is very wrong, very foolish, even sacrilegious. It is not playing with words, but with the life of human souls. It is like jesting with Scripture; casting firebrands, arrows, and death; calling them the scintillations of genius; and proclaiming this deadly doing to be sport. We are bound humbly and seriously to go to Scripture to find both the new and the old. Till all men are converted, till all are perfect, till the mystery of God be finished, there will be need and room for both. Heaven itself will bring forth from God's treasure both new and old. Its song will be new, and yet the old song of Moses and of the Lamb. Its city will be new-New Jerusalem; and yet old-Jerusalem. The new heavens and the new earth will be paradise restored-the long lost regained.

And now, for a moment in closing, let us think of the value and importance of both new and old in relation to the present interests of the kingdom.

There is to all human minds a charm in what is new, and also a charm in what is old. Some feel the attraetion of novelty most, and some the attraction of antiquity. Hence we find error in its various forms appealing to both principles of our nature. When the nations endeavoured to seduce Israel into idolatry, it is evident that they might do so on both pretexts-because it was ancient and because it was new. They might say, "Your fathers served such gods on the other side of the flood, and in Egypt;" or they might urge, "These images and this variety of worship will be new, and a welcome relief from that monotonous Mosaic system." At the present time, in this country, the claims of ritualism are urged to the subversion of the gospel on precisely these pleas; on the score of novelty and on the score of antiquity also. But the truth as it is in Jesus can make the same double appeal, and at whatever periods it has made progress there has such a double appeal been made. At the Reformation, for example, the great doctrine of justification by faith came out as old, as Pauline and Apostolic, and yet as the new Lutheran reformed doctrine. In the evangelical revival of the last century the truth of the Spirit's witness was old, well known not only to the early Christians but also to the Reformers, but it had been sadly left in the background, and when the Methodist revival brought it to light, it was new to the age. For the present time both new and old are needed; both new and old will have power.

There are many careless-multitudes with and without a profession of Christianity-wearing through their day of grace unblest. The new is needed, if by any means they might be awakened and startled, if doubt might be stirred or thought provoked. And yet the old is needed; for the old disease holds them, and the old gospel of grace alone can heal them.

But, specially, we live amid change and inquiry. There is a search after truth and a cry for rest. Our circumstances are troubled, and worse may any day come. Some good men are clinging to old truth fearfally, and trembling for the ark of God, as they hear the

shouting and the boasting of the enemy. They cleave to truth, but only as one clings to a dying friend, with the agony of love, but with no hope. Oh, what a relief it would be to such if the old or the new were commended to their conscience with fresh demonstration of the Spirit and power. It would be as when one wakes from a dreadful dream to peaceful realities. It would be as when nature confronts the man who has speculated away his faith in her existence, compelling his homage. They would believe afresh and rejoice

anew.

Some, again, are filled with wild hope. They sally forth as into an enchanted land, "heirs of all the ages," as they say. "in the foremost files of time." Now, merely to denounce or ridicule their errors and their hopes, merely to say that these delusions are old, is not the way to benefit them or even to reach them. But they can be reached by God's new and old truth. Even they would feel its strong and yet loving grasp if kindly and wisely, but powerfully, and with the Spirit's testimony, it were made to come near their consciences.

And there are others, many others, weary, worn with thought, worn out with thought, seeking rest and finding none. Like Noah's dove they will come in, if the ark-window is opened to them. The poor lost child that has wandered through the streets of the great city all the cold winter day, will lay it down at night on the stone step outside the bolted prison-door, and be glad of refuge in a cell. Such refuge in a prison-cell some weary souls like John Newman have found in Popery. But we have a better shelter than that to tell the weary of. It is the old, old shelter of our Father's house. There is a glory round the old home to the eye of the prodigal when he sees it after his wandering. Many a one who in youth sets out flushed with high hope to push his way in the great city of the world, becoming weary, longs to get back to the quiet God-made country when age and toil have passed over him. And so, the old, old truth as it is in Jesus, the simplest and quietest statement of it, is the very thing that thousands of the world-weary need. Let us strive to furnish this. Whatever we want or bring, never, never let us forget this. There is room and need for all that we can provide, room and need for the new, room and need for the old. The great lesson which the subject is fitted to teach is, neither to fear the new nor forsake the old.

New things, true and genuine, may present themselves to us; let us receive them, and, entertaining the stranger truths, we may entertain angels unawares.

