with me-we want just such a boy; and if he's steady, and gets on well, he may make his fortune in business. And I'm sure he's not fit for a life like yours."

Alas for John! he had done it; but he dared not retract. His wife was vehement, and Donald was anxious to do some work that he could; not having felt easy, though he never complained, under the constant reproach of idleness from the gudewife.

on ;

He felt that it would be unjust and selfish to stand in the way of this opening, so the thing was agreed and the next morning, after "sair greeting," Donald and the packman left the cottage together, poor John straining his eyes after them from the highest point of ground till they were fairly out of sight. Many a solitary hour had John after this. His wife was jealous of the attention that Donald had occupied while he was there, and yet seemed no whit more anxious for his company, now that he was gone. She grew angry now with the book, over which he would sit and pore in the evening and on sabbath day, lamenting his difficulties now that his little master was gone, but now and then delighted to find that he could read so as to understand.

Long names he passed by, and did not interfere with. One name he knew when he saw it, and that stood out to him as if it had been written in letters of gold. Long words, too, he was apt to pass, unless he found it impossible to master the sense of the verse without them; and then he would stop, and try to split them up into syllables, as Donald had taught him. But he seldom could get ahead of them this way, and generally had to carry his difficulties to Sandy Munro.

One way or another, he not only kept up his learning, but greatly increased it. Now and then he would try to get his wife to listen; but she was always "weary wi' wark," or she "felt herself not weel," or made some other excuse.

"If ye knew the sweetness o' the promises," he said to her one evening, "ye wad'na hauld them at sae cheap a rate."

"I dinna ken there's ae promise has come true to us," she replied, moodily. "Ye were aye dinning in my ears when that lad was here about the bread upon the waters, and our finding it again; but not a crunch of oat cake have we ever got for a' that we gave him, and it's mony days sin' we heard o' him."

John could have told her that the Bread of Life, of which he was then reading in the sixth chapter of John, was better than the meat that perisheth, and that the Lord had repaid him a thousand fold for all that he had done for the orphan.

"UNDER FIRST COST."

It was a brown sheep-skin Bible, held in the hand of a ragged school child, and on the cover these words were impressed: "Under first cost." The reader may sce them any day, upon certain cheap issues of the British and Foreign Bible Society; and they mean of course, that the volume is offered to the purchaser at a sum less than what has been spent in its production; but, looking that day upon the sacred book in the child's hand, it seemed to me that there might be another meaning latent, or another application made of them. "Under first cost!" and what was the first cost of the Bible? What the first cost of the glorious truths it reveals to men, and which are given to them literally

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without money and without price? Look back on the long generations during which, in type and prophecy and action, its existing histories were being built up by patriarchs, prophets, apostles; consider the deeds and the sufferings of those men who were inspired by God to be the mouth piece of his Divine mind, from the day that he said to Moses in the desert concerning the battle with Amalek, "Write this for a memorial in a book!" Ages rolled by whose only noteworthy result was the adding of a few leaves to the sacred story; when the single illuminated spot in the dark sphere of the world is that upon which the heavenly light of inspiration fell; sometimes on a shepherd's tent, while thrones of the Pharaohs are black as night, and on the fortunes of an outlawed Israelite hiding in caverns and dens of the wilderness, while the kings of Assyria are never heeded. And as to the awful transaction which is the keynote of the whole book, the final cause of every page, the culminating scene of narrative and prediction, that atonement which was made in the hour that Jesus Christ died for the sins of men, who shall calculate its cost? It is only by faint analogy from human affections that the Scripture declares how the dearly-beloved and only Son was given up to a death of shame and pain; neither can we measure the infinite capabilities of anguish that dwelt in the bosom of the Divine sacrifice. Verily in some respects the first cost of our Bible is altogether impossible of computation or even of conjecture.

