more than they that he slew in his life. It was by sacrificing himself, even unto death, that he did most to save his country from its enemies. So was it with One far higher and nobler and mightier than Samson. It was on the cross, and it was by His death, that our Lord and Saviour won the power by which to ransom and redeem the world. When we are willing to sacrifice ourselves then it is that we attain our highest power. For said Christ," He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.”

Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."
RUTH i. 16.

WENTY years hence, when the boys and girls who to-day are the readers of YOUNG ENGLAND, look back upon their lives, there is one thing which, if they are thoughtful and reflective, will fill them with astonishment, and that is, the wonderful way in which the greatest and most important things in their lives have come out of what seemed to be the most insignificant and trifling.

Twenty years hence these boys and girls will be husbands and wives, masters and mistresses; they will have homes and families and businesses; they will live, many of them, in places far away from those in which they live to-day-some of them in America, some of them in Australia, some of them in distant places in England; and these changes and surroundings they will find, on reflection, to have resulted, mostly, from events and occurrences which at the moment seemed to them to be but of the smallest consequence.

So was it in the history of Ruth, the beautiful girl from the land of Moab. Before her death she had found a home in the land of Israel, she had learned to know and worship the God of Israel, and there had been born to her a son, who became afterwards the father of Jesse and the grandfather of David, and from whom, as we know, long centuries after was descended JESUS, the Saviour. And all this came about in a way which Ruth could never have foretold, and from circumstances, some of which probably looked small enough at the time when they

occurred.

First, there was a famine in the land of Israel; then a man named Elimelech, with his wife and two big and almost grown-up sons, resolved that he would move into the land of Moab, in order to escape the famine. What particular place in the land of Moab they should go to, I suppose, when they left their home, these people hardly knew. But by and by, for some reason, possibly a very trifling one, they settled in a place near to the home of this girl Ruth and Orpah, her friend. One of the young men met the girl, accidentally it may have been. Soon he found he loved her; then followed all the rest-the wedding of the glad young couple, the early death of the youthful bridegroom, the sad days of widowhood, the journey out of the land of Moab, and the new and happy life in the land of Israel. Was it all chance? Beside the guiding hand of God, was there no point at which Ruth herself, by her goodness and her wisdom, by her strength of character and will, decided unconsciously, but no less really, what the future of her life should be. We know that there was.

and beyond that, we see that the decisions which we make at these "turning points" depend usually on the characters we have within. All the future of Ruth, her happy home in the land of Israel, her knowledge of Israel's God, the little baby boy who was to become the grandfather of David and the ancestor of Christ, all depended on the choice she made as she stood that day in the middle of the dusty road, and settled in her mind whether she should go on with her poor sorrowing mother-in-law, or whether she should go back to her old home. And the choice she made was the result of the love and the kindness, and the goodness and the faith which dwelt within her heart,

Any day you might come to the great turning point of life, therefore it is that every day you should ask God to guide and control your steps. Any day you may have to make a choice which will affect your entire future. These choices depend on the character you carry in your hearts, "Out of the heart are the issues of life." Therefore, should you earnestly and continually pray, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew within me a right spirit."

III. SEPTEMBER 16.

"The Lord hath given me my petition which 1 asked of Him.” 1 SAM. i. 27.

E have all of us heard the story of the little girl, who, one bright, hot, cloudless Sunday, went to church, carrying with her a big umbrella. Why had she brought such a huge umbrella on so fine a Sunday? So the people asked, smiling as they did so. "Were they not going to pray for rain," she said, "and if they prayed for it, would not God certainly give it?" We admire the little girl; we love her for her simple faith, but was she quite wise? When she became a little older would she not smile at herself? Does God always give rain when people ask Him to do so? We know that He does not. This good woman Hannah prayed for a child, and by and by a child was sent her. "The Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of Him." Does God always give children to those who ask Him for them? Again, we know that He does not.

Some years ago-so the story was told, and I have no reason to doubt that it was true-two little princes in a royal palace prayed to God to spare the life of their father, who was very, very ill. Their father's life was spared, and he is living to-day.

