ing Machine Co., and he interested himself in me and encouraged me to study for the ministry, which I did under the care of the Jersey City Presbytery. I pursued my studies in the Union Seminary of New York sixteen years ago. When I was ordained Mr. Mac Kenzie had a church built for me, in Jersey City, known as the John Knox Church. I became its pastor, and the records will show what success I had. Eight years ago I sought a dissolution of the pastorate to do evangelistic work, and have done so in the States of New Jersey, New York, York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. I have worked under the auspices of the General Assembly's Committee, of which Dr. Chapman is secretary, for three consecutive summers. My work in the tent where I am in this city is better known to you than I can write it. The mention of these names of men and incidents are links in the chain of God's providence toward his sightless messenger.

THOMAS HOUSTON. NEW YORK, August 11th, 1904.

RECOGNIZED.

When Sir Henry M. Stanley met the lost missionary-explorer he had been sent to find in a little lakeside village in Africa, thousands of miles from civilization, and the only white man in the region, he lifted his hat and said, as politely as he might have done on a city street, "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" When the story was told everybody saw the unconscious humor of the situation, the New York Sun says. Everybody laughed over it, and then forgot it until it was recalled to the explorer himself on a stately occasion.

After his return to England from the relief of Emin Pasha, when honors of all kinds were being heaped upon Stanley, Cambridge University summoned him to cominencement to receive from her the honorary degree of LL.D.

The senate-house was crowded, the recipients of degrees of honor were numerous and of

great dignity. The Duke of Devonshire, chancellor of the university, conferred the honors, and up in the gallery the undergraduates, in accordance with a time-honored custom, guyed each dignified recipient as he came forward in hood and gown to receive the parchment creating him an honorary doctor of the university and to hear the public orator sound his praises in formal Latin phrase.

They stepped up, were saluted and passed by in their turn, and at last came Stanley. As he moved forward to the rostrum a shrill, piping voice from the short-gowned youths in the gallery inquired:

"Mr. Stanley, I presume?"

Chancellor, public orator and even Stanley himself joined in the roar of laughter which swept through the senate-house.

HE HAD GOOD REASONS

Admiral Dewy tells of the case of an officer in the navy who, after years in the service, proffered his resignation. The Navy Department was loath to accept the resignation, for the reason that the officer in question was almost invaluable by virtue of his expert knowledge pertaining to ordnance matters.

The Admiral and the retired officer happening to meet one day last winter, the former inquired of his friend the reason for his sudden quitting of the service after so many years spent therein. "I thought you were devoted to the navy," said the Admiral.

"So I am," responded the other. “Aside from the smallness of the salary, there were four reasons for my resigning. I'm getting along finely now."

"Glad to hear it," said the Admiral; "but what were your reasons for resigning," "A wife and three children," was the retired man's reply.

HIS THREE TITLES.

The way of a politician was illustrated by Senator Dietrich, of Nebraska, who was asked by a friend in New York as to how he was getting along.

"Well," replied the Nebraskan, "the men whom I gave positions when I was Governor still call me Governor. Those whom I have helped since I was elected to the Senate call me Senator. The rest call me 'That damn ingrate.' I guess I am doing as well as the average."

Alexander Peden, born in 1626, in the parish of Scone Ayr, was one of the most noted and gifted men of the Scotch Covenanters. He was a graduate of the University of Glasgow, and was a gentleman by descent and upbringing.

A

What is trite and customary was far removed from Alexander Peden. glamour clings about his person, and we seem to be walking among enchantments and marvels when we are in company with him. Weirdness, humor, genius, mystery, these are the words which leap to the lips if someone pronounces his name. Dr. John Brown, speaking of "the round-backed, kindly, solemn hills" of Tweed, Yarrow and Ettrick, says that they are "too plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful to be commonplace." But there are Scottish mountains which are not plain-dark Lochnagar, the wild and lonely Cuchullins, four-peaked Ben Laoghal, the jagged Cobbler which frowns on Arrochar and Glen Coe. Peden resembles one of these, in his imaginativeness, in his eccentricities, in that individuality which was so marked. Yet we may easily exaggerate the elements of wonder. Could we know him as he actually was, we should find that he was no wizard, but a man most devout and most lovable. If he was a prophet, his own spiritual insight and his untiring fellowship with God endowed him with the penetration that others lacked. If he lived among escapes and mercies which appear to belong to the realm of magic, that was because he exercised the faith which laughs at impossibilities. It is after his expulsion from his parish in Luce, Galloway, that Peden's

