difficulty closed; and a swelling having arisen from the forced stoppage of the blood, a rupture subsequently took place. It was feared the accident would prove fatal; and Luther, in immediate prospect of death, commended himself to the Virgin Mary. "Had I died then," was his comment afterwards, "I should have died in the faith of the Virgin." Billow upon billow! During the same year he passed through the ordeal of a second severe illness. But the prophetic words of that venerable old priest, which he had breathed like balm into his ear, while standing by his couch at Magdeburg during his first affliction, must come to pass :—“ Be of good comfort, my brother; you will not die at this time. God will yet make a great man of you, who shall comfort many others."

In 1505, two years after taking his first degree, he received a diploma, constituting him master of arts, and entitling him to teach in the University. These functions he began to discharge by expounding the physics and logic of Aristotle. Simultaneously with these engagements, he commenced the study of the law, with a view of qualifying himself for some civil office-a consummation upon which his father's heart was most intently set-when an event occurred that gave a new and nobler direction to his thoughts, and that lured his feet into the opening path of his high destiny. This event consisted in the discovery of a Bible, while exploring the library of the University:

"That moment was the Reformation's seed;
That volume then the universe outweigh'd
In mental preciousness and moral power!
For in its pages couch'd those slumbering germs
Of principle, from out whose depths have sprung
The faith and freedom of a Christian world!"

The entire course of Luther's education and training tended to impress upon his mind the sanctity of the monastic life. This, in his view, was the surest way of pleasing God, silencing the alarms of conscience, and escaping the menacing terrors of futurity. He looked upon the cloister as a refuge for his guilty and perturbed soul. Two tragical occurrences brought his incipient resolution to a crisis. In 1505, Alexius, a university friend, was assassinated. Soon after, as Luther was walking alone, in a retired road, probably on his way home to escape the epidemic then prevailing in Erfurt, he was overtaken by a violent thunder storm, and the lightning struck with terrific force near his feet. He was stunned, and exclaimed in his panic, "Help, beloved St. Anne, and I will straightway become a monk." He, however, took two weeks for reflection before executing his purpose; during which interval he bitterly regretted his rash vow. The anguish and conflict of his mind was very great. On his intention being divulged to a few friends, he was pressed by arguments of "monstrous inhumanity," instantly to join the Franciscan fraternity. But he gave the preference to the cloister of the Augustinian eremites, probably out of regard to the more elevated character and literary reputation of that order. The reception took place on the 17th of July, 1505. On the preceding evening he invited his University friends to a social party. The hours stole pleasantly away in lively converse and song, the guests having no presentiment of what was to follow. On announcing his purpose, they strove to dissuade him; but in vain. ."To-day," said he, "you see me ; after this you will see me no more.' Late on that night, he passed from the friendly festival to the unsocial cloister. His scholastic, classical, and law books he gave to the booksellers; his master's ring, and his secular attire, he sent to his parents. The only books which he retained were Virgil and Tacitus. For a month, the door was bolted against his importunate friends who besieged the cloister to see him. Luther's father replied to his son's letter in a tone of the highest displeasure. To human view, this step seems altogether a false and foolish one. But it was essential to his equipment for his work. There he thoroughly tested the Romish system of legality, groped his gloomy way through mazes of error, and ultimately struggled into life and light. "God ordered that I should become a monk," says Luther, "not without good reason, that being taught by experience, I might take up my pen against the Pope."

Önce within the walls, Luther subjected himself to all the vexatious, annoying,

and senseless laws imposed by the prior. The monks delighted in teaching him lessons of voluntary humility. As he went into the cloister, they said to him, "It shall be with you as it was with us-sack on the neck." Many of them cherished a mean jealousy towards him in consequence of his former distinguished position, and felt a vulgar satisfaction in seeing him performing the menial offices of doorkeeper, sweep, and street beggar in the very city where he had so many literary acquaintances to witness his humiliation. Yet he bore it all with a spirit of patient acquiescence. "I was a monk without ever complaining; of that I can justly boast." He exposed himself in watchings till he nearly perished in the cold, and practised austerities and macerations of the flesh with the spirit of a martyr. But in all this, he found no spiritual rest-no peace. His soul was full of quakings and unspeakable anguish. He was as far from God as ever. The Day-star had not yet dawned in his heart. He found neither sympathy, solace, nor help from any of the monkhood. His mental solitude, therefore, was intense and complete. The chief companion of his conventual loneliness was the Bible. He called for a copy on his entrance; and he took to it wonderfully. He "read therein zealously," and imprinted its startling teachings on his memory. As the Scriptures took hold on his spiritual nature, he began for the first time to study the scholastic theologians, and the lives of the fathers and saints. Although the new rules of the order prescribed the diligent study of the Bible, yet neither the sentiments nor the practice of the Erfurt monks coincided with the rule. Though they could not refuse a Bible to the novice who requested it, they discouraged the examination of it.

