are not, indeed, her children; we are not even her allies; this, and this alone, may, to her modesty, leave it incomplete. Bugeaud. Traitor! I never ordered the conflagration.

Arab. Certainly thou didst not forbid it: and, when I consider the falsehood of thy people, I disbelieve thy assertion, even though thou hast not sworn it.

Bugeaud. Miscreant! disbelieve, doubt a moment the word of a Frenchman!

Arab. Was it not the word of a Frenchman that no conquest should be made of this country? Was it not the word of a Frenchman that when chastisement had been inflicted on the Dey of Algiers, even the Algerines should be unmolested? Was it not the word of two kings, repeated by their ministers to every nation round? But we never were Algerines, and never fought for them. Was it not the word of a Frenchman which promised liberty and independence to every nation upon earth? Of all who believed in it, is there one with which it has not been broken? Perfidy and insolence brought down on your nation the vengeance of all others. Simultaneously a just indignation burst forth from every quarter of the earth against it, for there existed no people within its reach or influence who had not suffered by its deceptions.

Bugeaud. At least you Arabs have not been deceived by us. I promised you the vengeance of heaven; and it has befallen you.

Arab. The storm hath swept our country, and still sweeps it. But wait. The course of pestilence is from south to north. The chastisement that overtook you thirty years ago, turns back again to consummate its imperfect and needful work. Impossible that the rulers of Europe, whoever or whatever they are, should be so torpid to honour, so deaf to humanity, as to suffer in the midst of them a people so full of lies and treachery, so sportive in cruelty, so insensible to shame. If they are, God's armory contains heavier, and sharper, and surer instruments. A brave and just man, inflexible, unconquerable, Abdel Kader, will never abandon our cause. Every child of Islam, near and far, roused by the conflagration in the cavern, will rush forward to exterminate the heartless murderers.

Bugeaud. A Frenchman hears no threat without resenting it his honour forbids him.

Arab. That honour which never has forbidden him to break an engagement or an oath: that honour which binds him to remain and to devastate the country he swore before all nations he would leave in peace: that honour which impels him to burn our harvests, to seize our cattle, to murder our youths, to violate our women. Europe has long experienced this honour: we Arabs have learned it perfectly in much less time.

Bugeaud. Guards! seize this mad chatterer.

Go, thief! assassin! traitor! blind grey-beard! lame beggar !

Arab. Cease there. Thou canst never make me beg for bread, for water, or for life. My grey beard is from God: my blindness and lameness are from thee.

Bugeaud. Begone, reptile! Expect full justice; no mercy. The president of my military tribunal will read to thee what is written.

Arab. Go; enter, and sing and whistle in the cavern, where the bones of brave men are never to bleach, are never to decay. Go, where the mother and infant are inseparable for ever, one mass of charcoal; the breasts that gave life, the lips that received it; all, all; save only where two arms, in colour and hardness like corroded iron, cling round a brittle stem, shrunken, warped, and where two heads are calcined. Go; strike now; strike bravely: let thy sword in its playfulness ring against them. What are they but white stones, under an arch of black; the work of thy creation!

Bugeaud. Singed porcupine! thy quills are blunted, and stick only into thyself.

Arab. Is it not in the memory of our elders, and will it not remain in the memory of all generations, that, when four thousand of those who spoke our language and obeyed our prophet, were promised peace and freedom on laying down their arms, in the land of Syria, all, to a man, were slain under the eyes of your leader? Is it not notorious that this perfidious and sanguinary wretch is the very man whom, above all others, the best of you glory in imitating,

and whom you rejected only when fortune had forsaken him? Is it then only that atrocious crimes are visible or looked for in your country? Even this last massacre, no doubt, will find defenders and admirers there; but neither in Africa, nor in Asia, nor in Europe, one. Many of you will palliate it, many of you will deny it; for it is the custom of your country to cover blood with lies, and lies with blood.

Bugeaud. And, here and there, a sprinkling of ashes over both, it seems.

Arab. Ending in merriment, as befits ye. But is it ended?

Bugeaud. Yes, yes, at least for thee, vile prowler, traitor, fugitive, incendiary!-And thou, too, singed porcupine, canst laugh!

