it points towards an awaking at "the resurrection, that is, the redemption of the body." She has "fallen asleep;" as the child, weary of weeping, sometimes turns in the mother's arms and rests. And parental solicitude, retrospective of a thousand particulars, which none but a father or a mother comprehend, will acquiesce in such relief and escape from trial. We speak so often, my brethren, of the domestic relations, that we are apt to forget how profound are the sentiments to which they give rise. Some there are, who treat as exaggerations much that is said and written concerning the warmth of attachment between parent and child, brother and sister, friend and friend. I profess myself to be of the mind of those who believe that the affection of a parent, purified by religion, may equal the highest reaches of romance or poetry. But these are chords which the hand even of sympathetic friendship may jar too roughly. The words of human speech cannot tell how great, how tender the deposit of treasured love which lies in those cerements.

Beloved friends, not only resign yourselves, but hush all wishes. God has sweetly interposed, and his touch is love. She whom you cherished, and embraced all the more yearningly if at any time she speeded from the howling tempest to nestle in your bosoms, longed for the infinite solace, and could be content with no earthly covert; wandering in quest of peace, she found no rest for the sole of her foot till she burst from that fainting body. She is with the Lord of Peace. "There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest."

[Here an extract was read from a letter to the Rev. Dr. Hewit, in August, 1857.]

If the character of her whom we lament were unknown, so as to require description, or obscure, so as to demand explication, there might be apology for greater length. But the presence of a whole congregation-may I not rather say of two congregations-together with numerous ministers of Christ, ruling elders, and other friends, attests at once the sympathy and the knowledge which make details superfluous.* You knew her, many of you, from infancy. Were it necessary to inform you of her person, her youthful grace, her culture in manifold departments of letters and art, her fascination, her tact, her discourse, her pen,-what chapters could be written concerning these! I would rather speak-for to some it may be as yet unknown-of a most remarkable revivification of her piety within the last three or four years. Under this divine influence she felt herself entered upon a new stadium of Christan life. Her labours of love, in schools, in mission work, in seeking the salvation of individuals, in stirring up the languishing graces of professors, in visiting the poor, seeking out the orphan, and watching beside the dying, are among those which adorn our common Protestantism, and more than reconcile us to the absence of female vows and orders, and ostentatious charities. These labours, from their nature, are best known in the houses of sickness, poverty, and old age. So much had this lamented lady identified herself with the spiritual labours of this church, that I hazard nothing in saying that only one death could have been a greater bereavement. Not only has the father lost his child, but the pastor his right arm. I believe I violate no confi

At that season the congregation is much scattered; but notwithstanding that fact, the church was full of deeply agitated mourners, who thus testified their affection for the daughter of their beloved pastor.

dence when I add, that for some years past the thoughts, studies, prayers, and other preparations of the deceased, have been bent towards a missionary destination among the savages of Africa. Yet let us not quarrel with the dispensation which takes away any from early toils and promise of usefulness. Just so the proto-martyr Stephen was taken away, when he fell asleep amidst the murderous missiles which closed his earthly service.

It is worthy of being noted, that as no one was more punctual in attending those daily devotions in this and neighbouring churches which have marked the recent religious awakening, so none evinced profounder interest than our departed sister, in everything pertaining to this memorable revival of religion.

My respected and beloved friends, who here occupy the chief place of mourning mourn not, but look upwards! She whom you love is with that Jesus who supported her in the serene triumph of the last few weeks. Where else could your most passionate wishes assign her a place?

Reverend brother, it is impossible for me to refrain from a personal reminiscence. It lacks but two years of the half century since you and I, little boys, were schoolmates in a neighbouring city, both sons of Christian ministers, both encircled with joyous groups, and brightened with childish visions of coming years. Ah! what events have since chequered the actual scene! And how many have we followed to the tomb! About three-and-twenty years ago I first saw her whom we are commemorating, then a fair, lovely, artless, happy creature, in her parent's home. Just as pure, and unspeakably more blessed, think of her, O parents, as this moment in the world of spirits. My smitten friends, I know you feel a deep unspoken joy bubbling up amidst these briny waters of grief. Faith of things future and unseen, will, I trust, sustain the hearts of the father and the mother, in that woe which no human sympathy can share; of these brothers, whose loss cannot be made up to them in kind; and of that sister, who is in a foreign land, unconsciously sitting to receive the arrow of evil tidings, which too rapidly is traversing the ocean.

To my Christian friends of this congregation I must be suffered to say, this is not only an admonition, but a rebuke. If she, whose remains are here, wore herself out in duties, it was for your sake. Let her zeal and devotion be your example. Let those whom she admonished and entreated, turn themselves now to God. These courts of the Lord's house have long echoed with her soft yet commanding voice, leading the high praises of God; let the association and remembrance cause every worshipper to hear an invitation from within the vail, saying, "Come up higher !"

As for her, let us recur to the truth with which we began. SHE IS IN PEACE. There the weary be at rest. Jesus, whom she sought and loved, has at length, earlier than we or she expected, met her with the kiss of peace. He has stooped to wipe away the moisture of weariness and anguish from her marble brow. He has taken her in his arms, out of the last fatal swooning; he has said to her MARY, and she has answered, RABBONI!

THE

PRESBYTERIAN MAGAZINE.

OCTOBER, 1858.

Miscellaneous Articles.

SIGNALS FROM THE ATLANTIC CABLE.*

THE union of the two hemispheres is a festival event in the history of the great globe. America, from Greenland to Magellan, thrills with continental joy at the pressure of the sister hands of Europe, Asia, and Africa. And the mighty hemisphere of the East, in one family three, receives, with kindred emotion, the welcome grasp of a long-separated and absent member of the terrestrial household.

