decision is, that the district be divided into three parts,"-as already described.

"The number of societies and general schools in the new Unions (including those that are expected to report this year) will be as follows:

After a very full discussion, which was altogether favourable to the proposition, the chairman called upon Messrs. Richmond, Simpson, and King-a deputation from the General Union-who expressed their hearty concurrence in the action of the Western Union Directors. It was thereupon unanimously resolved to divide the district into a Western and North-Western Union, as proposed, and the Directors were authorized to make the necessary arrangements in connection with the matter. It was also unanimously recommended that the Partick and Hillhead societies be formed into a separate District Union; and the Directors were instructed to convene a meeting of teachers to be held in Partick, where the matter will be decided.

The arrangement subsequently come to is, that a prayer meeting of teachers is to be held in Partick on a Sabbath evening previous to the general meeting. There is to be another prayer meeting held in Cowcaddens. Notice of both is given on the cover of the Magazine, and the attention of teachers is particularly requested to it.

GOSPEL ARCHERY.

IN Roger Ascham's Toxophilus, or "The Schole of Shotynge," is a dialogue between Toxophilus, "lover of the bow," and Philologus, "lover of learning," which we transfer, as suggestive to Sabbath school teachers, who are supposed to be shooting at a mark:—

Philol. What is the cheyfe pointe in shootynge, that everye manne laboureth to come to?

Tox. To hyt the marke.

Phi. How manye thynges are required to make a man ever more hyt the marke?

Tox. Twoo.

Phi. Whiche twoo?

Tox. Shotynge streyght and kepynge of a lengthe, (calculating distance.)

Phi. How shoulde a man shoote streyght, and how shoulde a man kepe a lengthe?

Tox. In knowynge and hauynge thinges belongynge to shootynge; and when they be known and had, in well handlynge of them.

DEFECTS OF THE SABBATH SCHOOL SYSTEM.

In a sermon delivered lately in the Cathedral by the Rev. T. B. W. Niven of the Tron Parish, the preacher made some suitable remarks on imperfections of the Sabbath school system, which will be found deserving the attention of our readers. Having described the aims of the

system, Mr. Niven continued :—

"True, the Sabbath school system was yet in its infancy. It had much to rectify in itself before it was perfected; while the Sabbath-day godlessness amongst the juvenile population was far from adequately reached. Quite evidently one part of the remedy lay in the extension of the local system. They remembered how nobly that system was organized and carried out, nearly 60 years ago, by the great apostle of modern Scottish Evangelism, Dr. Chalmers. In his gigantic spiritual strength, it might almost be said that the waste places of the Tron Parish began to rejoice. Every close had its spiritual superintendent, every entry its Sabbath school. And it was not only that thus the number of children overtaken was very much greater than it could otherwise have been, there was an unspeakable moral effect also over the whole locality. Such an institution placed right down in a centre of vice was a silent protest against it. It was a quiet testimony that Christ's power was not at an end, a check upon the openness of unrestrained vice, and a source which sent its leaven of piety into many a darksome home around. But, apart from this, he was compelled to say that there were other practical defects in the Sabbath school system. The most obvious and the most grave was the inexperience of the teachers and the inartistic character of the teaching. There was no doubt whatever that there was an immense waste somewhere in our Sabbath school power. Young persons entered upon it without appreciating its importance. They did not realize the necessity of perseverance, of punctuality, or regularity. Nay, often they had no adequate conception of the labour to be undergone, and the self-training that was requisite to form an accomplished Sabbath teacher, And so schools were conducted from year to year without any definite principle of coherence; and teachers did their best, but that was crude and ill-digested. We had all the elements of great success-numbers, piety, enthusiasm; and the question would now and then obtrude itself, Why is it that our success is not greater than it is? He conceived that but one answer could be made, and that was, that Sabbath teaching had not yet been regarded (as it ought to be) as something of a science. There were but few means at the command of the teachers for perfecting them in their sacred art. It had often seemed to him that some strong effort should positively be made to institute a process of training in Sabbath school work, so that the mass of power which was undoubtedly at work just now might be utilized to the best advantage. It seemed to him that the Church, i. e., the congregations of the Church, ought to bestir themselves to see to this-that by some system of previous training our Sabbath school teachers might pass from the ranks of the merely well-meaning to the membership of the well-equipped and accomplished. Meantime, however, brethren, said Mr. Niven, in conclusion,

you can do much to strengthen and help them. I take it for granted, of course, that many of you are unable to take a practical part with them, although I would most gladly see many more of our older members, married men, giving their assistance, however small. And I take the liberty of throwing out the hint to the congregation, whether it might not be possible for some of you who feel that your home duties are not altogether overwhelming, or that other claims have a weight with you over and above, to come forward to give a little of your time to this great work. But surely you can all at least manifest your sympathy with the object of their labours. You can do it to-day by the liberality of your contributions, testifying how you appreciate their work and their love. You can do it every day in your prayers to God, that He would be pleased to help them and bless them."-Newspaper Report.

THE STARS.

(From an Article by Selim H. Peabody, in the Bible Class and
Youth's Magazine.)

THERE is in the southern sky, too far south for us to see, a bright star called Alpha Centauri; that is, the brightest star in the group of the Centaur. So far as we know, this star is our nearest neighbour outside of our own immediate relatives in the solar system. How far? Only a trifling matter of more than twenty-one millions of millions of miles! It is easy to write these words; easy to read them; but neither writer nor reader can comprehend their immensity.

Were a man to walk thirty miles a-day, it would take him 9,500 years to reach the sun; but light travels over that space, from the sun to us, in eight minutes. It requires more than three and a-half years for the light of this, our next neighbour, to come to our eyes.

