We know that God made every sentient creature that it might be happy with the measure of happiness of which its nature is capable; that intelligent moral creatures, such as we are, are capable of moral happiness, (that is) God's own everlasting happiness. But we also know that we cannot have that happiness, nor any other worthy of the name, unless we are right. And having lost our rectitude and incurred great guilt, we are wholly unable either to pardon our own sins or to recover rightness and happiness. In this helpless, strengthless, hopeless state, the grace of God in the redemption by Jesus Christ, meets our ruined race. The faith of this brings peace to the guilty conscience, and reconciliation to the alienated heart. Thus the gospel is the power of God to the salvation of every one that believes it. Rom. i. They who experience that blessed power can show it, and by telling the truth, can convey the same power to others. This reconciling, this sanctifying gospel is what you have mainly to teach; that the souls of your pupils may be renewed by the knowledge of it into the image of Him that created them, even in righteousness and true holiness. Eph. iv. 23, Col. iii. 10.

3. As we are therefore called to this great work of remodelling the souls of our fellow beings, we ought to be well acquainted with the implements given to us to employ. We must be conversant with the Bible. It should dwell in us richly. We must therefore search the Scriptures: study, compare, commit

to memory. We must seek to feel the comfort of the Scripture. We must conscientiously act up to our perception of its injunctions. We must set our affection on the fulfilment of its promises and prophecies. We must more and more fervently pray, Thy kingdom come.

Then we have to communicate what we know, and with our best ability adapt it to those we teach. We must try to illustrate it, that we may endear it. Bible stories, all other stories, parables, and even suppositions, our own experience and observation, appeals to their own history, conscience, and feelings

all will aid us. God's works will often illustrate and delight. There are 'sermons in stones;' in the thunder, in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter; in flowers, fruits, weeds; in pictures, in passing events, accidents and deaths. Press everything into the holy cause.

4. Then we should be very careful to adorn, and recommend and endear our teaching by a behaviour and spirit imbued with the Gospel. Our faith must work by love. Love will both consecrate our object and beautify our manner. In the selfdenying Paul the Galatians saw Jesus Christ evidently set forth, crucified among them. The Thessalonians found him loving as a nurse cherishing her children. He persuaded the Corinthians with the meekness and gentleness of Christ, and he commended himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God. All this is to be reproduced in us, if our object is to be attained, and the attainment will repay the outlay.

5. Everything therefore must be guarded against which could hinder the result. Let us be conscientious in making and fulfilling engagements: - reliable and punctual. Avoid the appearance of evil, such as frivolity, vanity, immodesty, anger, pride, self-sufficiency, disrespect, insubordination, fickleness, backbiting. Let us ever keep the end in view, and never be satisfied till it is secured.

6. We may probably many of us

Sir,-In a leading article in The Medical Times and Gazette of July 5th, 1862, headed "English Sacrifices in Central Africa," after remarking on the general sickness that prevailed at the mission station Magomero, you very naturally ask, "How then can we reconcile these sad facts with the statement that 'the mission under the direction of Dr. Livingstone settled down in an admirable station high up the river, where the country is an elevated plateau, where the climate is tolerably salubrious, and where a dense population is immediately available for missionary work?'" The quotation is from the bishop, and expresses the opinion which I formed, and still hold, as to the general healthiness of the plateau referred to. The spot, taken as a temporary residence until extensive acquaintance with the whole region should enable the head of the mission to select a suitable locality for a permanent abode, was forty or fifty miles distant from the "Elephant Marsh," and at an altitude of between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above it. We shall therefore try to think of the marsh and mission station as distinct as Oxford and London. The plateau is ten or twelve miles broad, and probably 100 in length. We happened to travel along it at the

then found the climate deliciously cool. When previously in the Upper Shiré Valley, at an altitude of 1,200 feet above the sea, we were drinking water at 84 degrees, and in one day, mounting up to an altitude of between 3,000 and 4,000 feet, we had every few miles a gushing stream, with the water at 65 degrees. The air had that bracing effect which the mountain breezes have at home, and we were all struck by observing far more very old people than we had seen anywhere else. Our stay was too short for our own experience to be worth anything; and the experience of the missionaries amounts only to this-that without sanitary precautions the health is endangered here as it is everywhere else. missionaries were placed in very peculiar circumstances, and such as probably they never anticipated. As we climbed up the plateau together, and felt its refreshing breezes, we met parties of Portuguese, with long lines of bound captives in their possession. These were soon made free, and the bishop, trusting to the support of those who had sent him, bravely took charge of them. These re-captives soon amounted to 200; but in what follows I have only the testimony of the missionaries themselves, for I then left, and pursued the exploration of Lake Nyassa for some 225

The

the bend of a small river of exactly the same shape as that into which General M'Clellan, for "strategic reasons," ran. It was shaded by lofty trees, which the poor bishop admired exceedingly, and resolved to preserve. The efforts of the missionaries failed to prevent these two hundred people from depositing their droppings all over a space of less than one hundred yards by fifty, and it was then fitly described as a "pest-hole." For some months the people adjacent and around them brought abundance of provisions for sale, and no one imagined that these were all their surplus stores; but after the expenditure of the surplus came famine. The missionaries nobly shared their own provisions with the poor wretches whom they had adopted, and were reduced to the same hard and scanty fare. About fifty of the natives perished by ulcers and dysentery, and to me the wonder is, not that in that foul den the whites presented the sorry figure you have drawn, but that they were not all cut off together. Now, don't blame them; they felt the necessity of removing out of the pest-hole, but the grass had all been burned off, and new huts could not be built; slave-hunting, at the instigation of the Portuguese of Tette, was going on all around them; they were in new and untried circumstances; had to retire to the lowlands: but still all think that the plateau is the healthiest abode, and will return as soon as possible.

