To scorn delights, and live laborious days; WITH INVOCATION AND INACTION. the Red Sea close before them, and with Pharaoh and his host close behind them, what were the children of Israel to do? Was it for this that Moses had brought them out of the house of bondage, which yet had its fleshpots and creature comforts after all? What were they to do? They lifted up their eyes, and saw the sea in front, and the enemy in the rear; and then they lifted up their voice in querulous fear and expostulation. Should they go back? Then Moses lifted up his voice, and bade them stand still, and they should see a great deliverance. But the will of God was not that they should either go back, or stand still and merely look on. For "the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” Invocation may be excellent in itself, but, as a concomitant, inaction mars it. A hallowed thing is prayer; but to pray and sit still, when the need is to go forward and push on, is the sign or stigma of feeble folk. When Nelson told the King of Naples, in plain terms, that he had his choice—either to advance, trusting to God for His blessing on a just cause, and prepared to die sword in hand: or to remain quiet, and be kicked out of his kingdom; the king made answer that he would go on, and trust in God and NeOf the same stuff as Nelson, but his superiors in mora character and in practical recognition of Him that is Holy Holy, Holy, as well as Lord God Almighty, were those early English navigators, characterized by a modern pen as "indom table God-fearing men, whose life was one great liturgy. son. "The ice was strong, but God was stronger," says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and a day among the icebergs; not waiting for God to come down and split them, but toiling through the long hours, himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles and planks, with death glaring at them out of the rocks, and so saving themselves and it. We read in Turell's Life of Dr. Benjamin Colman, "that reverend father in our New England Israel," as Mr. Lowell calls him, that when the vessel in which he had taken passage for England was attacked by a French privateer, he "fought like a philosopher and a Christian, and prayed all the while he charged and fired." His the practice was, if not on his lips the maxim, to pray to God and keep his powder dry. It is expressly noted of the Maid of Orleans, in the Procès on record, that while she rather evaded the question of resorting to miraculous aids and appliances, and of affecting supernatural power, she "used the Gallic proverb, Ayde-toi, Dieu te aydera." "In daily toil, in deadly fight, God's chosen found their time to pray; Forcible is the portrait drawn in a recent work of fiction, of a man now steeped in moral degradation, who had once tried to be honest, and prayed to God to prosper his honesty ; but then he only tried to do right in a spasmodic, fitful kind of way, and expected his prayers to be granted as soon as uttered, and was indignant with a Providence that seemed regardless of his entreaties. Bentley is held to have happily ridiculed the helpless Chorus of Greek tragedy, who, when a deed of violence was to be acted, instead of interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow and surprise in dithyrambics. He burlesqued this characteristic by introducing into "The Wishes" a Chorus after the manner of the ancient Greeks, who are informed by one of the dramatis personæ, that a madman with a firebrand has just entered the vaults beneath the place which they occupy, and which contain a magazine of gunpowder. The Chorus, instead of stirring from the dangerous vicinity, immediately commence a long complaint of the hardship of their fate, exclaiming pathetically, "O unhappy madman-or rather unhappy we, the victims of this madman's fury—or thrice, thrice unhappy the friends of the madman, who did not secure him, and restrain him from the perpetration of such deeds of frenzy or three and four times hapless the keeper of the magazine, who forgot the keys in the door," etc., etc. The cry of Charles and his Paladins at Arles, “Help us, oh blessed martyr St. Trophimus!" is thus disposed of by Torfrid, Hereward's forefather, in the story of the Wake, "What use in crying to St. Trophimus? A tough arm is worth a score of martyrs here," in the thick of the fight for dear life. When Lord Rea, in 1630, as recorded in a well-known passage from Rushworth, uttered the pious conventionalism or devout platitude, "Well, God mend all!" his companion, Sir David Ramsay, impatiently exclaimed, "Nay," with an undevout expletive, "Nay, Donald, we must help him to mend it!" One is reminded of what Mr. Froude says of the Protestant leaders in Scotland, during the autumn of 1559, when the Queen Regent returned to Holyrood, once more absolutely victorious: "Notwithstanding all their talk about God, it