But her anxieties were not limited within the circle of her kindred and near friends. In the true spirit of Christian benevolence, they extended themselves far "The great love I bear to you has dictated this and wide; and wherever, by means of private friend-letter, and when God shall call me to his celestial manship, or through the influence which the fame of her genius procured for her, she possessed power over the minds of others, that influence was exerted for their spiritual welfare, and for the benefit and extension of the Christian Church. Several letters of her's, written in behalf of the suffering Protestants, are on record, but the most beautiful and affecting is that addressed to her faithful companion and friend, the Princess Anna of Este, Duchess of Guise. An extract from this letter cannot fail to interest our readers :

Her sorrowing husband, in a letter to the same person, gives the following account of her last moments : "A short time before her death, on awaking from a tranquil sleep into which she had fallen, I observed her smiling very sweetly; and I went near, and asked her whence that heavenly smile proceeded. I beheld,' said she, just now, while lying quiet, a place filled with the clearest and brightest light.' Weakness preCome,' said I,' be of good vented her saying more. cheer, my dearest wife, you are about to dwell in that beautiful light.' She again smiled and nodded to me. and in a little while said, 'I am all gladness. Nor did she again speak till, her eyes becoming dim, she said, I can scarcely know you, but all places appear to me full of the fairest flowers.' Not long after, as if fallen into a sweet slumber, she expired."

In the course of the same year, her husband and brother, the objects of her tenderest care, followed her to an early grave.

We have thus endeavoured to sketch the character of one, distinguished alike by her virtues and by her talents. Within the limits of a few pages, a mere outline could be given; but we trust it has been sufficient to show that the simplicity of the Christian, and the tenderness of the woman, were more prominent in her life than even the light which her genius threw around

her name.

There have been those, among the learned, and even among the pious, whose writings have done much to darken the light of divine truth by the subtleties of a vain philosophy; there have been those (and they are more especially to be found among females) who have mingled with the simplicity of the Gospel the false refinements of a sentimental religion; but in the writings of Olympia nothing is added to the simple "truth as it is in Jesus;" and the single-heartedness of her desires and purposes has been equalled only by the beautiful consistency of her life.

There have been those who, raised by their superior talents and endowments above the level of their friends and associates, have withdrawn themselves from affectionate sympathy with them, and who, conscious of their capability to soar beyond the common-place duties and occupations of their sex, have altogether excluded such from any share in their attention. But it was We have seen that, not thus with Olympia Morata. in all the relations of a wife, a daughter, a sister, and a friend, the tender feelings of her sex were adorned, not obscured, by her intellectual endowments; and that, dazzling as might be the prospect of fame to a youthful mind, and sweet as is the incense of adulation to a female heart, she had learned, in the school of Christ, that the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit is, in the sight of God, of greater price.

Each throws his martial ornaments aside,
The crested helmets with their plumy pride:
To humble thoughts their lofty hearts they bend,
And down their cheeks the pious tears descend.
TASSO'S JERUSALEM DELIVERED.

Even to the philosopher, Jerusalem and the Holy Land,
from having been the scenes of those events which have
exercised a powerful and extensive influence on the
character aud happiness of the human race, possess
peculiar interest. "On visiting the places consecrated
by those events which have changed the face of the
world, we have a somewhat similar feeling to that of
the traveller, who, after laboriously ascending the cur-
rent of a mighty river, like the Nile or the Ganges, at
length discovers and contemplates its hidden source."
"It seemed to me, also," says Lamartine, (Pilgrimage
to the Holy Land, vol. i. p. 319,) "as I ascended the
last hills which separated me from Nazareth, that I was
going to contemplate, on the spot, the mysterious origin
of that vast and fertile religion which, for these two
thousand years, has made its road from the height of
the mountains of Galilee through the universe, and re-
freshed so many human generations with its pure and
living waters! There is its source! There, in the

