their houses shared the same fate. In all this, it was evident that the magistrates were slow to repress the rioters, or the police might surely have more efficiently laboured to suppress these shameful disturbances.

The New York press inflamed the evil spirit by denouncing the abolitionists as "public nuisances," and even a professedly evangelical newspaper accused them of being "wild and reckless incendiaries.” These outbreaks did not stay the good work of abolitionary teaching; the thing for which the abolitionists contended was of God, and could not be overthrown, though men might continue to fight against it. The public furor, however, continued, and manifested itself under peculiarly odious circumstances. Every effort was made by Southern merchants and their sympathisers to injure Tappan's business. "Letters were often received by the friends of freedom of an insulting description; sometimes enclosing a small specimen of tar and feathers, one enclosing the ear of a negro, and most of them written profanely and obscenely. Rewards were offered for the abduction, or heads, of leading abolitionists. Fifty thousand dollars had been offered for the head of Arthur Tappan. On being informed of it he pleasantly remarked, 'If that sum is placed in the New York Bank I may possibly think of giving myself up."" We are told that Southern attorneys, having a collecting business for the firm, would relinquish the prosecution of claims. All these efforts, combined with the antagonism of not a few members of the same church with which he was connected, and the appeals of moneyed men, failed to shake his integrity. A deputation of leading men in the city conjured him for the sake of his business prosperity, his creditors, partners, and family, to relinquish his share in the anti-slavery movement. Calmly and with great emphasis, he replied, "You demand that I shall cease my anti-slavery labours, give up my connection with the Anti-slavery Society, or make some apology or recantation—I will be hung first."

A disastrous fire which occurred in New York in December, 1835, destroyed a number of the warehouses of the principal merchants. Mr. Tappan's store was consumed by the flames, but happily a portion of the goods was saved, with half a million dollars in value of notes receivable. With true Yankee promptitude, the next morning a contract was signed for a new warehouse, and this we are assured encouraged other merchants to bear up bravely against their misfortune. Some commended him for his spirit of trustfulness in God; others jeered, and expressed their hope that he had been deprived of the power of doing further mischief. "Hundreds of thieves, it was said, were arrested after the fire and taken to the police office, but not one of them a man of colour. Several persons called at the new place of business after the fire for compensation for services said to have been rendered on that memorable night, but not a coloured person preferred any claim. Doubtless they felt that they had worked for a benefactor."

In the midst of great financial embarrassments, when merchants were everywhere failing, the firm of Tappan suspended payment. Laborious exertions were made to prevent this, but it was inevitable. "The cause of our suspension," Tappan said, "was having a very heavy stock of goods at a time of great general financial embarrassment." We need not go into the circumstances attending this unhappy change in his

fortunes; enough that his arrangements were such as raised him still higher in the estimation of the public as an honourable merchant. "He lost all his property," writes Mr. Newman Hall, but "he lost none of his magnanimity. He did not gather up the wrecks of his estate to secure his own future comfort. He gave up all, and had the happiness of paying off every obligation with interest; and then, by new industry, he provided for his family, as well as continued on a smaller scale, though with undiminished liberality, his pecuniary support to the enterprises which were so dear to his heart." His own personal advocacy and untiring efforts for the slave, and for the spiritual and moral advancement of the degraded, were worth more than his pecuniary gifts; for these cost him more-himself. When the civil war came, he predicted that it would put an end to the accursed system of slavery. In his quiet home in New Haven, where he had retired, he watched the progress of events, and prayed without ceasing for the dawn of liberty.

He lived to see the day of emancipation, and was glad. "I am satisfied now," he remarked with emphasis. And thousands-millions -of anxious hearts were satisfied too. His death occurred in July, 1865, and many friends and admirers, both in this country and his own, hold his memory in high veneration.

The Holy Places and Spiritual Worship.*

F all that is attractive about Shechem, there is certainly nothing in the parcel of a field on which, on his safe return from Padan-aram, he pitched his tent, and which he afterwards bought at the hand of the children of Hamor, Shechem's father, for an hundred pieces of money. "And he drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle," as the woman of Shechem told the Lord Jesus. Jacob's well, however, has become to us what it is, not so much on that account as on account of the conversation of the Saviour of the world with the poor sinful woman.

