THE APOSTLE PAUL IN COMMON LIFE.

WE hear much in the present day about religious and secular education; but, even for the present life, the Bible is the best book after all. No situation in which man can be placed, either collectively or individually, is omitted in its pregnant pages; for every such situation we may find an example, a promise, or a warning. The famine and the pestilence are there; the battle and the tempest are there; the journey by land and the voyage by sea; the siege and the ambuscade; the furious mob and the glad assembly; the shout of victory and the wail of defeat. Every incident in domestic life is there; the marriage and the funeral; the joy for a first-born son, and the grief at parting with an aged parent; the sweets of home-bred affection; the horrors of fraternal discord; the mortification of the proud, and the calm enjoyments of the humble.

It is our intention, in the present paper, to select a few incidents in the life of the Apostle Paul, for the purpose of showing his manly and practical common-sense in the business and intercourse of life. We do not mean to expatiate on his apostleship, which he received not from man, nor by the will of man; nor on those letters on theology and morals, which take their place among the "other Scriptures"— an inheritance for ever to the Church and mankind, far more precious than all that Greece could boast as entitled to that proud distinction. Nor shall we dwell on any of those orations in the Acts, where he adapts his sentiments and language with such matchless dignity and propriety to the character and circumstances of his hearers. A few transactions and advices, not particularly prominent in his history, but well worth attending to, are the following:

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I. There was a sect of philosophers among the ancients well known by the name of Stoics, whose pretensions to wisdom and virtue were of the loftiest character. Their wise man was not only a man, but equal to the gods. They counted virtue the only good, and vice the only evil: outward things they reckoned to be quite indifferent. They spoke loftily concerning oppression; neither pain nor exile, nor imprisonment nor death, made any impression on them, neque mors neque vincula terrent. On one occasion, St. Paul showed that he had no sympathy for such transcendental apathy. When he wished the highest good for those royal and august personages before whom he was pleading his own and his Master's cause, he said: "I would to God that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether, such as I am, except these bonds."

II. Epaphroditus, one of the Apostle's companions in his travels and preaching of the Gospel, had been dangerously ill, and the knowledge of this had occasioned great sorrow in the hearts of his Christian friends at Philippi. No doubt they were persuaded, that to their pious friend death was but the entrance into life eternal. St. Paul had told them, in this very letter, that to himself to live was Christ, and to die was gain; yet, still, the universal feeling of human nature is, that when our friends are sick we should like them to recover; and, accordingly, we find the great Apostle speaks as a plain, every-day man, when he says: "Indeed he was sick, nigh unto death; but God had mercy on him, and not on him only, but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow."

III. At Philippi, St. Paul and his companion Silas, had been shamefully treated, scourged with many stripes, and their feet made fast in the stocks. There in the inner prison, they sang praises to God; and God by His mighty power

interposed in their behalf, loosed the bands of every prisoner, and made their keeper a trophy of redeeming grace. magistrates, who had so barbarously misused them, whether from some misgivings as to their own proceedings, or terrified by the transactions of the night, sent a message by their lictors in the morning to let them go. Their new convert, no doubt completely softened in temper by his wondrous change, was delighted to give them tidings of their delivery, and to bid them go in peace. But Christian as he was, the Apostle felt as a man; he had been unjustly handled, and he would not sneak away like a craven felon. "They have beaten us openly uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us out privily? Nay, verily, but let them come themselves and fetch us out." And they did come, and had to own themselves in the power of those whom they had insulted; they besought them and brought them out.

IV. A vexatious persecution, on the part of the Jews, had subjected the Apostle to much inconvenience, and even to imminent danger of his life, both from popular tumult and from a conspiracy for his assassination; and although not quite in a dungeon or in the stocks, the time-serving and bribe-loving provincial magistrates had kept him a prisoner for more than two years, so that he determined at length to endeavour to obtain justice from the higher powers. We can easily imagine some zealous countryman of his own attempting to dissuade him from this step. Would you sanction by your acknowledgment of his authority the usurpation of the Emperor over the land of our fathers, or plead your cause before a tyrant infamous for every crime, and stained with innocent blood? I find (might the Apostle say,) I find in the Providence of Him who gives the kingdom to whom He will, that this man has power over the Roman world; I inquire not how he got that power, nor

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with what crimes he is chargeable; I see he actually can control all inferior judges; "I fly from petty tyrants to the throne:" I appeal unto Cæsar.

V. We have little idea in our times and in countries professing Christianity, what difficulties beset the hourly path of the first converts from heathenism. Living in cities wholly given to idolatry, surrounded by temples of surpassing beauty, lured on every hand to practise rites well adapted to please the sensual appetites of fallen man; where the ox, as Gibbon says with great glee, at once appeased the gods, and furnished a supper for their joyous votaries, it was no easy matter for the newly enlightened converts to keep themselves unspotted from the world. If they ate things offered to idols, it was equivalent to owning their existence and their sacredness, and thus denying the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He had sent. We can suppose the weak and the timid telling them their need of the utmost circumspection; that it was their duty to abstain from the appearance of evil, and not to eat a morsel of meat, till they had inquired diligently whether it was in any way connected with an idol. No one knew better than St. Paul, what a precious jewel a tender conscience is: in this he exercised himself "to maintain a conscience void of offence towards God and men." But he did not perplex himself with needless scruples, nor did he lay any undue burden on his beloved converts. Even in the licentious Corinth itself, he tells them to go to the public market, eat what is sold there, asking no questions, for conscience sake.

It would not be difficult to select, from the sayings and doings of the great Apostle, many more instances of his noble, manly, practical character. No monkishness nor misanthropy is to be found in him. A heart burning with zeal for the eternal interests of his fellow-creatures, was

united with a frankness, and common-sense view of common things, that would have made him a delightful companion, even if he had never travelled beyond his own street or village. The inference we wish to be drawn from this paper, by our readers, and especially by our young friends, is this, that it is as true now as of old, that God's word is the best lamp unto their feet, and the best light unto their path; that its hidden treasures will reward all their search; that it should be read, and read, and read again, till it truly becomes the engrafted word, which is not only able to save their souls, but to teach them to order the affairs of this life with discretion. A. M.

REVIEW OF THE MONTH.

SUPREMELY silly in its contents, and not much indebted to the care of its Right Honourable editor, the Memoir of Tom Moore has draggled to a close. Scarcely needed for such a purpose, it is useful as showing how little heart and how little strength of principle enter into the composition of a popular member of fashionable society, and its insincere and frivolous pages contribute one illustration more to the Preacher's "vanity of vanities." But, considering the fame of the Irish minstrel, it is surprising how few are the gleams of wit or genius, or even hearty emotion, which occur throughout these egotistic journals; and unless their occasional jokes should furnish a slender supplement to the next reprint of "Joe Miller," we scarcely know any useful purpose which will be served by these eight gossiping octavoes. It had been well for the poet's memory had "Lalla Rookh" and the "Irish Melodies" been his only monument.

A very different biography is "The Memoir of Dr. John