hollow of the rocks on which I tread! This hill, the summit of which I am attaining, has borne on its sides the salvation, the life, the light, the hope of the world. It was there, at a few paces from me, that the Saviour was born among men, to withdraw them, by his word and his example, from the ocean of error and corruption, into which the human race was fast submerging. If I considered the matter as a philosopher, it was the point at which occurred the greatest event that has ever startled the moral and political world-an event, the influence of which is yet felt throughout the whole compass of social order. From hence arose, as from the bosom of obscurity, poverty, and ignorance, the greatest, the most just, the wisest, most virtuous of men: this land was his cradle! the theatre of his actions and of his affecting discourses! From hence, while yet young, he went with a few unknown and uneducated men, whom he had inspired with the confidence of his genius, and the courage necessary to their mission—which was, boldly to attack an order of ideas and things, not powerful enough to resist his doctrines, but sufficiently so to put him to death; from hence, I repeat, he went with alacrity to conquer death, and obtain the empire of posterity! From hence, in fine, flowed Christianity—at first an obscure spring, an almost unperceived drop of water in the hollow of the rock of Nazareth; in which two sparrows could scarcely have allayed their thirst, and which a ray of the sun could have dried up; but which THE wars which were carried on for the possession now, like the great ocean of mind, has filled every of the holy sepulchre had their origin in a high and abyss of human wisdom, and bathed in its inexhaustible generous enthusiasm. It is impossible to doubt that waves the past, the present and the future. Were I, many of the weary pilgrims who pressed into the Holy therefore, incredulous as to the divinity of this event, Land, were urged by strong feelings of devotion; it is next to impossible not to sympathize with that my soul would still have felt powerful emotions on apmixture of chivalry and piety with which the crusad-proaching its primitive theatre; and I should have uning armies and their attendants approached the city which was the end of all their toils and wanderings.

SCRIPTURE GEOGRAPHY AN
INTERESTING STUDY.
(Continued from page 648.)

Behold! Jerusalem in prospect lies!

Behold! Jerusalem salutes their eyes!

At once a thousand tongues repeat the name,

And hail Jerusalem with loud acclaim!

.

Each faltering tongue imperfect speech supplies;
Each labouring bosom heaves with frequent sighs.
Each took the example as their chieftains led,
With naked feet the hallowed soil they tread:

and

covered my head, and bowed down profoundly to that

occult and all-powerful will which has made so many great things flee from so feeble, so imperceptible a commencement." Nor is the interest, which this writer so feelingly expresses, confined to the birth-place of the Saviour. It belongs to every scene connected with the history of his life on earth. The villages in which he taught, and the mountain from which he pronounced

the beatitudes the wilderness in which he was tempted, and the garden where he was agonized—are scenes fitted to excite and to reward our most ardent inquiries. Indeed, every place which was sanctified by his presence, and blessed by the casting forth of that precious seed which has produced such an abundant harvest of glory to God, and good-will among men, should be regarded by us with feelings of the deepest gratitude and devotion. In seeking to know all that can now be learned of such places, we are gratifying a curiosity which is highly laudable, and which may be indulged to an extent which no similar subject can justify.

our readers in possession of the arguments by which this opinion is supported. They are as follows:

Of Ham's three sons, Canaan, the youngest, (the only one on whom the curse was pronounced,) was ancestor of the ten tribes whom Abraham found in occupation of the Promised Land, bearing the national patronymic of Canaanites-how awfully depraved in their morals, I need not remind you. Their iniquities, however, had not come to the full till four hundred years after Abraham, when the Israelites were the hammer in the Lord's hand for crushing them.

country of Judah, the Emim, who occupied the country east of the Dead Sea, afterwards Moab, the Zamzummim, who dwelt in what was afterwards called Amby the agency of the children of Lot, &c., who dwelt in mon, &c., being so utterly "destroyed by the Lord," their country, that, in the time of Joshua, " only Og, the king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of the giants."

Besides these nations, the Chorim or Horites, who occupied Mount Seir, were destroyed to make room for the children of Esau, or the Edomites; and the Avim for "the Philistines, the remnant of the country of Caphtor"-who came out of Caphtor" whom God emphatically tells us, I brought from Caphtor."

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Caphtor is the same word as Egypt or Copt, applied in Scripture to Lower, as Pathros is to Upper Egypt, or the Thebaid. It is clear, therefore, from the word of truth, that God, our Author and Disposer, "who hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habita. tion"-brought the Philistines, after some great revolution which reduced them to the mere remnant of a once powerful nation, out of Lower Egypt into the land of Canaan.

