ing into its chamber many an object of distracting solicitude; and then the excuse for rejecting religion will be, that there is "no room in the inn." The only way in which you can prevent the world from thus engrossing you to itself, is by allowing religion to become the principal occupant at once. Throw wide open the gates of your heart, and admit and enshrine the celestial guest. You know that at present it is comparatively vacant; occupy it with an altar and with all the signs and instruments of a temple service. It is an important qualification for usefulness, though only of a negative kind, that you are comparatively free from self-reproach. That your nature is sinful you feel and deplore. And we trust also that you are the subjects of that divine renovation which alone is adequate to your debasement and guilt. But these facts are quite compatible with the statement that, as yet, you are comparatively free from self-reproach. For, besides the fall in Eden, every man may be said to have a fall of his own. Each of you have had your first sin, though it was perhaps committed so early in life that you may not remember it. Yet in the book of God's remembrance there stands recorded against you a first sin. The record of that is the record of your personal fall; and is only another imitation of the primal fall of man. But we do not conceive that this is by any means the worst fall of which your nature is capable. Some-alas, how many! incur a more dreadful fall, when they first plunge into gross immorality; when the judgment first accepts the bribe of the passions; when conscience itself falls, and does not resume its warning-office till it is too late; when, like the flaming sword of the cherubim, it "drives out the man" from the paradise of his former peace, speaks only to reproach and to remind him of the Eden he has lost. The Gospel, indeed, can restore even him to " peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ;" but never will he regain the happy serenity of youth. The one is the unruffled surface of the transparent lake; the other is the calm succeeding the tempest, in which, though the storm is hushed, there is yet a swell. However entirely a man may surrender himself to the claims of religion in the later periods of life, he is likely to be often haunted with the bitter reflection that much of his time and life have been lost; that as evil propagates itself so much faster than good, the pernicious in-, fluence of his early life far exceeds his usefulness at present; that he is not likely to accomplish any great and valuable object, any thing as a whole, for God; that he is not actu ated by right motives in his present altered course, but by the fear of consequences, or because he has outlived his former opportunities and means of sin :—all of which necessarily distracts the attention and wastes the passions. His eye is fixed in compunction on the past, or on the stains and memorials of early guilt within, when it ought to be fixed on the Christian goal, and dilating with the grandeur of the prize which there awaits him. Were his energy undivided, it would not be more than enough for the accomplishment of the great ends of life; but, from the causes described, it is often scattered and lost. The ancient heathen, who sacrificed in the temple of Fear, had less to place on the altars of his other gods. But you are comparative strangers to self-reproach. Whatever your guilt may be as compared with absolute purity, and however much you may need "the washing of regeneration," yet if you are moral as opposed 66 to profligate, susceptible as opposed to obdurate, and uncorrupt as contrasted with a long course of ruinous depravity; if you have escaped those gross vices which blast character and destroy self-respect, your qualification for active usefulness is as much superior to that of the person described, as an unbroken skin is preferable for labour to that of a person with a green and angry wound. The arrows that drink up the spirits" are those of remorse; and the wounds which they inflict, like the poisoned darts of the ancients, can be cured only by a divine medicine. You can throw all the animating force of your passions Instead into the cause you espouse. of employing the language of confession only, at the throne of grace, and of praying for yourselves alone, you can become intercessors, and draw down a blessing on the world; and instead of being engrossed by remorse, gratitude should be ever cheering and impelling you onwards. duties of thy vigorous age, thou shalt never overtake that strength; the hinder wheel, though bigger than the former, and measures more ground at every revolution, yet shall never overtake it; and all the second counsels of thy old age, though undertaken with greater resolution, and acted with the strengths of fear and need, and pursued with more pertinacious purposes than the early repentances of young men, yet shall never overtake those advantages which you lost when you gave your youth to folly, and the causes of a sad repentance." BRITISH MUSEUM. WE have long intended to give our literary and youthful readers an outline of the past and present state of this institution, which already reflects more credit on the British name than the laurels of a Waterloo, or than the blazing hulks of a Trafalgar. Sir Hans Sloane, of Chelsea, who died in 1753, had collected a valuable museum and library, which had cost IMPORTANCE OF EARLY DEVOTEDNESS him more than £50,000; and he TO GOD. IN the preceding paper we have spoken of a comparative freedom from self-reproach as a qualification for usefulness. The following gem from the pen of Jeremy Taylor indirectly illustrates our statement. "If sin has