But does God always spare the lives of fathers and mothers when their little children come to Him and pray to Him to do so? No. We know that He does not; we know that there are many cases in which people pray to God, and do not get that for which they ask. What are we to believe, then, regarding prayer? What are we to do regarding prayer? What habits in respect of prayer ought you children to form? We are to believe this regarding prayer: we are to believe that God always hears our prayers. His ear is never closed; he never slumbers or sleeps; He never goes into some far place where our prayers cannot come. He always hears, and He answers, not according to our wisdom, but according to His.

everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, we are to make our requests known unto God." But we are to pray conditionally; we are to pray saying, "Thy will be done;" we are to pray asking that God will give us these temporal things according to His wisdom, rather than according to our wishes. And if we remember this, there is nothing about which we may not

speak to God; no trouble we may not tell to Him, and no wish we may not lay before Him. The habit of telling everything to God is a wise and good habit, and one that I would have you all to cultivate. Think nothing too small to speak to Him about. Martin Luther used to say, "Bene orasse, bene studisse." Some of you know what this means, “to pray well is to study well." And we may be sure that this is true; there is no work which is not helped by prayer.

But are there no things about which we may pray absolutely, no things for which we may ask without saying, "If it be Thy will"? Yes, certainly there are. We know it is God's will to make us good and wise, to give us His Spirit, and renew our hearts, and so for these things we may always ask without any condition or reserve, assured that we shall not ask in vain. "Delight thyself also in the Lord," said the Psalmist, "and He shall give thee the desire of thy heart." We are to covet the best gifts, the gifts of God's favour and love, of His help and His teaching, and we shall find that, coveting these, He gives us the desire of our hearts. While, as regards all lesser things, we are to remember that our "heavenly Father knoweth what things we have need of."

IV. SEPTEMBER 23.

"Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth."-1 SAM. iii. 9. WONDER how the readers of YOUNG ENGLAND would feel if to-night, as they were sleeping in their beds, God came to them, and spoke, or called them by their names. Some of them who love God, and try every day to please Him, would, I think, be very glad; and they would reply at once, like little Samuel, "Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth." Others, I fear, who do not often think of God, and do not care much to please Him, would be startled and alarmed, perhaps they would try to hide themselves, as Adam and Eve did behind the bushes of the garden. The fear or the joy that we have at the thought of the presence of God is no bad test of the state of our heart towards Him.

The boy Samuel was a good boy, a boy who tried to do God's will, and so it was that he had no fear when the voice of God was heard in the stillness of the night sounding through the rooms of the empty tabernacle. Nor do I think that God would speak to a little boy like Samuel in a loud or frightening voice. He would speak in His "still small voice," loud enough to rouse him, and to make him hear, but not loud enough to fill him with alarm.

Is Samuel the only boy to whom God has ever spoken? Has God no voices in which He still speaks to boys and girls. If I mistake not, God is always speaking, and always speaking to children. The voices in which He speaks are many and varied. Sometimes He speaks in the thunder, and then the children think how terrible He is; sometimes He speaks by the singing of the birds and the humming of the bees, and the bubbling of the brooks, and then if they are wise they remember how beautiful He is; sometimes He speaks by the voice of parents and friends, and tells them how good and kind He is; sometimes He speaks by the good example of those who are around, and then they hear how upright He is; at times He speaks by the voice of conscience, and often, I think, by His Spirit in our hearts. God has many voices. It would be a sad, dull world if He were to cease to speak.

of all when you are in temptation or difficulty, to catch these "words" of God! Listen for God's words when you are young, and then you will be able to hear them more easily when you are old. Not to hear them when we are young makes it very hard to hear them when old age comes on. Then the unused ear has lost its power, and, with sorrow and shame, the man finds that he is deaf.

Another thing I want you to notice. How did God call this boy? He called Him by name; He did not roughly shout out, "Boy, boy," as I have heard people do in the streets. No. He said, " Samuel, Samuel." He knew him from all other boys; knew his name, and knew his story. Ought not this to be a source of gladness to us, that God knows us each one, that He can call us by name, that He knows our lives? We are not lost in a crowd; each one is marked by God. If we are trying to please and obey Him, this thought should give us confidence and hope.