That brightest star in the firmament, Sirius, whose pale green light shines a little south-east of Orion, sends its light to us in about twentytwo years; that which glitters to-night from the Pole-star has been on its journey nearly fifty years. If the Almighty Will which made that star should blot it from existence to-night, its place in the sky would not be vacant until twenty years of the next century had expired.

If these are the nearest stars, how far away are the most remote? Astronomy hints at those whose light must have been on its way to us for more than 6,000 years before it comes to our eyes.*

Second, we learn that these far distant bodies must be self-luminous. If their light were furnished by any other body we could see that body by its own direct light. They do not shine by reflecting the light of our sun, because its light is not strong enough to go so far and return again with such brilliance. It is not difficult to determine how large the sun

[By way of aiding the imagination to some feeble conception of the enormous distance of the fixed stars, Professor Grant, at a recent meeting of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, employed the following comparison:-Supposing that six thousand years ago a railway train had left the earth, and travelled through space ever since, day and night, without resting, at the rate of fifty miles an hour, it would not yet have arrived at the nearest of the fixed stars.]

would seem at the distance of Jupiter or Saturn, and what brightness it would have at the distance of Alpha Centauri, or of Sirius. If the sun were as far away as Alpha Centauri, it would appear to be about twofifths as bright as that star. Sirius is believed to be a centre of light and heat nearly four hundred times as powerful as our sun.

The analysis of starlight by the polariscope shews that it is not reflected, but is emitted from bodies which are in active combustion, like the sun. The spectroscope is, if anything, even more positive in its revelations about the stars. The spectrum of Sirius shews a coloured band like that of the sun, but the fine dark lines which cross the band are not always the same. They have been very carefully studied and exactly measured. They tell us that in several of the bightest stars we have very certain evidence of the existence of sodium, magnesium, iron, hydrogen, mercury, and other substances, in Sirius, in Vega, in Pollux, and in other stars. More than sixty stars have been examined; all have some elements which are known in our sun, and in our earth; each has something peculiar to itself, which is probably quite unlike anything we are acquainted with.

The stars, then, are suns. Our sun is a star, and, it must be confessed, not a very large or bright one. The study of astronomy does not flatter our pride. Our earth, grand as it seems to us, is but a little world.

If the stars are suns, they are, probably, like ours, centres of light, and heat, and attraction, surrounded by systems of planets, moons, comets, all the various forms shewn by our solar system, with, perhaps, endless and strange variations. "When I consider thy heavens," says the Psalmist, "Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of him?"

A HINT. To the many well-meaning gentlemen who consider it their special vocation to speak on all possible occasions in Sabbath schools, we say in all seriousness-Have the grace sometimes to decline. When you do speak, be sure you have something to say, and say it shortly, especially if you have a large audience of tired, restive children.-The Christian at Work.

LIVING EPISTLES.-Christians are epistles to be read. The world reads them every day. How important that this living gospel, which walks, and trades, and stirs about in public places, should be correctly printed! Yet how many of these living epistles have been printed from battered type, from mixed founts, on spotted paper, and in dim ink. But after all, orthodoxy is safer in the consecrated heart than in the theological library. Evangelism is an upright, open-eyed, warm-handed, advancing thing, not the flat flimsiness of a mere programme, to be written and put away on the shelf for safe keeping; it is always alive, alert, and growing; it is not dead Latin, but vital mother-tongue in this country; it is not steepled in church, cadenced in ritual, or robed at the altar, so much as hearted in living people, and radiated in work-day duties.-Clark's Work-day Christianity.

THE BIBLE-SCHOOL.

THE Sunday school should be pre-eminently and always a school for Bible study. This idea is fundamental, and should underlie the whole organization. Whenever singing, or speech-making, or catechism, or anything else interferes with the regular systematic teaching of the oracles of God, the true object and interest of the school is subverted.

If the Church of God means to reach and hold the coming generation -her own sons and daughters, and the neglected outside masses of children and youth-let her with one accord lay loving, gentle hands on the children, and teach them, over and above all things else, the living Word-the words of Him who spake as man never spake.

God honours His own truth, whenever in simplicity and purity it is proclaimed from the sacred desk, or brought into direct personal contact with young hearts, by the faithful, living teacher. At the late grand jubilee at the Sandwich Islands, at which was celebrated that completest and most glorious of all successes in modern mission enterprises, there stood up, in the presence of the king, foreign diplomats, and other missionaries, the veteran native missionary Hanwealoba, returned after seventeen years in the Marquesas Islands.

All others had failed; but he alone, by God's blessing, had planted four churches, and won five hundred converts. Holding aloft his Hawaiian Bible, he exclaimed: "Not with powder, and ball, and swords, and cannon, but with this living Word of God, and with His Spirit, do we go forth to conquer." Words noble as they are true.

Let us teach the Word, and let us make the school bright and beautiful, but let all attractions centre and converge around the Cross, and throw a halo of glory on the sacred page; so shall we conquer the coming men and women for Christ.-The Christian at Work.

as

"The streams of religion run deeper or shallower," says Calcott, the banks of the Sabbath are kept up or neglected." A preacher in Holland called the Sabbath "God's dyke shutting out an ocean of evils."

A GOOD DAUGHTER.-There are other ministers of love more conspicuous than she, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart's warm requitals more joyfully respond. She is the steady light of her father's house. She is his morning sunlight and his evening star. She is the pride and ornament of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness.

"I believe in the communion of saints," is a part of our creed. I not merely believe it, but, thank God! I also see it. May the Lord, however, preserve it; for at the present moment it suffers. Those who are united

in Christ fall out with each other because they blindly embrace some school formula as their Saviour instead of Christ, as if they were tired of Him. This is a lamentable circumstance. May the Lord over-rule it, and awaken in the hearts of His children sentiments of real brotherly affection towards each other.-Krummacher.