66

SPRING FAST.

It is the confession of that learned Divine, Zanchy, that "there is no man, unless he be altogether unskilful in histories, and has never seen the ancient Fathers, who doth not acknowledge the observation of this time of Lent, to be most ancient. For Telesphorus who was the seventh Bishop of the Roman Church, and martyr, (about the year of our Lord 139), makes mention of it, as observed in the Church before his time."

peace on all sides. When the clock | ANTIQUITY OF THE LENT OR goes too fast, and the students complain of it, say,-Let me alone, do not trouble yourself, I will take care it goes slow enough." "But the others," said the good man, " will then cry out." Say to them," replied the Superior, "my children, trust to me, I will see that it goes fast enough. In the mean time, let the clock go its own pace. Answer all who come to you with good and gentle words; all parties will be satisfied, and you will be left in peace." You are going to Paris, continued the Saint, when he had finished his story, and there you will be exposed to much worldly criticism. If you pay attention to all that is said of you, you will have enough to do. What will be your best plan? You must return kind and gentle words to all, but at the same time pursue your own straight course, swerve not to the right hand or to the left, to follow the advice (for the most part contradictory) which many will thrust upon you; look up to God, and give yourself up to the guidance of His Holy Spirit. The judgment of men is of little importance to us, since we ought to seek to please God, and not them.

NEGLECT OF GOOD FRIDAY.

I do not know how it appears to others, but it seems very strange to me, that what the Church had strengthened and confirmed by an unanimous consent in St. Austin's time, (1400 years ago) should find any dissenter from it in these days. And yet I fear there are some, I wish they be not many, who scarce observe Good Friday, that is, the day of our Saviour's Passion, with any of that strictness, which I have mentioned; but eat and drink, and do all other things, as upon the rest of the days of the year.-Bishop Patrick on Repentance and Fasting.

And indeed it is so ancient, that there is no beginning to be found of it which hath moved many to run it up to the very Apostolical times, nay, to the Apostles themselves. For which there is more reason, perhaps, than now is commonly acknowledged. no Church can be found, wherein a solemn Fast before Easter was not observed; which is a strong argument to prove it derived itself from such a beginning as I have mentioned: for otherwise it cannot be conceived how it should prevail universally in all countries, where the Name of Christ was preached.-Bishop Patrick on Repentance and Fasting.

PRAYER.

"Prayer is the believer's universal medicine for all the disorders of the soul within, and his invincible shield against every enemy that can attack him without."-Bp. Horne.

BOOKS.

We beg to call the attention of our readers to the valuable series of Tracts advertised in the present Number.

OLD NEWS BETTER THAN NONE.

DANIEL GUMB, THE CORNISH MATHEMATICIAN.

DURING the earlier half of the last century, there lived in one of the villages on the outskirts of a moor in Cornwall, a stonecutter, named Daniel Gumb. This man was noted among his companions, for his taciturn eccentric character, and for his attachment to mathematical studies. Such leisure time as he had at his command, he regularly devoted to pondering over some of the problems of Euclid; he was always drawing mysterious complications of angles, triangles, and parallelograms, on pieces of slate, and on the blank leaves of such few books as he possessed. But he made very slow progress in his studies; poverty and hard work increased with the increase of his family. At last he was obliged to give up his mathematics altogether. He laboured early, and laboured late, he hacked and hewed at the hard material out of which he was doomed to cut a livelihood, with unremitting diligence; but want still kept up with him, toil as he might to outstrip it, in the career of life. In short, times went on so ill with Daniel, that in despair of ever finding them better, he took a sudden resolution of altering his manner of living, and retreating from the difficulties that he could not overcome. He went to a hill where many rocks were scattered, and looked about among them until he found some that had accidentally formed themselves into a sort of rude cavern. He widened this recess, he propped up a great wide slab, that made its roof, at one end where it seemed likely to sink without some additional support; he cut out in a rock that rose above this, what he called his bed-room, a mere longitudinal slit in the stone, the length and breadth of his body, into which he could roll himself sideways when he entered it. After he had completed this last piece of work, he scratched the date of the year of his extraordinary labours (1735) on the rock, and then he went and fetched his wife and family away from their cottage, and lodged them in the cavity he had made, never to return, during his lifetime, to the dwellings of men! Here he lived, and here he worked, when he could get work. He paid no rent now, he wanted no furniture; he struggled no longer to appear to the world as his equals appeared; he required no more money than would procure for his family and himself the

