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earlier stage in their history. It is only while such things are of honest meaning that they make themselves felt as realities.

But a charge of a graver description remains. It was often said that the Puritan contrived under his high spiritual pretensions to indulge in a large amount of spiritual wickedness. And we can suppose that men who believed in a Divine influence on the human spirit, enlightening it, and purifying it, might sometimes estimate their religious standing unduly. There probably were cases in which a man who seemed to prostrate his soul to the lowest before God, was sometimes found to be of a very defiant bearing towards men. But we are not sure that these two conditions of feeling are necessarily inconsistent with each other. It is a fact that these men were often far better men than the men to whom they were opposed; and if they sometimes betrayed a consciousness of that fact, the reproach of spiritual pride would be sure to follow. When, however, it is said of the Puritans that to the world they seem to be men who would not swear, be drunken, or be licentious, but could "lie, cozen, and deceive," we may say that such a description, if meant to be applied generally, is a description without warrant. Hypocrites, no doubt, there were among the Puritans. For it to have been otherwise human nature must have ceased to be itself. By avoiding costly vices, wasting no time in idle amusements, and accounting diligence in business a religious duty, the Puritans may be said to have taken possession of the industry and commerce of the country, and we may be sure that the men whom they

distanced in the race of traffic would not be slow to fling many hard speeches at them. Their caution would be construed as cunning. Their industry as an intense worldliness, little consistent with their spiritual professions.

Nearly all we know concerning the domestic life of the Puritans is eminently to their honour, and no mean guarantee as to what their social virtue must generally have been. The strength and tenderness of their domestic affections may be seen in the correspondence which passed between them when separated from each other. Such of them as lived on their own estates were models to their neighbours in their conduct towards their old servants, their care of the poor, and their sympathy with suffering; and their dwellings were always the homes of religious reading, of religious service, and of religious education. The Puritan gentleman was distinguished from other gentlemen only as being somewhat more grave in his manners. What a Puritan lady might be is seen in the life of Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson. In the humbler classes the difference between the Puritan and his neighbours in those respects was probably more marked. While the animosities of parties were rife, it was easy to convert this gravity into gloom, this plainness of costume into caricature, and the iconoclastic spirit of the zealous religionist into a Vandal indifference to all art and refinement. But the time has come in which intelligent and honest men may be expected to sift these exaggerations, bearing in mind that they have respect to such men as Hampden and Hutchinson, Cromwell and Milton. With

all their imperfections, these Puritans were the men employed by Providence to save the liberties of England, and it should not be a pleasant thing to Englishmen to be told that they owe this vast debt to men who should be

classed either with knaves or fools. The men on whom that great work devolved were men of strong religious feeling, but they were not less distinguished by political sagacity, and by their private and public virtues.

ORPAH AND RUTH; OR, RELIGIOUS SEPARATION AND DECISION.

'Tis said, that to the brow of yon fair hill

Two brothers clomb, and, turning face from face,

Nor one look more exchanging, grief to still

Or feed, each planted on that lofty place

A chosen tree: then eager to fulfil

Their courses, like two new-born rivers, they

In opposite directions urged their way

Down from the far-seen mount. No blast might kill
Or blight that fond memorial: the trees grew,
And now entwine their arms; but ne'er again
Embraced these brothers upon earth's wide plain,
Nor aught of mutual joy or sorrow knew,
Until their spirits mingled in the sea
That to itself takes all-Eternity.

THE account which Wordsworth gives of the origin of "the Shore trees" which rise conspicuously from the summit of Oker Hill, has many counterparts in nature and in grace. There are high places among the mountains of our own and other lands from which streams issue in opposite directions. These streams are small in their beginnings, so small that a child may wade through them and a man step over them. But as they flow they grow; and the farther they flow the farther they are separated. They never meet again, except as their waters commingle in the one great ocean which girdles the globe. So is it sometimes even with children born in the same family, and often with persons born in the same village or trained in the same school. For a time they associate as if they were all in all to each other. But the necessities of self-providing, the growth of

different tastes and ambitions, and circumstances beyond their own control, divide them and send them apart into different courses, to meet no more on earth.