To come later in history, and dwell upon matters more measurable by our limited standards of thought and feeling; what has it cost preceding generations to retain this book? We know that it has been handed down to us through a line of martyrs, who loved it more than their lives-far more than ease in any shape, or worldly good. To be reminded of these things is useful. It is as if mighty men had broken through a host of enemies, and drawn water of life for us from a beleaguered well, at the expense of their own wounds and blood, and brought that water of life to us sitting sheltered and secure from harm. Shall we not pour forth the precious gift an offering to the Lord? Shall we not make abundant use of the treasure in his cause, and for his sake, instead of for our mere selfish enjoyment? Let us not drain the sweet draught of salvation's promises regardless of those who long ago did more than jeopard their lives to transmit it to us, and regardless of the multitudes who have the thirst for it latent in their nature.

Behold what their Scriptures cost the Jews, in the single instance of the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. His special animosity was directed against the law and the prophets; "the wicked king rent in pieces the books which he found, and burnt them with fire; and whoever possessed copies of these books, or consented to the law, it was ordained that they should die; wherefore they chose rather to die, that they might not profane the holy covenant; so then, they died." What a simple statement of heroism!

It is stated that every writer of the New Testament died a death of violence, except John the apostle. Ten desperate pagan persecutions were directed against their successors in the faith of Christ. Diocletian burned the Christian books by hundreds, as being the root of what he called the superstition. Thousands of men and women would have escaped agonizing death by rejection of the Gospels, and preferred the anguish with the truth to an easy life without it. A Sicilian martyr was asked—

"Why do you not give up the Scriptures, as the emperor has forbidden them ?"

"Scripture was their all; and as the Jews treasured the manuscripts of the Old Testament, and carried them everywhere in their wanderings, musing in sullen grief, as they read them, on the ancient glories of their raceoften, as in the persecutions in Spain, winding them round their bodies, to part with them only with their lives and as the early Christians prized the gospels and epistles, gazing with intense affection upon their title therein contained to a kingdom yet to come-so these Waldenses laid up rich portions alike from the Old and New Testaments in their hearts, so that they could not be taken away.".

At public worship in the desolate gorges of the Alps, the want of copies of the holy book was supplied by the memories of certain young men, banded together for the purpose; who stood up and recited any chapters required by the presiding minister. We have all heard of the daring young officer in the Peninsula, who bound the colours of his regiment around his body, adhering to them thus even in death; and we have seen how the Jews in Spain anticipated such heroic resolve by similar use of the material manuscripts of their sacred writings; but a more effectual precaution and a loftier adherence was that of the poor moun. taineer who buried his Bible literally in his own heart, deeper than the sword of the persecutor could reach. Listen to the resolve of the race on that day in 1561, when twenty four hours' truce was granted them to consider whether they would abjure their faith or receive the extremity of fire and sword:

"We here promise, our hands on the Bible, and in the solemn presence of God, to maintain the Bible whole and alone, though it be at the peril of our lives, in order that we may transmit it to our children, pure as we received it from our fathers."

And in the baptism of blood that followed, we may read what the Bible cost them.

Our own forefathers endured the like. Many a Lollard was burnt with the little manuscript book hanging about his neck which was his prime offence; some gospel or epistle which had been to him the message of salvation, and which he had copied laboriously with his own hands, or paid a great sum of money for. A skilful scribe could not write out a Bible in less than ten months; and the price of the volume when written was as much as would have built two arches of the existent London Bridge.

John Tyndal, brother of the translator William, and a city merchant, was punished thus for having a New Testament in his possession; "he was set on a horse with his face to the tail, and a paper was pinned on his head, and many sheets of New Testaments sewn to his cloak;" further the sentence ran that these "were to be afterwards thrown into a great fire kindled in Cheapside, and

Even when Henry VIII. permitted Coverdale's Bible to be chained in the crypt of St. Paul's, its first public reader paid with his life as the forfeit of his work. Bonner threw him into Newgate, and because he talked of the Scriptures to his fellow prisoners, he was removed to the lowest dungeon, and laden with fetters so heavy, including one which yoked him close to the wall, that the young man was found dead in eight days. And his hearers were many a one crowned with the flames of martyrdom at Smithfield.

