church there, and is accosted by_a gentleman who sits near him. He eyes him closely. At length he recognises a resemblance to the face he once brought into his pew at home. The gentleman asks his name, and with much emotion inquires, "Do you not remember a wild Sabbath-breaker whom you once invited into Dr. B.'s church at Glasgow? I am that man. I am now a missionary in this island! The bread you then cast on the waters has been found after many days." Fellow-labourers for Christ! teachers, pastors! be of good cheer. Fling LUKEWARM CHRISTIANS. BY THE REV. THEO. L. CUYLER. A CHRISTIAN is one who professes to be a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. I do not believe that among professing Christians there is any large number of wilful hypocrites who enter the Church of Christ with a lie in their right hands, and a deliberate intent to deceive others. But at the same time I as certainly believe that there are a great many within the pale of the Church who give no evidence of a genuine conversion. Some came in through the unwise persuasions of others. It is as dangerous to urge people to join a church as it is to urge people to marry. Both of these great steps in life should be taken from the spontaneous promptings of the heart. Give a man the reasons for making a profession of faith; point out the happy influence of a sincere "standing up for Jesus;" and then let him decide for himself. Some come into the Church through a lamentable self-deception. They were the victims of a spurious religious excitement. They were alarmed by pungent preaching, or a view of their own sin, and mistook fright for contrition; they afterwards fell into the hands of false comforters, and then mistook the reaction of their excited feelings for true conversion. They were indiscreetly announced as new converts;" they felt committed to a certain course of conduct; and, before time was given them to put their own hearts to a severe trial, or to see how their religion would wear, they hurried into the Church with the most solemn of vows before God and man upon their consciences. Alas! how soon have such rootless professors withered away! How can such self-deceived souls be anything else than LUKEWARM- "neither cold nor hot"-neither out of the Church, nor yet honestly within it? From our inmost heart, we do pity those unhappy persons who are thus chained to a church with which they have no sympathy-professing to love what they regard with utter indifference, or else secret disgust. The true course of such is to burn up the stubble of a false hope, and seek at once a genuine hope in Christ before it is too late. ་ If it is a kindness to point out the first symptoms of a fatal disease in a friend, how much more is it a kindness to shake down the rotten hope of a self-deceived or lukewarm professor! Reader! if you do not believe that your professed piety is a true piety, then lose not an hour in fleeing to Jesus. Do not flee out of the Church; but flee to the Saviour. Thousands have been converted within the pale of the Church. A second portion of the lukewarm in nearly every church-perhaps the larger portion-are so from a culpable declension of heart-religion. They were once converted, but are now downright backsliders from God and from duty. They have lost their first love. Jesus Christ has ceased to be the supreme object of their thoughts and affections. This strikes at once to the vitals. For love to Christ is essential to Christianity. It is the marrow of true religion. It is this which links the soul to God; which keeps the passions down and the graces up; which vanquishes temptation; which puts the world under our feet; and which turns duty into a delight. Love to Jesus makes the dullest heart to glow, and quickens a slow tongue to eloquence. Love of Jesus sent Henry Martyn to the sand-plains of Persia, and Samuel Mills to the boors of Africa; it made stout old Latimer sing at the burning stake, and it irradiated the seraphic countenance of Payson as he passed through the river of death. It is the very pith of every good man's piety. When love to Jesus ceases to be the master-affection of the soul, the spiritual decline has commenced, and the sad effects soon strike outward into the life. As the inward fire burns low, lukewarmness begins. If love of Christ does not draw a man to the prayer-gathering, a sense of duty will soon cease to drive him there. If Christ is not allowed to keep a Christian's purse, selfishness will soon steal it. If a Christian is not conformed to Christ, he will very speedily become conformed to the world. His moral sense becomes blunted. He gets used to neglecting his closet; used to shirking his duties; he gets used to sinning! A small excuse is enough to satisfy him. Instead of giving Christ "the casting vote" in every decision, he gives it to selfishness. Instead of growing in grace, he