BIBLE THOUGHTS.

score years and ten are not very many, but they are enough. The Son of God had a great work to do, and little time to do it in ; but still it was enough. The Father had measured it out for Him -its days, and hours, and minutes.

There is none to spare

2. We have not more than enough. over and above the needful time. He who knows both what time is and what eternity is has measured off our twelve hours. Within the period our work must be finished. Let us make haste. Let us redeem the time, for the days are not only short, but evil. Let us gird up our loins and press forward.

The sun

3. We can neither shorten nor lengthen a day. will not move slower for us, nor will it move faster. It has measured man's [day for six thousand years, and it will continue to do so. We have our twelve hours; let us consider that, and be satisfied; let us consider it, and be in earnest. We are not independent of the arrangement of nature. Whether we will or not the sun will rise and set; and we must make the best of our day.

4. We shall find the twelve hours the very best for us, both as to time and eternity. Hereafter, on looking back, we shall be thankful for our twelve hours; glad that they were no more and that they were no fewer. Are we indolent and idle? What a stimulus to work! Are we overwrought and weary? What a comfort that the toil will soon be over! There are but twelve hours. Are we laid upon a sick bed? Be of good cheer; it may be much tribulation, but it is not long. Are you bereaved and broken-hearted? Sorrow cannot be long. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." There are but twelve hours for life's fever to run its course in, and then all is over. Disciple of the Lord Jesus, lift up thy head, for thy redemption draweth nigh.-Dr. Horatius Bonar.

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No man who is fit to live need fear to die. Poor faithless souls that we are, how we shall smile at our vain alarms when the worst has happened! To us here death is the most terrible word we know; but when we have tasted its reality, it will mean to us birth, deliverance, a new creation of ourselves. It will be what health is to the sick It will be what home is to the exile. It will be what the loved one given back is to the bereaved. As we draw near to it a solemn gladness should fill our hearts. It is God's great morning lighting up the sky. Our fears are the terrors of children in the night. The night, with its terrors, its darkness, its feverish dreams, is passing away; and when we awake it will be into the sunlight of God.

man.

POETRY.

Poetry.

COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD.

LIFE's milestones, marking year on year,
Pass ever swifter as we near

The final goal, the silent end

To which our fated footsteps tend.
A year once seemed a century;
Now like a day it hurries by,

And doubts and fears our hearts oppress,
And all the way is weariness.

Ah me! how glad and gay we were,
Youth's sap in all our veins astir,
When long ago, with spirits high,
A happy, careless company,
We started forth, when everything
Wore the green glory of the Spring,
And all the fair, wide world was ours,
To gather as we would its flowers!

Then, Life almost eternal seemed,
And Death a dream so vaguely dreamed,
That in the distance scarce it threw
A cloud shade on the mountains blue,
That rose before us soft and fair,
Clothed in ideal hues of air,
To which we meant in after time,
Strong in our manhood's strength, to climb.

How all has changed! Years have gone by,
And of that joyous company
With whom our youth first journeyed on,
Who-who are left? Alas, not one!
Love earliest loitered on the way;
Then turned his face and slipped away;
And after him, with footsteps light,
The fickle graces took their flight,
And all the careless joys that lent
Their revelry and merriment
Grew silenter, and, ere we knew,

Had smiled their last and said "adieu."

Hope faltering then with doubtful mind,
Began to turn and look behind,
And we, half questioning, were fain
To follow with her back again;
But fate still urged us on our way,
And would not let us pause or stay;

Then to our side, with plaintive eye
In place of Hope came Memory,
And murmured of the past, and told
Dear stories of the days of old,
Until its very dross seemed gold.
And Friendship took the place of Love;
And strove in vain to us to prove
That love was light and insincere-
Not worth a man's regretful tear.

Ah! all in vain-grant 'twas a cheat,
Yet no voice ever was so sweet-
No presence like to Love's who threw
Enchantment over all we knew;
And still we listen with a sigh,
And back, with fond tears in the eye,
We gaze to catch a glimpse again
Of that dear place-but all in vain.
Preach not, O stern Philosophy!
Nought we can have, and nought we see,
Will ever be so pure, so glad,
So beautiful, as what we had.

Our steps are sad-our steps are slow-
Nothing is like the long ago.
Gone is the keen intense delight,
The glory and the effluence
The perfume faint and exquisite,

That hallowed the enraptured sense,
When Faith and Love were at our side,
And common life was deified.

Our shadows that we used to throw
Behind us, now before us grow;
For once we walked towards the sun,
But now, Life's full meridian done,
They change, and in their chill we move,
Further away from Faith and Love.
A chill is in the air-no more
Our thoughts with joyous impulse soar,
But creep along the level way,
Waiting the closing of the day.
The Future holds no wondrous prize
This side Death's awful mysteries;
Beyond, what waits for us, who knows?
New Life, or infinite repose?

-Blackwood's Magazine.

THIS is a picture of one of those narrow streets which exist in modern Jerusalem. Only very few windows of the houses are in the streets, and these are very small. That round dome at the end of the street, behind the man riding on the camel, is a Turkish mosque, or chapel. The arch across the street is a ruin of some ancient building. There are many pieces of old walls built up into the modern houses in modern Jerusalem.

