of the hymns and sacred songs most used in the school. Thus the little ones will be gently and easily led to Jesus, their Good Shepherd. When in the second period of boyhood the young scholar is able to read, he will begin to learn from books more fully the letter of the Word. He will now take pleasure in the particular histories of the men of the Bible, the prophets, poets, kings, and apostles, and should be frequently exercised in tracing the rise, progress, and fall of the Jewish nation. The life of our Saviour will, of course, take the leading place amongst these, and with it the connection between the Old and the New Testaments. By degrees he will have unfolded to him the meaning of some of the symbols used in the Bible, and their application to himself. He will thus learn the representative character of the objects of the world in which he lives, and will doubtless have a multitude of questions to ask, in answering which the teacher will have abundant opportunity for giving good advice and sound moral lessons. The scholar's inquiries should not be repressed nor evaded, lest he be discouraged and be induced to think the objects of them are not worth knowing; on the contrary, he should be invited to ask questions, and be led to exercise his thought, on all that is submitted for consideration.

When the boy has grown into the youth, the time has come for lessons on the geography of those lands in which the events recorded in the Word took place, on the habits and customs of their inhabitants, and on the plants and animals found there, as well as for an outline of the history of the great nations of antiquity. These subjects well taught will prove highly interesting to the scholars, and will be of great assistance to them in more advanced stages of their religious education. The principles upon which correspondences are based may be now more fully explained, and striking examples adduced from the Word to prove the truth of the science. This age is perhaps more important than any other, and now the resources of the teacher will be severely tried. The utmost care will be needed to guide without seeming to coerce, and to instruct without appearing to dogmatize, for the youthful mind, like the green corn, carries a straight and stiff neck, and is very apt to manifest strong self-will and wrong-headedness in unskilful hands. To win the young scholar, encourage him when won, and urge him to perseverance, will be at this period the great aim and the great difficulty of the earnest teacher.

In the later stage of Sunday school experience, when the scholar has arrived at the age of reason, doctrines of the Church which have

hitherto been rather implied than taught, should be carefully considered. Too often these topics are discussed at an age when the vivacity of youth causes them to be treated with levity. I speak with diffidence, but still I think that it were better to allow the above-named course to be gone through before doctrines are discussed in school. Young men and women will apply to the study of them with greater steadiness and energy than boys and girls, and the near approach of the cares and responsibilities of life will cause them to consider their future, and to learn with proper respect and steady earnestness the laws by which they are to be guided. Along with these will naturally come an unfolding of the sacred volume in its spiritual sense, with its close individual application, and this study will prove a source of continual and delighted interest. Happy that teacher who is so fortunate as to succeed in assisting a class of earnest young men or women to a clear perception of New Church doctrine, and to a comprehensive view of the Law of Correspondence, if at the same time he shall have succeeded in awaking them to a deep sense of their individual dignity and responsibility in the world as workers together with God, to will and to do of His good pleasure; for in his intercourse with them he will have discovered to them a mine of wealth and a spring of satisfaction that will never be exhausted, and which will be an eternal source of happiness both to himself and to them. At this period the conjugal relation of man and woman should by no means be ignored, for, although it is the sacred right and duty of parents to advise their children upon this holy subject, it may also be properly treated by the wise Sunday school teacher. Especially in cases where parents are unable or unwilling to approach the subject of marriage with their children, it is desirable that in the person of their teacher the Sunday scholar should find a friend and counsellor, one whom past experience has taught him to trust, and to whom he will still cling when married life shall have partially or wholly removed him from his class.

Having thus shown what appears to be the wants of the Sunday scholar, and feeling that there is no need to urge his claims here, since this organization proves the recognition of them in the fullest extent, it only remains for us to inquire how far we supply these wants, and whether we can improve upon our present methods of doing so. Το this inquiry each society should address itself, and, like a careful man of business, take stock, and examine its means and methods of production to see whether all is being done that might fairly be accomplished, and if not, to introduce improvements or even commence anew.