A giant race, distinct from the Canaanites, "a people great, and strong, and tall," occupied many parts of the country between the Nile and the Euphrates in AbraWhen the Saviour had accomplished his decease at ham's day; their punishment, probably as being earlier Jerusalem, and his apostles, shaking the dust from their depraved, took place between his time and that of feet against that devoted city, went forth from it, bear-Moses; the Anakim, who dwelt at Hebron in the hilling with them a light brighter than any which had ever burned behind the rent vail of its temple, the field of Scripture geography becomes wider, but scarcely less interesting. The journeyings of the apostles are fitted to awaken in us the most lively and generous emotions. Altogether independent of the sacredness of the cause in which they were engaged, the zeal and intrepidity which they manifested whether fighting with wild beasts at Ephesus, or with the more furious passions of their infatuated countrymen,-whether bearing up against the taunts of infidelity at Athens, or the rage of persecution at Rome,-are sufficient to enlist all our sympathies on their side. When we think of the pure and lofty doctrines which they taught, and of the generous and manly eloquence with which they urged these doctrines on the acceptance of their hearers, the mantle of their divine Master seems to descend upon the holy brotherhood, which now contains no traitor in its band. When we read of the prejudices which they subdued, and the idols which they overturned-of the deserts which rejoiced, and the wildernesses which blossomed at their word-of the sinners whom they converted, and the churches which they planted-we feel that we are reading the accomplishment of what the prophets going before them had spoken. In following the tract of the apostles, we find that we are in the train of truth, and breathe more loftily than if we were swelling the pomp of some victorious army. Some of the candlesticks which were set up by the apostles have been removed; some of the lights which they kindled have been extinguished; but a deep and solemn interest must ever gather round the history of those churches which were planted by the apostles and first teachers of Christianity; and the fact, that some of these churches are now in ruins, so far from diminishing our desire to know all that Scripture geography can tell of the condition of these churches, should only stir up our faith and quicken our vigilance, and lend additional interest and emphasis to the Scripture, which saith, "He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the Churches." WHO BUILT THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT? THIS is a question which has occasioned considerable difference of opinion among learned men. In a very interesting work which has recently appeared under the title of "Letters on Egypt, Edom, and the Holy Land," by Lord Lindsay, the noble author endeavours to prove that the Pyramids were built by the shepherd kings of Egypt, the ancestors of the Philistines, in the time of Abraham. We have thought it right to put

While Canaan was peopled by the descendants of the younger, Egypt was so by those of the elder son of Ham, the Misraim. From her great natural advantages, she soon rose to civilization, and flourished till a nomadic race, surnamed the Uk-sos, or Royal Shepherds, (by some, says Manetho, supposed of Arabian origin,) poured down upon the country, subdued the natives, and held the sceptre for two hundred and sixty years, till the natives roused themselves, and, after a long and bloody contest, compelled them to take refuge at Abaris, probably Pelusium, a stronghold on the Eastern branch of the Nile, which their first king had fortified as "the bulwark of Egypt" against the Assyrians, then the dominant power in Asia. After a tedious siege, the Egyptians, in despair of getting rid of them otherwise, allowed them to depart, with their families and cattle, in quest of another settlement, which they did, in the direction of Syria.

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It must have been during this usurpation that Abraham visited Egypt, for the revolution by which they were expelled had evidently taken place shortly before Joseph's time, when "every shepherd was" such "an abomination to the Egyptians," that the pasturing Israelites were assigned the district of Goshen, the best of the land," rich unoccupied pasture ground, for their residence, that they might dwell there with their flocks and herds apart from the natives; by which providential separation they were preserved as a distinct people. Jacob passed through Goshen, and Joseph met him there, on his road from Canaan to Egypt; the Israelites did not cross the Nile when they quitted Egypt; Goshen, therefore, lay to the East, probably along the eastern bank of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile. Why was "the best of the land" unoccupied, but

true are thy ways, thou King of saints." It is, however, through thickets of apparent contrariety and contradiction, that the eternal wisdom makes its way to fulfil the designs and purposes which, when accomplished, shall occupy the search and the wonder of everlasting ages.

because the shepherd owners had just been expelled? | are thy works, Lord God Almighty, just and Now, when we read in the Bible that the Philistines came out of Lower Egypt, and were settled in the land of Canaan before the arrival of the Israelites, from whose triumphant exodus (though Manetho ignorantly, and Josephus wilfully, confounds them) their's differed in being so calamitous an expulsion, that "a remnant" only survived, though that remnant was numerous enough to subdue the Avim, and occupy their country; and when, naturally inquiring what light Egyptian history throws on the subject, we find this story of the expulsion of the shepherd kings, in the direction of Canaan, at a period anterior to the arrival of Joseph; is it possible to doubt the identity of the royal shepherds and the Philistines?-that warlike people, those foreigners" of the Septuagint, speaking a language distinct from that of the Jews, who occupying the seacoast between the Nile and Ekron, gave it their own name, Palestina, confined by the prophet Isaiah to their pentapolis, but afterwards extended to the whole land of Israel, Palestine a word, mark you, not Hebrew, but Sanscrit, and still implying, in that language, "the shepherd's land."

