cheered sod. True, that on the Sabbath-days, when, as it were, the sun is at its zenith, the heavenly light may gleam down upon the soul; but at such long intervals, and from so transient a visit, little can be expected. No, the bulwarks raised by Satan must be levelled with the ground. Pride must be humbled, self-forgotten in the contemplation of Christ's dying love and all the blessings He has thus purchased for us; and then, when these difficulties are removed, together with that covetousness which is idolatry, then may we, without fear, say, Abba, Father," and, enjoy the benefits and cheering influences of heavenly light and heat, together with those healthful, invigorating breezes that come forth from the Holy Spirit of God.

66

"Yes, it may be so," says a sorrowing sinner, "but how can these massive rocks be removed? I have tried so many times to conquer these difficulties and obstacles, but they are irresistible." "Yes, in your own strength the task would be impossible; yet, remember the walls of Jericho fell not by any efforts of the Israelites, but by obedience to the command of the Great Jehovah. He did the work, while the people followed His prescribed orders, and followed them in faith." We can do the same now. 'Whatsoever ye ask in my name," says Jesus, "that will I do," (John xiv. 13).

66

What a simple power, and yet how gigantic in its result-"Ask, and ye shall receive." Receive what? Power to remove mountains, mountains of sins, infirmities, and temptations. Not by the trouble of walking seven times around the great city, but in answer to simple, earnest, faithful prayer, Satan will be removed, and pride, covetousness, and self-love shall fall at the feet of Jesus! He will forgive, comfort, cherish, and confirm you in every good work, while peace and love shall steal in upon your heart, filling it with joy unspeakable, just as the bright sun and cheering breeze

of heaven fills the natural body with health, vigour, and cheerfulness.

These thoughts were suggested by a visit I was lately called on to pay at the home of a reduced gentlewoman, and contain part of the advice given to her. It was a bright summer's day, as I set off along a beautiful avenue of trees to see this sister in affliction. All nature looked gay and peaceful; the bounteous heaven, bounteous in its gifts of fruits, and birds, and flowers, filled my heart with gratitude and peace, as I entered the small house, and asked for the lady lodger. It was a deplorable place for one accustomed to, and valuing this world's gifts. I passed into a kind of scullery, and ascended an open stair, little more than a ladder, and knocked at the door. The sight which met my eyes, as I followed the request to walk in, appalled me. A woman of large make, reduced almost to a skeleton, and surrounded by every appearance of abject poverty, was sitting up in bed. She was suffering great bodily pain from the want of those comforts and proprieties which are essential in a sick room. I came prepared, by the liberality of others, to administer to the latter sources of trial. But what was my distress to hear from her lips no words of resignation, no acknowledgement of the loving hand of God in these her trials.

"That I should ever come to this! I am the most afflicted of women. The Almighty is chastising me, and I must bear it!"

EYAM is a lovely place between Buxton and Chatsworth, perched high on a hill-side, and shut in by another higher mountain-extremely beautiful, but exactly one of those that, for want of free air, always become the especial prey of infection. In 1665, lead works were in operation in the mountains, and the village was thickly inhabited. Great was the dismay of the villagers when the family of a tailor, who had received some patterns of cloth from London, showed symptoms of the plague in its most virulent form, sickening and dying in one day.

The rector of the parish, the Rev. William Mompesson, was still a young man, and had been married only a few years.

His wife, a beautiful young woman, only twenty-seven years old, was exceedingly terrified at the tidings from the village, and wept bitterly as she implored her husband to take her, and her little George and Elizabeth, who were three and four years old, away to some place of safety. But Mr. Mompesson gravely showed her that it was his duty not to forsake his flock in their hour of need, and began at once to make arrangements for sending her and the children away. She saw he was right in remaining, and ceased to urge him to forsake his charge: but she insisted that, if he ought not to desert his flock, his wife ought not to leave him; and she wept and entreated so earnestly, that he at length consented that she should be with him, and that only the two little ones should be removed while yet there was time.

Their father and mother parted with the little ones as treasures that they might never see again. At the same time Mr. Mompesson wrote to London for the most approved medicines and prescriptions; and he likewise sent a letter to the Earl of Devonshire, at

Chatsworth, to engage that his parishioners should exclude themselves from the whole neighbourhood, and thus confine the contagion within their own boundaries, provided the Earl would undertake that food, medicines, and other necessaries, should be placed at certain appointed spots, at regular times, upon the hills around, where the Eyamites might come, leave payment for them, and take them up, without holding any communication with the bringers, except by letters, which could be placed on a stone, and then fumigated, or passed through vinegar, before they were touched with the hand. To this the Earl consented, and for seven whole months the engagement was kept.

Mr. Mompesson represented to his people that, with the plague once among them, it would be so unlikely that they should not carry infection about with them, that it would be selfish cruelty to other places to try to escape amongst them, and thus spread the danger. So rocky and wild was the ground around them, that, had they striven to escape, a regiment of soldiers could not have prevented them. But of their own free will they attended to their Rector's remonstrance, and it was not known that one parishioner of Eyam passed the boundary all that time, nor was there a single case of plague in any of the villages around.

The assembling of large congregations in churches had been thought to increase the infection in London, and Mr. Mompesson, therefore, thought it best to hold his services out-of-doors. In the middle of the village is a dell, suddenly making a cleft in the mountainside, only five yards wide at the bottom, which is the pebbly bed of a wintry torrent, but is dry in the summer. On the side towards the village, the slope

upwards was of soft green turf, scattered with hazel, rowan, and alder bushes, and full of singing birds. On the other side, the ascent was nearly perpendicular, and composed of sharp rocks, partly adorned with bushes and ivy, and here and there rising up in fantastic peaks and archways, through which the sky could be seen from below. One of these rocks was hollow, and could be entered from above-a natural gallery, leading to an archway opening over the precipice; and this Mr. Mompesson chose for his reading-desk and pulpit. The dell was so narrow, that his voice could clearly be heard across it, and his congregation arranged themselves upon the green slope opposite, seated or kneeling upon the grass.

On Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays arose the earnest voice of prayer from that rocky glen, the people's response meeting the pastor's voice: and twice on Sundays he preached to them the words of life and hope. It was a dry hot summer; fain would they have seen thunder and rain to drive away their enemy; and seldom did weather break in on the regularity of these services. But there was another service that the rector had daily to perform; not in his churchyard—that would have perpetuated the infection-but on a heathy hill above the village. There he daily read of "the Resurrection and the Life," and week by week the company on the grassy slope grew fewer and scantier. His congregation were passing from the dell to the heathy mound.

Day and night the rector and his wife were among the sick, nursing, feeding, and tending them with all that care and skill could do; but, in spite of all their endeavours, only a fifth part of the whole of the inhabitants lived to spend the last Sunday in Cucklet Church, as the dell is still called. Mrs. Mompesson had persuaded her husband to have a wound made in his leg, fancying that this would lessen the danger of in

fection, and he yielded in order to satisfy her. His health endured perfectly, but she began to waste under her constant exertions, and her husband feared that he saw symptoms of consumption; but she was full of delight at some appearances in his wound that made her imagine that it had carried off the disease, and that his danger was over.

A few days after, she sickened with symptoms of the plague, and her frame was so weakened that she sank very quickly. She was often delirious but when she was too much exhausted to endure the exertion of taking cordials, her husband entreated her to try for their children's sake, she lifted herself up and made the endeavour. She lay peacefully, saying "she was but looking for the good hour to come," and calmly died, making the responses to her husband's prayers even to the last. Her he buried in the churchyard, and fenced the grave in afterwards with iron rails. There are two beautiful letters from him written on her death-one to his little children, to be kept and read when they would be old enough to understand it; the other to his patron, Sir George Saville, afterwards Lord Halifax. "My drooping spirits," he says, are much refreshed with her joys, which I assure myself are unutterable." He wrote both these letters in the belief that he should soon follow her, speaking of himself to Sir George as "his dying chaplain;" commending to him his "distressed orphans," and begging that a "humble pious man" might be chosen to succeed him in his parsonage. "Sir, I thank God that I am willing to shake hands in peace with all the world; and I have comfortable assurances that He will accept me for the sake of His Son; and I find God more good than ever I imagined, and wish that His goodness were not so much abused and contemned," writes the widowed pastor, left alone among his dying flock. And he concludes, "and with tears I entreat that when you are praying for fatherless

66

and motherless infants, you would then remember my two pretty babes."

These two letters were written on the last day of August and first of September, 1666; but on the 20th of November, Mr. Mompesson was writing to his uncle, in the lull after the storm. "The condition of this place hath been so dreadful, that I persuade myself it exceedeth all history and example. I may truly say our town has become a Golgotha, a place of skulls; and had there not been a small remnant of us left, we had been as Sodom, and like unto Gomorrah. My ears never heard such doleful lamentations, my nose never smelt such noisome smells, and my eyes never beheld such ghastly spectacles. Here have been seventysix families visited within my parish, out of which died 259 persons."

However, since the 11th of October there had been no fresh cases, and he was now burning all woollen clothes, lest the infection should linger in them. He himself had never been touched by the complaint, nor had his maid-servant; his man had had it but slightly. Mr. Mompesson lived many more years, was offered the Deanery of Lincoln, but did not accept it, and died in 1708. So virulent was the contagion that, ninetyone years after, in 1757, when five labouring men, who were digging up land near the plague-graves for a potatogarden, came upon what appeared to be some linen, though they buried it again directly; they all sickened with typhus fever, three of them died, and it was so infectious that no less than seventy persons in the parish were carried off.

The last of these remarkable visitations of the plague, properly so called, was at Marseilles, in 1721. [After relating the circumstances of this visitation in the days of Louis XIV., the terror created, and the crimes committed, our author concludes as follows:] In the midst of the misery there were bright lights “running to and fro among the stubble." The Provost and his five

remaining officers, and a gentleman called Le Chevalier Rose, did their utmost in the bravest and most unselfish way to help the sufferers, distribute food, provide shelter, restrain the horrors perpetrated by the sick in their ravings, and provide for the burial of the dead. And the clergy were all devoted to the task of mercy. There was only one convent, that of St. Victor, where the gates were closed against all comers in the hope of shutting out infection. Every other monastic establishment freely devoted itself. It was a time when party spirit ran high. The Bishop, Henri François Xavier de Belzunce, a nephew of the Duke de Lauzun, was a strong and rigid Jesuit, and had joined so hotly in the persecution of the Jansenists that he had forbidden the brotherhood called Oratorian fathers to hear confessions, because he suspected them of a leaning to Jansenist opinions but he and they both alike worked earnestly in the one cause of mercy. They were content to obey his prejudiced. edict, since he was in lawful authority, and threw themselves heartily into the lower and more disdained services to the sick, as nurses and tenders of the body alone, not of the soul; and in this work their whole community, Superior and all, perished, almost without exception. Perhaps these men, thus laying aside hurt feeling and sense of injustice, were the greatest conquerors of all whose golden deeds we have described.

Bishop Belzunce himself, however, stands as the prominent figure in the memory of those dreadful five months. He was a man of commanding stature, towering above all around him, and his fervent sermons, aided by his example of severe and strict piety, and his great charities, had greatly impressed the people. He now went about among the plague-stricken, attending to their wants, both spiritual and temporal, and sold or mortgaged all his property to obtain relief for them, and he actually went him