barest necessaries of life; he suffered no interruptions from his fellow-workmen, who thought him a madman and kept out of his way; and, most precious privilege of his new position, he could at last shorten his hours of labour and lengthen his hours of study with impunity. Having no temptations now to spend money, no pressing demands of his landlord to answer whether he was able to meet them or not, he could work with his brains as well as his hands; he could toil at his problems upon the top of rocks, under the open sky, amid the silence of the great moor; he could scratch his lines and angles on thousands of stone tablets freely offered around him. The great ambition of his life was, achieved. Henceforth, nothing moved him, nothing depressed him. The storms of winter rushed over his unsheltered dwelling, but failed to dislodge him. He taught his family to brave solitude and cold, in the cavern among the rocks, as he braved them. In the cell that he had scooped out for his wife (the roof of which has now fallen in) some of his children died, and others were born. They point out the rock where he used to sit on calm summer evenings, absorbed over his tattered copy of Euclid. A geometrical puzzle, traced by his hand, still appears on the stone. When he died, what became of his family none can tell. Nothing more is known of him than that he never quitted the place of his exile; that he continued to the day of his death to live contentedly, with his wife and children, amid a civilized nation, and during a civilized age, under such a shelter as would hardly serve the first savage tribes of the most savage country. To live, starving out poverty and want, on a barren wild, defying both to follow him among the desert rocks; to live forsaking all things, enduring all things, for the love of knowledge, which he could still nobly follow through trials and extremities, without encouragement of fame or profit, without vantage ground of station or wealth, for its own dear sake. Beyond this nothing but conjecture is left. The cell, the bedplace, the lines traced on the rocks, the inscription of the year in which he hewed his habitation out of them, are all the memorials that remain of a man, whose strange and striking story might worthily adorn the pages of a tragic yet glorious history which is still unwritten, the history of the martyrs of knowledge in humble life.-W. Wilkie Collins's Notes in Cornwall, taken a-foot.

NOTES ON CHURCH HISTORY.

No. IV.

IN a quarter of an hour Butler returned, and took up the subject as follows: :"Certainly, Edward, there is a great deal in your notion, that we have no right to expect God's Church on earth to be perfectly carried out, any more than His other works, so far as they are entrusted to man. Nay, we may in some sort the more expect to find in it faultiness and decay, the more perfect it is in itself compared with the imperfection of those who deal with it."

H." As a bad angel is worse than the worst man, so generally, the abuse of the best is sure to be the worst."

B. " Why, even in these few minutes since we parted, I have been reminded of what you were saying by the behaviour of one of the boys, your friend Jerry Mountain. I have made out that one chief reason of his strange behaviour to-day (for you know what a good boy he is in general) is his having stinted himself unusually in food, through desire to fulfil a duty, which had been mentioned to him, but not explained gently and carefully enough, as not being a duty for such children. It had had a bad effect on his temper. I presently said to myself, This may be a little of it the boy's fault, and a great deal the teacher's; but it is certainly not the Church's fault: Edward's idea was quite right.

H." And I the while have been thinking, whether Holy Scripture itself does not in one way plainly prepare us for such seeming failure. How was it with the Church and nation of Israel? They were God's own people, how great soever their sins, till they rejected our Lord. Now does not the whole of the Old Testament seem in a manner to say to us, 'Wonder not, in whatever unrighteousness, idolatry, and falsehood, the Lord's people may seem to lose themselves ?" "

B. "Yes; and even in the early Christian Church, lovely as the picture of it is, one may see in the Acts and Epistles the beginnings of a great deal of the mischief that has followed."

H. "Do you say so? I should have thought that all through those times the evil came chiefly from without: the unbelieving Jews stirring up the Gentiles, and the Gentiles, for one cause or another, very willing to persecute; within, generally speaking, it all seems truth and peace."

B. "Nay, think of Ananias and Sapphira."

H." It is true: theirs was a sad case; under the very eye of the Apostles, and with signs and wonders being wrought all around them."

B. "Think of Simon, the magician of Samaria."

H. "As you put it now, I perceive, what I had not always observed, that his, too, was a case of mischief within the Church; for he had believed and was baptized, and continued with Philip; yet his heart was so wrong, that he proposed to purchase the Apostles' office with money."

B. "And you will remember how the Christians were divided about the great question, whether the whole Law of Moses was still necessary to be kept."

H. "You mean the place in the middle of the book of Acts; when the Apostles held their council at Jerusalem."

B. "Yes, that is the place: and we may notice that even the letter of that council, though of course it had a great effect, was not able to settle all men's minds concerning that question at once. St. Paul had afterwards to write two long letters about it, one to the Romans, the other to the Galatians, to quiet them and set them right. And it seems from the 21st chapter of the Acts, that even the Christians of Jerusalem, somewhile after, had a violent prejudice against St. Paul, on this very point.

H. "Yes; I see very plainly, that it was not all right, all as one could wish, even in the very Apostles' times, and among those who had most of their instruction."

B. "If it is perplexing now, it must have been also perplexing then, to recollect such prophecies as, Thy people shall be all righteous,' and 'Great shall be the peace of thy children.": H." Only (now I think of it), there was another set of Prophecies also the Prophecies of our Lord Himself,-which would surely lead people to expect a seeming failure in the Gospel. For He says, that at the very time when it should be preached in all the earth, then Iniquity shall abound, and the love of many shall wax cold:' and, When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth.'"

B. "Most true: His discourses are full of such warnings. And another thing has just come into my mind, very remarkable, if it be at all correct: Whether these beginnings of mischief in the early Church had not each of them something to do with some one or other of the best parts of the Holy Church System, according to what you said just now, that, the best things, abused. become the worst."