Spiritual separations are common likewise. Children in the same family or school, or playing in the same streets, are for a time one in their thoughts and feelings, in their aims and pursuits, in their pleasures and sorrows. The air they breathe, the light that shines on them, is not more one than they seem to be. But daysand years pass on, and there is a great change. Some of them will be found walking in the counsel of the ungodly, standing in the way of sinners, and sitting in the seat of the scornful, while others delight in the law of the Lord, and know no higher joy than to spend and be spent in the service of their God and Saviour. Some will be found sunk into the

mire of vice, and into the wretchedness of swineherds, while others are radiant with the beauty of virtue, and reflect the image at once of the character and blessedness of the God of heaven.

The story of Orpah and Ruth is well known to Bible readers. How a family of Israel, consisting of parents and two sons, sought refuge from famine in the land of Moab; how the sons married in the land of their adoption; how these sous and their father died, leaving three widows in desolation and sorrow; how the eldest of the three, the mother and motherin-law, now in poverty as well as widowhood, resolved to return to her own country and her own people; how her daughters-in-law, bound to her apparently by no common love, resolved to accompany her; how Naomi remonstrated in words and arguments which were sure to change their purpose if that purpose was not strong as iron; how, at last, Orpah, one of them, left Naomi, though not without tears and a parting kiss, and went back to her people and her gods; how Ruth, the other, with a love stronger than death and a will which nothing could change, said, in words which exhibit both the strength of man and the tenderness of woman, "Intreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me." All this has only to be mentioned to recal to the reader's imagination the scenes which are described with artless beauty in the Book of Ruth.

How long these two daughters of Moab, Orpah and Ruth, had travelled life's journey together; in what other relation than that of sisters-in-law they stood to each other; how far they both or either had by profession renounced the gods of their country, and avowed faith in the God of Israel, we do not know. But they and the family into which they entered by marriage seem to have formed an alliance which, probably, nothing could have broken but the crisis and test to which they were subjected by the return of Naomi to her own country. And then Orpah and Ruth, so fond and loving, whose joys and sorrow had so often and so long commingled, parted the one from the other, to meet no more;-a beacon to warn, and a light to guide.

Ruth was no philosopher, nothing but a simple-minded woman who spoke what her heart impelled her to speak, but in her words, "Thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God," we find foundation-principles which are true everywhere, in every age and in every nation; true because they are wrapt up in the very constitution which God has given us. Let us look at some of them.

Our nature is religious, and must have a God. That is, it has religious capacities and religious longings. The greatest want of the human soul is God. Man must have a God. He may do without light, without sound, but not without God. Sightless and speechless he may be holy and happy, but godless he must be depraved and miserable.

Caroline Fry tells us in her autobiography, that from the twentieth to the twenty-fifth year of her age, she was an Atheist in heart, and only not quite one in understanding; she

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wished that there should be no God; but because she was not quite satisfied that there was none, she hated the very utterance of His name, except when it was made a jest of." She tried to persuade herself that there was no God, and thought she believed in her own heart's lie." It was her deliberate study not to read God's Word, nor to listen to it, nor to pray. But she remembered afterwards how, having lain down as usual without any prayer, in the intense feeling of her depression, when about to close her eyes, she oftener than once mentally uttered something to this effect:-"God-if Thou art a GodI do not love Thee, I do not want Thee, I do not believe in any happiness in Thee; but I am miserable as I am; give me what I do not seek, do not like, do not want, if Thou canst make me happy; I am tired of this world, if there is anything better, give it me!" So difficult is it to rid the mind of all belief in God, so desolate and miserable is the mind that shuts God out, and so prone is the mind under a sense of its misery and desolation to call upon Him whom it neither knows nor loves.