The globe is now in electric union. Ye winds, who have swept over American forests, and African deserts, and Asiatic mountains, and European plains, a new agent, swifter far than your aerial speed, is a visitant of the four quarters of the globe. Ye stars of light, who chronicle new achievements in the infinite universe, record in the book of ages the laying of the thought-wire that speaks to nations through separating gulfs. Ye mountains, sublime in the peaks of everlasting hills, let your primeval rocks and verdure respond to the human enterprise which has mounted your Alpine heights, and has now thrown the rein of mastery over your submerged depths, and guides its way across the rugged mountain-path of waters. And thou, old Ocean, majestic in the billows of thy might, that anthem the praise of God from shore to shore,—thou, who leadest the intercourse of nations by outspreading sail and grander steam, to thine azure deep is committed a new trained

* An Address delivered at the Telegraphic Celebration, September 1st, 1858, in the City Hall, Burlington, N. J., by C. Van RenssELAER.

elemental power, from the hands of Him who rules the waves and directs the storm.

Occasions like the present have their high moral purposes. They serve to explain and illustrate the discovery they celebrate; they magnify to its true proportions the triumph of mind over matter; they secure to society an interval of intellectual and genial festivity; they exert an elevating and educating influence on the popular mind; they render homage to providential developments in the world's affairs; and they assist in bringing God to view as the great and glorious Ruler of the Universe.

The successful laying of the ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH is one of those leading and happy events in human history, which, when it occurs first, anticipates the emotions and honours of future triumphs of the same kind. Now is the time and the hour! Our celebration, on the appointed day, brings us into heartfelt connection with the general joy and praise; and the telegraphic poles of Burlington exchange signals with the wires on Albion's cliffs, and return the festival flashes, which pulse with the power of life, from our commercial metropolis to the outstretched boundaries of this great Republic.

The subject of our meditations shall be SOME OF THE LESSONS TAUGHT BY THE LAYING OF THE ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH.

MEN.

I. The first lesson of the submerged telegraph is clearly THE SUPERINTENDENCE OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE IN THE AFFAIRS OF The time and the issuing of this event proclaim the hand of God. Occurring a century, or half a century ago, it would have been incongruous to human affairs. The world was not in a condition to appreciate or profit by an invention which antedated its necessity. God arranges all things so that everything shall be in its place, at the right time, in the mighty system of his advancing Providence. The clock on the dial of ages strikes, only when the seconds and minutes make up the hour. As the discovery of America was not demanded by the condition of the world, prior to the bold and hopeful adventure of the divinely guided Columbus, so an oceanic telegraph came into being only when the wants of the nineteenth century sought it out among the ordained inventions of a responsive Providence. The discovery of America in 1492 stands related to the counsels of God, just as the laying of the Atlantic telegraph in 1858. God is in history. Divinity overshadows every event with grandeur, and gives to it, like the stars, its right ascension in a sphere of glory.

The successful issue of the event we celebrate, as well as its time, brings to view divine Providence. Man walks beyond the bounds of his domain, when he undertakes to thread over, by the line of his skill, mountain peaks, submerged in ocean's depths. Adventurous was he, who first unfurled a sail upon the billows of the defiant deep; but what language can express the boldness, and even hopelessness of that enterprise that seeks to conquer, not

space on the surface wave, but on the unexplored mud and cavern in the darkness of the distant bottom? To what but the interposing help of divine Providence can be ascribed the successful deposit, in the lower parts of the boisterous ocean, of a wire, measured in size by a human finger and in length by a twelfth part of the distance around the globe?

In 1857, the first Atlantic experiment was made. On the 5th of August of that year, two ships, well named-the "Agamemnon," after an indomitable Greek chieftain, and thus representing the spirit of men; the "Niagara," after the great cataract, and representing the wonders of nature-these two vessels set sail with the mysterious cable, one end of which is held by the Old World, as the pledge of its firm faith in the enterprise. Five days out from land, on the 11th of August, the slender cord, intended to reach the New World, is broken by the heaving of the vessel; and the part submerged, of three hundred and forty-four miles, is left a buried and irrecoverable fragment amid the curves of the Atlantic plateau. Thus perished the hopes of the first expedition. Man's ability was inadequate to the work.

On the 10th of June, 1858, the undaunted ships again set out. Violent storms forebode disaster. The Agamemnon is shaken to and fro by the sea, as if to exult over the frailty of human workmanship, and the vessel barely escapes wreck. At last the cable is joined in mid-ocean, and the ships part for the two hemispheres. On the first day the wire is broken on the Niagara, on the second day at the bottom of the ocean, and on the fourth day on the Agamemnon. Three failures, with the loss of three hundred and thirty-five miles of cable, again rebuke human impotency. The Niagara returns in gloom, followed by her cheerless but not discomfited compeer. The conviction settles on the popular mind that the enterprise is beyond human power. And so it is. But not beyond God's. The Lord on high is mightier than the waves of the sea.

On the third expedition the noble ships reached their mid-ocean rendezvous on the 27th of July, true to each other as the needle to the pole, and eager to make the magnet available at the bottom of the ocean as on its surface. The splice was effectually, but this time rudely made; and "the apparatus was then dropped into the sea without any formality, and indeed almost without a spectator; for those on board the ship had witnessed so many beginnings to the telegraphic line, that it was evident they despaired of there ever being an end to it." The fact is, that public opinion, both on sea and land, had reached such a point of depression and of renunciation of human ability, as to produce the general feeling that, without the special interposition of Providence, the work must prove a failure. Thus did God prepare the world to put its trust in Him alone. Where else is trust safe?

The ships now slowly part from each other in the concealed