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fate has connected her. The Post can be procured of the periodical agents, or by addressing the publishers, 319 Walnut street, Philadelphia. Price five cents a single number, $2.50 a year, or $1.25 for six months.

GOOD INVESTMENTS.-Dr. William J. Walker, of Newport, R. I., recently deceased, leaves by will $1,000,000, to be equally divided between Amherst and Tufts Colleges, the Institute of Technology, and the Boston Society of Natural History. Mr. J. Washburn, of Worcester, Mass., has given to Bangor Theological Seminary $10,000 for the increase of its library, and the same amount for the fund in aid of indigent students. W. E. Dodge, Esq., of New York, has also given the institution $5,000 for the latter purpose. Hon. A. C. Harding, Member of Congress elect from Illinois, has given $10,000 for the endowment of a professorship of English Language and Literature in Monmouth College. Hon. John B. Brown, of Portland, Me., has given $5,000 for scholarships in Bowdoin College, and medals for the Portland High School. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler has established a free scholarship in Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., for the son of a soldier, white or black, disabled in the present war. We are glad to notice these acts of liberality, and hope the time is not far distant when the acts of our law-makers and officers shall testify their belief, that

"Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals or forts."

-Ohio Educational Monthly.

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Readers of THE SCHOOLMASTER, and the public generally, are respectfully invited to call.

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THE youth is exposed to the temptation of skepticism. propensities clamor for indulgence and seek an excuse; his judgment is immature, and his knowledge of the Bible, and of the corresponding teachings of nature and of God's moral government, is imperfect. Some young persons are constitutionally skeptical, and many anxious to know the truth and to practice it, are perplexed with the arguments of skeptical writers, or of skeptical companions. "There is a great deal of infidelity in young people," said Dr. Gordon on his death-bed to his pastor, "and you have many of them about you. Tell them from me I have read a great many skeptical books-ancient and modern, of all sorts. It is all very fine, but fallacious; they are very plausible, but can give no consolation at a dying hour."

The teacher has frequent opportunities to remove from the youthful mind many common objections to religion. He is culpably negligent if he does not improve them. He is dealing with immortal minds and is exerting immortal influences. It is his to plant seed to bloom in celestial gardens; it is his to turn the steps of the wanderer to the path that leads through the gate of Heaven. "The color of our whole life," says Cowper, "is generally such as the three or four first years in which we are our own masters make it." There is truth in the remark. The influence of past instruction is powerful for good or for evil in those critical years.

There is a certain class of scholars-and it embraces the bestwhose minds are open to conviction, and who eagerly seize upon the outward evidences of Christianity as they are presented to them, and add them to the numerous reasons, which they are deliberating, for seeking the inward evidence. Such scholars are quick to discern their immortal interests. A suspicion thrown on the credibleness of Christianity pains them. It calls up a train of gloomy reflections like those which Charlotte Bronte graphically describes after reading Miss Martineau's "Letters on the Nature and Development of Man." "Of the impression this book has made upon me," she writes, "I will not now say much. It is the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism I have ever read-the first unequivocal declaration of disbelief in the existence of a God or a future life. In judging of such exposition and declaration one would wish entirely to put aside the sort of instinctive horror they awaken, and to consider them in an impartial spirit and collected mood. This I find difficult to do. The strangest thing is that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank—to receive this bitter bereavement as great gain—to welcome this unutterable desolation as a state of pleasant freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do it if he could? Sincerely, for my own part, do I wish to know and find the truth; but if this be Truth, well may she guard herself with mysteries, and cover herself with a veil. If this be truth, man or woman who beholds her can but curse the day he or she was born!"

Many of the studies pursued in schools afford a striking commentary on the attributes and the super-abounding providence of God. The skillful, conscientious teacher may make them instrumental in promoting the spiritual welfare of his pupils. Let him use them for that purpose. Religion is the source of peace, health and long life

here as well as of happiness hereafter.

"Soft peace she brings; wherever she arrives

She builds our quiet as she forms our lives,
Lays the rough paths of peevish nature even,
And opens in each breast a little heaven."

The minds of most scholars, even if they have not been already, are liable to be tossed about in the eddy of unbelief. The tendency of the educated class is to read everything, and the press teems with speculative works.

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state.

The mind that becomes unsettled in its religious faith is in a fearful God is the source of human happiness and hope, and he who loses his confidence in God becomes a spiritual orphan, and makes his existence aimless. He will soon say like the fallen angel in Milton, 66 Evil, be thou my good."

Said a melancholy man to John Wesley:

"I know there is a God, and I believe him to be the soul of all, the anima mundi, if he be not rather, as I somtimes think, the To Pan, the whole compages of body and spirit everywhere diffused. But further than this I know not; all is dark: my thought is lost. Whence I came I know not; nor what nor why I am; nor whither I am going. But this I know, I am unhappy; I am weary of life; I wish it were at an end."

David Hume wrote as follows:

*

"When I look abroad I foresee on every side dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I turn my eye inward I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; though such is my weakness that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves when unsupported by the approbation of others. The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections of human reason has so wrought upon and heated my brain that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favor shall I court and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every faculty and member."

* *

Of the striking analogies between the teachings of religion and nature we propose to give some illustrations from one particular branch of study-Astronomy.

Have you never gazed on the starry heavens, and, scanning the outposts of, perhaps, more than a thousand million worlds, been so impressed with the magnitude and sublimity of the celestial empire, that ideas of the Creator become obscure?

But you read in the heavens the unanswerable verdict of the whole creation-design. It brought you back to God, held you awe-struck and bewildered in his presence; you animadverted to your own comparative nothingness, and felt that the only object of your life should be to seek Divine favor. You looked upon all other objects as phantasmas, baubles, lights that led astray. The bewildering questions that God asked of Job "out of the whirlwind" came home to you. You said with David: "When I consider thy heavens, the works of thy fingers; the moon and the stars which thou hast órdained; what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him?"

There is a thought of Sir Isaac Newton that will assist the mind overwhelmed with the magnitude of creative wisdom and power. He speaks of God as the "powerful, ever living Agent, who, being in all places, is more able by his will to move the bodies within his boundless, uniform sensorium, thereby to form and reform the parts of the universe, than we are by our own will to move the parts of our own bodies."

Had you been born helpless, would not that power of the soul that employs the different parts of the body as its agents have seemed most marvellous? Could you have comprehended it ?

Says Lord Bacon: "It is true that a little philosophy inclineth a man to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds back to religion; for, while the mind of man looketh on second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no farther, but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity."

An eminent astronomer says: "Our earth is one of the humblest of all planets. If we visit the mighty system of Jupiter, such is the vastness of its celestial architecture that all we have left behind

appears trivial and insignificant. Go we yet farther and survey the still more amazing system of Saturn, with its retinue of attending moons, and its girdle of enigmatical rings of light, we find displays of power and wisdom so resistless that, if all other worlds were stricken from existence, enough would here remain to demonstrate the being of God. But these are not separate existences. They are indissolutely united, and all flying through space. Whence, then, come the wonderful laws of their reciprocal influence, and whence the laws that curb their high career? Relax for a single moment the conti

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