him. When the time came that I was to go, he threw his arms round my neck, and expressed great misery. I left him about twenty minutes or a quarter before five."

I exclaimed, while my

66 "Nobody to advise with! uncle in mingled sorrow and anger paced the room, Why, where were the bishops of the Protestant Church of England? If the poor king knew not the blessed privilege of drawing near to God for counsel, was there no man to step forward and uphold him in the battle that he was so willing to fight for the maintenance of the national religion?

"That battle is the Lord's," said my uncle," and the first act of him who would engage in it must be to acknowledge the Captain of our Salvation as the Leader under whom alone victory can be gained. I doubt whether the scene thus pourtrayed can be paralleled in the whole course of English history. I really could not get on, when reading it; for the picture of that poor infatuated monarch, dragged to the brink of a yawning gulf, and compelled to cast himself down, with the certainty of implicating a mighty empire in the consequences of his fall, is too vivid to look upon. It resembles the storied fascination by which a bird is compelled to descend from its secure perch, and drop into the jaws of the venomous reptile that charms it. Yet, alas! what else could we look for on the part of one who so piercingly reiterates that he had nothing to fall back upon? The event is one of every day occurrence; it is the common, the almost universal plea of Satan when tempting men into transgression. No human being who knows God as He has revealed Himself in the Bible can, under any possible circumstance, say 'I

have nothing to fall back upon.' In bodily dangers, in spiritual troubles, in pecuniary straits, in domestic trials, the believer has something to fall back upon that cannot fail him; and that something includes every thing. The perishing beggar in the street, denied an alms by the passing rich man on whose charity he had reckoned as his last earthly resource, if his faith can but realize that word 'Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things,' will fall back upon it, and patiently wait the fulfilment of a promise that cannot fail, though heaven and earth should pass away. Another, having no part in that precious faith, listens to the tempter's whisper, 'You have nothing to fall back upon-steal, or die by your own hand.' The monarch in his gilded palace, habitually looking to Him by whom kings rule, and steadily believing the word They that honour me I will honour,' can look with calmness on the surrounding vacancy, when every earthly defence shall have forsaken him, and the fierce waves of popular violence rage and foam around his dwelling. If his conscience bears witness that it is by adhering to his own allegiance, he has lost that of his people, he has something to fall back upon that will sustain the heaviest weight he can lay upon it; yea, that can bear his rejoicing spirit to glory on high, should his fidelity even bring his crowned head to the block. Such was George the Third. Again, a king who has trusted in man, and made flesh his arm, forgetting that his own obedience to the Most High will be the measure of his people's fidelity to him, will live in perpetual fear of losing his only staff, and may at any time be intimidated by a whisper, the purport of which is to recal to his mind the fearful truth that he

has nothing to fall back upon. You talk of Bishops, my dear; what are they? George the Fourth knew very well that there was not a man in England more steadily opposed to the vile measure than the Archbishop of Canterbury; and another strenuous opponent was the Bishop of London: but these would not serve for him to fall back upon in the only sense that he understood. He wanted to form a Cabinet who should uphold him in his resistance to the measure, and all the Bishops in the land probably could not have persuaded him to entrust that matter to the Lord, as his father had done. You see, the king attributed his father's unyielding firmness to his certainty that the Peers would support him; but he utterly mistook the grounds of that certainty, if it indeed existed. 'The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he see them, because they are spiritually discerned.' Those words explain the whole matter as no other words explain it. It cuts me to the heart to contemplate such a spectacle : to see the death-warrant of a noble nation wrested and wrung and dragged from the grasp of a struggling king, fully awake to the damning consequences of such a deed, but overpowered by a force that nothing could resist, save the faith that was his father's, and which, alas! was not his."

And the men who could do such a deed, uncle

"Name them not to me: my soul recoils from the contemplation. I never felt, in all its extent, the lost condition of my country until I read that document. Sinners yet alive may repent and be converted; may turn from the error of their ways, cease

to do evil, and learn to do well. When such is the case, and may the Lord grant it so to be !-I shall rejoice on their behalf, and perhaps hope for the country; but till then, I must try to familiarize myself with thoughts of coming judgment on this guilty land. Look at the last triumph of the presented pistol-look at the Socinian endowment Bill, and say if the measure be not well nigh filled up. It does seem to me as though the whole infernal machinery of 1829 was thus unexpectedly laid open to the public eye as a merciful preparation for what, in His most righteous judgment, the Lord may be about to inflict on such a nation as this."

THE

CHRISTIAN LADY'S MAGAZINE.

SEPTEMBER, 1844.

THE TOUCHSTONE OF HISTORY.

CHAPTER XV.

THE Coming of the Son of Man will be an unlookedfor event to the world in general. As it was in the days of Noah, and as it was in the days of Lot, so shall it then be. Planting and building, marrying and giving in marriage, feasting and revelling, will be the characteristic of the age, even to the moment of the Lord's visible descent from heaven; with the addition of fiercely hostile operations in lands then marked as the theatre of war, and plans of conquest, and a daring grasp at universal sovereignty, even when signs thicken in heaven above and on earth beneath, shewing that the LORD is about to take to Him his great power, and to reign-to reign King over the whole earth, and His Name One."

"One

All this we know, for it is the familiar language of the Bible-of those parts which are most frequently brought within the hearing of Christians: but how SEPTEMBER, 1844.