to begin the world again with a new profession. It was to throw themselves almost into beggary. Moreover, it was the destruction of much knowledge that was really valuable. As in the pursuit of alchemy real chemical secrets were discovered, so it cannot be doubted that these curious manuscripts contained many valuable natural facts. To burn them was to waste all these, give the lore accumulated for years to the winds.

to

Once more, it was an outrage to feeling. Costly manuscripts, written with curious art, many of them probably the heirlooms of a family, many which were associated with a vast variety of passages in life, old feelings, old teachers, and companions, these were to be committed mercilessly to the flames. Remember, too, how many other ways there were of disposing of them. Might they not be sold, and the proceeds "given to the poor"? Might they not at least be made over to some relative who, not feeling anything wrong in the use or possession of them, would not have his conscience aggrieved? Or might they not be retained, the use of them being given up, as curious records of the past, as the treasure stores of so much that was beautiful and wise? And then Conscience arose with her stern, clear voice. They are the records of an ignorant and guilty past. There must be no false tenderness; the sacrifice must be real, or it is none. To the flames with them, till their ashes are strewed upon the winds, and the smoke will rise up to heaven a sweet savor before God.

Whoever has made such a sacrifice as this and every real Christian in the congregation in some shape or other has will remember the strange medley of feeling which accompanied the sacrifice. We should err if we expected such a deed to be done with feelings entirely single. There is a mixture in all such sacrifices. Partly fear constrained the act, produced by the judgment on the other exorcists; partly genuine remorse; . partly there was a lingering regret as leaf after leaf perished in the flames; partly a feeling of relief, and partly a heavy sense of loss in remembering that the work of years was obliterated, and that the past had to

be lived afresh as a time wasted; partly shame, and partly a wild tumult of joy, at the burst of new hope, and the prospect of a nobler life. We cannot, and dare not, too closely scan such things. The sacrifice was made, and He who knows the mixture of the earthly and the spiritual in His creatures' hearts doubtless accepted the sacrifice.

There is no Christian life that has not in it sacrifice, and that alone is the sacrifice which is made in the spirit of the conflagration of the "Ephesian letters," without reserve, without hesitation, without insincere tenderness. If the slaveholder, convinced of the iniquity of the traffic in man, sells the slaves on his estate to the neighboring planter, the mark of sincerity is wanting; or if the trader in opium or in spirits quits his nefarious commerce, but first secures the value of all that remains in his warehouse or in his ships, again there is a something which betokens the want of a heart true and honest; or if the possessor of a library becomes convinced that certain volumes are unfit for his shelves, immoral, polluting the mind of him that reads them, and yet cannot sacrifice the brilliant binding and the costly edition without an equivalent, what shall we say of these men's sincerity?

Two things marked these Ephesians' earnestness, the voluntariness of their confession, and the unreserved destruction of these records and means of evil. And I say to you, if there be a man here before me with a sin upon his heart, let him remember Conscience will arise to do her dreadful work at last. It may be when it is too late. Acknowledgment at once, this is all that

remains for him to relieve his heart of its intolerable load. If he has wronged a man, let him acknowledge it, and ask forgiveness; if he has defrauded him of his due, or kept from him his rights, let him repair, restore, make up; or if the guilt be one with which man intermeddleth not, and of which God alone takes cognizance, on his bended knees this night, and before the sun of to-morrow dawn, let him pour out the secret of his heart, or else, it may be, that in this world, and in the world to come, Peace is exiled from his heart forever.

III. We shall consider, thirdly, the sedition respecting Diana's worship. First under this head let us notice the speech of Demetrius, in which observe:

1. The cause of the slow death which error and falsehood die shot through and through, they still linger Existing abuses in Church and State are upheld because they are intertwined with private interests. The general good is impeded by private cupidity. The welfare of a nation, the establishment of a grand principle, is clamored against because destructive of the monopoly of a few particular trades. The salvation of the world must be arrested that Demetrius may continue to sell shrines of Diana. This is the reason why it takes centuries to overthrow an evil, after it has proved an evil.

2. The mixture of religious and selfish feelings. Not only "our craft," but also the worship of the great goddess Diana. Demetrius was, or thought himself sincere; a man really zealous for the interests of religion. And so it is with many a patriotic and religious cry. 66 My country," my church,"—"my religion," it supports me. it supports me. "By this craft we have

our wealth."

66

3. Numbers are no test of truth. What Demetrius said, and the town-clerk corroborated, was a fact,that the whole world worshipped the great goddess Diana. Antiquity, universality, popularity, were all on her side; on the other, there were only Paul, Gaius, Aristarchus. If numbers tested truth, Apollos in the last chapter need not have become the brilliant outcast from the schools of Alexandria, nor St. Paul stand in Ephesus in danger of his life.

He who seeks Truth must be content with a lonely, little-trodden path. If he cannot worship her till she has been canonized by the shouts of the multitude, he must take his place with the members of that wretched crowd who shouted for two long hours, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians," till truth, reason, and calmness, were all drowned in noise.

Let us notice the judicious speech of the town-clerk, or chamberlain more properly, in which observe,

1. The impression made by the Apostle on the wiser and calmer part of the community. The Asiarchs, or magistrates, were his friends. The town-clerk exculpated him, as Gallio had done at Corinth. Herein we see the power of consistency.

2. The admitted moral blamelessness of the Christians. Paul had not "blasphemed " the goddess. As at Athens he had not begun by attacking errors, or prejudices, or even superstitions. He preached Truth, and its effect began to be felt already, in the decline of the trade which flourished by the sale of silver models of the wondrous Temple, -a statistical fact, evidencing the amount of success. Overcome evil by good, error by truth. Christianity,-opposed by the force of governments, counterfeited by charlatanism, sneered at by philosophers, cried down by frantic mobs, coldly looked at from a distance by the philosophical, pursued with unrelenting hatred by Judaism, met by unions and combinations of trades, having arrayed against it every bad passion of humanity,- went swiftly on, conquering and to conquer.

The Continental philosophers tell us that Christianity is effete. Let this narrative determine. Is that the history of a Principle which has in it the seeds of death? Comes that from the invention of a transient thought of man's, or from the Spirit of the Everlasting ages?

XVI.

SOLOMON'S RESTORATION.

Did rot Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? yet among many nations was there no king like him, who was beloved of his God.". NEHEM. xiii. 26.

THERE is one study, my Christian brethren, which never can lose its interest for us so long as we are men, — and that is the investigation of human character. The deep interest of Biography consists in this, that it is in some measure the description to us of our own inner history. You cannot unveil the secrets of another heart without at the same time finding something to correspond with, and perchance explain, the mysteries of your own. Heart answers here to heart. Between the wisest and the worst there are ten thousand points of marvellous resemblance; and so the trials, the frailties, the bitterness of any human soul, faithfully traced out, ever shadow out to us a portraiture of our own experience. Give but the inner heart history of the most elevated spirit that ever conquered in life's struggle, and place it before the most despicable that ever failed, and you exhibit to him so much of the picture of his own very self, that you perforce command his deepest attention. Only let the inarticulate life of the peasant find for itself a distinct voice, and a true biographer; let the inward struggles which have agitated that rough frame be given faithfully to the world, and there is not a monarch whose soul will not be thrilled with those inner details of an existence with which outwardly he has not a single thought in

common.

It is for this reason that Solomon's life is full of painful interest. Far removed as he is in some respects,