him passages in the Scriptures, and seemed to have pleasure in talking upon religious subjects. CONSCIENCE.-" Conscience is a Latin word (though with an English termination), and according to the very notation of it, imports a double or joint knowledge; to wit, one of a Divine law or rule, and the other of a man's own action. And so is, properly, the application of a general rule to a particular instance of practice. The law of GoD, for instance, says, Thou shalt not steal; and the mind of man tells him that the taking of such or such a thing from a person lawfully possessed of it, is stealing. Whereupon the conscience, giving the knowledge of both these together, pronounces in the name of GOD, that such a particular action ought not to be done. And this is the true procedure of conscience; always supposing a law from GOD, before it pretends to lay any obligation upon man; for still I aver that conscience neither is, nor ought to be, its own rule."-SOUTH. bespeaks not less ingenuity. Upper Egypt preserving its verdure only four or five months, the flowers and harvest being seen no longer, the people of Lower Egypt profit by this circumstance, assembling on board large boats the bees of different villages. Each proprietor confides his hives, with his own mark, to the boatman, who, when loaded, gently proceeds up the river, and stops at every place where he finds verdure and flowers. The bees swarm from their cells at break of day, and collect their nectar, returning several times loaded with booty, and in the evening re-enter their hives without ever mistaking their abode. Thus sojourning three months on the Nile, having exhausted the perfume of the orange flower of the Said, the essence of the roses of Fagoum, the sweets of the Arabian jasmine, and of every flower, are brought back to their homes, where they find new riches. Thus do the Egyptians procure delicious honey, and plenty of wax. The proprietors pay the boatmen on their return, according to the number of the hives, which they have taken from one end of Egypt to the other. -Savary's Letters. EASTER AT JERUSALEM.-Among the various interesting ceremonies at this period in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over Mount Calvary, where the latter is the highest elevation, and ascended by pilgrims without shoes, is a procession on the night of Good Friday, preceded by a large image of our SAVIOUR on the cross, with a crown of thorns, and the body streaked with blood! Here it is erected, and a sermon delivered on the crucifixion, followed by a hymn. This finished, two persons, representing Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, approach with great solemnity, draw the nails, and take down the effigy, which is so contrived that the limbs are flexible. There it is laid in a sheet, anointed with spices, a hymn chanted, and the ceremony terminates by depositing the body in a sepulchre. At Easter, on the outside of this church is an extraordinary brisk sale of beads for the neck, crosses, and shells of mother-of-pearl, representing the nativity, the dove, and crucifixion, the manufacture of Bethlehem, and it is astonishing the number of these sent off in boxes to Spain and Portugal, where they are held as altogether invaluable.-Rae Wilson's Travels. PROBABLY but few of the many persons who daily pass by the old Church at Greenwich, in Kent, are acquainted with the touching story connected with it. It was here that, more than eight centuries ago, a Saxon Archbishop bore faithful witness for the truth, and nobly refused to buy his life with gold to be wrung from the cruelly oppressed and plundered people of his diocese, or to give such counsel to his sovereign; but instead of earthly riches he told of heavenly treasure, more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold, and of the wrath denounced upon all who reject or despise the proffered riches of CHRIST, and for this he was barbarously put to death by the idolatrous and infuriated Danes. The now common designation of the parish Church of S. Alphage, as simply "the old Church," may have helped on the ignorance that prevails as to the martyr's name, as well as story, but of all such forgetfulness the beginning must be traced to a deeper source. Well is it for us that there is One Who remembers our sleeping brethren, though we ungratefully forget those to whose labours and whose prayers we owe so much. Yea, there is One Who, like Boaz the near kinsman, "hath not left off His kindness to the living and to the dead," yet I shall not have written in vain, if by so doing I recal to the memory of some the story of a Saint of old. "Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His saints," and surely the spot which has been moistened with a martyr's blood, ought to be unto us as holy ground, not to be passed lightly by, or without a prayerful thought of the souls under the altar who cry, "How long, O LORD, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" The present Church, which is said like the former to be built upon the place where S. Alphage was put to death, stands now in the midst of a crowded thoroughfare, and though its closed doors too often remind one that the Church's hours of prayer are no longer observed among us as in other days, they are still opened from time to time through the week at eleven in the forenoon, and at these times the passer-by may turn aside from the busy scene without, and join in the Church's prayer and praise, in solemn Litany and holy Psalm, and win for others, as well as for himself, K a blessing out of the house of the LORD. The modern Church of S. Alphage, old though it may be called in comparison with the two other Churches in the parish, as well as from its being the mother Church, is by no means what my fancy pictured it when first named to me, a venerable Gothic pile, with carven work of saints and angels, and floriated windows glowing with "martyrs' pious effigies." It is a heavy-looking building, with formal plain glazed windows that show no trace of either the painter's or the sculptor's art, stiff pictures of kings and queens upon the walls, and high-built pews that looked so uninviting to a stranger that I was fain to sit down upon one of the benches for the poor up the centre aisle where I could look upon the altar before me. A tidylooking woman, who was herself an occupant of a bench in front, insisted on ushering me with all possible respect into one of the pews, which she informed me with a low courtesy, were " open for all the gentry. She was evidently quite unconscious how painfully her words recalled to mind the Apostolic admonition of James the LORD's brother, "My brethren, have not the faith of our LORD JESUS CHRIST, the LORD of glory, with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment, and ye have respect unto him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place, and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or Sit here under my footstool; are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?" وو The prayers were gone through in less time than I had ever before heard them read in, and as it