[To be continued.]

ANOTHER YEAR.

SOME men may be anxious to know whether this year, 1854, will be the last year of their existence on earth. Much wiser will it be for them to resolve that, by the grace of God, it shall be, without exception, the best year of their life. The one may be but a morbid craving of the carnal mind; the other will be the rational and devout realization of the prayer, "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

Complaints respecting the shortness of time, the uncertainty of life, the wasteful expenditure of the past-common as these are at this period of the year-are valueless, and really unmeaning, unless the utterer of them is firmly purposed to trace up his moral system, and to enter at once upon a course of unequivocal selfimprovement. If a man be sincere in his professions of regret, he will be instant in efforts at amendment. On the equitable principle, that "he who knows his master's will, and does it not, shall be beaten with many stripes; "it is a just ground of heavier condemnation, when a man, though acknowledging his past unprofitable course of life, shows no earnestness of purpose to make the future superior to what the past has been. This maudlin sentimentality has all the most disgusting features of cant, and all the repulsiveness of a gross hypocrisy. Let such a one say less, and do more. Let such a one convince others by his actions, rather than awaken suspicion of his sincerity by his profuse and lavish confessions, that he is sensible indeed that the time past of his life should suffice him for the waste, or too profitless occupation of his mental and moral energies hitherto. If" of all employments wishing is the worst," certainly of all moral delinquents in any class, he is most to be reprobated who, with an avowed consciousness that he hitherto has been in the wrong, yields himself up unresistingly to the influences which all along have led him astray.

Another year will be long enough for the man who, with healthy energy, devotes himself to the business and real destiny of human life. Many another year, added to the lifetime of him, who, in a spirit of ennui, looks regrettingly on the past, will only be so much waste material, which instead of being added to the common stock of society, and tending to the further enriching of mankind. has been thrown away upon the common heap of moral nuisances. It is wearisome to look on these lazaroni, who, in the midst of a world of activity and dili

gence, and surrounded by innumerable and powerful stimulants to action, are found in the same indolent posture of mind and heart, year after year, yielding nothing to the resources of life, and to the advancement of the world, and becoming so habituated to their moral sloth, as, while confessing their mendicant and beggarly condition, to have lost all sense of shame to its baseness and degradation. Fearfully will their conscience-now so drowsy as only to half open, for an instant, its eye, when admonished by the awful shade of another year-be aroused, when the cry irrevocable is heard, "Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?"

As " a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth," so the length of a man's life is not so much to be determined by the number of years which pass over him, but by the amount of healthy action which he, during his mortal existence, educes. Political economy teaches Chancellors of the Exchequer that, in matters of finance and taxation, two and two are not always four; and that the division of a financial amount by two will not necessarily give the exact result of a moiety of the whole. So man's history leaves the fact, impressive in its admonitions, and undeniable in its truthfulness, that he who has seen most years may not have lived longest, if the valuable ends and objects of living be items in the account of life. Affecting beyond description was it to hear the acknowledgment of a man, who remained unconverted until he was upwards of seventy years, say, on the first anniversary of the day of his conversion, "I am only one year old; for long as I have been in the world, I have only lived to purpose this last year of my life!" Humiliating confession! sad reminiscence this for gray hairs! Upwards of seventy years, that ought to have been employed to one's own truest enrichment, to the benefit of society, to the glory of the great God, all thrown, like useless lumber, into the depths of perdition! Upwards of seventy years, during which his sun might have been advancing towards the zenith of glory and of honour, and shedding its rays increasingly far and wide over the face of a rejoicing and benefitted society, remaining all that time beneath the horizon of usefulness, and thus helping to keep society enwrapped in the mantle of gloom and of woe! Upwards of seventy years, and he who during that period might have been sowing unto the Spirit, how could he, amid his grateful sense of the matchless love that rescued his gray hairs from coming with sorrow to the grave, forget to reproach himself for his guilt and folly, and extravagant waste of time, of energy, of privilege? He could not. To the last day of his life there was a fly in his pot of ointment, a bitter remembrance that even the loving favour of his God and Redeemer did not erase from the tablet of his memory; but which each after year seemed more deeply" graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock!"

A GOOD ACTION.

THREE things enter into the composition of a good action, scripturally so considered these are, a right principle, a right rule, and a right end.

The right principle is the love of God, 2 Cor. v. 14, 15.
The right rule is the Word of God, 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17.

The right end is the glory of God, 1 Cor. x. 31.

"My grace is sufficient." "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me." "He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself also so to walk even as he walked."

Scripture Cabinet.