Charlotte Williams-Wynn." BY THE REV. G. W. M'CREE. THE father of Miss Wynn, the subject of this profoundly interesting book, was the friend of Bishop Heber, Southey, Hallam, and Mackintosh; and she herself was the friend of Thomas Carlyle, Baron Bunsen, and the Rev. M. Maurice. A highly intellectual woman, overflowing with sense and goodness, independent, and noble in every action and word, her Memorials are full of fine and beautiful impulse, and worth a thousand novels. Some of her letters contain fragrant matter for Nonconformists, as witness this sketch of THE FAMOUS DR. HOOK. "At the head of them comes one of the first theologians of the day-Dr. Hook, a very reasonable, delightful man, who is the clergyman of Leeds, and there devotes his whole time to instructing and visiting the poor; through which he possesses an influence which is quite extraordinary. The great church, which was never half-filled, is now not large enough for the crowds who throng to hear him; and the other day he brought over to the Church of England, at once, a body of four hundred dissenters, with their minister at their head. Do not imagine I bring this forward as a proof of his excellence, or that I think such a flock of sheep are much worth having, as they will probably walk out of the church as suddenly as they walked in: but it shows the position he holds." We admire this about HERESY HUNTERS. "I am convinced there are a set of men in the world who answer to that race of dogs who hunt truffles. It is quite curious to see how, in a wood, one of them will rush at once to some particular tree, and hunt off the truffles that are to be found in the ground underneath it; and equally astonishing is it, to see how these men are always sniffling at, aud picking at, some hidden heresy in a book, which common eyes and readers never discover, and like the dogs too -they trouble themselves with nothing but the heresy, and look neither to the right nor to the left. They are made to perform that one duty, and they do it." Here is her view of LONGING FOR DEATH. "I think it is wrong to lay too great a stress upon a longing for death being a certain proof of a good life and of a Christian state of mind. It is a pity that the tone from the pulpit is invariably that men dread death, for I do not believe that it is true. You may have an intellectual desire to die, or rather a longing prompted by the intellect, merely the natural result of the limits and shadows by which it is here confined. Is this meritorious? The same spirit that makes the child, after admiring the toy, desire to pull it to bits, in order to discover how it is put together, accompanies us through life; and after wondering at the machinery around one, and spending many a year in vainly trying to find out why and how it acts, is it astonishing that we long at last to get into the engine-room?” There are many notices of famous preachers in this interesting volume, and not the least interesting is Miss Wynn's sketch of DEAN STANLEY'S SERMON ON LORD PALMERSTON. "I did hear Stanley's funeral sermon at the Abbey. It was most clever, and the preacher's beginning by saying he should entirely dismiss the religious * Memorials edited by her Sister. Published by Longmans. aspect, was a master stroke, for it left him free to dwell on the social aspect alone. One could not help honouring him for his love of truth; but I think it was a mistake. So heathen a discourse I could not have imagined. Socrates would have spoken more of God, and from that pulpit it was quite out of place, and left one cold and uninterested, though the advice to the young men was very fine. It seemed to me, also, that it was quite unnecessary to make so marked an omission of what is usually the ground-work of a funeral sermon. The extreme reticence that Lord Palmerston observed in speaking of any religious convictions belonged very much to his standing. Now, every man's religion is to be discussed and inquired into by his neighbour; but thirty years ago no one ventured on it. I remember, with my own father, who was a very religious man, and brought up in a wholly different school, how he shrank from any talk upon topics that are now discussed (with thorough earnestness, one must say) at a morning visit! To him the present license on such matters would have been unbearable, and irreverent in the extreme; and therefore I have much sympathy with those of a former age who could not bear to 'wear their hearts upon their sleeve for daws to peck at.' So I end by saying that if the preacher felt, with his paramount love of truth, that he could not take this into account, I wish he had declined to preach at all." We cordially commend this charming book to all our lady readers as a model life of a model woman. The Parable of the Earth-orm. FOR some time past I have been watching the burrows made in my garden by certain little creatures known as earth-worms; and I have noticed that as birds carry twigs and leaves of trees to make their nests, so worms come up from their tubular dwellings in the subsoil, inspect the country in the immediate neighbourhood, and collect all the food they can in the shape of leaves, twigs, etc., place them near the door of their homes, then roll them up and draw them down the tube, where they soon get steeped with moisture, and form a savoury dish for their next meal. The meal over, and the nutritive matter extracted from the earth, leaves, etc., the worms come back and deposit the non-nutritious portions in little heaps around their homes,-heaps which, in the course of years, form a terrace of soil exactly adapted to the growth of plants. In this way the "VEGETABLE MOULD" which forms a covering of several inches deep on the surface of all productive land has been produced; therefore we owe to the constant activity of the common Earth-worm (the Lumbricus) one of the chief feeders of the vegetable life of the world. Von Hensen, a German, calculates that one worm weighs forty-six grains, and manufactures eight grains of matter every twenty-four hours. There are 34,000 of these worms within an acre of ground; and they pass through their bodies and reduce to a fine state of division thirty-seven pounds of mould in twenty-four