has built those beautiful, numerous and extensive islands, which adorn the Pacific. It has been said, that "he that shall walk with vigor only three hours a day, will pass in seven years a space, equal to the circumference of the globe." Luther was asked, "How, amid all his travels and active labors, he could have made so perfect a translation of the whole Bible." "No day without a verse," was his reply. This slow process, in due time, carried him through.

Of nothing are men more prodigal than of those little portions of time, which intervene between their regular hours of business, and yet it is perfectly astonishing how much may be accomplished, by devoting such fragments to some valuable purpose. "It is a virtue," says Seneca, "to be covetous of time." God has given us all time enough, if properly improved, to make us intelligent, wise, and happy. Appreciate far more highly those little intervals, which your business leaves you every day. Appropriate them to the improvement of your minds.

"On all important time, through every age,

Though much and warm the wise have urged, the man
Is yet unborn, who duly weighs an hour.”

"Moments seize." Your happiness, your usefulness are on their wing.

4. Let your reading be select. We live in an age when the remark of Solomon seems to be verified, "of making many books there is no end." No scholar even can or ought to read the whole. Much less can persons, whose business is manuallabor. Considering the small portions of time which you can devote to this employment, there is special reason why your reading should be select. It is far better to read but few books of the right kind, and read them well, than to range superficially over the whole field of literature. Apply to some judicious friend to direct you to a proper course of reading. Especially, avoid bad books. Voltaire was made an infidel for life, by committing to memory, at the early age of three years, a deistical pamphlet. The influence of books, in forming the taste and in giving direction to life, is incalculable. The reading of Spenser's Fairy Queen, in his mother's apartment, made Cowley, as he says, "irrecoverably a poet." Sir Joshua Reynolds's taste for painting was first excited, by reading Richardson's Treatise on that subject. The reading of but one book, and that often a tract, frequently gives a cast to a person's character, and a bent to his destiny which last forever. Let your books, then, be well chosen and thoroughly read, and their influence will be

seen in the enlargement of your understandings, in the refinement of your taste, and in the augmentation of your usefulness.

5. Habitually attend upon the public instructions of the gospel. No one knows how much we are indebted to the gospel, for its improvement of the intellectual powers of man. Its simple, solemn and sublime announcements are admirably adapted to chasten and give wing to the imagination, to mature the judgment, to strengthen the memory, and to invigorate the conscience. The infant Sabbath school scholar has an amount of useful religious knowledge, to which the wisest heathen can make no pretension.

In this connection, let me urge you to avail yourselves of the inestimable advantages for intellectual as well as moral culture offered by the Bible class and Sabbath school. These institutions are pre-eminently adapted to your circumstances, while engaged in manufacturing pursuits. If properly improved, they will compensate, in no inconsiderable degree, for your want of time for reading and study.

But after all, the pulpit is the grand source of mental and moral illumination. It is a radiating point, diffusing on every side, light, intelligence, wisdom. A church-going community is a well

educated community. The Bible, which it is the business of the pulpit to expound, is an exhaustless source of information. Sir William Jones, who was master of twenty-six languages, and who, of course, must be regarded as a competent judge on such a subject, says, "The Scriptures contain, independently of their divine origin, more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains both of poetry and eloquence, than could be collected, within the same compass, from all other books that were ever composed in any age, or in any idiom." Much of the intellectual, as well as moral greatness of such men as Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Locke, Hale, and Milton, is to be attributed to a profound study of the Bible. If then, my young friends, you would be "as plants grown up in your youth, and as corner-stones polished after the similitude of a palace," be the habitual, humble students of the word of God. Let your seats in the sanctuary always be filled. Prosecute with vigor, and by all the means in your power, a course of intellectual improvement; and that improvement, if connected with holiness of heart, will fit you for more elevated communion with the minds of heaven.

LECTURE III.

ESTABLISHED AND

CORRECT RELIGIOUS

PRINCIPLES.

DAN. III. 18.-But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

SUCH was the decisive reply of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, three young men, to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, when he commanded them to worship a golden image which he had set up, on pain of being cast into a burning fiery furnace. Nebuchadnezzar had made an enormous image of gold, about ninety feet in height, and placed it in the midst of an extensive plain. He then issued a proclamation to all the princes, the governors, the captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the hundred and twenty provinces over which he reigned, to assemble together to celebrate the dedication of the image. In obe