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you to tell you how to conduct the suit, and every few minutes gives you the benefit of his counsel, and dictates to you how you should attend to your own business. What would you do, sir? You would return him his brief straightway!

Now that illustrates

your treatment of "our Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." If a client understood the business, he would not employ an advocate, and when he employs one he thus admits that he does not understand it, but that his advocate does, and having faith in his advocate, allows him to conduct the suit in his own way, and is not concerned to know the intricacies involved, but the successful issue.' This being the last point in the penitential struggle of my lawyer, he thus saw it clearly, and at once gave his case fully and unreservedly into the hands of his heavenly Advocate, and that very day he got his discharge from the deathsentence of the law, in the court Divine, certified in his heart by the Holy Spirit. The very moment God saw that, under the leading of the awakening Spirit, he fully surrendered himself to God, and accepted Christ at the instance of his Advocate,' the Father 'justified him freely' changed his relation from a condemned criminal to an adopted child, and then being a son, 'He sent forth the Spirit of His Son into his heart, crying, Abba, Father.'

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"From that Brother Pincent became decidedly active as a witness and

worker for God, and very useful in leading poor sinners to Christ.”

Mr. Pincent authorized Mr. Taylor to state these circumstances, adding, "So much of my life has been wasted that for the rest of it I wish my time, talents, and testimony, all used in any way that will promote the glory of God and the salvation of sinners."

Before the close of his campaign, Mr. Taylor tells us that Bishop Colenso called at the house of his host in D'Urban, and said to him, “I wanted to see you, and shake hands with you before you leave. God has given you your work to do, and you are doing it, and He has called me to another work, and I am doing my work. You don't suppose that all those who have been brought in at your meetings will stand, do you?" Mr. Taylor replied, "I certainly do suppose that the most of them will stand to the death, but a few of them, owing to their very bad habits, bad associations, and the influence of bad examples, may relapse into sin." "Our interview being short," Mr. Taylor adds, "but little passed between us beyond the facts given. I could readily see how by his kind, gentlemanly manner he won the friendship of many persons, who say they receive him as a gentleman without any reference to his ecclesiastical character and relations."

There can be no doubt that it is Mr. Taylor's gospel, and not Dr. Colenso's, that is fitted and destined to convert the world to God.

OUR MAID SERVANTS.

BETSEY, the cook, Sarah, the housemaid, Caroline, the nurse, come here, I want to speak with you. Do you know what the world thinks of you ? Do you know what is written about you in the papers? Don't be offended with me if I tell you. Listen to me till I have done, and let neither mistress, nor maid, pronounce judgment till she hears all that I have to say.

I have heard and read a great deal about servants, the substance of which may be given in few words: "indispensable evils-necessary nuisances." "What is? Who are?"

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'Why, you servants." "Me?"

"Yes, your mistress says that is the best description of you she can find." "I'll give her a month's warning the next time the bell calls me to the parlour." "So will I," "and so will I."

Stop a bit. You won't reverse the world's judgment in that way. Let me advise you to think of the matter calmly. What everybody says, we are told, must be true, and almost everybody says this about you. East, west, north and south, as wide and as long as the land we live in, spreads this sore evil. In large towns and small, in the metropolis and in the country I have inquired: "Do you know anything of servant-troubles here?" and the almost uniform answer is, "I think we do, there's no part of the country where the evil is greater than here." "The evil." "What evil?" "Why you can't get a servant when you want one, you can't keep her when you have her, you can't mention one fault if you see a hundred, privileges are taken as rights, wages are always