Arab. At thy threats, and stamps, and screams. Verily our prophet did well and with far-sightedness, in forbidding the human form and features to be graven or depicted,—if such be human. Henceforward will monkeys and hyænas abhor the resemblance and disclaim the relationship.

VIII. THE DELUGE.

(THOMAS GUTHRIE, D.D.)

Thomas Guthrie, D.D., senior minister of St. John's Free Church, Edinburgh, was born in Brechin, Forfarshire, in 1803.

Look, for example, on the catastrophe of the Deluge. And let not our attention be so engrossed by its dread and awful character, as to overlook all that preceded it, and see nothing but the flood and its devouring waters.

The waters rise till rivers swell into lakes, and lakes become seas, and the sea stretches out her arms along fertile plains to seize their flying population. Still the waters rise; and now, mingled with beasts that terror has tamed, men climb to the mountain tops, with the flood roaring at their heels. Still the waters rise; and now each summit stands above them like a separate and sea-girt isle. Still the waters rise; and, crowding closer on the narrow spaces of lessening

hill-tops, men and beasts fight for standing room. Still the thunders roar, and the lightnings flash, and the rains descend, and the waters rise, till the last survivor of the shrieking crowd is washed off, and the head of the highest Alp goes down beneath the wave. Now the waters rise no more. God's servant has done his work. He rests from his labours; and, all land drowned, all life destroyed, an awful silence reigning and a shoreless ocean rolling, Death for once has nothing to do, but ride in triumph on the top of some giant billow, which, meeting no coast, no continent, no Alp, no Andes against which to break, sweeps round and round the world.

sea.

We stand aghast at the scene; and as the corpses of gentle children and sweet infants float by, we exclaim, Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? No; assuredly not. Where, then, is his mercy? Look here; behold this ark, as, steered by an invisible hand, she comes dimly through the gloom. Lonely ship on a shoreless ocean, she carries mercy on board. She holds the costliest freight that ever sailed the The germs of the Church are there-the children of the old world, and the fathers of the new. Suddenly, amid the awful gloom, as she drifts over that dead and silent sea, a grating noise is heard. Her keel has grounded on the top of Ararat. The door is opened; and beneath the sign of the olive branch, her tenants come forth from their baptismal burial, like life from the dead, or like souls which have passed from a state of nature into the light and the liberty of grace, or like the saints when they shall rise at the summons of the trumpet to behold a new heaven and a new earth, and see the sign which these "grey fathers" hailed encircling a head that was crowned with thorns.

Nor is this all. Our heavenly Father's character is dear to us; and therefore I must remind you that ere Mercy flew, like the dove, to that welcome asylum, she had swept the wide world with her wings. Were there but eight saved, only eight? There were thousands, millions sought. Nor is it doing justice to God to forget how long a period of patience, and preaching, and warning, and compassion preceded that dreadful Deluge. Long before the lightning

flashed from angry heavens, or thunders rolled along dissolving skies, or the clouds rained down death, or the solid floor of this earth, under the prodigious agencies at work, broke up, like the deck of a leaking ship, and the waters rushed from below to meet the waters from above, and sink a guilty world; long before the time when the ark floated away by town and tower, and those crowded hill-tops where frantic groups were clustered, and amid prayers and curses, and shrieks and shouts, hung out their signals of distress, -very long before this, God had been calling an impenitent world to repentance. Had they no warning in Noah's preaching? Was there nothing to alarm their fears in the sight of the ark as storey rose upon storey?-not enough in the very sound of those ceaseless hammers to waken all but the dead? It was not till Mercy's arm grew weary, as she rang the warning bell, that, to use the words of my text, God poured out his fury upon them. I appeal to the story of this awful judgment. True, for forty days it rained incessantly, and for one hundred and fifty days more the waters prevailed on the earth; but while the period of God's justice is reckoned by days, the period of his long-suffering was drawn out into years. There was a truce of one hundred and twenty years between the first stroke of the bell and the first crash of the thunder. Noah grew grey preaching repentance. The ark stood useless for years, a huge laughing-stock for the scoffer's wit. Covered with the marks of age, it covered its builders with the contempt of the world; and many a bitter sneer had these men to bear, as, pointing to the serene heavens above and an empty ark below, the ungodly asked, Where is the promise of his coming? Most patient God! then, as now, thou wert slow to punish, long-suffering and of great mercy.