"The bishop, whose untimely fate everyone who knew him must deeply deplore, never spared himself, and was foremost in depriving himself of the comforts which you rightly conclude are indispensible to Europeans, in order to save his orphan children. He and Burrup were the strongest of the party, and were proportionately disregardful of their health. Exposed for more than a week previously to hard, fast marches, worse fare, and drenching showers, he set out from Magomero, ill with diarrhea, on his last and

through the stream, remarking that he would soon be wet at any rate. After two days' walking in a plight which you may imagine, he reached the Shiré, embarked in a miserable small canoe, and after dropping down the stream one day was upset, lost clothes and medicines, and went on, of course, still wet-coffee, tea, and sugar all gone; it is scarcely possible to conceive a more miserable plight. But let any one go through the same amount of exposure in England, and he will as certainly be cut off by consumption as the bishop and Mr. Burrup were by fever and dysentery. When I began to travel I walked through streams, and braved rains in the same way the bishop did; but I found that I had fever perpetually, and gave up the habit, though it was really pleasant to have the extremities cooled. You will perform a good service if you warn all Europeans going to the tropics to take as good care of their health there as they do at home. In addition to the loss of invaluable services, these untimely deaths are a great misfortune to the cause of African civilization, because people immediately ascribe them to the inevitable effects of the climate, and with you say, "It is of no use to send missionaries where they cannot live.” In our expedition, though we have undergone exposure to which no missionary need subject himself, we have had but two deaths among a large number of Europeans in four years, and these were caused by detention sorely against our will in most unwholesome localities.

'No great work can be accomplished without pain and suffering, and even death. Those who, with you, "would not say a word to damp the energy of missionaries and of those that send them," must expect to hear cases like that of the nobleminded Indian officer who lately fell a victim to gigantic labours during the Indian famine, or that of Lord Canning, and try to place a slight drag on the imagination. Horror seems to lay hold on you at the bare

mention of " Elephant Swamp." I am actually to pass through it to morrow, and am only sorry that the enormous herds of elephants-we have seen eight hundred in it at once-have become so knowing that we have no chance of getting a steak or a foot. But see the effect of bad example: my imagination, do as I will to prevent it, obstinately pictures you sitting on that wilderness of eight hundred cesspools, which the commissioners only the other day swept away, and drinking water mixed according to Dr. Acland, with all the abominations and unutterable filthiness which are poured out of Oxford, Reading, &c., into your cup. Oh! you filter your water through a few inches of sand, do you? I would not trust it (unless I were in London) though filtered through the Great Sahara. The delicious unconsciousness with which you exclaim, "Elephant Marsh; good heavens! what a vista of deep swamp, rotting vegetation, flies, vermin, stinks, agues, and dysentery do the words call up!" only excite

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a merry laugh, which I beg you to believe has not one particle of illnature in it, and the quotation,

"Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us."

You have actually a larger area of cesspool and marsh around and above London than exists in the Elephant Swamp, and to the direful effects let typhus, typhoid, diphtheria, cholera, consumption, scrofula, &c., testify. Here they are absolutely unknown. But our fever, if illtreated, as by bleedings, or not treated, as it was in the case of the missionaries at Linyanti, who took only a little Dover's powder, is as fatal as any two in your catalogue. And while it would be " penny wise and pound foolish" to make missionaries of inferior men, good men ought invariably to be accompanied by a thoroughly educated and wellpaid medical officer.

'I am, &c.,

DAVID LIVINGSTONE. 'River Shirè, January 26th.'

COMMUNION WITH GOD.

THE true Christian's intercourse with God is a living, personal, heartfelt communion. Let the profane scoffer, and the cold-hearted infidel, and the formal hypocrite, and the self-righteous moralist, smile, if they will, with a mixture of indignation and contempt at the idea of such fellowship, but it is for all that a blessed reality. Personal intimacy with God is the privilege of every believer. Let him approach the Bible with reverence as God's great autograph; and as he reads it in faith, he will find the exceeding great and precious promises break like the waves of the sea in music on the shore of his heart, and the truth will dawn upon his

soul as the light of the sun, in which alone the sun can be beheld. Let him habitually dwell at the mercy-seat, speaking to God with holy familiarity and child-like confidence, making known his wants, casting his burdens on the Lord, imploring His favour, and desiring to be changed into the same image, from glory to glory, and from the depths of a rich experience he will be able to say, Truly my fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son.

BE CAUTIOUS IN JUDGING.

THERE are many more good and truly pious people in the world than we generally suppose. And there are a great many people that we should love, if we only knew them better.