romance commences. He is chief and monarch of those wandering heralds of God to whom, in that era of death and silence, the country owed the deepest debt. For three and twenty years the mountains and moors were his haunts; we pant in vain after his unresting footsteps. If we look out from the vantage ground of his native county of Ayr, sometimes he is north in Lanarkshire or Renfrewshire or Linlithgowshire, sometimes south in Dumfries or Kirkcudbright or Wigtown. Here he is remembered by a grotto, whih is Peden's Cave; and here by a rock, which is Peden's Pulpit; and there by a shaded hollow, which is Peden's Bed.

various,

Peden's adventures-how how significant of his dauntlessness and mother-wit and unstaggering trust! Once he showed a party of the enemy's horse the way to the ford. "You might have sent the lad," a friend expostulated. "No," he retorted, "they would have asked questions at the lad, and he might have fainted and discovered us." Once, over among the glens of Antrim, he was pinched by hunger. He hired himself to a farmer to thresh his corn. The work was well done, and at night he had a comfortable bed in the barn. But in the dark and in the day, as his fellow servant reported, the stranger was continually praying for the afflicted. Church of Scotland, "naming a great many people who were in a furnace." So he had to confess his identity and was received into the house as an honored guest, and was a blessed instrument in the conversion of some of the neighbors and the civilizing of others. Once,

in the spring, when the rivers were big with melting snow, the troopers pursued him fast and close. Into a flood, where the current ran strong and where it seemed that nobody could live, he plunged with his horse. The dragoons drew bridle and watched; they did not dare to follow. He guided the horse skillfully to the farther side. Then, turning in his saddle, he saluted his baffled antagonists. "Lads," he cried, with the gleam of fun in his looks, "ye want my boat for crossing waters, and will certainly drown." But, as he galloped away, his accents were serious and wistful: "Consider where your landing would be. Ye are fighting for the devil, and riding post to him. Oh, think of it!" Many a time the mist shrouded him at the crisis, when his capture seemed inevitable. "Cast the lap of Thy cloak," he would pray in touching anthropomorphisms, "cast the lap of Thy cloak, Lord, over puir old Sandy"; and God covered His child with His pinions, and under His wings His servant found refuge. No wonder that an intense reality rang through his thanksgivings. Early on a certain morning, after sleeping with some others in a sheepcote, he took a walk along the margin of the stream which rippled through the moor. He was absent some time. When he returned he saluted his associates with that bracing verse of the 32d Psalm

Thou art my hiding-place; Thou shalt From trouble keep me free, adding, in his picturesque dialect, "These and the following are sweet lines. I got them at the burnside; I will get more to-morrow; and so we shall have daily provision, and go on in His strength." Mr. Meredith writes of the men whom he loves that "their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their features"; and the sentence may be snatched from its context

and appropriated to "savory Mr. Peden." His cheerfulness made others cheerful. His might have been the motto of another Covenanter, Sub pondere cresco-I grow and aspire and prosper under the loads meant to drag me down.

Yet he did not always escape the snares so assiduously laid. Proscribed after Pentland, though he had left the insurgents before the decisive moment, he was captured in June, 1673, when he was holding a conventicle at Knockdow, between Ballantrae and Colmonell, in one of the pleasantest bits of southern Ayrshire. Brought before the Privy Council, he was consigned to prison on the Bass, to remain there for four years and three months; and then, for fifteen months more, the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that "grave for men alive," shut him in. Confinement had its special irksomeness for one whose life had been so unfettered, but he did not murmur. We have a letter written from the Bass to Patrick Simpson, minister of Kilmalcolm, who had sent him some gifts gathered by friends-a letter full of dignity and delicacy. He thanks the benefactors for their kindly dealings with him, "unworthy of bonds and most unworthy to be remembered in bonds." He portrays the sorrows of a captive: "We are close shut up in our chambers; not permitted to converse, diet, worship together; but conducted out by two at once in the day, to breathe in the open air; envying with reverence, the birds their freedom, provoking and calling on. us to bless Him for the most common mercies. Again we are close shut up, day and night, to hear only the sighs and groans of our fellow-prisoners." there is no loss of faith. "He knows whereof we are reserved and what is appointed for us, who out of the eater brings forth meat. When darkest, it will be light; and most care, least care.

