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arms and their mouths open. In a night-not so much like notched

fact, they seemed a great deal more like little dogs than they did like little boys. But Bobbit did not think of this; they were very much like all his lodgers.

knives," said poor Bobbit; for the boiler gaped cruelly, and drew in long breaths of the storm upon him. The snow swept in, and the wind; the sleet crusted over his bleeding fingers, and in his hair. It was very dark. Often, when the wind was the wrong way and that front door went down, he could see stars through the rusty gums of the

"Babies," he said to himself, twisting himself together to keep warm. "Jest babies. Now I'd like to know what 'ud ha' become o' them two this night ef I didn't happen to keep hotel. Wh-e-ew!" creature-the boiler seemed more This night was growing quite like a creature than like an hotel, cold enough to emphasise. Bobbit after all, sometimes; but now it was a little surprised it grew so opened into blank blackness and cold. You see he was used to noise. sleeping in the "first-class rooms," over under the jacket and the hay. Right here, in the lips of the boiler, it was icy and wet. The wind puffed in at the cracks where the hogshead-top did not fit. It seemed as if the hotel were drawing in great breaths, like an animal, into its iron lungs. The sleet too shot in little broadsides of it, cutting and cold. Bobbit's hands bled where it struck them; but it was so dark that he did not know it.

"The wind's the wrong way," said Bobbit. "My front door 'll be blown down afore morning. Heigh-o! Harum!"

Harum was asleep. "Scarum! ""

Scarum was asleep.

"Warm as toast," said Bobbit, feeling them. "Wonder ef they could spare me the jacket?

But, after some thought, he concluded not to take the jacket. The storm was screaming horribly, overhead, this side, that side, all about, and the wind still the wrong way. If the front door should go down, the jacket would not be any too much for his little lodgers.

"I won't ask fur 't," said Bobbit, with a little grim smile. "I brung 'em in here. I won't ax fur the jacket."

So he did not ask for the jacket, and by-and-by the door went down. "Seems to me I never knew such

It was very, very cold. Bobbit had been very cold before, but never so cold as this. He looked over at the "best soot," where his little lodgers lay, and thought how warm it must be in there. He kept the edge of the storm from the little boys, you see. It struck and broke upon his own poor little freezing flesh. If he could change places with Harum and Scarum! If he could only change places for a little while!

But Bobbit shook his head hard at himself.

"That's one way to keep a hotel! Put folks into yer front entries, and freeze 'em afore mornin'!"

But it was bitter cold! Bobbit felt bitten and gnawed all over.

"I should ha' liked the jacket; but I won't. No, I won't!" said Bobbit. He put his head down upon his arm. The snow had drifted in high and soft; his arm and his head went down into it, like a cold cushion.

And

"I'll have a white pillar-case, at any rate," said Bobbit, slowly, wondering why he didn't laugh at his own joke. "And I won't-no, I won't; they was company. sech babies! Folks as keeps hotels must put up-with-onconvenience. It's somethin' to hev a white -pillar-case of yer own.'

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The little hotel-keeper sank lower and lower into his white pillow

case. The hotel door gaped steadily. All the front entry filled with snow. There was so much snow that the boiler choked, and gaped no longer to the black night. Instead, it grew dully white and warm so the little lodgers in the best rooms thought, when they waked each other up, once in the night, by trying to get their four feet into one of the jacket sleeves. They called out to Bobbit; but he lay quite still in the front entry, and made no answer. So they thought how comfortable they were, and went to sleep again.

Now in the morning there was a great noise inside the boiler, and outside too for that matter. For Bobbit's hotel was drifted and drowned almost out of sight and breath by the piling snow; and Bobbit's little lodgers, when they found it out, whined and whooped till a policeman and a butcher with two shovels came to dig them out. 'Puppies," said the policeman, letting sunlight in, "froze up here over night. A batch of pup— hal-loo!"

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For his shovel struck hard on something, and it was not a puppy. It was the little hotel-keeper, on his white pillow-case, asleep and

cold-so sound asleep and so cold that neither the policeman, nor the butcher, nor Harum, nor Scarum could wake him, though they tried their best for an hour.

"He give them other young uns the warmth of the whole freezing concern," said the policeman, talking very fast. "That's what I call g-r-i-t!"

