consciousness of weakness. But this sense of weakness is least of all present to strong minds when employed in study. While acutely discovering truth, or eloquently enforcing it, they feel a great power within them; a power which common men do not possess, and which, like all other rare qualities, the multitude who have it not themselves admire. This naturally feeds pride, and so stifles humility: and the same thing is likely to happen with charity. In reading we are of necessity much alone; and in reading, also, by the very nature of the case, the understanding, and not the affections, is exercised. To think, is something essentially different from to love. Thus we lose our sympathies with our fellow-creatures, and live in a little world of our own, in which self is ever prédominant. We think of others only as rejoicing in our exaltation above them; or, at best, in our power of enlightening them. And we may enlighten them, and may minister to their good, by teaching them many useful truths; but what becomes of our own souls the while? Are they growing up unto eternal life, increasing more and more in the fruits of the Spirit, in faith and love, in peace and joy? Or, may not our case be like Balaam's,

who, after having taught Balak the very sum of wisdom,-when he declared to him that man's duty "was to do justice and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with his God,"yet himself lived in sin; and though he had prayed that his latter end might be that of the righteous, yet it was, in truth, that of the wicked he died with the enemies of God.

It is here, then, that we may derive such immense benefit from following Christ's example, from taking care to mix habitually with our fellow-creatures, not only for our business or our pleasure, but for charity. No good is done or can be done, when, from his solitary reading, a man only comes forth for a while into what is called brilliant or agreeable society; or into that which deserves only a lower and a fouler name—the society of sensuality and riot. In the first case, the same evil spirits of pride and selfishness which had been with him in his lonely chamber, again haunt the man in the halls of gaiety; in the other case, the spirit of pride is but relieved for a time by the spirit of drunkenness or uncleanness. This is not the intercourse with our fellowcreatures which is to do us good; this is not to follow Christ's example. We dare not, in this case, trust ourselves in the society of

publicans and sinners: we should not do good to them, but they would rather infect us with their own evil. But the natural remedy for our peculiar dangers, the way in which we can best mix with our brethren for the nourishing of our affections, is to be found in the intercourse with our own families on the one hand, and with the poor on the other. I cannot but think that in the former of these points, a most evil habit has of late years grown up amongst young men when engaged in reading; I mean, that of going away from their homes, and fixing themselves, for three or four months, in some remote part of the country, where they may study without interruption. It may be, that more is thus read than would be read at home, though scarcely more than might be; but, even supposing it to be so, it is a dangerous price that is paid for it. The simple quiet of a common family circle, the innumerable occasions of kindness that it affords, and its strong tendency to draw away our thoughts from self, and to awaken our affections for others, a discipline precious at every period of life,-can then least of all be spared, when the hardnesses of the world are just coming upon us, when our studies, and even our very animal

spirits, are all combining to make us selfish and proud. Nay, at such a time, and to persons whose minds are strongly occupied with the excitement of reading, the mere commonplace society which most men meet with in the neighbourhood of their own homes, is capable of becoming highly useful. When the Psalmist said that he did not occupy himself with great matters which were too hard for him, but that he refrained his soul and kept it low, he expressed most wisely his sense of the fact, that we must not feed our minds always with great and high thoughts, but that the common trifling interests and conversation of every-day society, are, in their turn, a most wholesome variety. I have often thought that what is sometimes charged as a defect on such society, that it dwells too much upon personal and individual topics, upon the conduct and affairs of those immediately around us, is capable of becoming most useful to him who regrets his own want of interest in the common matters of life, and with whom himself and his own pursuits and labours occupy too large a share of his attention.

But, besides this wholesome intercourse with our own families, another way of mixing

with our brethren, in a manner most especially pleasing to Christ and useful to ourselves, is by holding frequent intercourse with the poor. Perhaps, to young men of the richer classes, there is nothing which makes their frequent residence in large towns so mischievous to them, as the difficulties which they find in the way of this intercourse. In the country, many a young man knows something, at least, of his poorer neighbours; but, in towns, the numbers of the poor, and the absence of any special connexion between him and any of them in particular, hinder him, too often, from knowing any thing of them at all: an evil as much to be regretted on the one side as the other; and which is quite as mischievous to the minds and tempers of the rich, as it is to the bodily condition of the poor. I can imagine hardly any thing more useful to a young man of an active and powerful mind, advancing rapidly in knowledge, and with high distinction either actually obtained or close in prospect, than to take him-or much better that he should go of himself—to the abodes of poverty, and sickness, and old age. Every thing there is a lesson; in every thing Christ speaks, and the Spirit of Christ is ready