parts, and more uncommon seriousness and piety. The first thing remarked in her was, her propensity to make enquiries on the various objects around her, and the improvement she made upon the answers she received. "Ought we not (said she) to love that God who made all these things, and gave them to us?" She had an early attachment to prayer, and an extraordinary gift in it; insomuch, that at four years old she prayed in a society of experienced christians, to which her mother had introduced her, to their great astonishment and edification.

A good man speaking to her one day of prayer, she said, "When I was a child, my mother taught me to pray; but now the Lord teaches me." Being asked how she knew the Lord's teaching from that of her mother, her reply was, "The Lord makes me both to rejoice and weep; he makes my heart glad, and gives me new words."

She even raised a little society of young ones like herself, who met for religious exercises, and made her their president. She persevered in a course of extraordinary piety till her death, which was very happy and religious in her 16th year, 1681.

It is said of Dr. Conyers, that he appeared to have had serious impressions from his infancy; and is remembered to have retired at a certain time from his playfellows, when only five years of of age, and to have run down a lane, to say his prayers. He was very fond of going to church when a little boy; and if he happened to be at play when the bell tolled for any ordinary service of the day, no solicitations of his juvenile companions could restrain his attendance.

Duke Hamilton, from a child, was remarkably serious, and took delight in reading his bible. When he was about nine years old, and playing about the room, the duchess told Lady C. E., a relation, that she said to him, "Come, write me a few verses, and I'll give you a crown." He sat down, and took pen and paper, and in a few minutes produced the following lines :

As o'er the sea-beat shore I took my way,

I met an aged man who bid me stay;

"Be wise," said he, " and mark the path you go;

This leads to heaven, and that to hell below:

The way to life is difficult and steep;

The broad and easy leads you to the deep."

THE ATHEIST CONVINCED.

THE famous astronomer Athanasius Kircher, having an acquaintance who denied the existence of a Supreme Being, took the following method to convince him of his error upon his own principles. Expecting him upon a visit, he procured a very handsome globe of the starry heavens, which, being placed in a corner of the room in which it could not escape his friend's observation, the latter seized the first occasion to ask from whence it came, and to whom it belonged. "Not to me," said Kircher, "nor was it ever made by any person, but came here by mere chance.” "That," replied his sceptical friend, “is absolutely impossible: you surely jest." Kircher, however, seriously persisting in his assertion, took occasion to reason with his friend upon his own atheistical principles. "You will not," said he, "believe that this small body originated in mere chance; and yet you would contend that those

heavenly bodies, of which it is only a faint and diminutive resemblance, came into existence without order and design." Pursuing this chain of reasoning, his friend was at first confounded, in the next place convinced, and ultimately joined in a cordial acknowledgment of the absurdity of denying the existence of a God.

The following account of the Atheist's Creed, drawn up by Archbishop Tillotson, will shew us how unreasonable, disinteresting, and uncomfortable, such a system must be. "The atheist believes that there is no God, nor possibly can be; and consequently that the wise as well as unwise of all ages have been mistaken, except himself and a few more. He believes that either all the world have been frighted with an apparition of their own fancy, or that they have most unnaturally conspired together to cozen themselves; or that this notion of a God is a trick of policy, though the greatest princes and politicians do not at this day know so much, nor have done time out of mind. He believes either that the heavens and the earth, and all things in them, had no original cause of their being, or else that they were made by chance, and happened, he knows not how, to be as they are; and that in this last shuffling of matter, all things have, by great good fortune, fallen out as happily and as regularly, as if the greatest wisdom had contrived them; but yet he is resolved to believe that there was no wisdom in the contrivance of them. He believes that matter of itself is utterly void of all sense, understanding, and liberty; but, for all that, he is of opinion that the parts of matter may now and then happen to be so conveniently disposed as to have all these qualities, and most dexterously to

perform all those fine and free operations which the ignorant attribute to spirits." Such is the atheist's creed, from whence we learn that he must be weak, credulous, and absurd.

Of all principles, that of atheism is the most incongruous to the nature of man, and the most inimical to true happiness. Without the belief of a God, and the hope of immortality, the miseries of human life would often be insupportable.

The following observations of Dr. Beattie relative to characters professing such principles are truly admirable, "Caressed by those who call themselves the great, engrossed by the formalities and fopperies of life, intoxicated with vanity, pampered with adulation, dissipated in the tumult of business, or amidst the vicissitudes of folly, they perhaps have little need and little relish for the consolations of religion. But let them know, that, in the solitary scenes of life, there is many an honest and tender heart pining with incurable anguish, pierced with the sharpest sting of disappointinent, bereft of friends, chilled with poverty, racked with disease, scourged by the oppressor, whom rothing but trust in Providence, and the hope of a future retribution, could preserve from the agonies of despair. And do they, with sacrilegious hands, attempt to vioalte this last refuge of the miserable, and to rob them of the only comfort that had survived the ravages of misfortune, malice, and tyranny ? Ye traitors to human kind, how can ye answer for it to your own hearts? Surely every spark of your generosity is extinguished for ever. -Let not the lover of truth, however, be discouraged. Atheism cannot be of long continuance; nor is there any danger of its becoming universal,

When men have retrieved the powers of serious reflection, they will find it a frightful phantom, and the mind will return gladly and eagerly to its old endearments." Truth will arise, and vindicate her rights, notwithstanding all opposition: it must and will prevail.

BIBLE VALUED.

WHAT an invaluable blessing is it to have the Bible in our own tongue! Our forefathers rejoiced when they were first favoured with the op portunity of reading it for themselves. We are told, that when Archbishop Cranmer's edition of the Bible was printed, in 1538, and fixed to a desk in all parochial churches, the ardor with which men flocked to read it was incredible. They who could, procured it; and they who could not, crowded to read it, or to hear it read in churches, where it was common to see little assemblies of mechanics meeting together for that purpose after the labour of the day. Many even learned to read in their old age, that they might have the pleasure of instructing themselves from the scriptures.-Mr. Fox mentions two apprentices who joined each his little stock, and bought a Bible, which at every interval of leisure they read; but being afraid of their master, who was a zealous papist, they kept it under the straw of their bed.

By a law, however, in the 34th of Henry VIII, it was enacted, that no woman, except noblewomen and gentlewomen, might read to themselves alone, or to others, any texts of the Bible, &c; nor artificers, apprentices, journeymen, husbandmen, nor labourers, were to read the Bible or New Tes