more broken-hearted and humbled to the feet of my Saviour. See," said he, pointing to his wounds, "the bones are healing and the flesh returning as the flesh of a little child-Oh! for a child's heart-as one of those little ones, of such as whom is the kingdom of heaven."

The question of Sabbath labour in our large iron works has often been mooted. It is a question of the gravest importance. To the earnest Christian it gives not a little pain, to see in many parts of Scotland the great furnace of fire blazing on the Sabbath evening. Its mighty roar like the rushing of a great wind-its heat and power like the belching of a volcano, grieve the soul of the people of God, as one dark figure after another is seen cast out into relief by the flame. Most public works are now closed on the Sabbath; but we believe that the iron furnaces still blaze and burn without the seventh day's rest. To those who are engaged in this business we recommend the study of the following extract:-"It was attempted some few years back to induce the iron masters of Staffordshire to blow out their iron furnaces on Saturday nights, in order to give opportunity for a better observance of the Lord's day among their labourers, a certain number of whom were always engaged in systematic Sabbath-breaking. A public meeting was called-much was urged on both sides-it was pronounced impracticable to stop the blast furnaces-though some few expressed their willingness to make the attempt. A meeting to hear the result was again called at the end of two years. The clergy pressed the duty of keeping the Lord's day, and were again met by many objectors on account of the impossibility. The meeting was nearly breaking up in despair, when the manly form of the individual whose character I am recording, rose slowly up. The room was in a moment hushed. Each party was eager to know what side he would take. Nor were they long in doubt. He looked at the chairman, then round the room, and gravely, I may say solemnly, uttered-"He who has said, I am the Lord thy God-has also said, Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy;' and shall men dare to say against Him, and to Him, it cannot be done? I call fact to witness that it can be done. I call that High God to witness that it can be done. For two years past my furnaces have not once blazed in desecration of the Lord's day; and I solemnly declare that I am a gainer by my obedience, and that I have worked more iron, and that I have realized more money in those two

years than in any two years besides in my whole career. Gentlemen, it can be done. Fellow-Christians, God says it shall be done; and with this testimony, where is the man who will not do it?' The earnestness, the sincerity, the right, the obedience to God, which was on his side for the time prevailed; his firmness for God's command, his evidence that God honours them who honour Him, was for the time successful; and that meeting broke up with the unanimous resolution that with them and their men the Sabbath should be kept holy'" pp. 143, 145. We quote this extract because it is practical-because it may do good-because God may put it into the heart of some one, influential in such quarters, to commence a movement among iron masters for the hallowing of the Sabbath. We pray that He may do so, and that this paragraph, like a seed dropped by the bird in passing, may bring forth a precious return many days hence.

We now take the liberty of passing from Mr. Thorneycroft altogether to the more general, and we take leave to think the more interesting portions of the book. There is a description of colliers and their work which has pleased us much. We fear the writer has drawn them in somewhat of a fancy colour. He loves them evidently, and may have softened evils and exaggerated good. We trust not. That they have constrained the writer to love them is not a little in their favour, and let us hope that we have been thinking too hardly of them in time past. There is a fine description of them and of the district they inhabit, closing with a hymn which has touched us not a little. "Lying in the centre of the great South Staffordshire coal-field, it has been described as the black country.' Black it is by day, but a fire country, an interminable terra del fuego, by night. The glare reflected on the clouds (and there are generally clouds to reflect it) from the blast furnaces and leagues of cokehearth, are visible at radial distances of twenty miles before you reach their lurid foci. There is a fierce sublimity in the panorama of the district by night, which sinks into vulgar bluster by day. The moral and physical aspects of the collieries have been over-painted by tourists, inspectors, commissioners, 'own correspondents,' and other caterers for the nonce; but with much to deplore, there are some things to admire in the moral courage of the population. Their courage in danger, endurance of toil, mechanical and manufacturing skill, vague rever

One

the fastest runner that is supposed to gain the prize. Vain are generally the whisperings of conscience vain the warnings of Scripture. "The race is not to the swift." Ninety-nine men out of a hundred, in city life, seem to disbelieve this utterly. But the spectators who stand aside, and see the competitors in the race, pushing on amid such feverish excitement, who see the most eager drop half way almost unnoticed, or see them clasp the prize with a palsied hand, they feel the truth sinking silently into their hearts-it is not the swift, not the enthusiastic, not the devotee, who use life aright. "The end of these things is death." The successful merchant pays dearly for his prize. The price is, for us at least, too great. It is not long since a tragedy took place in Scotland, reading us one of the lessons of over-work. of the finest nervous intellects of late years, whose services in science, and whose graces in literature, had won him a distinguished and an honourable name, departed beneath a dark and terrible cloud. A great work had been elaborated, spun from that busy brain. Precious thoughts dug from the deep mine of that noble mind had received an imperishable form. The dim night-lamp had watched over the slow completion of the work. The fine-wrought fibres of the brain had been subjected to constant tension for months. And at length the book and life were done together; with his own hand the author wrote "Finis" to both; and his fellow-countrymen stood shuddering beside the self-made grave! Of mind and body it is equally true, extreme labour is sooner or later death. But let us see how well Mr. Owen illustrates the evils of over-work. "The exhaustions of the long hours minister to vice. It is the testimony of the workmen themselves that their jaded spirits crave a temporary lull of relief in the excitement and drink of the taproom. An abnormal state of depression is produced, which craves an equally artificial stimulant, and the poor operative sets the inflammation of his brain to recruit his exhausted physical energies, thereby burning the candle both ends, and accelerating the wreck of the self-destroyer. On that rock are too often foundered home, honour, health, honesty, and happiness; and in the case of the poor slave of her needle, or of the factory, the system is the wholesale seducer of female virtue, the virtual panderer to prostitution. 'Whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent will bite him.' (Eccles. x. 8.) The hedge of opportunity