A few words of Dr. Gaussen, the celebrated Genevrn pastor, sum up something of the cost of the Bible to those who preserved it for us. "It had to traverse the three first centuries of pagan persecution, when persons found in possession of the holy books were thrown to the wild beasts; next the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, when false books and false legends were everywhere multiplied, and the subsequent centuries, when the use of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue was punished with death." Yet the book has run the gauntlet of all persecution, and has ever found some person ready to die for its protection. They laboured and suffered, and we have entered into their labours; thus indeed are we―

"The heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of Time." and thus indeed have we the precious Bible-under first cost.

STEPNEY MEETING HOUSE-OLD AND NEW. In the year 1644, six Christian men and women met in the parish of Stebonheath, in some place now unknown, gave to each other the right hand of fellowship, and by mutual consent and agreement constituted themselves into a church of the Lord Jesus Christ, "to walk," they said, "in all the ways of Christ held out unto them in the gospel."

In this solemn act they were presided over by a man of well known name, Henry Burton, at that time, "pastor of a church in London." A few years before Henry Burton was the rector of St. Margaret's, Friday Street. Some years earlier he was clerk of the closet to Prince Charles, son of James the First, and when Charles, the first of that name, ascended the throne, Henry Burton and William Laud came into collision in the royal palace. These men were the representatives of the contending forces and opposite tendencies of that age, the one of puritanism and evangelical truth, the other of tyranny and of Romanistic error. They were both men of determined spirit, neither of whom could submit to any compromise. Laud gained the ascendancy and Henry Burton retired to the comparative privacy of his rectory in Friday Street. But Burton was a man who could not hold his tongue or his pen. From his pulpit in Friday Street, and from the press, he denounced the tyranny of Laud and the course through which Laud and his followers were hurrying England. For this offence he was charged before the Star Chamber with sedition, and was sentenced to have his ears cut off, to, stand in the pillory at Westminster. and to imprisonment in a distant castle. This crucl sentence was executed in its utmost barbarity. But

in some remote nooks and corners of the land. But the May day lecture at Stepney has been perpetuated to this day, and seems to sustain its pristine interest. The 191st of this interesting series of discourses was delivered on the first day of May this year (being Lord's day) by the present minister, the Rev. John Kennedy, to a congregation which crowded every corner of the new and spacious building, while some hundreds of persons could not get within the doors. One of the pastors of the church in Stepney meeting, the Rev. Samuel Brewer, was privileged to preach fifty May day sermons, and the last of them, in 1796, was the last occasion of his occupying the pulpit.

When old Stepney Meeting House was erected, Stepney was a rural village pleasantly situated among fields and trees, a pleasant resort of London citizens, and the home of some of the wealthiest of London merchants. The heart of the old village is still recognisable in its "High Street," and in the old parish church of St. Dunstan's, one of the most ancient ecclesiastical structures in the kingdom. But the fields no longer wave with corn or grass, but are covered with

endless streets. The neighbourhood is densely peopled, especially with those classes which are directly or indirectly connected with the shipping of the Thames, and the various manufacturing establishments on the banks of the river. And among these all who love the Lord Jesus, of every communion, find the amplest scope for their efforts and prayers.

The beautiful structure of which we give an engraving, is seated for 1350 persons, and cost (including 1000l. for the site, immediately adjoining the old) about 11,8007. the whole of which was provided for before the opening services were concluded.

THE NESTORIANS. CHAPTER III.

THE origin of the name by which the Nestorians are generally known in the western world, but which they indignantly repudiate, will confirm the view previously expressed as to the antiquity of their church, and introduce us to some of their religious tenets.

"It is difficult," says Layard, "to ascertain when