I can imagine that you have already anticipated me in thought, and have fancied me sitting at the side of the well with my Bible turned up at the fourth of John. Perhaps you are even somewhat jealous of the privilege I might enjoy in reading and meditating upon the Saviour's words at the very well itself. You doubtless imagine me quite absorbed in holy contemplation. There, on that spot, you will be saying to yourself, must the words of Jesus powerfully penetrate the soul !

Such, also, were my own thoughts, my friend! and my heart leaped with joy when I stepped forth to pay a visit to the holy spot. Oh, said I to myself, the dry and thirsty soul shall be abundantly refreshed.

* Extracted from Vol. I. of “Narrative of a Tour through Syria and Palestine in 1851 and 1852." By C. W. M. VAN DE VELDE, Late Lieutenant Dutch R. N., Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. A very useful work, but written in the dreariest and most chaotic style. We have been compelled to condense.

For you will not wonder, that with all the distractions and irregularities of my travels, notwithstanding the sanctity of the places I visited, I had experienced little that could be called the life of the soul. How could it have been otherwise, considering the uncommon hardships with which travelling is accompanied in this country, and, still more, the annoyances and provocations which its barbarous inhabitants throw in the way of the traveller at every step? I have often to myself accused Madam de Gasparin of great want of consistency, for having allowed. the tone of her mind to vary so much during her journey through the Holy Land, now soaring aloft as if borne upon the wings of the cherubim, now troubled, impatient, and angry, under the vexations caused by the Arabs. But I must now completely exculpate that noble woman, after the experience I have had myself, and cannot enough admire the moral worth that carried her through this journey with so little deterioration of her temper and inward life. Not that I would wholly deny that the holy places of Palestine can fill the traveller's mind with holy impressions, but I begin to learn daily more and more, that such is not generally the case, and that it were well for people to examine themselves and see whether certain pious sentiments are not rather carnal feelings than the work of the Holy Ghost. So easily and so willingly do people deceive themselves in regard to these. So willingly do they indulge in religious emotions. So hard is it for them to understand the living and walking by faith and not by sight. And while people do not find in themselves what they should so readily have found, they then forget that the work of the Holy Ghost is independent of places or localities. Mental emotions have no necessary connection with his work, although we often confound the one with the other; and mental emotions are subject to, or rather are, the consequences of the influence exerted on us by whatever objects surround us; how, then, should we have religious emotions excited in places, where in former times, it is true, much that is important and holy has taken place, but which at the moment of our being at them, have nothing holy about them, but, on the contrary, are desecrated by all sorts of offensive occurrences? A journey, therefore, through the Holy Land can then only promote our sanctification when we are enabled by the Holy Ghost to learn patient endurance under the more than ordinary trials to which such a journey exposes us; or when we acknowledge God's watchful and protecting hand in the extraordinary dangers we have to surmount-dangers with which precious lessons for faith are associated; but as respects the localities mentioned in Bible history, these are earth and stone, dumb and voiceless, incapable of teaching us anything more than what James says of Elias, that the men that lived, prayed, wrought miracles, and lie buried there, were men of like passions with us.

But come now and allow me to take you along with me to Jacob's well.

Is that hole in the ground there, covered by three or four large rough stones, leaving an opening of less than two feet across-is that, say you, the well of Jacob?

Yes, my friend, that same hole. Don't allow it to disappoint you too much. In the days of Jesus the well probably had a different aspect; perhaps it was covered over with a vault, or at least furnished

with a raised wall of masonry built round it. But two causes have been since that time in operation, and these may have wholly altered the form and fashion of this well, as they have done those of so many other consecrated spots in this land. I refer to the long series of wars and desolations, and to the idolatrous worship paid to such places. If the former of these causes threw down every thing, the latter built all up again, but in a manner altogether different from the original. From the moment men departed from the true doctrine of the gospel, and forgot the commandment:-" Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them;" from the moment that men proceeded to serve the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the caprices of their own depraved understandings, the Holy Land became full of idolatry, fostered under the awful delusion that this was honouring God and his saints. Foremost in this respect stood the Empress Helena and her son Constantine. Never were those spots, with which one or other incident of Bible history has been associated, so much sought out, honoured, and covered with altars and oratories, as by them. Jacob's well had to share in this destiny, and a church was erected over it.

