y,
and willing to accept an old man. There are very few women in Geymonat's
congregation. The converts are nearly all men."

While we rejoice in the spread of the light, we cannot but marvel at the
mysterious connection which may be traced between the first and the
second reformations in Italy, as regards the spots where this divine
illumination is now breaking out. We have already adverted to the
progress of the Gospel in the sixteenth century in so many of the
cities of Italy, and the long roll of confessors and martyrs which every
class of her citizens contributed to furnish. Not only did these men, in
their prisons and at their stakes, sow the seeds of a future harvest,
but they appear to have earned for the towns in which they lived, and
the families from which they were sprung, a hereditary right, as it
were, to be foremost in confessing that cause at every subsequent era of
its revival. We cannot mark but with a feeling of heartfelt gratitude to
God, in whose sight the death of his saints is precious, and who, by the
eternal laws of his providence, has ordained that the example of the
martyr shall prove more powerful and more lasting than that of the
persecutor, that on the _self-same spots_ where these men died of old,
the same mighty movement has again broken out. And not only are the same
cities of Turin, and Milan, and Venice, and Genoa, and Florence,
figuring in this second reformation of Italy, but the same families and
the same names from which God chose his martyrs in Italy three centuries
ago are again coming forward, and offering themselves to the dungeon,
and the galleys, and the scaffold, in the cause of the Gospel. Does not
this finely illustrate the indestructible nature of truth, which enables
it to survive a long period of dormancy and of apparent death, and to
flourish anew from what seemingly was its tomb? And does it not also
shed a beautiful light upon the order of the providence of God, whereby
he remembers and revisits the seed of the righteous man, and keeps his
mercy to a thousand generations of them that fear Him?

On Wednesday the 6th of November, after a stay of well-nigh a week in
Florence, I took my departure by rail for Pisa. The weather was still
wild and wintry, and the Apennines were white with snow to almost their
bottom. The railway runs along the valley, close to the Arno, which,
swollen with the rains, had flooded the vineyards and meadows in many
places. A truly Italian vale