us men thoroughly ashamed of ourselves-for in these grand essential virtues, not a few of you have the pre-eminence. Well, but the weather again! For more than thirty years, as a travelling preacher, the writer has braved it in long pedestrian journies, in all its pranks, and rough and tempestuous varieties. He has often been stuck fast in snow drifts, and almost smothered. Deluged with merciless rains, startled with thunder claps, menaced by those fearful lightning flashes, which to men and beasts have proved fatal; pelted with those outrageous hail-storms, which have smashed sky-lights, and done wide-spreading mischief, and yet somehow or other such weather never disposed him to stay at home and neglect his appointment, except in those very, very rare cases in which word has been sent to him not to come, because the people could not come to whom he was to preach. By God's good providence his outer man is strong and tough as ever. Weather, then, does not trouble him

Does anything else trouble him? Yes, he will confess his infirmity-you may call it sin if you like, but he has been troubled. Real troubles are within us: "man is born unto trouble," and yet everybody knows there is more trouble than there need be. Unmerited contempt, perpetuated injustice, and unprovoked injury, inflict trouble. Talk of stormy and tempestuous weather! Pooh! Pooh! 'Tis something next to nothing as to our individual experience. But,

"When cares like a wild deluge come,
And storms of sorrow fall,-

we are in for it, in a sense, immeasurably worse than Miss Mims, who goes out without an umbrella, and on her return is caught in a "dreadful" shower, so that she has to change her dress, her dear papa and mamma fearing that without immense attention she will catch her death of cold; and it is certainly as proper to prevent the results of a shower, as it is to avoid that excess of tenderness which makes it dangerous.

But now as to cares and sorrows, brought upon us by people who, professing to believe the Bible, ought to have behaved better. Must we brood over them? Moralists, philosophers, and divines say, No; yet surely we may enlighten and admonish those whose errors and delinquencies give trouble to their neighbours! This we mean to do, and at once inform the reader, that as we have been deemed eccentric, charged with eccentricity as a fault, and as a reason why we should be kept down low in station and finance; and as censorious Pharisees have in a quiet way persecuted us through a great part of our life, we mean to defend ourselves. We intend to check censoriousness, as it is applied to the character and conduct of innocently humourous Christian ministers. To expose the errors of modern Pharisaism, and chastise, by wholesome satirical severities, its spurious solemnity and injurious tendencies; we shall, however, be under the real necessity of saying much about ourselves, which but for the queer treatment we have received, we should never have thought of saying.

Yet we

shall not bore the reader with eccentricity and censoriousness all through the book, but become discursive, and produce original articles, illustrative of various classes of character. We will not use offensive personalities; we mean to be faithful and fearless, yet preserve sincere respect for all good men in office and authority. Whatever extravagance may seem to characterize some of our pages, we think readers of discrimination and good temper will understand and not condemn us. We seek to do good by checking evil. The literature of flattery, which sees no vice in anything but outward and visible immorality, will doubtless be preferred by many readers to our own strictures and speculations; but that sort of literature seldom if ever renders permanent service to morality and true religion. And as to professedly religious books, while many are to be admired, many also are religious in scarcely anything but phrases and exclamations, dealing in loose generalities about sin and holiness, brow-beating and denouncing "the world," but leaving some of the worst features of a worldly and selfish spirit in some members of the "Church" altogether untouched. We want a clever book about the sins of the saints; we do not mean real saints, but those demure and sanctimonious personages whose godliness is of such a cast that they make a "gain" of it. These ought to be meddled with, told of their faults, and if they will not amend, they should be reminded that we have an express command from God to withdraw from them. (1 Tim. vi. 5.) We make

these remarks because selfishness, injustice, and other vices, are so often overlooked, and so frequently, when dealt with at all, merely touched by godly writers, and with such ineffable tenderness that nobody becomes the wiser or the better for such soft animadversions. Evils of such enormous magnitude ought to be handled roughly.

We will furnish the reader with a small bundle of extracts, to prepare him for some severities which he will soon overtake in his progress through the following pages, and for which preparation is at least expedient, if not absolutely necessary.

From an old book then, published in 1630-two hundred and twenty eight years from the time I write this (1858)—and entitled "WISDOM," I extract the following:-"Free and hearty admonition is a very wholesome and excellent medicine, and the best office of amitie. For to wound and offend a little, to profit much is to love soundly. A friend goes roundly to work, and respecteth not so much how he may please, as how he may profit, whether by fair means or by foul, as a good physician useth to do to cure his patient."

A writer named Glanville, speaking of a favourite author, says, "Wycherly in his writings is the sharpest satyrist of his time; but in his nature he has all the softness of the tenderest dispositions: in his writings he is severe, bold, undertaking: in his nature, gentle, modest, inoffensive."

Pope, the poet, referring to some pungent author,

says

"Yet soft his nature, though severe his lay,

His anger moral, and his wisdom gay;
Blest satyrist! who touched the mean so true,
As show'd vice had his hate and pity too."

May we not also, while expressing our sincere and intense admiration for the learned and the critical in the various departments of science and exegetical literature, add, that according to Alexander Pope, "The proper study of mankind is man." Yes; the knowledge of astronomy, geography, geology, botany, chemistry, is useful. The knowledge of languages, for which oriental and classical scholars and linguists are indebted to a powerful memory-able to retain the declensions of nouns, the conjugations of verbs, and all the rules, and exceptions to rules, with the various niceties belonging to grammar, is invaluable, and the world is very greatly indebted to superior men in this department of literature. But man, with all his vices and virtues, his faults and excellencies, should be studied.

Hydraulics, hydrostatics, and pneumatics-the first being the science of conveying water through pipes; the second, that of weighing fluids; and the third relating to the air, or the laws by which it is condensed, rarified, or gravitates, are parts of knowledge known to be very serviceable, yet only really wanted by a few. But man in his mental, moral, and