for moral and religious self-culture, for the morning and evening prayer, and meditation on the word of God and with God, and for the associations of the Sabbath-keeping the fence round a maiden's principles, the precious influence of the sanctuary is broken down by the slavish lash of severe labour, and the serpent of seduction coils round her broken spirit, till he abandons her to the sting and the shame of a ruined honour and a broken heart. The Retrospect and Twelfth Report of the Early Closing Association, observes, "The weaker sex in the workrooms of the fashionable milliners and dressmakers are made the victims of a system in the operation of which humanity has no voice-feminine weakness no advocate. The inhumanity of man to man is outdone by that of woman to woman. Fashion is more despotic than mammon itself, and worse tortures are inflicted at the shrine of vanity than greed ever had the hardihood to demand. It is proved by unquestionable testimony that the largest amount of labour ever continuously exacted from human energies has been exacted, often from mere want of consideration, from feeble and delicate women, at the fiat of woman herself, feeble and delicate, but equally the slave of fashion. Man behind the counter, or in the workshop or warehouse, toils on, it may be, till the last chance customer has left the streets and midnight is at hand; but woman, long after the midnight bell has tolled, still plies the flying needle, night after night and day after day; sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours out of the twentyfour are ruthlessly exacted, so long as the pressure of business calls for the sacrifice, and sisters and daughters swoon at the needle; and fair young maidens pine on sickbeds, and sink into youthful graves; or else seek a refuge from the mammon lust which has already demoralized their heart and mind, in its next step, the prostitution of body and soul."

Theft is another evil proved to proceed from overwork. "The unnatural thirst for stimulants which the system creates, is too strong to withstand the temptation, as opportunities occur, to pilfer the means of its hideous indulgence from the master's till, or from the accounts of his customers or clients. An indefinite sense of some wrong done them prompts any available shape of plundering an employer in time, material, or workmanship, as an intuitive right of retaliation, or a wild mode of adjusting the balance between their taskwork and its inadequate wages." These

last are well-weighed words, they embody a truth-and a terrible one for a society like ours!

Disease is another product of an overworked brain. Mr. Grainger asserts "he would pledge all he knew of the constitution of the human frame to the assertion, that protracted labour is nothing else than another term for sickness, suffering, and death." Dr. Copeland "believes no less than three-fourths of the diseases to which human life is liable in the metropolis actually arise from this cause." Dr. Lancaster finds "there is in this metropolis a sacrifice of a thousand lives annually, through the practice of keeping in shops for a greater number of hours than the human constitution can bear. But this is not all-where a thousand persons die from this cause, there are at least eight thousand whose health suffers from it."

But it is needless to add to this sad list. We have said perhaps enough as to the evil-what as to the remedy? Again we quote Mr. Owen-“In a word, as the oase stands, man's holiday seems indis

pensable to the protection of the Lord's holy day. At all events, if we should secure a vacation from heavy labour on the half day preceding the Sabbath, there will not only, under God's blessing, be a better hope for the Sabbath's profitable observance, but the apology for popular Sabbath-breaking, that it is their only day,' will be taken out of the mouths of those who advocate on such grounds the opening on Sundays of public places of amusement. With the same

view, we contend for an early closing of places of business. Get the public out of its desultory habits of purchase into the rule of procuring their requirements within reasonable hours, which can only be taught them by the unanimous adoption of an early closing, tending to their own convenience, as well as to the comfort and economy of dealers, and once become the settled custom, all parties will be advantaged by the change. • Man goeth forth to his work, and to his labour, until the evening,' is the rule of Scripture, and with the evening, not the midnight, I should his labour cease." C.

NOTWITHSTANDING the bitter opposition which was given to the Psalter of King James as uncalled for and faulty,-notwithstanding the indignant and stout assertion which was made of the excellence of the old version, there was at the same time in Scotland a deep conviction of the necessity of an amended translation. It is by no means a difficult thing to account for this contradiction. But the fact was sufficiently proved by the private and laborious preparation of several versions, and the anxiety which soon was openly manifested to take advantage of these. The same conviction was prevalent in England, though there the agitation on the subject was promoted not only by those who sincerely longed for a better version, but also by some who expected that the movement would bring about the total suppression of psalmody in divine worship. I have no reason suspect that such an idea was entertained by any party in Scotland; and I

to

purpose now to say something of two of the metrical versions produced at that period, and which are not commonly known.

Before setting out to discharge his duties as a Commissioner from the Church of Scotland to the Westminster Assembly, Baillie (afterwards Principal of the University of Glasgow) wrote the following letter. It is dated at Kilwinning, of which parish he was then Minister, October 9, 1643. "For the right worshipfull his assurit Friend, Sir William Muir of Rouallan. Right Worshipfull, If it be God's will that our intendit voyage towards London hold, it is liklie that on of the points of our conference will be anent a new Psalter. Your's I did lyk better than any other I have sein. If you think meet to send to me a perfyte copie thereof, I shall assur to mak that use of it which you shall direct, or the best I am able. Expecting your mind heeranent, I rest, your loving