_. The poor and needy ones who, in this great
turmoil of life, have found no helper among their fellows; the wicked
and outcast, whose hand is against every man's, because they have
found, by dire experience of the world's selfishness, how every man's
hand is against them; the prodigal and broken-hearted children of the
human family, who have the bitterest thoughts of God and man, if they
have any thoughts at all beyond their own busy contrivances how
to live and to indulge their craving passions,--all these, by
the mesmerism of the heart, and by means of that great witness,
conscience, which God, in mercy, leaves as a light from heaven in the
most abject dwelling on earth, can, to some extent, read the living
epistle of a renewed soul, written in the divine characters of the
Holy Spirit. They can see and feel, as they never did anything else
in this world, the love which calmly shines in that eye, telling of
inward light and peace possessed, and of a place of rest found and
enjoyed by the weary heart! They can understand and appreciate the
unselfishness--to them a thing hitherto hardly dreamt of--which
prompted this visit from a home of comfort or refinement, to an
unknown abode of squalor or disease, and which expresses itself in
those kind words and looks that accompany the visit. They can perceive
the reality of the piety, which also reads to them, in touching tones,
the glory of Him who came to seek and save the lost; and their souls
cannot refuse some amen, however faint, echoed by their very misery,
and from their yearnings for a good they have never known, to that
earnest prayer of faith uttered, in the bonds of a common brotherhood,
to one who is addressed as a common Father, through a common Lord.
If ever society is to be regenerated, it is by the agency of living
brothers and sisters in the Lord; and every plan, however apparently
wise, for recovering mankind from their degradation, and which does
not make the _personal_ ministrations of Christian men and women an
essential part of it, its very _life_, is doomed, we think, to perish.

It is thus that our Father has ever dealt with His lost children. He
has in every age of the world spoken to men by living men; and "God,
who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake unto our fathers by
the prophets, has in these latter days spoken to us by his Son!"

But are there any willing to labour? Yes; many are labouring, and
thousands in this land are prepared in s