New developments of error may surround us, but God reigneth, and we need not fear. If the Lord used Babylon and Egypt, Greece and Rome, with all their power and wisdom, with all their idolatries and immoralities, in subserviency to the interests of his kingdom, surely he can use the unbelief and superstition of our time, and make them but add to the glory of the reign of righteousness which is to be.

And let us not be ashamed of the old truth-the

ancient cause of God-the everlasting gospel of the everlasting kingdom. The crowd calls it antiquated, the world pronounces it behind the age. They might as well call the sun in heaven antiquated, or say that the everlasting hills are behind the age. Even if we see difficulties, confusions, and apparent contradictions facing us, let us "hold fast that we have."

"God is his own interpreter,

And he will make it plain."

It is very useless to spend time in vain regrets that we have fallen on an evil age, or to say, Oh that the quiet times of unquestioning belief were back again! Oh that men were more child-like! Oh that the old days were back!" So to feel is natural; but it is just as when the man in the midst of his cares wishes himself a child again. It is very vain. We must

stand in our own lot and face what God is pleased to send. Let us do it. Let us testify and speak out as God gives us opportunity. The time may soon arrive when men will not endure sound doctrine, when the storm of opposition and hate will burst so fiercely round us, that, like the desert traveller overtaken by the simoom, we shall be able only to hide our face in our mantle, and lie down till it pass, enter into God's chamber, perhaps into the grave, and rest till the storms of night have blown, till the day dawn and the shadows flee away. But that has not yet come; and, therefore, now let us be diligent, bringing forth the new and old, fulfilling our testimony in our day. Let us work for Christ's sake, for conscience' sake, for our friends' and brethren's sake, for the kingdom's sake, and when it comes we shall find that our labour has not been in vain the Lord.

S

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE

L

OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS.

INCE England was, such an event was never witnessed within sound of her seas, as that which darkened London on the fatal 30th of January 1649.

In the recollection of such moments it is difficult to disentangle feeling from fact, what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears from what others told us, from what we saw with the imagination and heard with the heart.

In my memory that day lies shrouded and silent, as if all that happened in it had been done in a city spell-bound into silence in a hushed, sunless, colourless world, where all intermediate tints were gathered into funereal black and white, the black of the heavily-draped scaffold and the whiteness of the frosty ground from which it rose into the still and icy air; whilst behind the palace slept, frost-bound, the mute and motionless river, imprisoning with icy bars the motionless ships.

From early in the day the thoroughfares and squares and open gathering-places of the city were filled with the Commonwealth soldiers. I remember no call of trumpet or beat of drum ; only a slow pacing of horsemen, and marching of footmen, silently to their assigned positions, the tramp of men and the clatter of the horse-hoofs ringing from the hard and frosty ground, and echoing from the closed and silent houses on the line of march.

It was no day of triumph to any. To the army, and those who felt with them, it was a day of solemn justice, not of triumphant vengeance. To the Royalists it was a day of passionate hushed sorrow and bitter inward vows of retribution ; to the people generally a day of perplexity and

woe.

Old Mr. Prynne, who owed the king nothing, as he said, but the loss of his ears, the pillory, imprisonment, and fines, had pleaded for him generously in the House, before the House had been finally "purged."

And the most part of the men, and well-nigh

all the women, I think, would have said "Amen" to Mr. Prynne. If the king's captivity and trial and condemnation had been a solemn drama enacted to win the hearts of the people back to him, it could not have been more effectual. Political and civil rights, rights of taxation and rights of remonstrance, seemed to the hearts of most people to become mere technical legal terms in the presence of Royalty and Death. Pillories and prisons were dwarfed into mere private grievances beside the scaffold on which the king, son of so many kings, kings of so many submissive generations, the source of power, the only possible object of the dreadful crime called treason, was to die the death of a traitor.

The trial brought out all that was most pathetic in royalty and most noble in the king. The haughty glance which had been resented on the throne, was simply majestic when it encountered unflinchingly the illegal bench of judges on whom his life depended.

The Parliament, mutilated to a remnant of fifty; the High Court of Justice, who could not agree among themselves, whose assumption of legal forms sounded (to many) like mockery, whose trappings of authority sat on them (many thought) like masquerade-robes, were a poor show to confront with that lonely majestic figure defying their sentence and their authority, a captive in the ancient Hall of Justice from which, throughout the centuries, not a sentence had issued save by the sanction of his forefathers.

The royal banners, which drooped from the roof above him, taken from his Cavaliers at Edgehill, Marston Moor, and Naseby, seemed to float there rather in his honour than in that of his judges. Many felt that adversity had restored to him his true royalty, and that he sat far more a king now, arraigned at the bar, than when, eight years before, at the last trial those walls had witnessed, he sat as a helpless spectator of the proceedings which brought Strafford, his greatest minister, to the scaffold.

