with a firebrand has just entered the vaults beneath the place which they occupy, and which contain a magazine of gunpowder. The Chorus, instead of stirring from the dangerous vicinity, immediately commence a long complaint of the hardship of their fate, exclaiming pathetically, "O unhappy madman—or rather unhappy we, the victims of this madman's fury—or thrice, thrice unhappy the friends of the madman, who did not secure him, and restrain him from the perpetration of such deeds of frenzy or three and four times hapless the keeper of the magazine, who forgot the keys in the door," etc., etc.

The cry of Charles and his Paladins at Arles, "Help us, oh blessed martyr St. Trophimus!" is thus disposed of by Torfrid, Hereward's forefather, in the story of the Wake, "What use in crying to St. Trophimus? A tough arm is worth a score of martyrs here," in the thick of the fight for dear life.

When Lord Rea, in 1630, as recorded in a well-known passage from Rushworth, uttered the pious conventionalism or devout platitude, "Well, God mend all!" his companion, Sir David Ramsay, impatiently exclaimed, "Nay," with an undevout expletive, "Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend it!" One is reminded of what Mr. Froude says of the Protestant leaders in Scotland, during the autumn of 1559, when the Queen Regent returned to Holyrood, once more absolutely victorious: "Notwithstanding all their talk about God, it had come to this. God had as much interest in them as they had themselves courage, energy, capacity, understanding, and perseverance-so much precisely, and not more." Or again of that homely thrust in the "Biglow Papers," where one of the interlocutors, on a critical occasion, avowing a wish to know where and when to strike, is thus answered by his plainspoken mate :

"'Strike soon,' sez he, ' or you'll be deadly ailin',—
Folks thet's afear'd to fail are sure o' failin';

God hates your sneakin' creturs thet believe

He'll settle things they run away an' leave.'"

There is something to be said—indeed in our present sense

there is more to be said, for the farmer than for the clergyman in the story of the latter congratulating the former on the state of his crops, and finding him not free from apprehensions, in regard of former bad years-"My friend," urged the rector, "trust in Providence." "Providence! Yes, yes," replied the other; "that's all very well: but give me the doong cart." Dr. John Brown relates with zest how one of his faculty was attending a poor woman in labour-a desperate case, that required a cool head and a firm will, while the good man, "for he was good," had neither of these,-and losing his presence of mind, gave up the poor woman as lost, and retired into the next room to pray for her. "Another doctor, who perhaps wanted what the first one had, and certainly had what he wanted, brains and courage, meanwhile arrived, and called out, 'Where is Dr. -?' 'Oh, he has gone into the next room to pray.' 'Pray! Tell him to come here this instant, and help me; he can work and pray too ;"" and by the new-comer's, the snell working doctor's, assistance the woman's life was saved.

Sir Robert Peel, in his reply to certain suggestions offered by Lord Kenyon in reference to the potato-disease, coupled with the recommendation of a "special public acknowledgment of our dependence on God's mercy in our present distressed state," was mildly sarcastic on the seeming inconsistency of making such an acknowledgment, while at the same time leaving "in full operation the restraints which man has imposed on the import of provisions."

Not likely to be soon forgotten, on either side the Tweed, is Lord Palmerston's reply as Home Secretary, to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, touching the national attitude pending a visitation of Asiatic cholera. He advised them that it was better to cleanse than to fast. Let them see to purifying the foul wynds and overcrowded flats tenanted by the poor, and so get rid of "those causes and sources of contagion which, if allowed to remain, will infallibly breed pestilence, and be fruitful in death, in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a united, but inactive nation." To apply what a north country bishop says in Shakspeare:

"The means that Heaven yields must be embraced,
And not neglected; else, if Heaven would,
And we will not, Heaven's offer we refuse;

The proffered means of succour and redress."