too low, the hour to be up and the hour to be in are too early, every situation is a "hard place," and to no mistress is it possible to "give satisfaction." They have a nice discrimination. All work, regular and irregular, is classified with an accuracy of discernment which the British Association must pronounce admirable. Ann will scrupulously avoid the domain of Mary, and cook would not think of preparing baby's pap, that is nurse's grand prerogative. In the domestic republic, rebellion has created a North and a South, the entrance to the kitchen stairs being the frontier line. Below, you find another climate; the public opinion prevailing there rests on a basis not recognised upstairs, and is very vigorously maintained and propagated. Master and mistress-No; these words are expunged from their vocabulary—Mr. Brown and Mrs. Brown have their ascertained reputation in that all-judging republic, Mr. Brown usually standing better than Mrs. Brown. He is a little reasonable, he can speak a kind word, though a little stern sometimes. Every member of the family is weighed in the balances, and most of them, especially the ladies, found wanting. The grievances, the hardships, the wrongs discoursed of might move your pity for those most oppressed and ill-used of their kind. But the doleful tale, you will remark, is told by young women of flourishing physique and finance, sitting by the fire, faring sumptuously, and so well clothed that visitors are in danger of mistaking them for the ladies of the house This grievance-grumbling

below has its echoes upstairs, with this difference, the wrong has changed sides. The ills that mistresses are heirs to are the topic of many a morning call. When they meet, their sympathies are stirred, and their fluent confabulations conclude at length in the unanimous conviction, that foremost amongst the evils of these times must be placed the inefficiency, uppishness, and unmanageableness of servants."

If this be not an absurd exaggeration-and who will affirm that it is ?then there is a sore evil under the sun, into the causes and cure of which it is important to inquire. Obsta principiis (resist beginnings) is good as a maxim, but does not seem to be acted upon in social science. Political reform is deferred till the clouds of popular discontent gather, and blacken, and mutter thunder. Not till pestilence, with her dreadful imperatives, orders it, will men obey the laws of health, and the modern malady, called "servantgalism," has reached the intensity which makes it hardly safe to defer the search for a remedy any longer. A remedy assuredly there is. If no other, there is the rough one of doing without servants altogether. How my lord would like to groom his own horses, and my lady to cook her own dinner, and her daughters to scrub their own rooms, will not be the question. If present symptoms develope, it will come to this, or to a worse thingthe old anomaly, precursor of revolution, which the shrewd Koheleth saw and augured ill from-" servants riding upon horses, and masters walking as servants on the earth.'

For some reason or other the relations of mistress and maid have, for the last twenty or thirty years, been

growing unsatisfactory, like a machine with some undetected mischief in it, causing frequent stoppages, and puzzling repairers. Yet the principle of the machine is sound and the parts good; the construction and management only are at fault. Cause and cure here also are closely related. Fairly answer the question-How has this come to pass ? and you are near to knowing how it can be put away.

Nobody need be surprised at the fact. Common sagacity could have said, at the beginning of the century, mistresses will have unusual trouble with their servants before it is over. A gipsy Huldah could have spelled out this prophecy from the hand of either, they were both getting white so fast. The evil is one which, if it ever ought to have appeared, is certainly in place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the "strike” spirit reaching the kitchen. Employed labour has now been for some time in chronic unrest; and if the farm-labourer has caught the ague of quivering unsettledness-and one cannot regret that he has we can hardly hope for a perfect equilibrium, in the nervous system, of the tens of thous ands of their more susceptible sisters in domestic service.

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an exciting novel may be read all the year through, and that if they can dress strikingly, a hundred admiring or envious eyes will be on them on Sunday.

The soaring and diving of science, the prying of discovery, the swelling of commerce, the tale-writing and penny printing, the better living and better dressing, the general waking up and self-assertion of man, has given to the nineteenth century its peculiar spirit-bold, self-sufficient, self-gratifying, sceptical-which has little respect for age or antiquity; little for superior intelligence or station, little for established usage or opinion, and not much for the conclusions of religion or the claims of God. This spirit spreads and operates far beyond the sphere of its birth, and carries away in its eddies many who know nothing of its source. The aforesaid phenomena, presented by the relation of the democracy of the kitchen to the oligarchy of the parlour, are evidences of its presence there.