dwindles every day. Having a name to live, he is dying at the root. I have seen such Christians gasping away like a poor animal under the exhausted glass "receiver" of an air-pump. Put a score of such professors of religion into a prayer-meeting, and it becomes an ice-house. Put a church-full of such professors into a community, and it does about as much good as a monster snow-bank in a fencecorner does to fertilize a field. I would not exchange the prayers and the power of a single servant-girl that I have in my church for five hundred of these petrified professors sitting around the communion-table in meaningless mockery of a crucified Master. Oh! it is terrible to think how low a Christian's religion may sink, and yet the breath of life be still left in him. It is terrible to think how far a backslider may go, who is yet not an open apostate. Terrible is it, too, to contemplate the mischief which these lukewarm professors make in the Church and in society. Over such as they, sinners stumble into perdition. Every backslider commonly has one or more clinging to his skirts. In the terse words of the old Liturgy, such professors "do those things which they ought not to do, and leave undone those things which they ought to do; and there is no spiritual health" in them. What did the Holy Spirit say unto a lukewarm church at Laodicea? "Be zealous, therefore, and repent." And the best way to repent of sin, is to quit it. If sin have grown into a horrid ulcer, cut it out! It is better to enter into life maimed and bleeding than to be cast into hell. The most effectual repentance for neglected duty is to resume that duty. Do not stop, my friend, to mourn outside a bolted closet-door. Open again the place of secret devotion, and, as thou enterest there, bathe with tears the feet of thy deserted Saviour. Rear again thy household altar. Go back to your post of labour. Implore the grieved Holy Spirit to aid you. And do it betimes. The Judge standeth at the door! To-morrow you may be in your shroud, and your soul may be summoned to the bar of God! THE CRUSE THAT FAILETH NOT. Is thy cruse of comfort wasting? Love divine will fill thy storehouse, For the heart grows rich in giving; garner, Is thy burden hard and heavy? Numb and weary on the mountains, Is thy heart a well left empty? Is thy heart a living power? And by serving, love will grow. Tales and Sketches. MASTER ELIAS'S RULE. A STORY FOR DECEMBER. THIRTY years! it is a long period in the allotted term of life on earth! First the baby sleeping in its cradle; then the child in short frocks romping in the garden-walks; then the muchcoveted jacket and trousers, and the going to school, and out into the world to find joy or sorrow; and then the closing of the eyes and rest to the restless heart. And to many comes all this within the space of thirty years! If any one had said to Master Elias, on his thirtieth birthday, "Master Elias, there will come a beggar to your door to-day; give her one of those two barley-loaves of yours, and thirty years from to-day you will be paid for it— and a good price too,"-Master Elias would probably have stared at this announcement, and might in truth have answered that there was charity enough in his heart to give a loaf of bread to a beggar, without hope or promise of being paid for it, either in thirty years or at any other time. Master Elias, I must tell you, was the village schoolmaster; but he did not live as country schoolmasters are too often obliged to do-in lodgings. When he came to the village, three years before, he brought with him a little sister, a pretty child, about twelve years old: they two were all alone in the world; and he seemed to feel the need of some place that he could call home for himself and her; so he hired a humble little cottage, and took into it a poor old woman, who for her support was willing to be his housekeeper. After two years she died, and then the little girl became housekeeper. Whether Master Elias had a little store of money when he first came to the village, and spent it all in his attempts at domestic comfort, I cannot tell; but certain it is that he grew poorer and poorer, and now was very poor indeed. It was a poor village where he lived and taught; each one of the villagers thought that the others were doing a great deal for the support of the schoolmaster; so, being everybody's business to support him, it became in the course of time nobody's business; and so it happened that, on his thirtieth birthday, a bright December day, when he and his little sister sat down to the grand banquet on the occasion, the grand banquet consisted of nothing but bread and milk, the contents of the pantry having been reduced to two barley-loaves. But bread and milk is a very good thing to anybody with a good appetite and a good conscience, so the two sat long and merrily over the repast; and just as