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His glory with exceeding joy, to the only Wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now Amen!

and ever.

So prays, my dear friends,

yours faithfully and affectionately,

The EDITOR.

THE PLEASURES OF A WORKING MAN.

It was twenty years last February, since I set out, a little before sun-rise, to make my first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint; and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time-fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and (woful change!) I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his "Twa dogs" as one of the most disagreeable of all employments-to work in a quarry. Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by, had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods, a reader of curious books when I could get them, a gleaner of old traditionary stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day dreams and all my amusements, for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil.

The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or a frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it presented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments which had fallen from above, blocked up the face of the quarry, and my first employment was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel soon blistered my hands, but the pain was by no means very severe and I wrought hard and willingly that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented so firm and unbroken a

frontage, were to be torn up and removed. Picks, and levers, and wedges were applied by my brother-workmen, and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these instruments, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They all proved inefficient, however, and the workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly amusing one; it had the merit, too, of being attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital shots; the fragments flew in every direction, and an immense mass of the diluvium came topping down, bearing with it two dead birds that, in a recent storm, had crept into one of the deeper fissures to die in the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty cock goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the gold to which it owes it name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the woodpecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a greyish yellow. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts, and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching downward towards the shore.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious "blink of rest" which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother-workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced, into one of

those delightful days of early spring, which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at mid-day, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighbouring wood which commands, through the trees, a wide prospect of the bay and opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvass. From a wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith there ascended a thin column of smoke; it rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple. I returned to the quarry convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

When my first year of labor came to a close, I found that the amount of my happiness had not been less than in the last of my boyhood; my knowledge, too, had increased in more than the ratio of former seasons, and as I had acquired the skill of at least the common mechanic, I had fitted myself for independence. The additional experience of twenty years has not shewn me that there is any necessary connection between a life of toil and a life of wretchedness; and when I have found good men anticipating a better and a happier time than either the present or the past, the conviction that in every period of the world's history the great bulk of mankind must pass their days in labor, has not in the least inclined me to scepticism.-Hugh Miller's “ Old Red Sandstone."

INVENTION.

See man yonder, bending over his stone mortar, working away to beat his grain into a more esculent form. He stops, and looks at the torrent rushing down a rock; he begins to think, he whistles a little, and whittles a little, and contrives a little

machine which he gradually develops. Look at him again, how proudly he stands, with folded arms, looking at the huge things which are working for him. He has made that raging torrent as tame as his horse; he has given it hands, and put the crank of his big wheel into them, and made it turn his ponderous grindstone. What a taskmaster! Look at him standing on the ocean beach! He has conceived, or heard, that richer products may be found on yonder invisible shore; his mind sympathizes with his physical nature. See, there is a new thought in his mind! He remembers how he first saddled the horse; he now bits and saddles the mountain wave. Not satisfied with overcoming this element, he breaks another for his purposes, and with his water-horse, and his air-horse, and his steam-horse he drives across the waves of the ocean with a majesty and a rapidity, that would make old Neptune blush with envy, and sink his clumsy chariot beneath the wave. See, now he wants something else! He has plodded along with his one-horse waggon till he is disgusted at his slow progress, and he makes an iron-horse, with ribs of steel, and limbs of brass, which he loads with half the contents of a village, and away it thunders over the iron road, breathing forth fire and smoke in its indignant haste to outstrip the wind-Elihu Burritt.

Enquiries and Correspondence.

Original Sin.

SIR,-Perceiving that you kindly answer inquiries, I shall feel much obliged if you will do so with the following:

Man is born with such a depraved heart that he cannot help sinning against God, and incurring his displeasure; but, as it is not his fault that he is so born, how can we reconcile the fact of his deserving punishment with the known immutable justice of God. Yours very respectfully,

C. H. M.

The doctrine that man "cannot help sinning against God," is nowhere taught in the Bible, though there is certainly such an inveterate tendency to do wrong in our corrupt natures, that no man, Christ only excepted, ever lived a life of perfect holiness and

conformity to the Divine will. God punishes us not for our inability, but for our unwillingness, to do what is right.

We are no judges as to what is just in God's sight, as he is at once the Eternal Source and Standard of all justice; besides which, the fact is quite notorious, independently of all Revelation, that children do suffer for sins committed by their parents, and for which, according to our imperfect notions, they are in no way responsible; as stated more at length in our next answer.

Entailed misery.

SIR,-You would much oblige a reader of your valuable magazine, by reconciling the latter part of the second commandment (Exod. xx. 5.) commencing "For I, the Lord," &c. and several other passages of similar meaning; (and we find that God did act so in the cases of several of the kings of Israel-punishing the children for the sins of the parents) with Matthew xvi. 27, and other passages, again proving that we shall each be judged for our own sins only.

M. D. F.

Our ideas on the subject of punishment are exceedingly imperfect, and widely different from those entertained by God himself. The texts cited by our correspondent refer to different doctrines, the first treating of temporal visitations inflicted for correction and warning; and the last, of eternal rewards and punishments administered as retributive.

There can be no doubt of the fact that children often suffer for the sins of their parents, as where any specific disease, or a weakly constitution is inherited. Nor are these entailed disorders confined merely to the body; they extend also to mind and estate. A man of weak or imbecile intellect has not unfrequently children of the same stamp ; and those who have brought up their offspring in luxury and affluence, leave them sometimes to endure all the privations and sorrows of the most abject destitution.

Now in all these cases, the fact is undeniable, that the sins of the father are visited on the children; but then it must be borne in mind that the Bible has nothing to do with it. This will be sufficiently evident if we apply these remarks to heathen nations who are subject to the same law, which is indeed entirely an arrangement of Providence, and not one of the specific doctrines of Scripture.

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