But

Oh, for grace to credit Him, hitherto never cumbersome, and His Cross, in whatever piece of service, in bonds or freedom, He cuts out!" One does not find Alexander Peden sojourning of his own will in a land of sand and thorns.

In December, 1678, he was out of Tolbooth, to enter on fresh experiences of trouble. With sixty others he was sentenced to banishment. They were put on board a vessel in Leith Roads, to be conveyed to America. But he assured his brothers in the kingdom and patience of Christ that "the ship was not built that would bear them over the sea to any of the Plantations"; and thus, in fact, it turned out. For in London they were all liberated, perhaps because Lord. Shaftesbury was courting the good will of the Presbyterians. Peden made his way gradually back to Scotland, and fort the seven years of conflict that remained he divided his ministry between his native country and the north of Ireland, going, as he phrased it, "from the one bloody land to the other bloody land."

If we have no portrait of the man, his friend, Sergeant Nisbet, has limned the likeness of the preacher. "Such," the Sergeant says, "was the weighty and convincing majesty that accompanied what he spoke, that it obliged the hearers both to love and fear him. I observed that between every sentence he paused a little, as if he had been hearkening what the Lord would say unto him, or listening to some secret whisper. And sometimes he would start, as if he had seen some surprising sight." The vivid. words bring the weather-worn prophet before our eyes, and we are beholders of his native kingliness, of the awe and the affection he inspires, of his pauses and sudden starts, of his most brotherly familiarity with his Lord. Such a man. was certain to be credited with supernatural powers, and, because his com

merce with the Throne was unbroken and his discernment of men was shrewd and clear, the ascription was not wholly foolish. Often his forecasts were simply the convictions to which he had been led by a keen observation and an alert wisdom; Norna of the Fitful Head, if she had shared his sympathies, would have predicted as he did that at Rullion Green and at Bothwell the saints should be "broken, killed, taken and fled." And if, here and there, the premonitions and presentiments are more inexplicable, what can we do but fall back on the axiom, as true in Britain as. in Israel, that the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He will show them His covenant? Peden was the friend of God, and therefore the thin veil which hides the future became sometimes more transparent and diaphanous.

As Nisbet hints, he could mount in preaching to great heights-rugged, to be sure, but sublime and solemn. In one sermon he spoke of the living who yet are dead; for "when God comes to call the roll of Scotland He shall find many blanks-dead ministers, dead professors, dead men and women, though going upon their feet." He instanced different classes of the pulseless, bloodless, soulless folk. There are those who "are plunging in the world," and who excuse themselves by the plea that they must labor for their livelihood. "Oh, sirs," he cried, "will ye trust God and give Him credit? If so, He will help you at all your work. I will tell you what He would do for you. He would plow your land, sow your corn, shear your corn, sell your corn, and bring home your money. He will even, as it were, rock the cradle, if it were necessary, for you. He will condescend as low as ye desire Him." Then there are the others who have a religious profession, but no inward holiness. "I fear Christ hath

quitted many of you," their monitor said, "and given you the farewell clap upon the heart, and He will reprove you no more"; and can there be an exodus more grievous? Peden could not speak without expressing himself in sentences full of piquancy. "For you," he declared, "the poor, broken-hearted followers of Christ, to whom He hath given grace to follow Him in the storm, I tell you, Grace is young Glory." Or what better delineation of the Church can we conceive than this? "Where is the Church of God in Scotland at this

day? It is not amongst the great clergy. I will tell you where the Church is. It is wherever a praying young man or young woman is at a dykeside in Scotland-that's where the Church is." Or, again, he would encourage his hearers to talk face to face with Christ: "If there be one of you, He will be the Second. If there be two, He will be the Third. Ye shall never want company." Frequently he drew his illustrations. from what he had himself seen.

(To be continued.)