Harum and Scarum called it a pity. They did not know what else to call it.

"A norful pity," said Harum, as they were marched off to the Little Wanderers' Home.

"Where's he gone to?" whispered Scarum, looking frightened. "Purrgetorry, mebbe," suggested

Harum.

"Will he keep hotel in Purrgetorry?" asked Scarum, after a very little very stupid thought.

"It's the praste as knows. I doan't," said Harum.

Now Scarum was thinking a very curious thing. "If he keeps hotel in Purrgetorry," said Scarum to himself, “I hope they'll give him hot bread every day, jist." But he did not think about it long enough to say it; and he wouldn't have known how to say it if he had. Besides, that is the end of the story.

FEW SAVED?

A SERMON BY THE REV. J. W. THEW.

"Lord, are there few that be saved ?"-Luke xiii. 23.

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FEW things are more annoying to a truly earnest mind than the inability on the part of companions and friends to understand its earnestness. With ignorance and sin it can bear up patiently. There is nothing hopeless in either of these. But with that crass and chronic want of power to enter into noble purposes, to comprehend great questions, to sympathise with lofty designs-with this lies at once its greatest difficulty and its greatest annoyance.

It is very obvious that this was the Saviour's portion during the whole of His earthly life. From His earliest boyhood to the end of His shortlived manhood-from the scene in the Temple to the tragedy on the cross-if there is one thing more patent than another, it is

this Men neither understood what He was, nor what He meant to be about. His character, His motives, His aims, His entire work that which He came to do, and the way in which He meant to do it, lay quite beyond them. And it is not an uncommon thing to find, that while He is resolving great plans, and bringing the whole force of His great Being to bear upon great interests, His most attached friends are busy settling some petty dispute; as when they vexed each other's little souls with who should be the first in the kingdom of heaven.

Though the question of the text comes from an unknown listenernot an attached friend-it nevertheless illustrates the sentiment already advanced. The Saviour is taking His last journey to Jerusalem. The city which killed God's prophets and stoned His messengers is in the immediate foreground. The agony and the death-the tomb and the triumph-are close at hand; and it is amid this gathering gloom and glory that a bystander propounds the ill-timed and ill-chosen question, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" The question was not answered. The questioner read his rebuke in the memorable words, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate; for many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter in and shall not be able."

"Lord, are there few that be saved?" It is important at all times, it is supremely important now, to draw careful distinctions between a spirit of mere curiosity, and an eager and well-grounded desire to know. One of the first acts of the human mind-and when that human mind retains its early healthfulness, one of the last-is to look earnestly into the nature and reasons of things. It is this which so often lights up the liquid eye of childhood with new wonder and delight. It is this which so often makes the dim eye of age to flash again as with returning light. It is this which ministers perennial gratification to the student, keeping him ever beneath a trembling consciousness of advancing knowledge. It is this which sustains the traveller as he passes on from sea to sea, and from shore to shore. It is this, in fine, which imparts the greatest charm to life. The mere desire to know is among the most rooted of our instincts, and the mere act of getting to know among the richest of our rewards.

As the human mind does not change either its nature or its attitude when brought to bear upon religious objects, the bare desire here for knowledge is as strong as elsewhere. The mind of God, the ways of God, the methods and government of God, the plans and the purposes of God, are all, within devout limits, and to a devout spirit, as truly legitimate subjects of investigation as the position and extent of our coalfields, or the tastes and tendencies of the times. It is the Church of Rome, or other Churches which have copied the Romish spirit while repudiating the Romish name, which seek to discountenance the free and fearless looking-into of religious questions. And I think it may be said without risk of contradiction, however grave the errors into which some people are led, through a manifest incompetency to deal with great questions, the evil is multiplied and intensi

fied a thousandfold, when these questions are fenced round by ecclesiastical restrictions, and free-thought is stifled by the dogmas of a Church, of a sect, or of influential individuals. "We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakspeare spake, the faith and morals hold that Milton held."