A recent apologist for the captain of a lost steamship submitted that the destruction of that fine vessel was what is called in the old-fashioned language of a charter-party, "the act of God." Less partial critics, on the other hand, affirmed it to be the act of the folly and madness of man,-the term quoted belonging to an age when they who go down to the sea in ships had not learned the irreverent practice of imputing to the Deity the direct consequences of human rashness. "Let us, if we can, amend this folly; or, if we will persist in it, let us at least take the blame upon ourselves." They that go down to the sea in ships have, however, in all ages, though not so much one people as another (English for instance as Italians), been prone to waste in wailing outcries to patron saints the energy that, in peril of wreck, they might have expended to better purpose. The "Colloquies" of Erasmus give a lively sample of this run-to-waste invocation. The last of the heroes of La Vendée, Charette, while still a youth, sailed from Brest in a cutter which lost its mast, and was in imminent jeopardy of going down; the sailors, on their knees, were praying to the Virgin, and had entirely given up all notion of exertion, "till Charette, by killing one, succeeded in bringing the others to a sense of their duty, and thereby saved the vessel." Lord Broughton describes a scene of the kind, in a Turkish ship of war the Greeks on board called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Allah; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling his passengers to call on God: he rung his hands, and wept aloud, and being asked what he could do, said he could do nothing. "Could he get back to the main land?" "If God chooses," was his answer. "Could he make Corfu ?" "If God chooses." One thinks of the testy old patrician's rejoinder in "Coriolanus" to the tribune's exclaimer, "The gods be good unto us!" "No; in such a case the gods will not be good unto us." In Scott's tale of the Crusaders, "I will vow a

golden candlestick to the Holy Sepulchre-a shrine of silver to our Lady of Engaddi-a pall, worth one hundred bezants to Saint Thomas of Orthez," cries the Queen in extremity." Up, up, madam," says Edith; "call on the saints an you list, but be your own best saint." In "Ivanhoe," again, when the Grand Master forbodes the contingent extinction of his order (the Templars), "Now may God avert such a calamity!" says the Preceptor. "Amen!" rejoins the Grand Master, with solemnity, "but we must deserve His aid."

It is all in keeping with the practical character of the man,

the prayer which on one critical occasion Benvenuto Cellini records his offering: "Almighty God, favour my cause, for Thou knowest it is a just one, and that I am not on my part wanting in my utmost efforts to make it succeed." On another he tells us how he "told Lionardo, who was incessantly crying out, Jesus, Jesus!' that Jesus would assist him, if he strove to help himself." Elsewhere again Cellini emphatically asserts his systematic habit of "always exerting his utmost efforts to extricate" himself from difficulty, as well as of devoutly recommending himself to God, by whom alone those efforts could achieve success, and who so often had delivered him when the best of these had clearly and entirely failed.

Saintly as well as Saint Francis of Sales bids his brethren, "En toutes vos affaires, appuyez-vous totalement sur la providence de Dieu, par laquelle seule tous vos desseins doivent réussir; travaillez néanmoins de votre côté tout doucement pour co-opérer avec icelle." The counsel is at one, au fond, with that of the heathen stoic in the old play

"I am plain, fathers. Here you look about
One at another, doubting what to do,
With faces, as you trusted to the gods,

:

That still have saved you; and they can do it: but
They are not wishings, or base womanish prayers,
Can draw their aids; but vigilance, counsel, action;
Which they will be ashamed to forsake.
'Tis sloth they hate, and cowardice."

CO-OPERANT UNITS.

EPHESIANS iv. 16.

HE universal Church is designated by the apostle a

THE

body, which whole body is fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part. And every part in its measure, and according to its imparted power. Very little are some of the joints and fibres; but every little helps. Who shall despise the whole of small things? But for the accumulated atoms, the aggregated littles, where were the body?

"Let me not deem that I was made in vain,
Or that my Being was an accident,
Which Fate, in working its sublime intent,
Not wished to be, to hinder would not deign.
Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain
Hath its own mission, and is duly sent
To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent

'Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main.

The very shadow of an insect's wing,

For which the violet cared not while it stayed,
Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing,

Proved that the sun was shining by its shade :
Then can a drop of the eternal spring,

Shadow of living lights, in vain be made?”*

As the author of "Felix Holt" says, we see human heroism broken into units, and are apt to imagine, this unit did little— might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. "Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death-a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on

Hartley Coleridge, Sonnets.