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burdens and if the tear be falling for some beloved one, sleeping in Jesus, how sweet to be reminded of the lapse of time, hastening on the day when them that so sleep shall God bring with him!

We wrote our last preface in more stirring times than the present. The elements were then moved, portending some speedy convulsion that should rock the world. That symptom has passed away, so far as man's eye can penetrate; but though the surface is more calm, the under current does not pause in its swift career, nor are the influences less actively at work that will produce the anticipated" shaking" of things to be destroyed. There is less of open assault; more of secret undermining; and in Ireland particularly the latter is working on both sides, among worldly men; each party avoiding open collision; each trying to sap the sandy foundation of the other and both opposed to that which their combined forces may assail, but shall not movc from its firm and abiding basis. There never was a time when the prayerful sympathy of English Christians was more urgently called for by their true brethren in Ireland than now, Engaged at once in building up the believing Church on its most holy faith, in gathering into it such as the Lord daily adds from the neglected mass around, and in striving for the privileges of scriptural education for the children of the land, our dear Irish friends are opposed not more steadily by the arm of the Romish demagogue and the Romish priest, than by the misapplied power and influence of a nominally Protestant government, thwarting them in the work to which God has called them. At this time, they are maintaining a contest of which we, in England, hear not

mnch, but in the issue of which the eternal interests of millions are involved. It has been our privilege for eleven years, to plead the cause of Irish Protestantism; and we once more call on all who love the Lord to watch and to pray over if they cannot in any other way aid, the noble struggle still persevered in with unabated energy and zeal, by the few devoted servants of God in that most interesting portion of the British Empire.

December, 1844.

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