A little time ago, in one of our great towns in the north, there was a terrible accident, by which nearly 200 children lost their lives. After the accident, one of the fathers of the missing children came to seek his child. At length, as he thought, he found him lying among the dead, and, taking up the poor little form, he gently carried it home. But when home was reached, and the sorrowing father put the little body on the bed, he found that he was wrong. It was another's child that he had brought away, thinking it his own.

God, the great Father, makes no mistakes like that; He knows each and all of His children, and if they will but trust Him, and hear His voice, and say, even in poor, half-uttered speech, "Speak. Lord, for Thy servant heareth," He will carry them all in His arms and bring them, not dead, but living, to His blessed home.

V.-SEPTEMBER 30.

"Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord."-Ps. cvii. 43.

F all things in the world, the most important to us is the loving-kindness of God. If God loves us all is well, if He cares for us and is seeking ever to do us good, then we can endure any sorrow and face any danger. As the Apostle Paul said, "If God be for us, who can be

against us?"

But then how are we to know whether God does care for us, how are we to find out whether there is any lovingkindness of God, in the midst of which we live, and move, and have our being? If we look up at the starry sky we see above us countless worlds and systems, and we think,in the midst of this great, vast, boundless universe, how can God care for me? So small am I, so insignificant, that He must surely overlook me, and our hearts grow sick and sad at the thought that perhaps, after all, God is not caring for us. How are we to find out this loving-kindness of the Lord? Our text says by observing these things. What things? The examples of God's care and goodness to His children.

During the past three months, some of you have been studying some of these examples. You have read of God's goodness to the children of Israel, in delivering them from the land of Egypt, and providing for them in the desert; of the kindness he showed to Moses and Joshua, to Naomi and Ruth, to Hannah and to Samuel. The Bible is full of these examples; we find them in the Old Testament and no less do we find them in the New, and they are put there, as I take it, for our learning, put there to encourage us and increase our faith. By reading these grand old stories, i.e., by "observing these things," we come to understand the loving-kindness of the Lord. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that such examples are only to be found in the Bible. The history of the world is full of them, and especially that part of the history of the world which belongs to Christian times and

And so it is, that there is no more profitable reading than the history of good men who have put their trust in God. The biographies of such men supply us with wonderful examples of the care and goodness of God, and of the loving help He gives his children. But we need not go to printed books. If you will ask any earnest Christian man or woman what his or her experience is regarding the goodness of God, you will get the answer, that the goodness of God has followed such an one all his days, that God's mercies towards him "have been new every morning and fresh every evening." Nothing is more wonderful than the way in which God helps and delivers His trusting children.

But there is something more than this that I would have you do, and I would have you begin to do it while you are young, and go on doing it as long as God shall

spare your lives. I would have you "observe the times and ways in which He helps and delivers you. Keep a record of times when God steps in, as it were, to help you in difficulty, to guide you in perplexity, to deliver you in temptation, and to comfort you in sorrow; "observe these things," and long before you are old you will have your own wonderful story of the "loving-kindness of the Lord." We cannot follow or comprehend the loving-kindness of God all through the worlds that He has made and that He still upholds, this is far too great for us; but we can follow and, at least in part, take in, His loving-kindness to ourselves, and to those immediately about us. These are the things we should observe, and it is by observing them that our faith is to be made strong.

CE are informed by travellers and historians that there are boys across the Channel as everywhere else; and if boyhood be not one of those things which they manage better in France, it seems to be for no want of elaborate educational arrange

ments.

Education, there, is one of the departments of Government, being conducted by rule and system, with formidable tables of statistics to show for all its methods and results. I remember hearing of a certain French Minister of Public Instruction, who would take out his watch and declare how, at that moment, so many hundred thousand pupils all over the country were doing such and such an identical lesson. This seemed to him the perfection of educational management. He felt proud to be at the centre of so neat a system, winding up, keeping at work, and regulating from his office the whole machinery by which the youth of France was being turned out useful and enlightened citizens, with opinions, habits, and morals, made as far as possible to the same pattern. But, machine-made goods, however elegantly turned out, don't wear as well as hand-made; so, at least, think we in England, whose ideal is strength rather than neatness.