The Palestine Exploration Society have made some wonderful discoveries lately, and foundations of the old temple, and other singular relics, have been found at a great depth below the present streets.

Jerusalem is a very wonderful city, the most wonderful city in the whole world. Other cities may have been more beautiful, and richer; but this "city of the Great King" will always stand first before all others.

ANECDOTES AND SELECTIONS.

Here David and Solomon lived and reigned and died. Here the holy prophets spake as they were moved by God Himself. It was in this city, also, that the Son of God often dwelt. He foretold its sack by the Romans many years before that awful event took place, and said that the misery which should then be endured by the people in it, men, women, and children, was so great that none like it had ever been felt in the world before, and none like it would ever be felt again.

Anecdotes and Selections.

THE BULGARIANS.-Prof. Virchow, of Berlin, has, in a recent series of lectures, given some very interesting notes to the ethnology of the Bulgarians. It is a well-known fact, established by the Byzantine historians, that in the ninth century a people of Finnish-Turkish descent penetrated into the regions between the Danube and the Balkans, subjugated the Slavic inhabitants, and settled in the country. But as the present Bulgarians speak a purely Slavic language, live on exclusively Slavic traditions, profess the Greek-Catholic religion, &c., it was generally believed that those Finnish-Turkish invaders, who as conquerors once occupied the highest social peaks, had either been washed away during those furious storms of the following centuries or swallowed up by the Slavic undercurrent. Nevertheless, when meeting the Bulgarians in larger masses, it was impossible to see them dance, or drink, or fight; to hear them sing, or declaim, or dispute, without noticing something wild, fierce, and even cruel, which is utterly foreign to the sombre, mystical, but kind nature of the Slav. And now, after making extensive and elaborate craniological researches, Prof. Virchow has shown and proved by irrefragable evidence that the Bulgarians, although Slavic with respect to language and traditions, are Taranian-that is, relatives of the Finns, Magyars, and Turks, with respect to descent and instincts, all the principal features of their skulls being identical with those belonging to the Taranian race.

STATUARY CHRISTIANS.-It is said that when Oliver Cromwell visited York Minster Cathedral, he saw in one of the apartments statues of the twelve apostles in silver. "Who are those fellows there?" he asked, as he approached them. On being informed, he replied: "Take them down and let them go about doing good." They were taken down and melted and put into his treasury. There are many who, like these silver apostles, are too stiff for service in much that the Lord's work requires. Some are too nice, some too formal, some disinclined. They stand or sit stiff and stately in their dignity, and sinners go unsaved and believers uncomforted, unhelped, for all the effort they will make to lift a hand to serve them. They need to be melted down and sent about doing good. Statuary Christians, however burnished and elegant they may be, are of little real service in the cause of Jesus.

ANECDOTES AND SELECTIONS.

AGREEABLE PEOPLE.-Rest assured, you cannot be pleasing at all times and seasons, or to all persons, without trying to be agreeable. You must not be too brilliant. Clever things cannot be said unobtrusively enough. A person so brilliant as to make others feel that your efforts are above theirs will be detested. If you are well satisfied with yourself, and sure of pleasing, you will be apt to succeed. Characters pleased with themselves please others, for they are joyous and natural in mien, and are at liberty from thinking of themselves to pay successful attention to others. Still the self-conceited and the bragging are never attractive, self being the topic on which all are fluent and none interesting. They who dwell on self in any way—the self-deniers, the self-improvers-are hateful to the heart of civilised man. Try to adjust yourself to the peculiarities of others, and appear interested in them. The belle is a lady who has an air of enjoying herself with whomsoever she talks. We like those who seem to delight in our company. You must not overdo it, and thus make yourself suspected of acting; but do not imagine you will please without trying. Those who are careless of pleasing are never popular. Those who do not care how they look invariably look ugly. You will never please without doing all these things, and more. After all, what a Pecksniffian business it is to go into-what constant subjugation of self is required! No wonder there are so few thoroughly agreeable people.

ENEMIES. The men who have real enemies are generally they who have true friends also-men of will and pride, of courage and power, dealers with events and shapers of circumstances, not gabblers and maunderers. These do not talk of their enemies either; they do not think of them; they have other and better things to do. Accepting them as a matter of course, they attend to the business they have in hand, neither explaining nor telling why they are what they are not, and were never designed to be. Depend, when you hear a man vapouring over his enemies, that his character or lack of it is incapable of supporting even one veritable enemy. His enemies are internal, not external, and he raves about them either because he has lost balance through his egotism, or because he is trying to throw up defences for his own inadequacy.

BIRDS AND THE WIND.-The birds are not compelled to face the wind while they are sailing, but by changing the position of the wings a little they can go in whatever direction they wish, much as a boy changes his direction in skating by leaning a little to one side or the other. Some birds are very skilful at this kind of sailing, and can even remain stationary in the air for some minutes when there is a strong wind; and they do this without flapping their wings at all. It is a difficult thing to do, and no birds except the most skilful flyers can manage it. Some hawks can do it, and gulls and terns may often be seen practising it when a gale of wind is blowing, and they seem to take great delight in their power of flight.

MAN. This little life-boat of an Earth, with its Mankind, and all their troubled History, will one day faded like a cloud-speck from the azure of the All!

noisy crew of a have vanished; What, then, is