tive education which is now almost universal, and which, as the great historian Alison too truly declared, is capable of producing nothing but educated devils.

"We should steadily contemplate man as he is-variously compounded of great and noble, and base and vicious inclinations; the former requiring constant care for their development, the latter springing up unbidden in the human breast. Education, if unaccompanied with sedulous moral training, only aggravates the evil; it puts weapons into the hands of the wicked; it renders men able and accomplished devils Wise statesmen must acknowledge with humility that it is by the spread of religious instruction and the extension of virtuous habits that the reform of the human heart is to be effected." (Alison's History of Europe, vol. xiv., page 56).

These powerful words of the celebrated historian tally remarkably with a well-known saying of the great Whitfield. "Man," said Whitfield, "is half beast and half devil, only we must beg the beast's pardon, for a beast never becomes half so vile as man does, when left fully to develop his bad propensities."

A terrible denunciation of the sin of withholding the expected hire of the labourer is found in the Epistle of James. The English nation, which is at present the richest nation on earth, and rich Englishmen especially, would do well to ponder the following words: "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you. Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts; for the coming of the Lord draweth near." Man's duty is succinctly described in the words, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and

with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." If the cruel men who neglected Samuel Baldwyn Rogers had made the faintest attempt to discharge their duty, the scientific historian would have been spared the humiliation of recording the fact, so disgraceful to England: "Samuel Baldwyn Rogers died at the age of ninety, and although, by an improvement relating to the manufacture of iron, he largely contributed to the wealth of others, yet he died in the deepest poverty himself. He expressed an earnest wish that he might not be buried in a pauper's grave, and his brother Freemasons have responded to that wish." There are thousands of sermons preached in England every week on Christianity, the fundamental doctrine of which is that God felt such compassion towards ruined man that He actually gave up His only Son Jesus Christ to die as an atonement for human guilt; and that He has made the condition of individual salvation so easy that it is instantly secured by the greatest sinner, through means of one single act of faith in the atonement made by Christ on Calvary's cross. But, surely, Christianity cannot have penetrated to South Wales, else Timbs would never have said that "Samuel Baldwyn Rogers was formerly employed at large iron-works in South Wales, and committed the indiscretion of publishing 'An Elementary Treatise on Iron Metallurgy,' for which he was dismissed from his situation.”

Depression and failure, failure and depression, are the characteristics of every trade and business in England at present. Agriculture, shipping, Parliamentary business, banking, and trade in general, are as depressed as they can well be. And why is this? It is because the rich oppress the poor. It is because the rich refuse to give enough to the poor. How can there ever be a market for the purchase of iron and other goods, if the number of the poor increases perpetually?

The perfect, and the only remedy for that deluge of poverty, which threatens to drown England, consists in every Englishman giving a portion of his income regularly, systematically, wisely and unostentatiously, to those who are poorer than himself. "There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty." Giving to the poor tends to enrich, not to impoverish the donor. "Honour the Lord with thy substance, and with the first-fruits of all thine increase, so shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy

fruit-bins shall be pressed down with a great abundance of ripe grapes." God has so constituted society that the rich must feed the poor, just as the hands must feed the mouth. The hands never refuse to feed the mouth, so the rich ought never to refuse to supply the wants of the poor. The hands never say to the mouth, "We work and toil and slave only to fill you, the mouth, which neither toils nor works. This must cease. We shall henceforth ourselves enjoy the fruits of our own labour." And the rich ought not to entertain such views regarding the poor. But they often do act as insanely as the hands would do if, refusing to feed the lazy mouth, they smeared themselves over with the food they had cooked, resolving selfishly to keep to themselves the fruits of their labour.

If there were any poverty caused to the rich by their gifts to the poor, one should not wonder at the slowness of the rich in giving to the poor, but when the whole of Scripture and the whole of history unite in declaring that giving to the poor enriches the donor, while withholding from the poor impoverishes the withholder, words can hardly be found sufficiently strong to condemn the stinginess of the rich classes among Europeans towards the poor. The Jews were commanded in the Mosaic law to give three-tenths, or about one-third, of their incomes to the poor and to the Tabernacle service. Christians who have had a far more glorious revelation of God's love might be expected to give more. But how few, how very few, give even a tenth of their incomes to the poor! "Would'st thou be poor, scatter to the rich, and reap the tares of ingratitude;

Would'st thou be rich, give unto the poor; thou shalt have thine own with usury.