gotten the power of any one of us, consider in what degree the sin has prevailed: if but a little, the battle will be more easy, and the victory more certain; but then be sure to do it thoroughly, because there is not much to be done but if sin hath prevailed greatly, then, indeed, you have very much to do; therefore begin betimes, and defer not this work till old age shall make it extremely difficult, or death shall make it impossible. If thou beest cast behind, if thou hast neglected the authorized his executors to offer it to the British Parliament for £20,000, which was accepted, and the whole was then vested for public use in trusteeship. This museum included above 100,000 books, MSS., antiquities, and articles, in various departments of natural history. The Cotton Library, which is principally of MSS., and was collected by three baronets of that name, Robert, Thomas, and John, was next added to the National Library. The number of these MSS. volumes was originally 958; but, by a fire in 1731, they have been reduced to 861 volumes, which, from the ample fortune, the taste for antiquarian research that marked its first owners, and the peculiar opportunities of their age, are some of the most valuable historical Saxon coins was procured for the numismatic department, for £620; and in 1807, Dr. Bentley's own copies of the Classics, enriched with his notes, were obtained for £400, and are in number 84 volumes; and 4,000 guineas were also paid for Mr. Roberts' English coins, in 1810. The following are some of the bequests to this patriotic institution :— muniments in the kingdom. To small sum of £460; and another this last library had been annexed mineralogical purchase was made from that of Major Edwards, who, besides Mr. Hatchett, of Rockhampton, for bequeathing to the Cottonian trustees £700, in 1798. In the year 1796, 2,000 volumes, left £7,000 to raise a the oriental MSS., bound in 93 suitable building for their preservation. volumes, which belonged to Mr. HatThe next addition to the National leed, were procured for the small sum Library in the British Museum, arose of £550. To these many other vofrom the purchase by Parliament, for lumes of oriental MSS. have been £10,000, of the Harleian MSS., which since added, which makes the collecare contained in 7,600 volumes, and tion of considerable consequence; which include above 40,000 original and it is all included in 800 volumes, rolls of the greatest historical value. for which the public treasury paid George II. also, in 1757, gave to the £7,500. In 1802, Tysseu's series of Museum the Royal Library, which had been gradually increasing from the times of Henry VII. to his own; the MSS. of this library are contained in 1884 volumes, and the Royal Library also includes a most valuable series of miscellaneous tracts, in 2,000 volumes, relative to the eventful times between 1640 and 1660. In 1773 the King also gave a complete copy of the Journals of the Lords and Commons. The celebrated museum of classical antiquities belonging to Sir William Hamilton, was in 1772 purchased by Parliament for the sum of £8,400, and vested with the other property of the Museum; while the Townley Collection of Grecian busts and statues was purchased for £20,000 from Charles Townley, of Lancashire, in 1805. In 1807, the sum of £4,925 was given for the Lansdowne MSS., which are included in 1,244 numbers. The collection of minerals made by the Hon. Charles Greville, was in 1810 purchased for £13,727; and the library of Francis Hargrave, recorder of Liverpool, for £8,000, in the year 1813. The MSS. of this last library are chiefly on legal subjects, and in number 499. Another purchase to the amount of £8,200 was made from the Townley family in 1805, of miscellaneous antiquities. The Greenwood collection of stuffed birds was added in 1795, for the Dr Birch's Library, rich in biographical literature, in 1766. Dr. Brandens' collection of fossils, in 1765. Mr. Tyrwhitt's classical library of. 900 volumes, in 1786. Sir William Musgrave in 1800 gave a library of 2,000 printed books, and 40 volumes of MSS. The Rev. C. M. Cracherode's splendid museum, to the value of more than £20,000, in 1799. Sir Joseph Banks deposited the Icelandic collection in 1772. The Royal Society in 1781 presented the greatest part of its curiosities to the British Museum, which was further enriched by the Earl of Exeter giving a collection of classical miscellanies, worth not less than £3,000. To meet some of the greater purchases, and to procure a suitable receptacle for so splendid a collection of national literature, Parliament resorted to a lottery, by which it raised £95,194 8s. 2d.; and from a recent fectly catalogued, while the total commission issued under Sir Robert amount of MSS. volumes is about SELF-CONQUEST. THE life of man in this world is a continual warfare. His appetites and passions are ever rebelling against his reason; at one time, assaulting it with open violence, at another, by artfully laid schemes, surprising it. Peel's government in 1835, and which 24,000, of which only about 17,000 sat two years, and after having ex- are described in 11 volumes, of which amined sixty-eight witnesses, printed some are folio and others quarto. the "Report" in 1,500 folio pages, We hope that thus to popularize the it appears there is nothing like the grounds of just complaint against the accommodation for the literary pub- management of the British Museum, lic which there should be. For be- will both have the effect of attracting sides closing the British Museum to it many of our country readers who every other day, and the whole month visit the metropolis, and who can of September, under the pretence of command leisure; and