If this needed confirmation, we should find it in the testimony borne by the Hindoo records, that a branch of the great Pali, or shepherd race of India, whose sway extended, from their far-famed capital, Palihothra, to Siam on the east, and the Indus on the west, the intermediate country bearing the same name Palisthan, or Palestine, afterwards imposed on the land of Canaan-conquered Egypt, and oppressed the Egyptians, in the same manner as the Egyptian records tell us the royal shepherds did. Nor is it less remarkable, that while Abaris, or Avaris, the stronghold of the Auritae, or royal shepherds, in the land of Goshen, derives its name from Abhir, the Sanscrit word for a shepherd-Goshena, or Goshayana, in the same language, implies the abode of shepherds," and ghosha is explained, in Sanscrit dictionaries, by the phrase Abhiropalli, "a town or village of Abhiras or Palis." And who, then, (to revert to the point from which I set out,) who can the shepherd Philitis, who fed his flocks near Memphis, whose name the popular tradition of the Egyptians, in Herodotus's time, gave to the pyramids, built by his cotemporaries Cheops and Cephrenes, the tyrants who shut up their temples, and forbade the sacrifices, and whose names the people held in such abhorrence that they would not pronounce them -who and what can he be, but a personification of the shepherd dynasty the Palis of the Hindoo records, who, after erecting the Pyramids, those imperishable monuments of their glory, after the models they remembered in their native Assyria, re-appear in later years, and when fallen from their high estate, as the Philistines, "the remnant of the country of Caphtor,' ever at enmity with the people of God, and now, like every nation that oppressed them, vanished from our eyes?

THE GLORIOUS PROSPECTS OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST :
A DISCOURSE.*

BY THE LATE REV. JOHN Love, D.D., Minister of Anderston, Glasgow. "Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold: all these As gather themselves together, and come to thee. I live, saith the Lord, thou shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, and bind them on thee, as a bride doeth."—ISAIAH xlix. 18. "GREAT and marvellous," saith the assembly of redeemed spirits in heaven, "Great and marvellous * Preached before the Directors of the Glasgow Missionary So

ciety, 25th October 1802. We are glad to learn that there is at present in the press a volume of the Letters of this eminent mimister, transcribed from his short-hand MSS.

The complaint recorded, verse 14th of this chapter, hath a very glorious sound. It hath been frequently in the mouths of individual believers, and hath staid them when their feet were stumbling on the dark mountains. And if we consider the prospects of the Christian Church, the foundation on which she rests, the words of divine promise put in her mouth, and the spiritual weapons of warfare she holds in her hands, and compare with these the present state of religion through the habitable parts of this whole earth, it may, perhaps, be considered as a complaint to be justly assumed by the whole multitude of Christian believers now in the word, as a collective body. The Zion now existing on the earth may say, "The Lord hath forsaken me,

and my Lord hath forgotten me.”

Such expostulations, however, cease to appear strange when we consider such words as we see recorded, verse 4th, as coming from the lips of the beloved of the Eternal Father, in whom his soul "Then I said," I, whom Jehovah hath delighteth. called from the womb, whose name he hath mentioned with delight from the bowels of my mother, I, whom he hath made a polished shaft and hid in his quiver; I, to whom He said, thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified; I said, pierced with anguish, and worn down with disaj pointment, "I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain."

But the reply to such complaints from the Church and from her Redeemer, complaints that, as it were, touch the heart strings of Deity, is emphatical indeed.

To the majestic though humbled Redeemer, the answer is in these terms: "It is a light thing that thou shouldst be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob; I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation to the ends of the earth,—In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and I will give thee for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, that thou mayest say to the prisoners, go forth, to them that are in darkness, show yourselves."

And to the spouse of the Redeemer, the answer issues forth from on high in accents of still more tender condolence, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb; yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee, behold I have graven thee on the palms of my hands, thy walls are continually before me."

From the same bowels of compassion and love, but in a tone which rises with each sentence in grandeur, significance, and triumph, proceed the "Lift up thine eyes round about and behold; all these gather themselves

words of the text.