For the secret hand of Providence prospereth the charitable always ;

Good luck shall he have in his pursuits, and his heart shall be glad within him.

Yet perchance, he never shall perceive, that even as to earthly gains,

The cause of his weal, as of his woe, hath been small givings to the poor."

The above are the words of a great English poet.

"Give, and it shall be given you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal, it shall be measured to you again." "He that

giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord, and what he had given shall be repaid him again." "He that giveth to the rich shall surely come to want; he that giveth to the poor shall not lack. Thou shalt surely give unto the poor, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him; because that for this thing the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto. For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy in thy land." These are the words of the Almighty. And if men are not blessed in all their works and in all that they put their hands unto, if every branch of their business suffers from depression, we are justified in concluding that it is a punishment for their neglect of the poor. Spurgeon says on this point, " Our God has a method in providence, by which He can succeed our endeavours beyond our expectation, or can defeat our plans to our confusion and dismay; by a turn of His hand He can steer our vessel in a profitable channel, or run it aground in poverty and bankruptcy. It is the teaching of Scripture that the Lord enriches the liberal, and leaves the miserly to find out that withholding tendeth to poverty. In a very wide sphere of observation, I have noticed that the most generous Christians of my acquaintance have been always the most happy, and almost invariably the most prosperous. I have seen the liberal giver rise to wealth of which he never dreamed; and I have as often seen the mean ungenerous churl descend to poverty by the very parsimony by which he thought to rise."

Certainly it is not to be wondered at if such cruelty as that from which poor Samuel Baldwyn Rogers suffered should have caused ungenerous churls to descend to poverty.

But it is not only poor inventors of low social rank like Rogers who suffer from the heartlessness of the present cruel age. Men of very high rank are made its victims, as the following quotations from Timbs's valuable "Year Book" will show. "Sir Charles Barry, R.A., the architect of the new Houses of Parliament, died in 1861. His own preferences and tastes would have led him to adopt the Italian style of architecture for the New Palace of Westminster; but as the instructions to the competitors limited the choice of styles to Gothic or Elizabethan, he chose the former as the more suitable for such a building. From the moment he commenced his arduous undertaking until the

time of his death, a period extending over more than twentyfour years, this work occupied his thoughts night and day. The manner in which his professional services were requited by a Government proverbially indifferent to the claims of art' is a disgrace to the country, which the bare honour of knighthood can ill conceal. We sympathise in reading history with the ill-treatment of Sir Christopher Wren, and the cabal and controversy by which he was assailed; but in the present day we have an equally glaring instance of meanness and injustice to merits of the highest order. Sir Charles Barry was elected a Royal Academician in 1842; he was also a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Member of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and a member of many foreign academies, including those of Rome, Belgium, Prussia, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden."

"Thomas, Earl of Dundonald, died in 1861. He was 'a renowned sailor, warrior, and an ambitious inventor.' Since his retirement from naval service he had studied the science of naval warfare, and invented new projectiles, and new methods of blowing up ships; and published many valuable hints for the improvement of our steam navy. These will be found developed in the autobiography of the Earl of Dundonald, which he just lived to complete. The fitful fever of his political life, and the coldness with which his bravery was acknowledged by an ungrateful country, or rather persecuting administration, are not our specialities. His merits as a scientific inventor were variously estimated. The editor of the Mechanics' Magazine, in announcing his death, remarks: 'Only last week we made mention of him in terms which we do not wish to recall, but with less tenderness than we now feel in thinking of the grand old man who is no more. Thousands of inventors have outshone him; but no braver man or greater sailor ever lived, even in England. As to his bravery and its insufficient rewards, there can be but one opinion. He was honoured with burial in Westminster Abbey; but, to quote a homely proverb, to be treated with respect after death is but a poor recompense for being neglected while living.""

These are only a few illustrations of cruelty to inventors. And all such cases of known cruelty are only a tithe of the unknown cases. In the light of such cruelty, is it to be wondered at that trade is dull? The Almighty hurls a specific woe at those who use their neighbour's service without wages: "Woe unto him that buildeth his house