"Builded together." This is the meaning, too, of Christian baptism; our whole nature being surrendered to be "an habitation of God through the Spirit;" and this done in the name of the Father, for His sake, and in His Spirit. "For by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free"-1 Cor. xii. 13.

"Builded together." This is the meaning, also, of the church discipline. We must be afraid lest we ourselves should get out of the perpendicular (as stones in a building); and we must have the same fear with respect to one another. God is a jealous God: He searches us continually-Ps. cxxxix. Where is the house that we build for God? We ourselves—our very bodies, are to be that house: and if we be the habitation of God through the Spirit, we become jealous, like unto God; jealous over ourselves, and over one another, with a godly jealousy-2 Cor. xi. 2; the language of our hearts is, "Search thou me, O God!-Search thou me, O my brother !"

"Builded together." Again; this is the meaning of the Lord's supper. If we do not mean this, in our coming together to eat the supper of the Lord, then it is a private eating, and not the Lord's supper; for we are "not discerning the Lord's body."

THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA.

MOST people think the land the main part of our globe, and are even more anxious to read the mysteries of the starry heavens than to inquire concerning the depths of the sea. Familiar with hill and dale, with mountain and plain, with broad uplands covered with fertile soil, with vast alluvial deposits yielding rich harvests, with iron and coal, with lead and tin, dug from the earth's depths, they appreciate the language of the psalmist when he says, "the earth is full of Thy riches," but few fail to acknowledge the equal beauty, propriety and force of the statement that follows, "so is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great."

Man has been trying for ages to decipher the handwriting of the Almighty Creator on the flaming firmament; and the highest honours have been ungrudgingly bestowed on the faithful few who have successfully interpreted to us the ways of Him who "telleth the number of the stars, and calleth them all by their names." Geographers have penetrated, with consummate patience, and exhaustless energy, the wilds of Australia, the deserts of Africa, and the regions of the Rocky mountains, and we have welcomed Livingstone, Baker, Burton, Stanley, and their earnest colleagues, as amongst the largest contributors to our knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants. "But "the riches of the sea" have remained almost unexplored, and the infinite ranges of wealth stored up and being stored up by God in its gigantic caverns have scarcely stirred our curiosity, and never kindled our enthusiasm. But a change is at length dawning. A few years ago the bottom of the sea was wanted for telegraphic purposes, and the bed of the Atlantic was mapped out by practical men, and sagacious guesses were made as to the nature of the material covering the floor of the ocean. In 1868 Professor Wyville Thomson suggested to the Royal Society through Dr.Carpenter, the desirability of soliciting aid from government for extensive deep sea dredging. The appeal was successful. Several cruises were made in 1868-9-70. Another is now being made in the "Challenger." The

The Depths of the Sea.

129 book mentioned at the foot of this page* gives a popular account of the work already done, under the direction of Dr. Carpenter, J. George Jeffreys and Dr. Thomson, in the "Lightning," and the "Porcupine," describes the instruments used in the dredging, and the contents of the various hauls, and discusses the bearing of their discoveries on the current theories of scientific men about the past and present life of the globe. The work is richly illustrated with maps and plates, vignettes and wood cuts, is written in an interesting style, and though costing a guinea and a half, is not dear at the price.

What are these depths of the sea? Imagine the immense area covered with air and not with water, and what would the one hundred and forty millions of square miles reveal to us? A surface, in outline, very much like that of the land. Smoother and less jagged for the most part, but consisting of heights and hollows, valleys and hill ranges; some districts reminding us of Salisbury Plain, and others of the Peak of Derbyshire; broad and level terraces in some parts, a series of descending steps in others, groups of volcanic mountains in one direction, and wide undulating plateaus in the opposite; off the coast of Ireland, for example, a gentle slope of one foot in a thousand, but between the Azores and the Bermudas a chasm of seven miles and a half, so that if you could lift the Himalaya mountains, which are the highest on the globe, (29,000 feet above the sea level,) and set them down in the deepest part of the Atlantic, they would be two miles below the present surface of the waters.

But what is the floor of the deep sea made of? We say of the deep sea; for it is well known that between the tide marks we get sand and sea weeds shingle and shells, and so forth; and beyond that, for some distance, we have a bottom of similar character, but of more finely powdered materials, covered with differently tinted sea-weeds, and more brightly coloured animals. Next is the home of the corals, oysters, cods, haddocks, soles; and further still, that of the deep sea corals. Between the Faroe isles and Scotland the bottom is uniformly gravel and clay, consisting on one side of pebbles, &c., worn from the rocks of the North of Scotland, and on the other of fragments from the basaltic rocks of Færoe. But what is the floor two and three miles deep? Exactly the same as you see in the white chalk at Dover, Hitchin, and Flamborough Head. In fact, Professor Thomson says that if you take a little of this chalk and wash it down with a brush in water, and then place a drop of the milky product on the slide of a microscope, you cannot tell it from the ooze hauled up from the bed of the Atlantic. The chalk is made up of the ruins of countless shells, more than a million of them occupying a cubic inch; and the mud dredged up consists almost entirely of the calcareous shells, whole or in fragments, of little globe-like creatures, "whose empty shells fall through the water in an incessant shower." One difference obtains. In the Sussex chalk there is no free silica or sand; but in that dredged up from the Atlantic bottom there is an abundance. The explanation is, however, obvious. In the lapse of immense ages the regular layers of flints seen in the Chalk Downs have been formed, the free particles of sand being thus brought together. A similar process, it is highly probable, is now taking place in the compressed chalk beneath the floor of the deep sea.