It was well for his adversaries that those days of the king's humiliation were not prolonged. Irrepressible veneration and pity began to stir among the crowds who beheld him, and the cries of "Justice! justice!" were changed more than once into murmurs of "God save the king."

But the pity was a slowly-rising tide of waves now advancing and now recoiling. The determination for "justice on the chief delinquent" was a strong and steady, though narrow current; and it swept the nation on irresistibly to its end.

The soldiers, foot and horse, had taken up their position. My brother Roger and Job Forster were posted opposite Whitehall. Roger waved his hand as he passed our windows. His face, as was his wont in times of strong emotion, was fixed and stern. He was riding in a funeral procession, which for him led to more graves than one.

At ten o'clock His Majesty walked through St. James's Park to Whitehall, passing rapidly through the bitter cold, under the bare branches of the silent trees, through a crowd in appearance as cold as silent. His face, men said, was calm and majestic as ever, although worn; his beard had become gray, and his form had a slight stoop, but his step was firm. He disappeared through the Palace gates, from which he was never to step forth again. Then followed six hours of suspense and terrible expectation, the crowds surging uneasily to and fro, unable to rest, repelled and yet attracted by the terrible fascination of the empty, expectant scaffold, whose heavy funereal draperies fell from the windows of the Banqueting Hall on the frosty ground beneath. There were whispers that the ambassador of the United Provinces was pleading not hopelessly with Lord Fairfax; that the Prince of Wales had sent a blank letter signed by himself, to be filled with any conditions the Commons chose to demand; but that the king had burned this letter, and refused the ministrations of any but the clergy of the Episcopal Church of the realm;-so that if he was indeed to die, it would be as a martyr to the rights of the Crown and the Church.

And through these soberer reports ever and anon rose wild rumours of approaching deliverance, of risings in the Royalist counties, of avenging fleets. approaching the Thames, of judgment direct from heaven on the sacrilegious heads of the regicides.

But to us who knew of the purpose which had been gathering force in the army since that prayer-meeting at Windsor six months before, those mid-day hours were hours not of doubt or suspense, but of awful certainty, as minute by

was to be empty no more.

We knew that within the still and deserted halls of that palace, the king was preparing to meet his doom; and (all political questions and personal wrongs for the time forgotten) from a thousand roofs in the city went up prayers that he might be sustained in dying, and might exchange the earthly crown which had sat on his brow so uneasily, for the crown of life which burdens not, nor fades away.

came.

At length three o'clock, the moment of doom, "It was the ninth hour," as the Royalists fondly noted. Save the guard around the scaffold, and those who attended his dying moments on it, none were near enough to hear what passed there. It was all mute; but the spectacle spoke. In most royal pageants, the In most royal pageants, the thing seen is but a sign of the thing not seen. In this the thing to be seen was no mere sign, but a dread reality, a tremendous event. The black scaffold, the wintry silence, the vast awestricken crowd gazing mute and motionless on the inevitable tragedy; a few plainly dressed men at last appearing on the scaffold around the well-known stately figure of the king, richly arrayed "as for his second bridal;" "the comely head" laid down without a struggle on the block as on a bed;" the momentary flash of the axe; the severed head raised an instant on high as "the head of a traitor;" a shrouded form prostrate on the scaffold;-and then, as good Mr. Philip Henry, who was present, said, "at the instant when the blow was given, a dismal universal groan among the thousands of people who were within sight of it, as if with one consent, such as he had never heard before, and desired he might never hear the like again, or see such a cause for it."

แ

The multitude were not left long to bewail their king. One troop of Parliament horse rode instantly, by previous order, from Charing Cross towards King Street, and another from King Street towards Charing Cross; and so the crowd were scattered right and left, to lament as they might each man under his own roof, and to read in secret the "Eikon Basilike," which it is said the king composed, copies of which were distributed under his scaffold, and will, doubtless, be reverently trea

library, but in the oratory, beside the Bible and the Prayer-book, enkindling loyalty from a conviction into a passion, deepening it from a passion to a religion, while they compare the king's trial to that before the unjust judge of old, his walk to the scaffold to that along the Dolorous Way, his sayings to those last words on which dying men and women have hung ever since.

Every one knows the heaviness with which even a day of festivity closes, when the event of the day is over. The weight with which that fatal day closed it is hard for any who did not feel it to imagine.