of rousing the cleaning it, there is a most disgrace- proper authorities to remove the ful want of suitable catalogues to the literary grievances of this noble esMSS. volumes, whose contents are tablishment. R. B., F.A.S. even unknown to the erudite visiters, on account of the feeble policy that prevails among the literary inmates; who, instead of having suitable incomes, and being narrowly overlooked, it would seem, saunter the day away, while not one in fifty of the fishes in the Museum is labelled. There are not, indeed, specimens of a fourth part of the fishes; the reptiles are not classed; the coins, me- Pride, envy, anger, revenge, intemtals, and antiquities share the same perance, lust, covetousness, and all neglect; and the proportionate num- the direful train of evil that dwells bers of vertebrated skeletons in the in, and issues from, an undisciplined Museum of London and Paris are heart, constitute, in number and 7 to 2,600. The British Museum strength, a powerful army of adverhas long been one of the national saries. Reason, however, has auxilicormorant nests; but the nimble fin- aries ready to assist in combating its gers and searching eyes of reform foes. Conscience is perpetually in will disturb the useless brood; to arms against every kind of acknowwhom there has doubtless been a ledged evil; disgrace, joined to the most unjust partiality shown even in restraint of human laws, withstands the permissions to visit. For, in the violence; affliction and poverty check year 1834, in the month of Septem-intemperance and lust; a moral sense ber, which was closed to the public, of right, based on humanity, resists four hundred and eighty-five persons covetousness; inherent benevolence obtained admittance. We consider opposes pride and anger; and envy the government of this institution and revenge are opposed by that feeble, the policy bad, the divisions natural complacency which attends of labour confined, the salaries in-human beneficence. But with all adequate, and the officers too few in these friendly resources, reason, pownumber, and too austerely treated by erful as unquestionably it is, has their overseers. The whole number constantly been defeated. of volumes in the British Museum is What, cannot a few exalted spirits about 240,000, which are very imper-be found, if not in the present day, in the dusty annals of the past, who and wherefore it was created,) has have succeeded by a long and reso- revealed in the Scriptures of eternal lute struggle in conquering them- truth the never-failing way for man selves? Turn over the pages of uni- to habituate himself to the love and versal history with a careful hand practice of virtue. The King of and penetrating eye, and what is the kings has published a proclamation result? That the best and wisest announcing an unconquerable Geneobservers of human nature have pro- ral. Christ died and rose again that nounced the enemies of reason the conquerors. the Holy Spirit might effectually enable man to use his reason in overcoming himself. Availing himself of this aid, he may obtain the conque ror's fadeless crown of glory; but if he neglect or refuse the grace so freely given, he will inevitably be vanquished, and fall to rise no more. F. H. GRAVITATION. Previous to the appearance of the great Captain of man's salvation, some of the most cultivated minds, not of the stock of Abraham, were doubtful of the immortality of the soul. One of the brightest among the geniuses of Heathen antiquity, Socrates, argues thus, "If the soul of man subsist not after death, how can it be affected with rewards and punishments? Or if its existence at best be dubious, wherein consists Or all the phenomenon of matter, man's encouragement to virtue." that which we call gravitation, or Another of the same school says, having weight, is the most general "And how shall a race be run with and the most extraordinary. It is vigour for a prize which no man is the exercise of the quality of heavisure of obtaining, supposing he had ness, the Latin name for which is conquered?" These sophistical sages gravitas; and yet, though it is uniof olden times were enveloped in a versal among matter, we cannot with dense cloud; but man cannot now propriety call it a quality. A quality adopt their mode of argument, because is properly that which a substance the Sun of righteousness has dissipated may or may not have, and yet remain the cloud, and enlightened the hori- the same substance; and of such zon of the moral world with an inex- qualities each may have an opposite, tinguishable blaze. God has pro- or may vary, the other qualities of posed more powerful motives to the the substance remain the same. Grapractice of virtue than were ever con- vitation, however, is inseparable from ceived or heard of before. He knew matter, not in the least affected by what man needed to assist his reason changes of the qualities of matter. in the day of battle, and therefore We can form no notion of gravitation provided a General, under whose com- apart from matter; and we can form mand victory is certain. Does any just as little notion of matter without one ask, Who is this renowned Gene- gravitation absolutely identified with ral? and what are the motives and it. Gravitation is, therefore, the uniencouragements provided? I an-versal test or evidence of the presence swer, That He alone who could as- of matter, the only measure of its certain the immortality of the soul, quantity, true to the last particle, and (because He came from the great as much proof against destruction as Father of spirits, and therefore knows the very essence of that matter of the nature of the soul, and the why which it is the test and the evidence. |