Hence these 140,000,000 square miles added to the field of Natural History are not a barren desert. They are inhabited by kinds of animal life "more rich and more varied, and with organisms more elaborately and deli* The Depths of the Sea. By C. Wyville Thomson, F.R.S. Macmillan, pp. 527.

cately formed and more exquisitely beautiful in their soft shades of colouring and in the rainbow tints of their wonderful phosphoresence, than the life of the well-known belt of shallow water which fringes the land." At all depths there is an abundance. The lowest forms of animal existence known are there in unimagined numbers. Creatures, whose remote ancestors built the rocks from which the pyramids of Egypt were quarried, and reared the North and South Downs of England, still carry on, though in another region, the ancestral work. Sponges clothe the bottom, in some places, over a large area like heather on the moor. Magnificent sea-urchins, and brilliant star-fishes, disport themselves in one province of the seas dominions, and regular banks of some corals, and large colonies of others, populate related provinces. Lily-encrinites give proof of their presence: and though fallen short of the glory of their predecessors, who helped to build the rocks of Wales, the pear-shaped encrinites are still found in existence. In a word, all forms of invertebrate life swarm in these deep waters. The sea is full of the riches of life.

Passing by questions belonging to the temperature of the sea at great depths, and to currents, and such like, let us observe the illustration afforded by these facts of the poetical fancy of nearly all nations, that "the earth is the daughter of the ocean." Continents are elaborated in the bosom of the sea. The limestones, sandstones, and clay masses on which we tread have been deposited at the bottom of the oceans, and have taken shape and form there. New rocks are ever being manufactured to take the place of the old. At Beechey Head the sea is lashing down block after block of the chalk; but in mid-Atlantic it is building up far more extensive areas of the same material. And the chief, though not the only, agent in this perpetual transformation is animal life. Shells, corals, in countless hosts, tenant the ocean, absorb and digest the food brought from the old hill sides to the sea; secrete their calcareous or sandy houses; and, as generation after generation these creatures perish, their remains, and those of their dwellings, are spread over the floor of the sea, to be brought to light by some subsequent elevation, and to form the dwelling place of future races of men. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But he has not ceased to build. His work goes on ceaselessly. He is now making the continents and islands of far distant ages. Verily He is the Almighty; let us walk before Him and be perfect. J. CLIFFORD.

THE REV. N. HAYCROFT, MA., D.D.

OBIIT., FEB. 16, 1873.

OH! how very sad and mournful
Are our weeping hearts to-day,
For the loved, the true, and brave one
Summoned from our midst away.
Like a passing dream it seemeth

To our chastened spirits sore,

And the saddened thought o'erwhelms us,
We shall never see him more

In the hallowed place and temple,
Where his higher gifts were lent
To proclaim "a free salvation"
With a speech all eloquent.
As we pause, and think, and ponder
Over his appeals to men,

One thought welleth up within us,
Who will hear "his like again ?"
He is gone, our friend and pastor,
Loved by all who knew his worth;
Well and faithfully he laboured

For his brotherhood on earth.
Leicester.

Be his memory ever sacred,
E'en amid our daily strife;

So reflect his noble spirit,
And his chivalry and life.
Though the public hall and homestead
Ring not with his eloquence,
They are with his teachings vocal,

And his fervid utterance.

He could blend Art, Science, Nature,
Like a true impassioned soul,
With the glory of the gospel,

And so harmonise the whole.
Though his genius, gifts and learning,
Exercised unmeasured sway,
He was meek, and kind, and lowly,
Till he passed serene away.
So his brilliant life hath ended
Full of honour, full of grace;
And we ask, with calm submission,
Who shall fill his vacant place?
GEORGE BURDEN.

JOSEPH ARCH: THE LABOURER'S FRIEND.

THE inhabitants of this sea-girt isle, while a united people, need not fear a foreign foe. Our shores have been inviolable since God scattered the "Invincible" Armada. Buonaparte boasted about what he could do, and left the trail of bloodshed and misery in every country where he led his conquering legions; but he was content to cast envious glances across the channel, and to utter threats which made our grandmothers shake from head to foot. But though the footprints of a foreign foe have not been traced upon our shores for centuries, and no blood has been shed in civil strife for generations, and we have enjoyed for a long period, unparalleled prosperity and peace, still some of the fiercest bloodless battles have of late been fought and won on English soil. The circumstances of social life in England are such that the interests of classes, which ought to be identical, are often found to clash, and one section of society is pitted against another. Then the characteristic prejudice, pugnacity and persistency of our countrymen, both sides blind to the real issues, urge them to hit each other as hard as possible; but in the end prudence acts as umpire and proposes a compromise, which is accepted amid a general handshaking and expression of a wish that any bitterness engendered in the strife may be forgiven and forgotten. While such is the amicable ending, the struggle, while it lasts, is stiff and stern, as long and obstinate strikes, with their consequent suffering, suffice to show.

