The Welsh people of Racine and its environments are of an excellent grade-sober, thoughtful, intelligent, moral, ambitious. They stand well in the community. Exerybody spoke well of them as I made inquiry concerning their standing and progress. They are fast accumulating property and entering the learned professions -thus becoming leaders of the people. Among the preachers of all the M. E. Conferences that I visit, I find a few Welshmen, most of them taking good rank as preachers of the word. Yours, GEO. C. WILDING.

Begin to prepare the lesson early, instead of late in the week.

Read slowly, verse by verse, and mark words, phrases, customs, &c., requiring explanation.

TEACHING THE LESSON.

Know thoroughly and familiarly whatever you would teach.

Get and keep the attention of your scholars, and excite their interest in the lesson.

Use language which your scholars understand, and explain the meaning of every new term you need to employ.

Begin with what is already known and proceed to the unknown, making each step thorough before taking the

next.

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Excite the self-activity of the scholar, and tell him nothing which he can easily discover for himself.

Require the scholar to re-state correctly, and in his own language, whatever he has learned.

Review, review, review, carefully, repeatedly.

COUNSELS.

Be on hand at the opening of the school.

Be courteous, kind, and social with your scholars.

Profitably occupy the spare moments before opening by inquiries after the absent, or the sick; in private rebuke or remonstrate; narrate some incident which has fallen under your observation during the week, susceptible of a moral or spiritual application.

Never forget you are a teacher.

Insist on order and discipline at all times; require each scholar to find and read the hymn, if not to sing it. See that the request of the superintendent for the school to pray or repeat lessons aloud is complied with; do this by the force of example.

Bring Christ into every lesson. Create in the scholar a deep interest in all that pertains to the Church. Urge a regular attendance of the scholars upon all the means of grace.

Inquire who attended church this morning, and who not? Who will meet me at the weekly prayer-meeting?

Encourage your scholars to contribute systematically, and from pure motives, to all the benevolent enterprises of the Church.

See that every scholar is a converted church member.

Be on the lookout for ministers, missionaries, and teachers in your class.

ORDER.

Always have it. Get it by insisting on it quietly, allowing nothing to

proceed when the order is not perfect. If you consume one session in getting order, it will have been spent most profitably. Keep order by infusing a spirit of devout and joyful worship into your exercises.

CAUTIONS.

Don't cram the scholar's mind with

too much.

Do not preach. Bear in mind that your scholars remember long what they tell you, but soon forget what you tell them. Draw out the obser

vation, reflection, &c., of the scholar, and so make them remember; a mass of information may be told which is no sooner heard than forgotten, because the scholar is not worked, and takes no part in the lesson.

Do not neglect the dull scholars; it is easy to teach a child who is anxious to learn, but the dull and stupid

ones want the most care. Be graphic.

QUESTION-GUIDE.

1. Parallel Passages. Is the incident, parable, conversation or discourse of the lesson, or any thing like it, elsewhere given in Scripture?

2. Persons. (Biographical.) Who wrote this lesson? to whom? what persons are mentioned? what do you know about them?

3. Places. (Topographical.) Where did these persons live? Places mentioned-where situatedsize, distance, and direction from Jerusalem.

4. Dates. (Chronological.) What year of the world and of Christ did these things occur? Age of persons. Allusion to days, hours, seasons, &c.

5. Doings. (Historical.) What did each person do? who had the most to do? why?

6. Doctrines. (Theological.) What truths about God, man, character, conduct, the future, the present, are taught?

7. Duties. (Practical.)

To God, man, self, to church, nation, neighbor, enemy, friend, world, young, old, good, bad?

man.

RESPONSIVE PSALMS.

The Psalms have pervaded human life, because they are intensely huComing from the heart, they show man to man as water showeth face to face. Their range is wide, for they touch humanity. They have helped to shape great events by making the despairing hopeful and the doubting faithful.

They have consoled the grieving, ing a meeting-place to be divided, relieved the suffering, and by afford

have established the communion of saints. Before the art of printing opened to men the whole Bible, the pen of the copyist was kept busy transcribing the Psalms, because in them men, environed by conflict and suffering, found finger-points, danger signals, and good cheer.

me.

