PREA

REACHERS' ADDRESSES.-R. SQUIRE, Barn Steet, Liskeard, Cornwall. E. V. STEPHENS, Half Way, St. Neot, near Liskeard. W. LUKE, 64, Princess Road, Kilburn, N.W.

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ISSIONARIES WANTED.-Brethren willing to go to South Australia are desired to communicate at once with the Foreign Secretary, 216, Burrage Road, Plumstead, London, S.E.

IBLE CHRISTIAN CHAPEL, BRADFORD, YORKSHIRE.-The Trustees

B want to borrow money on this Chapel at 4 per cent. Apply to the Rev. S.

JORY, 90, Whetley Hill, Bradford, Yorkshire; or F. W. Bourne, 26, Paternoster Row, London, E.C.

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IBLE CHRISTIAN HALL, SOUTH TOTTENHAM, to be used for the time as School-Chapel -The Trustees are open to receive Loans at 4 per cent. Apply to the Rev. J. HONEY, 31, Eastbourne Road, Stamford Hill, London; or F. W. Bourne, as above.

EW BIBLE CHRISTIAN CHAPEL, PLYMOUTH.-The Trustees will be King Gardens, Plymouth, or Rev. F. W. BOURNE.

CONSECRATION AND SERVICE.

THE

CONFERENCE SERMON

Of 1885, by

JOHN HERRIDGE BATT; With Notes. Published by Request.

WILL BE READY SHORTLY.

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THE

BIBLE CHRISTIAN MAGAZINE.

THE GOOD EARL.

N his Commentaries, Sir William Jones says, "If I am asked, Who is the greatest man? I answer, The best; and if I am required to say, Who is the best, I reply, He who has deserved most of his fellow-creatures. Whether we deserve better of mankind by the cultivation of letters, by obscure and inglorious attainments, by intellectual pursuits calculated rather to amuse than inform, than by strenuous exertions in speaking and acting, let those consider who bury themselves in studies unproductive of any benefit to their country or fellow-citizens. I think not." Measured by this standard, Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who died on the 1st of October, and whom the whole world mourns, was undoubtedly the foremost man of his age. Surprise need not therefore be expressed that the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon should be reported as having said in the Metropolitan Tabernacle the Sunday after his death: "Among men, he did not know whom he should place second, but he should certainly put Lord Shaftesbury first. A man so true he had never met. . . A man so firm in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and so intensely active in the cause of God and man, he had never known. The deceased was a man all round faithful to his Master and true to his fellow-men. For many a month, for many a long year, they should not know how much they had lost, or how sincerely the late Earl had been devoted to every good object for the welfare of his fellow-men. He had lived for the nation and for God." If Earl Shaftesbury had shaped his own career, how different it might, yea, how different it would have been, as we learn from this precious fragment of autobiography :

"In early life I was passionately devoted to science, so much so, that I was almost disposed to pursue science to the exclusion or everything else. It passed away, and I betook myself to literature, hoping that I should not only equal, but that I should rival many

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in mental accomplishments. Other things were before me, and other things passed away, because, do what I would, I was called to another career, and now I find myself at the end of a long life, not a philosopher, not an author, but simply an old man who has endeavoured to do his duty in that state of life which it has pleased God to call him."

His father, the sixth earl, married a daughter of the third Duke of Marlborough. Their eldest son was born on the 28th of April, 1801, at the family residence in Grosvenor Square. At Harrow first, and afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, his education, carefully begun by his parents, was completed. An industrious student, in 1822 he obtained a first class degree in Classics; and ten years later he took the degree of B.A. Later, his university accorded him the additional distinction of D.C.L. Bishop Short, long and favourably known in South Australia, speaks of him in his college days, as "assiduous in his duties, diligent in his studies." In those days it was expected, almost as a matter of course, that the eldest son of a peer, even when not prepared to discharge its duties, should enter upon public life almost as soon as he was out of his teens. We notice that authorities [?] differ as to whether Lord Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury's title then, entered Parliament for Woodstock, the pocket-borough of the House of Marlborough, at the age of twenty-two or twenty-five; but we may assume that it was when he was twenty-five, at the General Election of 1826. Woodstock was relinquished in 1831, and for fifteen years his lordship held one of the seats for the County of Dorset, and it may be said that it was as a county member that his great and honoured career as a philanthropist commenced. It has been well said that "the age was so different from our own, the abuses were so abundant, the grievances and the reforms which excited crowds angrily demanded were so many, that, as we look back upon its storms and controversies through the vista of two generations, that old world seems hardly to have been identical with our own of to-day." But the cries of the poor, the desolate, and the oppressed, extorted from them by their wrongs and woes, were too loud and bitter to permit Lord Ashley, with his large natural sympathies, quickened into tenderness and activity by the spirit of Christ, to turn a deaf ear to them. Happily he was formed, both by nature and grace, to be something more and something better than a mere party man. the manufacturing districts, the wrongs of factory children, worked * Shaftesbury: his Life and Work. By G. HOLDEN PIKE. (S. W. Partridge & Co., Is.) The best account probably that has yet been published, to which we are much indebted.

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