We are getting accustomed to workmen's unions, and masters' combinations. Skilled workmen have long been clamouring for less work and more wages, and again and again have gained their demands. But there was this exception-a class the worst housed, the worst fed, the worst paid, the worst worked the agricultural labourers, were left out in the cold. Dusty Blue Books told of the dreadful privations they bore before the abolition of the Corn Laws; but it was generally thought that since that time the rural districts were as like unto Paradise as two P's. Special correspondents told what they saw and heard as they trudged through Dorset, Somerset, and Bucks, and their graphic stories did much to dissipate the sentiment about sweetness and simplicity, and make us feel that after all there was not anything very poetic about a farm labourer's life. While some amount of sympathy was called forth on their account, the sufferers themselves seemed, if not satisfied, indifferent. The fact was they were in bondage, and dared not assert their manhood. They fancied themselves free because they saw not the bond that tied them like serfs to the soil. At last they caught the spirit of the age, tried to move, and found themselves in fetters. A muttering of discontent ran through the land like the rumbling before the earthquake. The vibrations have been felt throughout the social fabric from basement to attic, and the whole will be shattered to fragments unless the wrongs of ages are speedily redressed. The long suffering tillers of the soil are being rapidly enrolled for the fiercest fight between capital and labour. The name of the general who has marshalled, and who commands this host, stands at the head of this paper. Joseph Arch has succeeded in stirring them from boorish stolidity to enthusiasm in a righteous cause. He is their Moses-" taken from among them and like unto them." Under his guidance they are destined to break away from their feudal oppressors. The day of their emancipation draweth nigh. Already they feel the loosening of their shackles. Their leader deserves to be known. I will endeavour

to introduce him to the reader of this paper.

For this purpose I will cull a few facts from a shilling sketch written by F. S. Attenborough.*

Joseph Arch was born in the village of Barford, Warwickshire, Nov. 10th, 1826; he is now, therefore, in the prime of life. The district where he first saw the light is watered by "the classic Avon," and in the immediate vicinity stands the fine old Tudor mansion, where tradition says Shakspeare was tried for deer-stealing before "Justice Shallow." His father was a farm labourer who, for peace and quietness, generally went with the stream; but in the days of the anti-corn-law agitation, he gained some notoriety by refusing to sign a petition in favour of the monopolists. His mother belonged to the Puritan type. The principles she held and fearlessly avowed, and the piety by which she was distinguished, were impressed upon her son, who "thanks God daily that he had a pious mother." She was his first teacher, and at six, when he went to the village school, he could read and write fairly well. At eight and three quarters, he finished his regular schooling, and began to earn his bread by shivering in the cold and wet, shouting and shaking clappers from dawn to dark to scare birds from the freshly sown fields for fourpence per day. At that tender age, and even younger, indeed as soon as they can toddle and make a noise, thousands of English boys begin their life-long labour as animated "scare-crows." By being torn thus early from all educational streams they grow up in crass ignorance, and become as docile as the cattle they drive. Those who do not sicken and die, grow up stunted and illshapen in body, dull and depraved in mind.

At ten Joseph began to drive plough. This was promotion to harder work and higher wages. If the reader has ever crossed a newly ploughed field he will not have forgotten it. The wonder is that many of these lads do not have their legs lugged off. They have literally, on heavy clay-soil, to drag themselves along by clinging to the horses, and if they do not drive straight they are likely to be knocked senseless to the ground by a clod hurled at their heads by the ploughman. At thirteen Arch was made a full waggoner. It is a great event in a lad's life to be entrusted with a team. On this day the following temptation beset Arch. "Joe, lad, moind the gaat! Well done! Cum and 'ave a 'orn o' beer." And Joe did so. "Joe, lad, dra' up close to th' stack; thot's it, get a 'orn o' beer." And Joe did So. Well, Joe, how are you getting on?" "Pretty well, thank 'e, master." "That's right; here have a horn of beer." And Joe had one. Joe got down right drunk, and as the effects wore away, felt so sick and ashamed of himself that he wished to die. Next morning, said the master, "Why, Joe, lad, how drunk you were last night, you're getting quite a man; come up to the house and have a drop of brandy to set you straight." Fortunately his mother was at hand, and her counsel and character very largely counteracted the pernicious influences which beset her boy away from home. But when he was sixteen that dear good mother died. Deprived of her watchful care he drifted from the course of rectitude, and for two years was in the greatest danger; but God was with him and delivered him. His mother's prayers prevailed.

At twenty Arch was living with his father and earning eleven shillings a week. At this time he had opportunities of considerably improving his condition; but as they would have taken him from home he refused them, and decided to "stand by the old man." Soon he married a wife, a woman in every * Joseph Arch, the founder of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union. Published by S. Palmer, 335, Strand, London.