In the days of persecution the French Protestants sang the third Psalm, as they posted sentinels to guard against attack: "Lord, how are they increased that trouble me? Many are they that rise up against I laid me down and slept; for the Lord sustained me." When the danger had passed, and they could worship in quietness, they sang the one hundred and twentysecond Psalm: "I was glad when house of the Lord. they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!"

The mother of the famous Scotch physician, Sir James T. Simpson, being early left a widow, had many sore struggles to provide bread for

her children. When she was so hard pressed that the conflict seemed to be going against her, she used to sit down and repeat the twentieth Psalm, which her children called "Mother's Psalm." She quoted from the old Scotch version:

Jehovah, hear thee in the day

When trouble He doth send,
And let the name of Jacob's God
Thee from all ill defend.
O let Him help send from above
Out of His sanctuary;
From Zion, His owa holy hill,

Let Him give strength to thee. Personal as are many of the Psalms, yet all can sing them, if they will adopt Richard Baxter's method. Speaking of the sixty-third Psalm, he says: "I can sing it, because, though I have not a soul like David, I desire to have it. I have a heart to the heart."

It was because Luther's heart answered to the heart of the forty sixth Psalm that he founded on it his noble hymn: "The Marseillaise of the Reformation," as Heine calls it "A mighty fortress is our God." It is a war song, written to inspire men at the time when the Protestant cause seemed wavering in the balance. Its energy and faith thrill heroic souls even unto this day, as they did Huguenot and Covenanter, when in time of trouble they sang it. The adaptation of the Psalms to the varied circumstances of life, and the suddenness with which they leap from the lips, are illustrated by many other anecdotes quoted in "The Psalms in History and Biography," a Scotch book, which has given materials for this article, but we shall give only

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Paul Gerhardt's hymn, founded on the thirty-seventh Psalm :

Commit thou all thy griefs

And ways into His hands;

To His sure truth and tender care,
Who heaven and earth commands.
-Youth's Companion.

HISTORY OF MISS HAVERGAL'S NOTED HYMN.

Miss Havergal one day in the spring of 1878 (about a year before her call home), while walking around her garden at Leamington, said to her nurse, "I want to tell you of the gentle way by which the Lord led one to Himself whom I have long known. He had for years avoided all services. But in the first year of this leading he began to come to the church, sitting just inside the lobby. The next year he sat just inside the church. The third year he began seating those who came, and took a comfortable seat himself. A short time after this I went by invitation to stay with his family. As I alighted from the carriage he met me at the door and said, 'Miss Havergal, I hope you have come to be a great blessing to us.' On his saying that, I went straight to my room and asked God to give me every soul in that house, and before I left my prayer was answered. Ten in number, they all became anxious about their souls and found peace. The night this transpired I was so overjoyed I could not sleep. As I lay awake, the lines of the hymn

Take my life and let it be Consecrated, Lord, to Thee; Take my moments and my days, Let them flow in ceaseless praise, passed through my mind, and I put The next them down in pencil. morning I was writing to Rev.-— the head of the Irish Society, and I enclosed these penciled lines. He had, strange to say, just been pre

paring an address on consecration, which be delivered to several hundred people. In the middle of his discourse he read these lines aloud. After the service a gentleman came to him and asked if he might have them printed. He did so; and thus within three weeks after they had passed through my mind thousands of copies were circulated in England and Ireland.—Times of Refreshing.

BUNYAN'S "GRACE ABOUND

ING."

This book, if he had written no other, would stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest masters of the English language of his own or any other age. In graphic delineation of the struggles of a conscience convicted of sin towards a hardly won freedom and peace, the alternations of light and darkness, of hope and despair, which chequered its course, its morbid selftorturing questionings of motive and action, this work of the traveling tinker as a spiritual history has never been surpassed. Its equal can hardly be found, save, perhaps, in the "Confessions of St. Augustine." These, however, though describing a like spiritual conflict, are couched in a more cultured style, and rise to a higher metaphysical region region than Bunyan was capable of attaining to. His level is a low one, but on that level Bunyan is without a rival. Never has the history of a soul convinced of the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as the most certain of all facts, and of its own imminent danger of hopeless, irreversible doom-seeing itself, to employ his own image, hanging, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which might snap at any moment-been portrayed in more nervous and awe-inspiring language. And its awfulness is enhanced by its self