they finished, came a rap at the door: a poor girl in rags; her mother was sick in the hovel on the hill; she was begging for food. Master Elias hesitated for one instant only. “If I give away the bread, what shall we eat to-morrow?" thought he. It was but a passing thought, and he put it from him, and felt trustful in Divine providence for the morrow. "I will give you half of all I have ; I can do no more," he said; and gave the girl one of his barley-loaves, and divided with her the scanty fuel he had to cook the morrow's meal-should there be one to cook-and the girl departed. The long, cold winter passed: night after night, when his labours were over, would he sit by his solitary fire, with his little sister by his side, teaching her, telling her stories, and thinking of the time when she would be a woman-a good and beautiful woman, with a bright, happy home of her own. But toward spring there came a time when he had to dismiss his school and shut up the school-house, and tell his boys his little sister was sick, and there would be no school for a few days, until she got well again; and the days grew on into weeks, and still there was no school. And there came an evening when Master Elias sat quite alone in his cottage, and in the village churchyard in the valley there was a fresh grave heaped up, and the night-dews were falling on it, and the winds whistled over it. Master Elias never opened his school-house again. In the spring he left the village, and no one knew whither he had gone. Years passed on; ten years passed: many new faces were seen in the village, many old ones had disappeared from it. Ten more years passed, and still greater were the changes. New houses, and churches and chapels, and shops; whole new streets; and when yet another ten years had gone, little, very little indeed, was left of the village of thirty years before. The old men and women of that time were sleeping in the shadow of the ivycovered church in the valley; the young ones had mostly scattered, and travelled to other places. But there were some little legacies that the old village had bequeathed to the new village. One was the stage-coach, which had not yet given place to a railroad; another was the village inn, a time-worn structure, under the great elms and poplars at the entrance of the village; another was the buxom wife of the innkeeper-she was born in this village, and had passed here her whole life; and, lastly, there was an especial legacy of her own, that she kept and cherished as something better than gold and silver, that had been, as she said, the blessing of her life, and was certainly a blessing to the poor within her reach; and this legacy was what she called, "Master Elias's rule." When any poor soul in distress went to her for help, she might be able to give but a little, but that little she gave with such kindness and sympathy that it seemed a great deal, and she would say, in giving it, "It is Master Elias's rule." Did any poor traveller come along who could scarcely afford to pay for his supper and bed, he got them for nothing" for Master Elias's rule." Did the good man, the farmer and innkeeper, gently remonstrate sometimes when her charities seemed beyond prudence, she would say, "Have we not prospered well in all things, my husband? Yet have I followed all my life Master Elias's rule." And if, while she was busy with some kind charity, some one would ask, "Who is this Master Elias, and what is his rule?" she would smile, and say, "This is his rule," and go on with her work of mercy. So it came to pass that "Master Elias's rule" became a proverb and a saying in the village for every action of benevolence and good-will. It happened one winter night, when the passengers had alighted from the stage-coach and gone into the cheerful inn, and one very poor old man had lingered outside, as if afraid to go in among such grand company, that the stage-driver took him by the arm, and led him into the parlour, and called out to the landlady, “Here is a poor old man, mistress, who will be thankful, I believe, for Master Elias's rule to-night." "He shall be taken care of," answered the landlady, cheerily, as she was bustling round preparing supper for her guests. The old man had started when the driver spoke, and had looked for a moment from one to the other, and then seemed to sink into a reverie; but when the mistress of the house set some supper before him, he looked up timidly in her kind face. "I am afraid I cannot pay for much of a supper to-night! "You shall not pay anything for it, nor for your bed, either," was her reply. Eat; it will do your heart good, man. "Yes," added the innkeeper, who had come in a moment before, "eat; it does one good to eat such days and nights as these. I think my wife may as well follow "Master Elias's rule,' as she calls it, with you." The other travellers had gone up to 1 |