3. A person must be influenced by proper motives. Before a young man enters upon the study of the ministry he ought to sift and understand his reasons for so doing.

a) He must feel himself inwardly drawn and driven to it. Not simply in a cool, calculating business way, to choose it in response to the dictates of his judgment. "But the love of Christ," and the love of souls should "constrain" him. Paul says: "Necessity is laid upon me; yea woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel of Christ." This woe the young candidate ought to feel. But it never comes to the ambitious aspirant for honor and position. It comes by fasting and prayer.

The desire must be the result of calm and prayerful deliberation. Not the spasmodic impulse of an hour, but the considerate and ripe conclusion of much earnest meditation and thought. The heart is deceitful, and the danger of selfish motives is very great. There are powerful inducements to engage in the work of the ministry. A man may desire it for his own sake. To get a living without working with his hands; to gain credit and standing; to make himself a great name in the world; to enjoy literary ease and renown. A poor young man may expect to earn a livelihood more easily, and get a more respectable standing. In short, few persons have the faintest idea how liable young men are to err in this respect. We accord to them a great degree of faith and selfdenial for the cause of Christ, whereas their prime motive may be one of policy or self-interest.

We ascribe the failures in the most of our theological students to the want of proper motives. Where the heart has "woe" for souls and for Christ, it will wrestle with God for the needed grace to continue steadfast. Our mind recurs to a sad list of fallen candidates for the holy ministry. Sons of wealthy parents, perhaps prompted by a natural generosity to labor for souls, or aspiring for pulpit renown, ran well for a season. Then they fell in with the "fast students," lost their desire, and disappointed the hopes of their parents and pastor. Young men of limited means, were kindly taken by the hand and supported. For a few sessions they, too, ran well. Unused to such prosperity their heads soon began to reel. Some played the ladies' man, others the rowdy, to the neglect of their studies. We regret that truth compels us to speak thus. Not only in the Reformed Church, but equally in other Churches, the way into the ministry is lined with deserters; candidates who have become bankrupt in the most solemn obligations of their life.

A melancholy list one could prepare of such men. Some of them have a sad history. One, the pet and pride of his pastor and congregation, a genial, companionable youth, after a few years'

support, becomes a gallant, a fancy gentleman. Not given to vice, but seized by a mysterious uneasiness to get into business. He has succeeded, and a sorry business has he made of it.

Another is a young man of decided talent, of fine appearance and address. His preparatorian declamations are the admiration of the whole College. A most charming delivery he has. And his public prayers in language and sentiment are most edifying and pleasing. Gradually he neglects his studies and the church services. Selects rowdy associates. At the opening of a certain session he refuses to return to College. Now he is a wreck in body and soul. Thus an earnest pastor and his flock have their hopes of a supposed model young man blasted. A sad tale could we unfold by sketching the history of some of these wayward young men. The secret of their fall resulted from a wrong motive from the start. The Church, the Reformed Church, ought without delay to have several hundred more ministers. Souls are daily perishing for the want of them. We call upon the thousands of pious boys, possessed of vigorous bodies and minds, to enlist in the ranks of the holy ministry. But the only way to do this, is first to give their hearts to Christ; to see to it that they will be truly pious. Boys who love the Lord Jesus Christ, in sincerity and in truth, and daily pray and find their highest pleasure in acts of piety; these are the boys we want. Let them devoutly and earnestly beseech God to fill their hearts with His love, and with an unselfish desire to lead souls to Him. On this point Beecher speaks with great beauty and power:

There is one thing more. I do not think that any man has a right to become a Christian minister, who is not willing and thank ul to be the least of all God's servants and to labor in the humblest sphere. If you would come into the Christian ministry, hoping to preach such a sermon as Robert Hall would have preached, you are not fit to come in at all. If you have a deep sense of the sweetness of the service of Christ, if the blood of redemption is really in your heart, and in your blood; if you have tasted what gratitude means, and what love means, and if Heaven is such a reality to you toat all that lies between youth and manhood is but a step toward Hea ven; if you think that the saving of a single soul would be worth the work of your whole life, you have a call, and a very loud call A call to the ministry is along the line of humility, and love, and sympathy, and good sense, and natural aspirations toward God.

If, therefore, you feel willing to work for Christ's sake, for the sake of eter nity, for the love that you have for the intrinsic sweetness of the work of the ministry, the molding of men and making them better, and helping them upward; if this is itself sweet and pleasant to you; if you are moved to do it in low places, without renown, and are willing to take your crown hereafter for it, you are called, and there is no doubt about it. But if you want only this: To be very eloquent men, and to watch the eloquence of others; or if you want to have a big church, with a big salary behind it, and if that is your call to the ministry, stay away. You may be called, but it was not the Lord that called you; it was the Devil.

Don't come from pride, but come from a love for the work, and then, let me tell you your work will be music. I hear ministers talk about their cares and their burdens. There are cares and burdens, but no more than there are discords in Beethoven's symphonies; and your work will be as sweet and as musical as his symphonies are. Working for men! There is nothing so congenial. It is the only business on earth that I know of, excepting the mother's business, that is clean all the way through, because it is using superior faculties, superior knowledge, not to take advantage of men, but to lift them up and cleanse them, to mold them, to fashion them, to give them life, that you may present them before God.

MISSIONARY LETTER TO YOUNG PEOPLE.

TUNGCHOW, CHINA.