evident truth. Bunyan was drawing no imaginary picture of what others might feel, but simply telling in plain unadorned language what he had felt. The experience was a very tremendous reality to him. Like Dante, if he had not actually been in hell, he had been on the very threshold of it; he had in very deed traversed the "Valley of the Shadow of Death," had heard its "hideous noises," and seen "the Hobgoblins of the Pit." He "spake what he knew and testified what he had seen." Every sentence breathes the most tremendous earnestness. "Life of John Bunyan," by Canon Venables.

MEN OF GENIUS; HOW THEY WON THEIR HONORS.

Isaac Newton wrote his "Chronollogy' fifteen times over before he was satisfied with it.

Edward Gibbon' wrote out his "Memoir" nine times.

Sir Matthew Hale studied for many years at the rate of sixteen hours a day, and when wearied with the study of the law he would recreate himself with philosophy and mathematics, and wrote his contemplations when on his circuits.

David Hume wrote thirteen hours a day while preparing his "History of England."

Montesquieu, speaking of one part of his writing, said to a friend-"You will read it in a few hours; but I assure you it has cost me so much labor that it has whitened my hair."

Lord Bacon left behind him many manuscripts entitled, "Sudden thoughts set down for use.

William Harvey, an indefatigable laborer, spent no less than eight long years of investigation and research before he published his views of the circulation of the blood.

Cicero boasted that his philosophi

cal studies had never interfered with the services he owed the public, and he only employed such hours to them as others gave to their pleasures and pastimes.

Daguesseau,

one of the great Chancellors of France, by carefully working up his odd bits of time, wrote a bulky and able volume in the successive intervals of waiting for dinner.

Dr. Burney learned French and Italian while traveling on horseback from one musical pupil to another.

Kirk White studied Greek and went over nouns and verbs as he was going to and from a lawyer's office.

Dr. Mason Good translated Lucretius in his carriage, while, as a physician, he rode from door to door.

Melancthon noted down the time lost by him that he might thereby reanimate his industry, and not loose an hour.

John Bradford used to say-"I count that hour lost in which I have done no good with my pen or tongue."

Elihu Burritt (the learned blacksmith) attributed his first success in self-improvement, not to genius, which he disclaimed, but simply to the careful employment of those invaluable fragments of time called "odd moments." He mastered some eighteen ancient and modern languages and twenty-two European dialects.

Henry Martyn won the honored title, "The man who never wasted an hour."

POWER OF KNOWLEDGE. What is it mainly distinguishes a man from a brute? Knowledge. What makes the vast difference between savage and civilized natiors? Knowledge. What forms the principal difference between men as they

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Know

appear in the same society? ledge. What raised Franklin from the humble station of a printer's boy to the first honors of his country? Knowledge. What took Sherman from his shoemaker's bench, gave him a seat in Congress, and there made his voice to be heard among the wisest and best of his compeers? Knowledge. What raised Simpson from the weaver's loom to a place among the first of mathematicians? and Herschel from being a poor fifer's boy in the army to a station among the first of astronomers? Knowledge. Knowledge is power. It is the philosopher's stone-the true alchemy-that turns everything it touches into gold. It is the sceptre that gives us our dominion over nature; the key that unlocks the storehouse of creation, and opens to us the treasures of the Universe.-Dr. Hawes.

THE SEAT OF HUMAN CHARACTER.

Deeper than the judgment, deeper than the feelings, lies the seat of human character-in that which is the

mystery of all beings and all things, in what we call their "nature," without knowing where it lies, what it is, or how it wields its power. All we know is, that it does exert a power over external circumstances, bending them all in its own direction, or breaking its instruments against what it cannot bend. The nature of an acorn turns dews, air, soils, and sunbeams to oak; and though circumstances may destroy its power, they cannot divert it while it survives. defies man, beast, earth and sky, to Cultivation make it produce elm. may affect its quality, and training its form; but whether it shal! produce oak, ash, or elm, is a matter into which no force from without can en

It