The disheartening fact that so many of our Sunday scholars drop off and do not become members of societies, though doubtless mainly arising from their own unhappy perverseness or want of thought, may in some degree be traceable to the lack of some element in their Sunday school training. It may be that they have been imperfectly instructed, or that they have had the light of truth without the warmth of love, or that they have not been taught but amused, or that they may have been neglected both at school and at home. Where outside influences are very strong, there is the greater need for solicitude on the part of teachers. It would be a source of great strength to a school if every teacher were a visitor; in place of three or four, there would then be thirty or forty visitors, each of whom has a peculiar interest and a special claim to plead. Indeed, the success or failure of a Sunday school must ever depend upon the zeal or indifference of its teachers. What manner of men then ought we to be who undertake the office? We hold a large measure of the good or ill fortune of the young people in our hands. When they ask bread, shall we give them a stone; or for a fish, shall we give them a serpent? Nay! rather let us strive to be ourselves all that we would have them become, by cultivating our various faculties, and especially by striving after purity of heart and singleness of mind, that the Divine influence may as far as possible pass unsullied and unperverted from us to them, that love may beam forth from our face in every look, become audible in every expression, and be seen in every act. The Sunday scholar will look upon the life of his teacher as the effect of his doctrines, and where he sees in him an example of integrity, amiability, and energy, he will be stimulated to exertion, and led to imitate, and possibly to excel, him who once taught him the way of righteousness.

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION.

[A small part of the following notice of the proceedings of this body, from another correspondent, goes over the ground covered by the last month's article ; but it has been thought desirable notwithstanding to give it entire.]

THE annual meeting of what has been well called the Scientific Parliament of Great Britain, was held during August in Edinburgh, and was a most interesting and successful reunion of the students of Science. To the New

Churchman its meetings are especially interesting, for hardly a subject of extended interest can be broached, in any field of science, that does not bear in some way or other on Swedenborg's philosophical theories or theological teachings; and on this occasion, as might be expected, the number of topics having such a bearing was not small. The introductory address by the

President, Sir Wm. Thomson, was one of unusual ability, and gave a lucid summary of recent achievements in Science. Among these may be mentioned the discovery that comets are nothing more than clusters of meteoric stones, such as fall to the earth in the form of shooting stars during the autumn of every year while the tail of a comet, which has for years been a puzzle to astronomers, is found to owe its size and brightness merely to the manner in which the sunlight is reflected from the more scattered particles that surround on all sides the central group of stones,—the so-called head of the comet hence the astonishingly rapid change in the direction of the tail is due, not to any alteration in the position of the particles themselves,—but to the fact that the sun's rays are reflected to us from a fresh portion of their number. In speaking of chemical atoms, Sir W. Thomson showed that present researches tended to prove that they were particles of definite size and shape and incessantly in regular motion: their rate of movement being in the case of hydrogen gas equal to more than 6000 feet per second:1 this tends to confirm the theory of Swedenborg's Principia, which deduces all matter from what he calls actives,-particles of the purest created substances in constant motion. In one respect the presidential address illustrated the darkening influence on the mind of the materialistic science now prevailing, Sir Wm. Thomson declared his belief that "life was antecedent to life," and in order to account for the origination of organized forms on this earth, suggested that meteoric stones were fragments broken off some other world, conveying with them seeds, which when they fell on our own planet became the sources of all our forms of life. As a member said, "he attributed the origin of life to an interplanetary post." As this theory merely transfers the question of the origin of life to another earth instead of this it is in no sense a solution of the matter: had the speaker declared that life is antecedent to the forms into which it is received, he would have uttered a grand truth, nor required any further speculation on the subject.