This is the main cause of the alleged evil, and it is one which cannot be removed. You can no more repress the spirit of the age than you can undo its work. We would no more recall the mental stagnation of the past, than we would destroy the Atlantic cable, hide again the sources of the Nile, raise the postage, or fetter the press. The tide of human thought is on the "flow;" may the "ebb" never come Destroy the movement we cannot and would not; direct and supplement it we may and must. The development which the century has given to the mind is one-sided. It is the little knowledge which is a dangerous thing. The fault lies mainly at the door of the Church. Had she been equally moved and improved,

there would have been much less to complain of and to fear in the condition of modern society. Science has lengthened the keel of the ship, and raised the masts, and widened the yard-arms, but the Church has not in like measure done her work of supplying the ballast. The moral and spiritual have lagged behind the intellectual. Man has enlarged himself, and has not been taught at the same time to enlarge his views of the Infinite God. Never perhaps was the idea of the Master in heaven less present than now to the minds of masters and men on earth. But this is the all-adjusting, all-healing idea. Even when it exists only in the impersonal form of a strong sense of the right, reasonable, and fair, it prevents collision and facilitates the settlement of disputes. But when God is enthroned in the heart, and divine love and law embrace, after the Christian idea, all the relations and incidents of life, all the evils we are deploring disappear. And there is no other remedy. The intellect need not be impoverished, but the conscience must be reinforced. The throne of Christ must be set up in the restless republic of servants too proud to serve, and of masters too self-willed to think of their Master.

It is indeed said that of all servants, those who are members of churches are the most disagreeable and unmanageable. I know some ladies in whose judgment church-membership in a candidate for their service would

disqualification. Nor can it be denied that some ground exists for such a conclusion. It does great injustice indeed to a large number of faithful Christian servants, who adorn the doctrine of their Saviour in all things

but that a prejudice should exist against servants who profess religion is a sadly suggestive fact, and quite sufficient to show that the Church has failed in her duty towards them, both in her collective capacity, and in the action of her individual members.

Some Christian mistresses carefully exclude religion from their dealings with their servants, never give them any instruction in the Scriptures, nor inquire into their spiritual state, nor make a direct effort for their salvation, nor allow them more than the slenderest opportunities of public worship. Some servants never go to worship at all, and very many are allowed out only on the Sunday afternoon, the sleepiest hour of the day, and when, as a rule, the sleepiest of preachers preach, and the dullest of services are held.

Let the Sunday disadvantages of servants be duly considered. They are entitled to all the force there is in this plea, in bar of a severe judgment. The large majority of them have, and perhaps unavoidably, one half of the Holy Day taken from them, and that necessarily spent in such a way as to diminish the value of the half that remains. In what mind for worship is the cook, who has spent the morning of the Sabbath before a roaring fire and steaming pots and revolving joints? or the maid whose only hour for the sanctuary is taken from a dozen that she must pass with noisy children in the nursery? From confusion she goes, back to confusion she returns, and seven days must pass before that brief hour can come again. judging of the faults of our maids, we must not forget that though their imperfect education, and the monotony of their lives, make the stimulus of the Sabbath doubly necessary to

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them, they have less than half the hours and advantages of the day.

But there are Servants' Classes. Yes, and fine examples of zeal and wisdom many of their conductors are. Many, I say, not all. Some, knowing the spirit of the young women, are afraid to give them the only teaching likely to do them good. It must not be even called a "servants' class," and the Christian duty of being up early in the morning, of being clean, respectful, honest in little things, diligent, obedient, and serving the Lord in the kitchen, must hardly be mentioned. The class wouldn't stand it. This heavy pressure of God's word would push it over altogether. The kindly and pious teacher assures them that in the Church all are equal, and that Christianity knows no difference of social grade; she lovingly exhorts them to come to Jesus, and having come, to sing "O happy day that fixed my choice, on Thee my Saviour and my God," and to tell Him that He shall hear daily renewals of the solemn initial vowbut that that vow involves a dustless moulding, a tidy person and room, a punctual and well-cooked dinner, an economical use of fuel, a quick answer of the bell, and a silent hearing of a consciously deserved rebuke, they are never told, and perhaps would never suspect. This absence of direct teaching makes the class powerless against the evils which hang on the skirts of all such gatherings. It requires strong virtue and a firm government of the "little member" not to talk of wages and grievances, and family secrets, when thirty girls from thirty different households meet, after seven or fourteen days' separation, and have nothing else particular to say.

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