Scripture words repeated with ominous warning by ministers, Presbyterian and Episcopal, echoed like curses through countless hearts: "I gave them a king in my anger and took him away in my wrath." "Who am I that I should lay hands on the Lord's anointed?"

Death gave to the king's memory an immaculateness very different from the technical, "the king can do no wrong of the ancient constitution."

And even with those whose resolution remained unwavering to the last, this was not the time for speech. The extremity of justice had been done; there was nothing more to be said. It would have been an ungenerous revenge far from the thoughts of such regicides as Colonel Hutchinson and General Cromwell to follow it with insulting words, and their own self-defence they were content to leave to events. Mr. Milton's majestic Defences of the English People came later.

Ours was a silent fireside that winter night, as Roger, weary and numb, came at last to warm himself beside us.

As he entered, I was saying to my husband, "The terrible thing is, that he who lived trampling on the constitution and the rights of conscience, seems to have died a martyr to the constitution and conscience, doomed by a few desperate men."

"We must concern ourselves as little as possible, sister," Roger said very quietly, "with what seems."

"I fear this day will turn the tide against all for which you have fought throughout the war." "The tide will turn back," he said.

"But what if not in our time?" I said.

"Then in God's time, Olive," he said; "which is the best."

But he looked very worn and sad. I repented of having said these discouraging words, and weakly strove to undo them as he asked me to unlace the helmet which his benumbed hands could not unloose.

"I would rather a thousand times," I said, "have you with Colonel Hutchinson, and General Cromwell, and those who dared to do what they thought right in the face of the world, than with those who thought it right yet dared not do it. The nation will recognize their deliverer in General Cromwell yet."

"I do not know that, Olive," he said; "but it will be enough if General Cromwell delivers the nation."

"At least the generations to come will do you all justice," I said.

"I am not sure of that," he said. "It depends on who writes the history for them. There is one Judgment Seat whose awards it is safe to set before us. Before that we have sought to stand. That sentence is irrevocably fixed. What it is we shall hear hereafter, when the voice of this generation and all the generations will move us no more than the murmur of a troubled sea a great way off, and far below."

Yet he could not touch the food we set before him; and as he sat gazing into the fire, I knew there was one adverse verdict which he knew too well, and which moved his heart all the more that it had not been able to move a hair's breadth his conscience or his purpose.

Many sorrows met in Roger's heart, I knew, that night; the pain of pity repressed driven back on the heart by a stern sense of justice; the pain of being misjudged by some whom we honour; the pain of the resignation of the tenderest love and hope; the pain of giving bitter pain to the heart dearest to him in the world. But one pain, perhaps the worst of all, he and men who, like Cromwell and Colonel Hutchinson, had carried out that day's doom fearlessly before the world because in unshaken conviction of its justice before God, were spared the enervating anguish of perplexity and doubt.

all.

And this, perhaps, is the sorest pain of

II.

LETTICE'S DIARY.

"The space between is the way thither,' Mr. Drayton said. It may be; it ought to be. But is it? That seems to me precisely the one terrible question which, when we can get cleared, all life becomes clear in the light of the answer, but which it is so exceedingly hard to have cleared.

"The days, as they pass, whether clothed in light and joy, as the old time at home was when I had a home, and a mother, and so many hopes -or in darkness that may be felt, as so many of these later days have been to me, are indeed surely leading us on to old age, to death, to the unseen world, and the judgment. But are they indeed leading us on to new youth, to changeless life, to heaven, and the King's 'Well done?'

"If I were as sure of the last as of the first, for me and mine, I think (at least there are moments when I think) I would scarcely care whether the days were dark or bright. For life is to be a warfare. All kinds of Christian people agree in that. And having learned what war means, I do not expect it to be easy or pleasant.

"But I am not sure. For myself or for any one. "Roger thinks the execution of the king was a terrible duty. I think it was almost an inexpiable crime.

"Olive, I know, thinks I am breaking plighted faith, and betraying the most faithful affection in the world in parting from Roger. Mistress Dorothy thinks I am fulfilling a sacred duty, doing what was meant when we were commanded to pluck out the right eye. As to the pain, I am sure she is right. If I could only be as sure as to the duty! For if it is right, it must be good, really, in the end for him as well as for me. How, I cannot imagine. For it seems bad as well as bitter for me. And Olive says it will be bad and embittering for him.

"Happy, happy people, who lived in the old days of dreams, and visions, and heavenly voices, saying, "This is the way; walk in it;' when God's will became manifest in pillars of fire and cloud, in discriminating dews and fires of sacrifice, and such simple outward signs as poor perplexed hearts like mine can understand.

"Holy people say these days of ours are in