would have been like running a race to have attempted to get through the responses as quickly as the clerk, I could only add my heart's Amen at the close, but even with this drawback, it was no small privilege to be permitted to join in the prayers and praises of the Church on the very spot where one of her faithful sons had sealed in blood his witness for his LORD. The life of S. Alphage, or Elphege, as it is frequently written, is variously recorded by different writers; but as far as I have been able to gather from the works to which I have referred, the substance of the story is as follows. He was born of noble and Christian parents, about the year of our LORD 953, the same year in which another S. Elphege, a Bishop of Winchester, is recorded to have suffered martyrdom, and from this coincidence of dates it seems not unlikely that the infant was named after his saintly predecessor. Little, however, could his parents know when in their faith and piety they brought their little one to the holy font to be born again of water and of the Spirit, and called by the name of one already numbered with the noble army of martyrs, that he too in after years should follow so closely in his steps. And yet for in the true and tender heart of a Christian mother there is strength for such thoughts, and those were days of violence and strife, in which it was no strange thing for the saints of GoD to be called to resist even unto blood, striving against sin-a dream of this kind might mingle with the mother's prayers as she watched beside the cradle of her sleeping babe, and mused upon the awful mystery of the cross which had been traced upon his infant brow and as he grew in years, the story of the martyred Bishop, heard from a mother's lips, might help to nurse in the frank and fearless Saxon boy the spirit of a Christian hero. Of his childhood and youth, however, the record is very scanty; nor does it belong to us to lift the veil from the hidden life of saints, or to reckon up the drops of dew, the sunny gleams and vernal showers, and all those breathings of the winds of Heaven, coming and going, whence and whither we know not, which nurture into strength and beauty the flowers of Heaven, and the goodly trees of the LORD, which are full of sap, even the cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted. And yet we are too apt, on the other side, to overlook, while dwelling on the matured beauty of some saintly character, the gradual fashioning and moulding, the many prayers and tearful vigils, and exercisings day and night in all righteousness and true holiness which have gone before, and without which there can be no real growth in grace and in the knowledge of our LORD and SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. This much at least we know of the early life of Alphage, that at an age when those of his own rank and standing were learning to mount a steed and handle sword and shield, and to take their part in the abundant feasts and boisterous entertainments of the Anglo-Saxon nobles, Alphage, shunning the pleasures of the world, whose pomps and vanities he had in his baptism renounced, was learning to endure hardness as a good soldier of the cross, and that he might the better please Him Who had chosen him in warring a good warfare, and keep himself free from all entanglings with the affairs of this life, having first overcome by his earnest entreaties the reluctance of his mother, he betook himself to a life of solitude and prayer, first in a monastery at Deerhurst in Gloucestershire and afterwards in a cell which he built for himself near the Abbey of Bath. It was no love of selfish ease, no pusillanimous shrinking from an active life in those stormy times that led to this withdrawal from the world, for as we may well infer from the fearlessness which marked his conduct in after life, he was by no means unfitted to take his place among the bravest warriors of those days; nor does it become us who live in very different times to condemn as superstition the piety which in other days led our ancestors to the monastery or the hermit's cell. As in the earliest ages, so then there were especial reasons for such a line of conduct which hold no longer. The strife and bloodshed around them, the wars and tumults, the conflict still going on between the dark and sanguinary spirit of Paganism, and the mild influence of the Gospel of peace, drove many of the most devout to seek out, for a season at least, a refuge in the wilderness from the windy storm and tempest; and is not some such preparation in solitude and secret, to be noticed in the lives of almost all who have at any time been used of the LORD for high and holy service in their day and generation? S. Alphage lived in the reigns of Edgar, Edward, and Ethelred, surnamed by Dunstan the Unready, and on whose head the crown, secured to him by his mother's wickedness, seemed indeed to sit like a curse. He was only ten years old when he succeeded to the throne on the murder of his half-brother in the following manner. The young king Edward, between whom and the little Ethelred a brotherly attachment existed, took the opportunity, when hunting in the neighbourhood of Corfe Castle, where his step-mother, Elfrida, resided with her child, of quitting his attendants to call at the castle. Elfrida came forth with her little son to meet him at the outer gate, and bidding him welcome, invited him to dismount. This the young king declined, fearing that if long absent he might miss his company, but asked for a cup of wine, that he might drink in his saddle to Elfrida's and his brother's health before he rode off. The stirrup cup was brought, and as he bent forward to receive it, one of Elfrida's attendants, according to instructions given beforehand, stabbed him in the back. The wounded king, who had not dreamed of such treachery, put spurs to his horse, but soon fainting from the loss of blood, he fell from his seat, and, hanging by one foot in the stirrup, was dragged along by the terrified animal through woods and rugged ways till quite dead. His careless attendants, in their search after their sovereign, tracked him by the blood until they found his disfigured corpse, which as if they wished to obliterate the proof of Elfrida's guilt, and to give to his death the semblance of an accident, they burned, and then with little ceremony and with no regal pomp they buried the ashes at Wareham. The little Ethelred, who tenderly loved the king, is said to have so provoked his mother by his lamentations for Edward that, seizing a large torch which was at hand, she beat the child (for whose promotion she had done this cruel deed) so severely that he fainted, and had almost lost his life also. Alfere the Duke of Mercia, and other powerful nobles were in conspiracy with Elfrida, and her child, who was now the rightful heir, was proclaimed king; but as Dunstan is said to have foretold at his coronation, his reign was as evil and disastrous as the auspices under which it began. It was to England, according to that word, "Woe unto thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning." |