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to lose anybody just now, they must raise the cause somehow, so he proposed this happlicashun should be received, and that one or two brethren should do as the Apostle did and try to teach him the way of God more perfekly."

This was received with a general "Hear! hear !" especially from the deacons and their wives, who were all on Henry's side. It was then proposed that the brother who had just spoken, and the deacon Mawley should wait upon Henry and see what they could make of him.

After this had been arranged, the other candidates were called in one by one from the side room where they had been waiting; having been introduced to the Church, they were desired to stand up and relate their experience. Matilda Frampton was a rather modest-looking girl about nineteen; she was very nervous as she faintly endeavoured to tell how she had given up her Popish ideas, and abandoned all attempts to go to heaven by works, and cast her soul on free grace, and "found peace" in believing. After assuring Mr. Cranch it was all through his "beautiful preaching," and that she should have cause to thank him for ever for telling her how to be saved, she was allowed to withdraw, and the next case, that of Richard Pottington was called on. He stepped boldly into the room, bowed to the chair and the meeting, and paused to look impudently around him. He was short and stout, with a round, red, greasy-looking face suffused with a hypocritical smile; he was dressed in black, with the white tie in which he used to hold forth in the streets on Sundays; he had evidently come prepared with a telling experience. He showed how his depravity, as manifested in playing pitch and toss on Sundays, and cheating at marbles, in frequenting music-rooms, and in drinking and smoking and

Sunday birds-nesting was all put a stop to at a quarter past four on the 17th of last June, when he got wet out in Whitemoor fields as a judgment on his evil ways; and how he was thoroughly, completely, finally, effectually, and God-glorifyingly, Satan-confoundingly saved, under the telling, powerful, mandebasing, heaven-exalting, awakening discourse from the affecting words "Adam, where art thou?" Turning to Mr. Cranch he declared he should be a star in his crown in heaven, and ended by an appeal to the Church, to receive him into their number, 'umble and youthful though he was.

Then came Pleasant Snivell, who finished her experience by another fit of hysterics, and was led out. of the room into the vestry where certain restoratives, not supplied by the company who attended to the tank, were kept ready for emergencies. All the cases being favourably regarded, it was agreed that if the brethren appointed to look after them reported satisfactorily, they should be baptized forthwith. A few weeks after, another meeting was held, and when the other business had been arranged, it was reported that Henry's case was not so bad as was at first supposed, and that Mr. Mawley and his lady were quite convinced that he was a child of grace, though as brother Holloway said, he was "very higgerant of the gorspel."

So, at last, Henry was received, and no one of them knew him, no one of them saw an inch below the surface; and he rejoiced that they did not, for he instinctively recoiled from their unctuous advances. His fellow-members thought him proud, for he never

4 Vulgar Dissenters affect the use of compound words to a great extent.

associated with them, and though he taught for the love of God some of the children in the school, he held himself aloof as much as possible and went on his way, trying to follow Him whose look of love guided him through all, and supported him amidst everything.

CHAPTER X.

LIFE WITH A NEW AIM.

Two years have passed since Henry became a Baptist, his apprenticeship has expired, and being delivered from the Flaxman household he has entered as a student at St. John's Hospital, London. The resolves he made in his dangerous illness have not been forgotten. His newly infused goodness was not as the morning clouds and the early dew which soon pass away, on the contrary his conversion to God was a progressive work, and every day saw its in

crease.

We entirely disbelieve the accounts, of which we so often hear, of persons suddenly becoming saints; there may be, and probably is, in most religious men's lives a turning-point, when the bud of early piety bursts like the opening flower into maturity; but those who from a life of wickedness suddenly profess to be fit for heaven, as suddenly return "as dogs to their vomit, and as the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.”

Henry daily grew to love God and heavenly things more and more, and as time went on and he saw the abundant treasure with which the hands of religion

were laden, and how it could transform as by touch of magician's wand, dull, dreary, sinful existences into lives full of radiant hope, burning charity, and fervent devotion, he became daily more and more seized with the desire of making others share in his growing happiness, and to enrich them with that treasure he had so happily found.

Heaven-born Love has no taint of selfishness. Selfishness is centripetal, charity is centrifugal. Earthborn greed seems to draw everything to itself: treasure from the world's utmost limits; pleasures from every source, however distant; fame from everything, however vain or insignificant, that can in any sense be made to minister to its desirer. Self is at the bottom of nine out of ten even of the proposals and schemes for benefiting the world, disseminating knowledge, or widening the field of science.

In the vast majority of instances, the principle that sets the orator's florid words a-going, that animates the philosopher in his researches, that sends the explorer across the arid deserts or the fields of waters, that drives the author's pen or binds the statesman to his post is simply, SELF. The orator's words may have been the new life of his hearers, the philosopher's researches may have added a new star to the glowing firmament of human lights, the author's pen may have redressed the most crying evils of his age, the statesman's master-hand may have been his country's salvation, the explorer may have added new territory to the map and have placed at our feet new luxuries and new means of getting them; but self and its glorification was the final cause of all, of course with many noble exceptions, so rare as to prove the rule. And if we shall analyze these exceptions, what do we find? Simply this in every instance,

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another principle equally powerful, yea, a thousand times more potent, has been within to counteract self,-heaven-born charity, self-abnegating, self-sacrificing love. Charity, we said, was centrifugal; like the rays of the sun always going forth with light and warmth for the distant, it ever seeks another object on which to exercise itself.

God is love, and God is always going out of Himself—always radiating. Love caused creation. Love must have objects to manifest itself by. Love built this beautiful world, adorned it as a fair garden, clothed it with a mantle of loveliness, made it a home for man, carpeted it with an enamel of fair verdure, hung it round with a tapestry of luxuriant flora, covered it with the blue sky for a roof, and then, filling it with everything that could delight the senses He had blessed him with, made man its tenant. But this was not all love's work. Take the telescope of the early inventors, and you shall see the gems of heaven's azure vault are worlds far larger than our own, and probably as richly adorned with beauty for perhaps ten thousand times more worthy tenants. And you shall go on taking still more powerful telescopes, and you shall go on finding out still more worlds beyond the field of your former reach of vision, till you invent the most powerful instrument you can imagine, and there shall still lie beyond fields of space besprinkled with stars, till you are lost in contemplating the fearful majesty of God. And, overcome by the gigantic and the distant, you seek to penetrate the minute and proximate; you take a child's microscope, and begin your search at the object that may happen to be handiest, and wonders pass before you, and you find things are not what they seem" at all; you see on every hand, life that you had never dreamed of, and

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