There was a period when the hand was used somewhat too roughly in most English systems of education; but, even in the old times of fagging and flogging, we find our great writers, as a rule, speaking kindly of their schooldays, from Gray to Thackeray. Now, schools in England are more and more becoming places which their pupils may be glad and proud to remember. We have a whole flourishing literature devoted to reminiscences of schooldays, the most popular of which take the most marked tone of enthusiastic loyalty. In French literature there is almost

nothing of the kind. Our neighbours have ever so many pretty things to say about childhood; but no Tom Brown comes forward among them to glorify his old school. When writers of fiction introduce a schoolboy, it is generally as a mischievous, illconditioned brat. This shows something wrong in French school life; as if a man looked back on these days only as one dull round of rules, and tasks, and punishments, which he was glad to forget as soon as possible.

Till lately, there was one kind of school in France which did not fit in to the machinery, and which has accordingly been abolished, those schools where a certain clerical influence was the cog-wheel; yet the Jesuits, though no longer allowed to teach across the Channel, have left their mark upon the whole system of French public schools. They were educational reformers once, and did good as well as harm; but it was a main principle with them to treat human nature as a thing which must be watched, guided, and kept out of mischief at every turn.

Since Napoleon's wars, the military element has, unhappily, come to the front in French life. So French public schools, colleges, or lycées, as they are called, have taken the form of a compound of convent and barracks, in which boys must be told how to think, and trained into order. Education is a strict course of drill, intellectual and other. Every pupil wears a uniform, which is the same all over France, and the same for all classes. Whoever enters a lycée, whatever be the position of his family, must conform to the rule of equality; he is now the child of the State, which undertakes to look after him like any fussy grandmother, though not with so much fond indulgence.

Those of us who may have visited Paris or any large French town, must often have met with a party, sometimes a whole regiment, of boys marching along with their shako caps, red striped trousers, and long, brass-buttoned coats of the official pattern, going two and two like a Noah's ark, under command of their masters; the leading files, young men with whiskers

sprouting, the rear brought up by mere children, who look rather ridiculous in their precocious coat tails. These are the boys of some boarding-house, going to or from their college; or, perhaps, the whole body of internes from the college itself, out for their halfholiday promenade. They are never left to themselves. They walk, and play, and eat, and learn their lessons under the eye of some authority.

In one lycée, and I believe it is a common thing, I have seen a spyhole in the wall of the playground, through which the porter, while busy at his trade of cobbling, could keep an eye upon the boys at their diversions. At night they sleep in great bare dormitories, with a master's bed at the end; and it is the custom sometimes for a guard to patrol up and down between the rows of couches, to see that their occupants are all asleep, like good boys.

There are two orders of authorities to carry out this strict discipline; first, the Professors, who have to do merely with teaching in class, then the Maitres d'études, who form the police of the school. These superintending ushers, popularly nicknamed pions, are as a rule an ill-paid and inferior class of young men, the object of all the tricks and jests of the boys, with whom they have to be day and night, and who are naturally apt to make up by dislike and contempt for the fear through which it is the pion's duty to keep their noses to the grindstone of obedience. Over all stands a Proviseur, the centre rather of the management than, as with an English head-master, of the teaching of the school.

In a large college there will be other functionaries, charged with the business of "serving tables," And all these masters are the slaves of their own system; they have to do the minutest details of their work to order, under close inspection. We are told by one who ought to know, that a proviseur cannot engage a new kitchen-boy, much less a professor, without referring through all the proper channels to the Ministry at Paris, where a clerk must decide for him. Each educator thus becomes a wheel in the machine, not a human soul acting upon other souls at the most impressionable period of their growth. A boy may go through such a school, it appears, without finding anyone to take a kindly personal interest in him, unless he should happen to fall ill, and come under the care of some good Sister of Mercy in the infirmary.

The very appearance of a lycée is painfully suggestive of the spirit that reigns there; everything looks so cold and clean, and bare and orderly, shut in by high walls and bars like a model prison. If a school were to be nothing more than a well-managed manufactory of knowledge, one could find little fault with these schools.

