contented, modest, easy, steady, tender, it was a pleasure to be in his company. He exercised no authority but over evil, and that everywhere and in all, but with love, compassion, and long-suffering. A most merciful man, as ready to forgive, as unapt to take or give an offence. Thousands can truly say he was of an excellent spirit and savour among them, and because thereof, the most excellent spirits loved him with an unfeigned and unfading love."

This also is very much of the 13th of 1st Corinthians in practice, and it may be a part of the secret of the vast ingathering from Fox's mission.

J. H. BARBER.