Another foundation-principle suggested by the words of Ruth may be stated thus:-Our character and happiness in this world and in the next depend on how these wants of our nature are supplied; in other words, on what people we choose for our people, and what God for our God.

There is only one God and one people in the faith and fellowship of whom we believe it possible for men to form a truly divine character and to find a truly divine happiness,-the God of Israel and the true Israel of that

God. The character which men form by faith in and fellowship with this God will be as different as possible from that which will be formed by faith in and fellowship with such gods as those of Moab, or such gods as men's hearts may choose and follow after.

It may be that the actual Israelite seldom rose, and that the actual Christian seldom rises, to the height and purity of the ideal Israelite and Christian. It may be that all Moabites did not sink into the utter loathsomeness which a full conformity to their gods would have produced. And, happily, we know that all godless worldlings among ourselves do not sink into all the sin and wretchedness of which godlessness is the natural and most fruitful parent. But it is still true that our character and our happiness will depend on how those great wants of our nature, the want of a people, and the want of a God, are supplied,-what people we choose and what God we choose.

In connexion with these foundationprinciples the words of Ruth suggest some practical principles of the greatest importance.

FIRST There is no such thing as making no choice in the matter of religion. Some people seem to think that there is. They do not formally and deliberately reject God and His people, they only let religious things alone, to take their chance and their course. But this is making a choice. The man who is dangerously diseased, and knows himself to be getting rapidly worse, and is well assured that his disease, if unchecked, can have but one issue, but does not choose to send for the physician, chooses to die. The man who is floating down a rapid current which he knows falls over a

precipice within a short distance, and puts forth no effort to get out of the current, chooses to be destroyed. The youth who finds himself drifted by circumstances into the society of the godless, the sinner, the scornful, and who does not will to betake himself out of that society, but leaves himself passive, to be acted on, to laugh when others laugh, to swear when others swear, and to drink when others drink, chooses to be himself godless and scornful. So with all men in their relation to God. Let them avoid the trouble and difficulty and disquiet connected with turning from sin to holiness, and choosing the Lord to be their God, and His people to be their people, and they choose to be of the world and to perish with the world. There is no such thing as making no choice.

SECONDLY: There are periods and events in men's history which form crises on which depend all their after history and character. Such a period and event was the departure of Naomi from the land of Moab, to her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. Such was the ministry of Christ to the Jewish nation. "When He was come near (on one occasion), he beheld the city and wept over it, saying, 'If thou hadst known, even thou, at least, in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another;

because thou knewest not the time of

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thy visitation.'" Such a crisis was the message which Pilate's wife sent to her husband-" Have thou nothing to do with that just man, for I have suffered many things in a dream because of Him." Such to Saul of Tarsus, was the light which shone round about him as he journeyed to Damascus, and the voice which said, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" Such to the Philippian jailor was the earthquake by which the foundations of the prison were shaken and the prison doors were opened. Such to the Roman Felix, were the words of Paul, when he reasoned of righteousness and temperance and judgment to come. Such to Nero was the presence of the Apostle before him, when, forgetting himself in his work, he was strengthened to make the Gospel "fully known" to his imperial judge and to the "Gentiles" who stood around his throne.

Such to the reader may have been the death of a loved relative, a season of personal sickness and danger, the solemn counsel of some dear friend, or the decision for God of some early companion. Such may have been words of warning from the pulpit, or from the parental chair. Such may be these pages now in the reader's hand and suggesting these thoughts to his mind. The message is assuredly from God. The example of Orpah is recorded by His Spirit as a beacon to warn, and the example of Ruth as a light to guide and to draw us on to God. Oh! that every one who now sees that Light may henceforth be able to say,

"'Tis done! the great transaction's done;
I am my Lord's, and He is mine;
He drew me, and I followed on,
Glad to confess the voice divine."

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