Of the Professors and their work, it may be said that they are excellent, so far as they go. No one is allowed to teach in France without proving that he is not an ignoramus himself; and we have only to compare the mass of French books and newspapers with ours to see that French boys are more carefully trained in the use of words, and all that makes for form rather than substance. But the great lesson of school life is that which teaches a boy how to live like a good man; and no amount of mere literary training will make up for deficiency in character. The French can set us copies in style and in manners;

yet, for my part, I would sooner have a boy brought up at the roughest and most behind-the-age public school of the English type.

I am given to understand that English boys do not always behave and learn at school as they ought, and that their masters are sometimes obliged to enforce a sense of duty upon them by means of punishment. Human nature being much the same everywhere, it is to be expected that French boys too will require to be punished; and punished they are pretty often, as may be supposed, under such a régime. But there is as much difference between school punishments in the two countries as between the guillotine and the gallows. Most juvenile Britons have at some time or other in their career had occasion seriously to consider Solomon's precepts on the matter; but the young Gaul is possessed by a very precocious sense of personal dignity which does not suffer any of his tyrants to lay a hand upon him, "save in the way of kindness." The rod, in every form, has been banished from French schools, lingering longest in clerical seminaries.

Before petitioning Parliament, however, to abolish corporal punishment, English schoolboys must be prepared either to carry out a radical reform in their own conduct, or to suggest some fitting substitute. Their neighbours in misfortune, over the Channel, are not so much to be envied in having no fear of cane or birch. With them, imprisonment is the form of capital punishment, or takes the place of a shorter and sharper punishment, which has been described as "the reverse of capital." A very naughty boy will be locked up for as many hours, or even days, in a bare, dismal cell, there to reflect over his offence, and resolve "not to do it again.". Pensums, impositions of so many lines to write, are largely given. The pions will also condemn a slight misdoer to the punishment of au piquet; that is, he will have to stand in the playground, with his face to the wall, perhaps, for such and such a time, while his comrades are amusing themselves; in this tantalising attitude he may even have to learn lines by heart. Then at some schools there will be a "table of honour" and a "table of penance," where boys who have distinguished themselves creditably or otherwise are put to sit at dinner, treated to extra dainties, or to plain bread and water respectively. In fact, the wheels of such a close grinding system have to be kept greased by a constant application of petty corrections, in the invention of which no little ingenuity has been shown. Perhaps one of the most common and the most dreaded is a boy being deprived of his sortie-permission to go out on holidays.

Sunday and Thursday afternoons are the regular holidays, when the pupils go out for a walk together

always under superintendence-or may visit their friends in the town, if they are lucky enough to have any. We can imagine how youngsters thus "cabin'd, cribb'd, confined," are glad to breathe the open air of the outside world. To be free from the constant eye of the pion would be treat enough; and we may be sure that kind uncles and other friends, who have been schoolboys themselves once, very well understand that the lycéen's holiday should be marked by something nice to eat. It is said, upon good authority, that English schoolboys out for the day have the same weakness.

Young John Bulls would certainly turn up their noses at a French boy's ordinary fare. Breakfast is apt to be a very scanty meal at the lycée. Dinner at midday will perhaps consist of a thin soup, then the meat that has been boiled in it, then a dish or two of vegetables, haricot beans most likely in their season, as "filling at the price;" lastly, to do the thing in style, a very scrimpy dessert of apples, or dry prunes or figs, the whole washed down by an allowance of thin sour wine, diluted with water. At four o'clock comes the goûter, a mere snack of bread, answering to our tea; but tea is too dear in France to be given to schoolboys. Before bedtime there is supper, an abridged edition of the dinner.

On this diet French boys are apt to have a "lean and hungry look," and appear to be somewhat greedy in their cravings for "more." "They will do any thing for something to eat," is the condensed character given of them by a young English friend of mine, who was once a day boarder at a French college, where he got all his impositions readily done for him in consideration of a cake or an orange that he would bring from home.

However, all such sweeping charges are to be taken with a large grain of salt; no doubt there are plenty of our boys in whom the stomach is the most active principle.