The point, however, is not so much whether there shall be free inquiry or not; that is at any rate claimed and professedly conceded on all sides. The point is, what is the spirit in which this free inquiry shall be carried on? We hold out the great facts and doctrines of Christianity; the mystery of the Being and the providence of God; the nature and the destiny of the teeming human family-and we say it is already a conceded point that these are proper objects for investigation; but before the investigation begins we put a hand upon the shoulder of the candidate, and say, "Show us your credentials-let us see that you have a right to investigate; " in other words, "What is the spirit in which you mean to investigate." If your spirit is a true one, an earnest and a devout one, you may begin your inquiry at once, and pursue it to any reasonable length; but if your spirit is an idle one, a merely curious or captious one, you are morally unfit to ask the simplest religious question, or to face the most elementary religious problem.

Let us apply this test to the case before us. The Saviour has been speaking of the small beginnings, and of the immense growth, of His kingdom, when a bystander puts the question, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" Is the man's soul trembling with anxiety lest, after all, a mere handful of the great family will reach the everlasting home? Is he so keenly alive to the magnitude of his question that an answer in favour of the many would send him home dancing with delight, or better still, fill him with a grand ambition to do his best to make the many more? Or is he concerned about his own salvation, and is the question paramount, "Many or few, shall I be among the number?" "Not at all! It is a purely idle question, put in a purely idle mood, by a purely idle man. It strikes him as something he would like to know, that is all! An interesting speculation, a curious problem. "I wonder if heaven will be crowded, or if it will be half empty. I'll just ask the Master; He's sure to know!" And because of the spirit out of which the question was born he got no answer.

Now I do not want to be uncharitable, but it would appear that the better half of what is called just now a spirit of inquiry on religious matters is only a spirit of semi-curiosity, and as mere curiosity is in its very nature fickle, it follows that more than one-half of what is called religious inquiry is worthless. Even should our proportion be objected to as being too large a proportion, and we cut it down to onefourth, it still remains a very serious matter that so many men-not by any means our worst or feeblest men-are pushing their way intellectually into religious questions, in such a spirit as totally to miss the mark; are asking in such a tone and temper of mind as precludes the

moral possibility of an answer; are knocking at a door which will never open to them till they have learned the art of knocking in the spirit of Him who said, "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

Brethren, I have called this a serious matter, and as such I wish to speak to you about it, and I wish to speak to you face to face. There are men in all our congregations who do not get settled religiously. Regular, attentive, apparently devout, they yet connect themselves with no Christian Church. Let it be granted frankly that we of the Christian Church are not blameless-that our theology has been hard and unkind—that we have fenced up the doorway with restrictions the Master would have torn down. Let all this be said, and much more, still I ask you, Are we the only guilty parties in the business? Is there no particle of blame attaching to you? Has pride, or cynicism, or a mere idle curiosity, nothing to do with keeping you from settlement on these great points? Is it only our repellent temper, and not your idle sneer? only our theology, and not your indifference? only our "Avaunt," and not your languid look into things which the angels desire to look into? If we have said, "Swear by us," have you been other than mere idle seekers of religious curiosities, uttering your weak, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" while the Lord is treading the path to Jerusalem and the cross? The word of warning to you to-day is a very solemn one, "Strive, agonise, to enter in at the strait gate, for the time is coming when many shall seek to enter in and shall not be able."

We have spoken of the spirit of religious inquiry, and we may be arrested here by a very fair question, "When may a man know that his desire to know is a real and not an idle one? I am looking, for example, into the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. How am I to know that it is not mere curiosity, but a sound religious instinct and spirit, which prompt the inquiry?"

Suppose, after your investigation, you came to the conclusion that there are three persons in the Godhead-the Father, the Word, and the Spirit. You are convinced that Scripture teaches that, and reason does not disapprove it. And yet you remain exactly the same kind of man after your investigation that you were before. The Father is no more to you. The Son is no more to you. The Spirit is no more to you. You do not say with greater meaning, "Our Father who art in heaven," &c. You do not say with greater fervour, "My Lord and my God," and you do not seek one whit the more diligently for the personal influences of a personal Spirit. Then I say your inquiry is vain. Your questions are idle. Your orthodoxy is a figment. The whole thing is worthless. It is only the spirit of the man who said, "Lord, are there few that be saved?

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Suppose you come to the conclusion of the Theist. Jesus was only a man. The Holy Spirit an Impersonal Influence. The Father all in all. You have got rid, you say, of debasing superstitions. You have freed the fundamental idea of religion from all that ignorance and

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