My Dear Young Friends:

I propose in this letter to tell you something of the schools in which Chinese boys are taught to read and write. These schools are all for boys. There are no schools for girls in China, nor do girls ever go to school with the boys, unless it be in some very rare cases in private schools in the families of the rich. It is not thought worth while to teach girls to read, as they have no use for it. Their business is to stay at home and cook and sew. At a future time I may perhaps tell you how girls fare in China. For the present my letter shall concern only the boys.

About half the boys in China, start to school at about eight or nine years of age, but the greater part of them only go one, two or three years, and very few of them ever really learn to read and write. This is owing partly to want of capacity, and partly to want of the necessary means. It is a very difficult and expensive thing to learn to read in China. The Chinese reckon it necessary to go school at least fifteen years in order to become an ordinary scholar. The schools are all small compared with the schools in America. Twelve or fifteen scholars are quite a large school.

In China houses are rarely built on purpose for school-houses, a room in a private house or a vacant room in a temple being generally used. These school-rooms are always small, and have no floor except the ground pounded hard. There are generally three or four tables in the room, and two or three boys sit at each table. They have no stoves or fire of any kind in their school-rooms, except that the boys sometimes bring small pans of charcoal, over which to warm their fingers. They sit with hats and overcoats on in the winter. Teachers are always employed for a year, and the schools all open in the first month and close in the last month.

In China there are no free schools as there are in the United States. The rich generally employ a teacher for their own family. Amongst the common people two or three or more families join together and employ a teacher. Many of the poor are quite unable to send their children to school. The schools generally open about the 20th of the first month. The teacher consults some one supposed to be skilled in finding lucky days, and by his advice appoints the day for the opening of the school. When the day has arrived, each boy gets on his best clothes, and his father goes with him to school. When all have arrived the teacher first writes what is called a p'ai wei, and pastes it up on the wall by his desk. This p'ai wei is a long strip of red paper, on which is written in large letters "The divine seat of the all perfect and most holy teacher Confucius." Having pasted np this p'ai wei the teacher lights several sticks of incense before it, and burns some paper money, and then he and the fathers of the boys arrange themselves before it, and all together bow down with their heads to the ground and worship; the boys then come forward and in the same manner bow down and worship, after which they also worship the teacher. The teacher then calls each boy, and if he has not been to school before, gives him a new name which takes the place of his old or baby name and becomes his proper name for life. A lesson is then assigned to each boy, and the school is fairly opened. The lesson is simply a portion of the Chinese classics to be committed to memory. Their whole education consists in learning by rote a number of sacred books called classics, together with the explanations of them handed down from their ancestors. These classics are all very ancient, most of them having been written or compiled by Confucius, more than two thousand years ago.

Chinese words are not spelled with letters, as ours are, but each word has an arbitrary sign of its own, called a character. Of these characters there are about ten thousand in common use. The teacher first names over the characters in the boy's lesson in a loud sing-song tone, and the boy imitates him. This is done several times, and the boy goes to his seat and begins to sing over his lesson as loud and as fast as he can. When a boy forgets a character he goes and asks the teacher, and at once begins to sing away as before. When ten or a dozen boys get to singing over their lesson in this way, each one trying to make the most noise, the confusion of sound is terrible-enough one would think, to distract the teacher, who listens to it all day long. When their lessons are learned the teacher calls them up, one by one, to recite. Putting the book on the teacher's desk, the boy turns his back to the teacher and his face to the wall, and sings over the lesson in the same loud drawling tone. If a boy does not know the lesson, the teacher scolds

him and sends him back to learn it over again. If, the next time, he does not know it, the teacher punishes him by striking him on the hand with his ruler. This ruler is the Chinese teacher's whip, and he generally uses it very freely, both when a boy breaks the rules and when he fails on his lesson. This process of learning the books by rote is kept up for several years, until six or eight or more volumes have been learned. A smart boy can commit in this way each day about fifteen lines of seventeen words each. All this time they are told nothing of the meaning of what they learn, and know no more about it than you would about so much Hebrew.

After from three to six years of committing in this way, the teacher begins at the beginning to explain to them the meaning of each word and sentence, and they learn to repeat it after him. As you may suppose this is a very dull and a very slow way of getting an education. The whole text of the Chinese classics is not more than the size of the New Testament, yet it requires a bright boy full fifteen years to master them all. Having done this and having learned to compose essays in the same stiff and obscure style in which they are written, he is counted an educated man.

In Chinese schools the scholars are never taught arithmetic, or geography, or grammar. The fact is they have no grammar, and they pay no attention to their language, whether it be correct or not. The books called classics, which they learn by rote, are written in a language entirely different from that commonly spoken. The style, also, is obscure and antiquated, and the subjects treated of relate chiefly to the government, and the conduct of kings and officers. Learning, and trying to imitate the style of these obscure old books are the whole education of a Chinese boy.

The pen used by the Chinese is very different from ours. It is a little brush of camel's hair, or other soft hair, having a bamboo-handle. The ink is in a hard block, like water color paints, and is rubbed on a smooth stone with a little water, and the pen rubbed in it. Their paper is very thin and soft, so that you can readily see through it. The teacher writes a copy for each boy, and makes him a writing book, each leaf of which is double. The copy is then slipped inside of the double leaf, and the scholar, seeing the copy through the thin paper, traces over it another like it; then turns it round and traces the other side of the leaf, and so on. By and by the characters in the copy are written smaller, but the plan is ever the same.

The Chinese, being heathen, do not of course observe Sunday, and so have school every day right along. They do not, however, value time at all. During the year they loose more time from school than you who keep Sunday do. In the second month school is always dismissed a number of days to attend the theatri