The games of French boys, also, excite the contempt of our haughty youth. In their narrow gravelled play-grounds, where big and little and middle-sized fellows are generally kept apart, such sports as cricket and football must be out of the question. Boys would not, indeed, be boys if they did not like running about and making a noise, so we find these boys playing at games familiar enough to us under other names, such as barres-prisoner's base; saut de mouton-leap-frog, leap-sheep!-les quatre coins, which we should call puss in the corner, and so on.

But there is too much loafing about and secret chattering in French playgrounds. The pion being. always at hand, to see rules kept, the pupil naturally takes his presence as a challenge to do something on the sly; and it becomes one of a boy's chief pleasures to play mischievous tricks, and exercise the arts of low cunning. He makes the usher's life a misery to him as much as he dares, and readily breaks out into insurrection if ever he gets a chance. It is no wonder that the victims of such a yoke should be disposed to kick against it.

We cannot cast human nature into moulds. The young Frenchman, curbed at every turn, watched in every action of his life, might, after such a course of breaking in to habits of obedience, be expected to turn out the most orderly and submissive of citizens. As a matter of fact, we know that no French Government feels itself safe against barricades and revolution from one year to another. On the other hand, English boys and girls, allowed to run wild, as it seems to a foreigner (they know better), ought in theory to make a most turbulent race of men and women: yet nothing astonishes continental visitors more than to see crowds peaceably managed by two or three unarmed policemen, who in their soberest of uniforms represent the majesty of social law and order.

That Young France is not satisfied with its condi

tion has been shown by a Congress of schoolboys, which was held at Bordeaux last year-the precocious little monkeys! In grave earnest the delegates ventilated their grievances, and drew up a list of reforms demanded by them, to this effect: (1) That the study of Latin and Greek should be optional; (2) that the school libraries should be enlarged; (3) that higher education should be provided gratis for deserving students; (4) that a master should no longer be judge as well as prosecutor in charges made against a boy; (5) that boarders should have a day's holiday every week, not to be taken away on any pretence of punishment; (6) that the works of Victor Hugo should be henceforth counted as school classics. This last clause because the great novelist quite falls in with the tone of boyish sentiment, and has become the patron of the discontented youngsters!

Such a juvenile Congress, if I remember right, has been suggested in England; but it is hardly likely to meet, or at least to go to work in this fashion, because English boys, if not so smart and witty as their French compeers, have more modesty, more horror of making themselves ridiculous, more of that kindly humour which is largely compounded with common sense. There are many things, indeed, that might be improved in English schools; and we might take not a few useful hints from French ones. But if any of our boys have to accuse fate because he does not get six holidays a week, or because his schoolmaster keeps a cane, or because the bread of his school life seems too thick and the butter too thin, let him rather consider that what can't be cured must be endured as cheerfully as possible, and take comfort in thinking that he might have been worse off.

AN AMERICAN CEDAR SWAMP.

THESE swamps are from half a mile to a mile in breadth, sometimes five or six in length, and appear as if they occupied the former channel of some choked up river, stream, lake, or arm of the sea. The appearance they present to a stranger is singular. A forest of tall and perfectly straight trunks, rising to the height of fifty or sixty feet without a limb, and crowded in every direction, their tops so of a perpetual twilight below. On a nearer approach, they woven together as to shut out the day, spreading the gloom are found to rise out of the water, which, from the impregnation of fallen leaves and roots of the cedars, is of the colour of brandy. The logs, and in many places the water, are covered with green mantling moss, while an undergrowth of laurel, fifteen or twenty feet high, intersects every spring so completely as to render a passage through laborious and harassing beyond description. At every step you either sink to the mees, clamber over fallen timber, squeeze yourself through between the stubborn laurels, or plunge to the middle in ponds made by the uprooting of large trees, and which the green moss concealed from observation In calm weather the silence of death reigns in these dreary regions; a few uninterrupted rays of light shoot across the gloom; and, unless for the chirping of one or two small birds, all is silence, solitude, and occasional hollow screams of the herons, and the melancholy desolation. When a breeze rises, at first it sighs mournfully through the tops: but as the gale increases the tall mast-like cedars wave like fishing poles, and rubbing against each other, produce a variety of singular noises, that, with the help of a little imagination, resembles shrieks, groans, growling of bears, wolves, and such like comfortable music.-Wilson's "American Ornith logy."

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