hours. Darwin cites a case in the proceedings of the Geological Society for 1837 in which a field covered with burnt marl and cinders received a four inch layer of soil in fifteen years; the marl and the cinders being buried underneath. Thus "the agriculturalist in ploughing the ground follows a method strictly natural; and he only imitates in a rude manner, without being able to bring the pebbles or to sift the fine from the coarse soil, the work which nature is daily performing by the agency of the earth-worm." One worm does but little, but it does its share; it adds to the mass; the work of the earth-worm community distributes the mould evenly and uniformly over the earth, tunnels a thousand ways in the subsoil for the roots of plants, and renders that subsoil more nutritive. Who shall despise the feeblest worker! The vegetable world owes its beauty, its fragrance, its shade and fruitfulness, to the despised and crawling worm. There is no measure to the issues of constant activity in obedience to the laws of our being, Each man at his work and always at it, is the parable of the Earth-Worm. JOHN CLIFFORD. Signals for Preachers. MR. SPURGEON'S METHOD-BY DR. HOLME. IT is not his manner to spin his web out of himself. The resources from which he draws are not measured by the strength and the store of his own faculties, but rather by the infinite fulness of the Divine Word. He never preaches from a topic. He always has a text. His text is not a mere motto, but in it he finds his sermon. He uses his text with as much apparent reverence and appreciation as if those few words were the only words that God had ever spoken. The text is the germ which furnishes the life-the spirit and the substance of the discourse. Every sermon has the peculiar flavour and fragrance and colour of the Divine seed truth of which it is the growth. Thus, as the Bible is a storehouse of seed truths inexhaustible and of infinite variety, so Mr. Spurgeon's sermons are never alike. "Every seed yields its fruit after its kind." If he brings you up again and again to the same old truths, it is always on a different side, or in a new light, or with new surroundings. This was strikingly apparent to the writer, who, as Editor of a series of Mr. Spurgeon, has gone through fourteen vols. page by page, and made an index to them. He says-In many thousand references, no two subjects or thoughts or illustrations were found exactly to correspond. The preacher is discussing essentially the same familiar truths over and over again. He is presenting the same great Saviour to lost sinners with what might seem slavish fidelity to the spirit and even to the letter of the written word. And yet his setting forth of truth, his shades of thought and his modes of illustration, always arrange themselves in new forms and colours with well nigh the endless variety of the combinations and tints of the clouds at setting sun. REPETITION. "Ministers A Judge in the Supreme Court of the United States once said, do not exercise good sense in addressing the people. They are afraid of repetition. Now if lawyers should take such a course, they would ruin themselves and their cause. When I was at the bar, I used to take it for granted, when I had before me a jury of respectable men, that I should have to repeat over my main positions about as many times as there were persons in the jury-box. I learned that unless I did so, illustrated, and repeated, and turned the main points over-the main points of law and of evidence,-I should lose my cause." -C. G. Finney, Autobiography, p. 85. Our Association for 1878. OLD Father Time is said to have a "forelock." We have not seen it, and do not know what colour it is, or whether there is much or little of it, but we are anxious to get hold of it, if possible, for our Association at Westbourne Park chapel in the coming June, and therefore have already put up some of our prehensile machinery. Our ministers know this; and some of them have responded to a letter recently issued. We shall be glad to hear from all of them as early as possible. Beds are plentiful in London, but they are mostly wanted. Four millions of people take up some room even when asleep. Moreover, house rent is so high in London, that not many individuals care to pay for the additional luxury of a "spare room;" so that we have one advantage over our friends in the country-there is not much danger of the beds being "damp through nonuse." Spare beds being very sparingly distributed in London, we shall be the more glad if any friend within, say, six miles of Westbourne Park Chapel, can arrange to "sleep" a "General Baptist prophet"-and wherever necessary, the prophetess" as well, from Monday, June 24, to Friday, June 28. From all we can hear there will not be one of our prophets left in the country that week, and therefore we shall want all the help we can get. Write to the Secretary of the Local Committee, REV. W. J. AVERY, 16, Maryland Road, Harrow Road, W.-Editor's Scraps. The End of a Great ar Is secured by the ratification of the Treaty of Peace of San Stefano. But who shall describe the results of the terrible carnage which has recently deluged and devastated the fertile fields of South-Eastern Europe? Who can estimate the enormous loss of human life, the immense sacrifice of the material gains of the hard-working and toiling millions of mankind, the awful increase of the war spirit-a spirit altogether alien to the Spirit of Jesus Christ? The physical evil is unspeakably great. Hundreds of thousands of men at the maximum of their vital force are suddenly sent into eternity. Myriad homes, once happy, are suffering from the blight of orphanage. Commerce, trade, and industry are checked; and worse than all, there is an amount of moral evil generated in the nations that goes on reproducing itself for ages. Still, it is not wholly and unmixed evil. Some good follows from war, if it is not directly secured by it, and notwithstanding all the good that issues from it, might have been and ought to have been obtained without war; yet we must recognise the good, in so far as we see it. This war will accomplish the beneficent object of (1.) restricting the area over which the Turk will rule: and that is an unspeakable good. Turkey is a purely military rule. It has no industry; and a military rule is sure to be tyrannical, harsh, and unjust, and inimical to the good of the people. Russia is increasingly industrial; and industry is a powerful agent in favour of peace and progress. No man who knows anything about what Turkish government was and is, will need urging to be grateful to God that it has received a blow from which it will never recover. (2.) It will develop in us a deeper interest in the subject populations of South-Eastern Europe, and carry English sympathies from the side of the aristocratic and governing Turk to that of the suffering people. We ought not to need this impulse. England, which has always been the first to denounce the government of classes and sections, and has gloried in being the land of liberty for the whole world, will obtain her own emancipation from the ghastly delusion that she is the defender of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. That will be an enormous gain to the world. (3.) We are willing to believe that the "Northern Despot," as the Czar has been called, will come out of this conflict in a better and brighter light than many Englishmen expected. Any way, he has already falsified a dozen of the wildest exaggerations, or, to speak less inaccurately, the blackest lies ever told-lies that came from that hotbed of falsehood, Constantinople,—and has disappointed his worst foes. Since even England will not be able to sink Russia in the sea, it is a gain to humanity that the Emperor's goodness is even a little in excess of what was expected from him. (4.) It is to be hoped that one gain will be an intensified hatred of war on the part of all Christian men. The early church was so averse to fighting against and murdering men, that it was charged against it as a crime. In the middle ages, Mr. Lecky says, "the church remained on the whole a pacific influence. The transition from the almost Quaker tenets of the primitive church to the essentially military Christianity of the Crusades, was chiefly due to another cause-to the terror and example of Mohammedanism. From that time the spirit of Mohammedism slowly passed into Christianity, and transformed it into its own image."* But surely the Spirit of Christ shall again conquer the spirit of Mohammed, and nations will be eager to settle their disputes as reasoning and reasonable men, and not as brute beasts. Our great military and aristocratic castes will not always rule the people. Europe will shake off the blinding delusion, now fed by five hundred millions of money per annum, and once more we shall hear May He speak "The voice of Christ say "Peace." Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals "Peace" and "Liberty" and "Equity" through British Christianity, in the forthcoming Congress! JOHN CLIFFORD. * Lecky's European Morals, II., 266. Scraps from the Editor's Waste-Basket. 1. THE MAY MAGAZINE will contain letters from Rome by the Secretary of the Missionary Society and the Editor, papers by the Revs. Giles Hester, T. Henson, A. C. Perriam, and others. My friend MR. FLETCHER, of 322, Commercial Road, London, E., has kindly consented to superintend its issue during my absence on the Continent. If, therefore, our friends will send all their information for the Church Register to him by the 15th of the month I shall be greatly obliged. II. PRAED Street and Westbourne PARK.-We take the following from the Praed Street and Westbourne Park Magazine (a local adaptation of the General Baptist Magazine) : "Bosworth Road Chapel-'God's reward for work done is more work to do,' is a joyous fact, which receives a fresh illustration in the circumstance that an additional sphere of labour has just been offered to, and accepted by, us in the neighbourhood of Westbourne Park and Kensal New Town, distant about a mile or a mile and a half from Westbourne Park Chapel. By the praiseworthy generosity of Mr. Hammond, the owner of the chapel in Bosworth Road, we are put in possession of a building which will seat from four to five hundred persons, in a locality where the need for Christian work is most abundant. The population is dense, and its capacity to support Christian worship, Sunday schools, and other forms of religious activity, very slender. The district teems with people needing the Gospel of Christ; and happy are they who are privileged to make kown the glad tidings of the Father's love. It is a rare thing for a church to have the gift of a CHAPEL. We accept the gift with cheerfulness and gratitude, and all the responsibilities connected therewith, and have engaged the Missionary, Mr. Stewardson, to continue his work of visiting the people in their homes and carrying the gospel to their doors. In short, we hope to make the place a centre of real and evangelizing usefulness to the whole district. We shall need, we do need, funds for this work. Who will give? Subscriptions may be sent to the Pastor, 51, Porchester Road, W." We began our work on Feb. 15th, and have had gratifying tokens of success in it. More than eighty members have been added to the church at Praed Street and Westbourne Park Chapel since the opening of our new chapel, exclusive of forty from Bosworth Road. Reviews. HOURS OF SORROW CHEERED AND COMFORTED. By Charlotte Elliott. Religious Tract Society. WE have been keeping watch for a long time for "Cheering Words for the Sick and Weary," and have noted everything that has come across our path. That literature is so scarce, and some of it is so unsatisfactory, lacking in invigorating thought, though abounding in soothing promise, often mistaking the end of suffering, sometimes even misrepresenting the true purpose of pain, that we welcome work that is sympathetic and yet strong, consolatory and yet not weak full of vigorous intellectualism and yet glowing with feeling. This volume is not exactly to our ideal, but it approaches it closely, and will be a true Barnabas to many of the sons and daughters of affliction. It consists of the songs of a companion in tribulation, and therefore is, as all real solace is, the message of experi ence. LIGHT IN THE JUNGLES: OR, THE TORN THIS is a "precious gem," and deserves |