In the various Sections for discussion kindred topics were treated. Colonel Yule, President of the Geographical Section, stated that the Karens, a tribe north-west of India, believed in one God, and had a tradition of having formerly possessed a sacred book, which they had lost; here, possibly, is a reference to the ancient Word spoken of by Swedenborg. Dr. Carpenter showed that the temperature of the water at the bottom of the Atlantic is only a little above 32° at 2000 fathoms, even close to the equator; as this coldness was accompanied by contraction and increased weight, it is evident that the arrangement of particles depicted in Swedenborg's principles of chemistry must be correct, and that therefore there is some probability of the truth of his theory concerning the formation of salt. The Moabite stone was commented on, and the name of Kir-hareseth, the capital of Moab, explained to mean 'the city-on-the-hill:' while in the wilderness near Mount Sinai several of the cities named in Joshua as belonging to the tribe of Simeon were announced to have been discovered in a ruined state by Mr. Palmer; hitherto their situation had remained unknown. Spiritist phenomena of course came in for a share of mention, but simply to have their reality denied. Old theological beliefs also met little favour from the speakers in the Association, with whom flint-implements served-far contrary to the intention of those who fashioned them as weapons of theological controversy, and of increasing the assumed antiquity of man. On Sunday the theologians had their turn, endeavouring to harmonize science and religion. Dr. Caird was the principal preacher, and addressed a crowded audience. He combated the idea that law and personality were opposed; asking what kind of phenomena looked most like the signs of a personal 1 This motion is molecular, and therefore vibratory or gyratory.

thought and will in nature? "Surely," he said, "those phenomena, surely that aspect, from which the indications of anomaly are most completely banished, throughout which from beginning to end reigns calm and changeless order, unbroken sequence and continuity, the majestic presence and power of law." On the Monday was made the usual attempt to show that man and the ape were a sort of Siamese twins, Mr. Wake, the author of a paper on the subject, stating his belief that "Nature was God,-—a personal God!" an announcement which was received with laughter, hisses, and cheers. The evolution of man out of the ape was combated with great zeal by many clerical speakers; but they were generally laughed at by their opponents, being ignorant of any higher law by which that doctrine could be successfully opposed,—such as they would have found in the New Church teaching that in every animal there is a tendency to the human form, not because man has been evolved out of the animal, but because man and animals both owe their origin to the Divine Man. A similar explanation would account for the anomalies which sometimes occur in the muscles of the human body; but the fact that a few of them present forms similar to those of the lower animals, instead of the arrangement they ordinarily present in man, was brought forward by a professor as another proof of 'evolution.' A paper on the Anthropology of Auguste Comte afforded another battle-ground, in which the speaker with great truth declared the inutility of Metaphysics in arriving at these conclusions. He was however himself unable to see anything in man that animals did not possess, and even attributed 'remorse' to the lower creation, a proposition which he failed to prove. Mr. Taylor, who gave a lecture to the Association on the Relation of Primitive to Modern Civilization, asserted that savages' belief in immortality was due to their dreaming, and seeing as they thought their friends in dreams. He did not attempt to explain how it is that persons are depicted to us in dreams. He attributed to similar causes the belief of savage tribes in guardian-angels, &c.; quoting in the course of his lecture numerous instances of savage superstitions or customs which have been continued, under other forms, to our own times.

In the anatomical section Dr. Gamgee attempted to show that the heat generated in the blood during its arterialization was sufficient to warm and convert into vapour the aqueous vapour exhaled from the body, and to leave warmth towards maintaining the temperature of the body: he considered, however, that further experiments were necessary. By the committee for investigating the increase of underground temperature, it was stated that the thermometer rose about 1° F. for every 54 feet of descent. While it was also declared that the underground strata must be much more dense than is commonly supposed, otherwise the surface of the earth itself would be attracted almost equally with the ocean by the moon, and so the phenomena of the tides could not occur; it is therefore probable that the crust of the earth is thicker than has been supposed, and that if any central fire exists it is far removed from the surface.

The hereditary transmission of endowments and qualities also came under discussion, the introducer of the subject endeavouring to explain the various facts connected with mental inheritance, on the supposition of a "flux and reflux" in regard to the qualities of the mind, which rendered them high or low accordingly. As none of the speakers on the topic appear to have regarded the mind as an organized form, they were not very likely to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion, and the discussion was consequently of little profit. The question of spontaneous generation had a morning devoted to it, when Dr. Bastian stated that in various experiments he had exposed such organic liquids, as the juice of turnips, to a temperature exceeding that of