You see, to your satisfaction I trust, nothing more of Helena's chapel, which once stood over Jacob's well, than some column pieces and building-stones scattered far and wide. You are not now at least scandalised by any superstitious altars. But why do I speak to you as if you were at my side? No; at this spot one would be all alonehere where Jesus sat and spoke words of eternal life to a poor sinful woman. I must confess that these thoughts wholly and entirely took possession of my mind. That the Son of God had come down among men, having taken upon him the form of a servant, to seek the unrighteous, the sinful, the depraved, to display love suffering love, suffering for their sins, yea, even to the death of the cross, that he might redeem them, this actual fact came for a moment with overwhelming force before my mind.

It was now about eleven o'clock. It was an hour later in the day when Jesus sat down there, "being wearied with his journey." According to the 35th verse of John iv., it must then have been the month of January, for the harvest comes on here in May. and "there were yet four months" until harvest. The flat portion of the valley, ploughed and sown in the days of the early rain, in November and December, was already covered with a very promising green carpeting of young corn-stalks. If the well was not at that time covered over with masonry, then must the Saviour, on account of his fatigue, have had his back turned to the sun, and his face towards the north, to the side of Mount Ebal and to Joseph's tomb, standing at the foot of that mountain about 800 paces distant from the well. I placed myself in the same position, and could well figure to myself the woman with her pitcher on her head, coming down out of the valley. He who knows all things, and whose free sovereign love has chosen his own to eternal life from the foundations of the world, he beheld her, the poor sinner, for whose preservation he had come down from heaven, he saw her as she

came along under the olive-trees, long before she was aware of his being there. And when she saw him, she hesitated, perhaps whether she should approach him, perceiving that he was a Jew. But what should she be afraid of, she the lost, for whom there seemed to be nothing but despair? Therefore she came on, and ..

Thus was I musing with myself, as I sat alone at the side of the well, and had just begun to read the fourth chapter of John, when I was suddenly roused by the blustering voice of a gigantic Arab, who had come up without my observing him, and addressed me thus, with all the characteristic repulsiveness and loathsomeness of the Arabs :--

"Marhhabah chawadja! baksheesh, baksheesh!"

This disturbance was most unwelcome. Think what a contrast! To be lost, as it were, in heavenly thoughts, and then all at once to be aroused by such a thief-like clamour for baksheesh! He was a fellow with a face enough to frighten one, filthy and disgusting; so filthy and disgusting as none but an Arab can be. I replied to his salutation, and begged him to leave me alone.

But no, he had no idea of doing that. "Baksheesh, baksheesh! he roared, and sat himself down at the well-side, opposite to me, at the same time taking out his pipe and lighting it with such composure, as to convince me that he had not the smallest intention to leave me for some time at least.

Before five minutes had elapsed, half a dozen of his fellows appeared, who forthwith placed themselves all round me in a very social circle, so that I had to abandon all thoughts of proceeding with my meditations on the favourite chapter.

A chorus of "baksheesh!" with all sorts of variations on the same theme, was now raised about my ears. I asked them, through Philip, on what pretence they wanted a baksheesh, begging at the same time that they would withdraw. Their answer was to this effect: "The land and the well belong to us, and no foreigner has any right to come here without paying us a baksheesh. Would you like to go down into the well? Here is a rope that we have brought with that view. We will let you safely down; you can see the well from within, and on coming up again pay us a baksheesh."

"But what makes you suppose that I want to examine your well? I know quite well the appearance of the well from within, and thus have no need to go down into it. Be, then, so good as to take your rope home again, and leave me alone."

I had almost added, "then I will give you a baksheesh;" but I thought, if these rogues see that a baksheesh is earned by merely allowing a stranger to be left alone at the well, then there is every chance that as soon as they are gone, another similar party will come down on me, and give me still more molestation than these.

"If the chawadja will not go down into the well, then will we go down instead of him, and tell him how it looks on our return; but anyhow we must have a baksheesh!

"I have no need of that either. Believe what I have said. I know all about the inside. Leave me alone. I want nothing else. What can make you suppose that I want either myself or you to go down into the well?"