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4. One of the most ordinary modes by which the Almighty distinguishes his purpose, is by planting a strong impulse to prayer for the object in the heart of his servants. He gives them, too, a spirit of expectancy in the growth of these plants of prayer. Whoever watches his prayers to wait for answers will find them fall about his path whenever he is walking in the way of the Lord. How many instances of this do these pages record! How many more might have been recorded had greater details been given.

5. But the most important practical lesson which may be drawn from this Story is the wonderful effect of a constant appeal to the power of the Holy Spirit in every passage, whether of lesser or of greater influence upon the Lord's work. Not one of the steps taken in all that has been recorded but was referred, openly as well as inwardly, to the direction of the Holy Spirit. The link that may be said to have bound the chain of Providences to the Almighty hand which worked them was the unvarying and unforgotten use of that blessed prayer, "O God, for Christ's sake, give the Holy Spirit."

APPENDIX.

THE following are the two Tracts referred to in Chapter VI. :

I.

A VOICE FROM HEAVEN TO IRELAND.

SURELY Ireland is a fine country; her hills and her dales, her mountains and her rivers, are cast in the mould of beauty, and covered with a soil of fruitfulness: but look upon them in a moral point of view, and there seems a mist hovering over them that makes the heart sigh, even while the eye rejoices.

Surely the people of Ireland are a clever people; they seem to have been born thinking happy thoughts, and to have been nurtured in the habit of making them group together in the attitude of wit: but a melancholy feeling seems to fold up the smile that their wit produces—the talent is full and overflowing, but it runs to waste, or to work mischief.

Surely the hearts of the Irish are warm hearts, buoyant hearts, elastic as a steel spring, and as strong to love, without being so hard to feel; yet is there a sorrow about their love, and all their energy of heart is powerless. It works no mighty -no sustained work; there is no greatness in it.

What can be the cause of so strange a disappointment?-so fruitless an autumn from a spring of such blossom?

There is one giant cause for this distressing condition ;-all minor hindrances are merged in that. IRELAND IS ENSLAVED—she is in bondage under a foreign yoke-a yoke of

most merciless tyranny, and all the more reckless in its tyrant rule because it is thoroughly un-Irish, wholly foreign to the soil, to the blood, and to the feeling of Irishmen.

The peculiar feature of this foreign usurpation is, that it works deceitfully, under the mask of the Irish name, to enslave, not the soil, not the bodies, not the properties of Irishmen, but that which uses their soil, moves their bodies, and disposes of their properties. It enslaves their souls, places their consciences in bondage, and controls the very spirit of the man. An Italian ruler, governing a small district in temporal matters, has set up an unfounded claim to govern in spiritual matters the whole world, and every soul in it. He was originally the Christian Bishop of the diocese of Rome. In the darkness of ignorance, in which all Europe at one time lay, he fixed his fetters on the consciences of kings and of their people, boldly presuming to do this in the assumed name of Christ Himself; at the same time that he used the usurped power to seal up and lay aside the book of authority to which he pretended to refer for establishing his claim. This Italian put the yoke upon the neck, under the warrant of the book of which he showed but the outside, and forbade his foolish victims to search whether the warrant of God justified his ambitious claim.

The fathers, who first endured this Italian tyranny, have left the slavery as a legacy to their children; and tyrant after tyrant has risen up from generation to generation, even until now, when the consciences of men, cramped for centuries with the tight manacles that first wounded the soul, and then hardened the sore, dare not rise and think-dare not open the eye and see-dare not spring forth and act to throw off the terrible trammels.

But no wonder that the poor enslaved Irish are kept in the snare, and tremble at the thought of venturing to be free; for, in order to keep Irish hearts, the usurper has cunningly arranged a band of Italian police, who live among the Irish with the appearance of Irishmen. In order to effect this, the system is to take a young Irishman, and separate him from his family to place him under training, where all the special love

of Ireland's liberty, and Ireland's hope, and Ireland's joy, is drafted out of his heart, and the vacancy filled up with Italian feelings and Italian characteristics; while an object is placed before his ambition, closely connected with the Italian supremacy, and absolutely involving Ireland's degradation. After transforming the Irish youth into this unnatural foreigner, when he has become Italianised, the usurper secures his agent from the return of natural and patriotic affections, by depriving him of the sources of Irish domestic feeling. He never can be under the temptation to feel for his original country again as a husband can feel for the people of a beloved wife-as a father can feel for the country of his children. All the possible avenues by which Irish feelings of affection might flow in to mitigate, in the least, his Italianised heart, are not only closed, but the gates that shut them up are barred with oaths; and if such feelings creep in through any crevice, conscience is scared with the alarm of "sin." Can these be called Irishmen, who have foresworn the links of Irish love-the ties of Irish domestic feeling, and have given themselves, body, soul, and spirit, to work the will of an Italian usurper in keeping the Irish people enslaved, and in hiding from them the Book of God that would set them free? No-these are no longer Irishmen, though their births were registered on the soil of Ireland. A poor Irishman would hold himself mocked if you gave him a potatoe from the outer skin of which all the mealy inside had been scooped, and every fibre, and every eye, had been cut off, so that it was neither good to eat nor to plant. You might tell him that the potatoe grew in Connaught, but he would not own it for a native root.

This Italian usurpation is the real foreign slavery of unhappy Ireland-the more depressing and terrible, because it fetters the soul, the spirit, and the source of action in the man, debases him, and cows his conscience; and leaves him without capacity to rise and ask for the document which proves the high warrant of God's Word, assumed by the tyrant. The debasing nature of this spiritual slavery can hardly be more clearly shown than by the cheat which is put upon the enslaved ones, to turn off

their attention from the real usurper. The Italianised police boldly talk in terms that might seem to be suited to the real condition of slavery in which the Irish are kept; but these terms, which echo on the heart of the suffering slaves, are artfully misdirected to point to the political dominion of England as the cause of the evil, instead of the spiritual tyranny of the utterly foreign Italian. IRISHMEN! when will you open your eyes to see the cheat? Surely, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.

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There was a time when all the nations of Europe were in the same bondage to this Italian power as the Irish are now. Three hundred years ago the people of England, by God's help, and in God's strength, cast off their chains. They cried for the Book of God—they got it—they read it—and, by God's blessing, it dissolved the spell by which they had been bound. England became spiritually free, and the blessing of God has prospered her ever since.

But the truth must be told: England did not treat their brethren of this island as tenderly as they ought to have done; they tried to work a freedom for them which, under God, a people must work for themselves. The Irish rejected the forced freedom, and perpetuated the foreign slavery. It was a sad, a painful, a sinful mistake on the part of Englishmen. May God forgive them for it! Irish hearts must forgive them now; and whatever be the feelings that may rankle still, yet, IRISHMEN! be not so mad as to pursue your quarrel with your kindred, by fastening more closely the fetters of your foreign yoke. How absolutely foolish is the suicidal spite which would throw yourselves into a perpetual prison, to avoid shaking hands with your brother. He who profits by your alienation from the English is the Italian despot; and none suffer so severely as yourselves.

It is three hundred years ago since a voice from heaven sounded over England, and called the nation into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Some of its divine power was manifested in its success, but the call was echoed to Ireland in the harsher voice of man; and in passing from Holyhead to Howth it lost its power. Well, that time is gone by; and

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