had come to this. God had as much interest in them as they had themselves courage, energy, capacity, understanding, and perseverance-so much precisely, and not more." Or again of that homely thrust in the "Biglow Papers," where one of the interlocutors, on a critical occasion, avowing a wish to know where and when to strike, is thus answered by his plainspoken mate: 666 'Strike soon,' sez he, ' or you'll be deadly ailin',— He'll settle things they run away an' leave.'” There is something to be said—indeed in our present sense there is more to be said, for the farmer than for the clergyman in the story of the latter congratulating the former on the state of his crops, and finding him not free from apprehensions, in regard of former bad years-"My friend," urged the rector, "trust in Providence." "Providence! Yes, yes," replied the other; "that's all very well: but give me the doong cart." Dr. John Brown relates with zest how one of his faculty was attending a poor woman in labour-a desperate case, that required a cool head and a firm will, while the good man, "for he was good," had neither of these,—and losing his presence of mind, gave up the poor woman as lost, and retired into the next room to pray for her. "Another doctor, who perhaps wanted what the first one had, and certainly had what he wanted, brains and courage, meanwhile arrived, and called out, 'Where is Dr. -?' 'Oh, he has gone into the next room to pray.' 'Pray! Tell him to come here this instant, and help me; he can work and pray too ;"" and by the new-comer's, the snell working doctor's, assistance the woman's life was saved. Sir Robert Peel, in his reply to certain suggestions offered by Lord Kenyon in reference to the potato-disease, coupled with the recommendation of a "special public acknowledgment of our dependence on God's mercy in our present distressed state," was mildly sarcastic on the seeming inconsistency of making such an acknowledgment, while at the same time leaving "in full operation the restraints which man has imposed on the import of provisions." Not likely to be soon forgotten, on either side the Tweed, is Lord Palmerston's reply as Home Secretary, to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, touching the national attitude pending a visitation of Asiatic cholera. He advised them that it was better to cleanse than to fast. Let them see to purifying the foul wynds and overcrowded flats tenanted by the poor, and so get rid of "those causes and sources of contagion which, if allowed to remain, will infallibly breed pestilence, and be fruitful in death, in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a united, but inactive nation." To apply what a north country bishop says in Shakspeare: "The means that Heaven yields must be embraced, And we will not, Heaven's offer we refuse; The proffered means of succour and redress." A recent apologist for the captain of a lost steamship submitted that the destruction of that fine vessel was what is called in the old-fashioned language of a charter-party, "the act of God." Less partial critics, on the other hand, affirmed it to be the act of the folly and madness of man,-the term quoted belonging to an age when they who go down to the sea in ships had not learned the irreverent practice of imputing to the Deity the direct consequences of human rashness. "Let us, if we can, amend this folly; or, if we will persist in it, let us at least take the blame upon ourselves." They that go down to the sea in ships have, however, in all ages, though not so much one people as another (English for instance as Italians), been prone to waste in wailing outcries to patron saints the energy that, in peril of wreck, they might have expended to better purpose. The "Colloquies" of Erasmus give a lively sample of this run-to-waste invocation. The last of the heroes of La Vendée, Charette, while still a youth, sailed from Brest in a cutter which lost its mast, and was in imminent jeopardy of going down; the sailors, on their knees, were praying to the Virgin, and had entirely given up all notion of exertion, "till Charette, by killing one, succeeded in bringing the others to a sense of their duty, and thereby saved the vessel." Lord Broughton describes a scene of the kind, in a Turkish ship of war: the Greeks on board called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Allah; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling his passengers to call on God: he rung his hands, and wept aloud, and being asked what he could do, said he could do nothing. "Could he get back to the main land?” "If God chooses," was his answer. "Could he make Corfu ?" "If God chooses." One thinks of the testy old patrician's rejoinder in "Coriolanus" to the tribune's exclaimer, "The gods be good unto us!" "No; in such a case the gods will not be good unto us." In Scott's tale of the Crusaders, "I will vow a |