pounce upon him like a pack of hounds with their muzzles tearing away at the flanks of one poor reindeer. In Paris there is a sculptured representation of Bacchus, the god of revelry. He is riding on a panther at full leap. Oh! how suggestive. Let every one who is speeing on bad ways understand he is not riding a docile and wellbroken steed, but he is riding a monster wild and bloodthirsty, going at a death-leap. How many there are who resolve on a better life, and say: "When shall I awake?" but seized on by their old habits, cry: "I will try it once more; I will seek it yet again!" Years ago, there were some Princeton students who were skating an the ice was very thin, and some one warned the company back from the air-hole, and finally warned them entirely to leave the place. But one young man with bravado, after all the rest had stopped, cried out: "One round more!" He swept around, and went down, and was brought out a corps. My friends, there are thousands and tens of thousands of men losing their souls in that way.

I have also to say that if a man wants to return from evil practices society repulses him. D.siring to reform, he says: "Now, I will shake off my old associats, and I will find Christian companionship." And he appears at the church-door some Sabbath day, and the usher greets him with a look as much as to say: "Why, you here? You are the last man I ever expected to see at church! Come, take this seat right down by the door." Insteal of saying, "Good-morning; I am glad you are here. Come, I will give you a first-rate seat, right up by the pulpit." Well, the prodigal, not yet discouraged, enters a prayer meeting, and some Caristian man, with more zeal than common sense, says: "Glad to see you; the dying thief was saved, and I suppose there is mercy for you." The young man, disgusted, chilled, throws himself on his dignity, resolved he will never enter into the house of God again. Perhaps not quite fully discouraged about reformation, he sides up by some highly respectable man he used to know, going down the street, and immediately the respectable man has an errand down some other street. Well, the prodigal wishing to return takes some member cf a Christian association by the hand, or tries to. The Christian young man looks at the faded apparel and the marks of dissipation, and instead of giving him a warm grip of the hand, offers him the tip-ends of the long fingers of the left hand, which is equal to striking a man in the face! Oh! how few Christian people understand how much force and Gospel there is in a good, honest handshaking. Sometimes, when you have felt the need of encouragement, and some Christian man has taken you heartily by the hand, have you not felt thrilling through every fibre of your body, mind and soul encouragement that was just what you needed? You do not know anything at all about this unless you know when a man tries to return from evil courses of conduct he runs against repulsions innumerable. We say of some man, he lives a block or two from the church, or Lalf a mile from the church. There are people in our crowded cities who live a thousand miles from church. Vast deserts of indifference between them and the house of God. The fact is, we must keep cur respectability, though thousands and tens of thousands perish. Christ sat with pubiicans and sinners. But if there come to the house of God a man with marks of dissipation upon him, people almost throw up their hands in horror, as much as to say: "Isn't it shocking?" How these dainty, fastidious Christians in all our churches are going to get into heaven I don't know, uuless they have a special train of cars, cushioned and upholstered, each one a car to himself. They cannot go with the great horde of publicans and sinners. Oh! ye

who curl your lip of scorn at the fallen, I tell you plainly, if you had been surrounded by the same influences, instead of sitting tc-day amid the cultured, and the refined, and the Christian, you would have been a crouching wretch in stable or ditch, covered with filt and abomination. It is not because you are naturally any better, but because the mercy of God has protected you. Who are you, that, brought up in Christian circles and watched by Christian parentage, you should be so hard?

I think men als are often hindered from return by the fact that churches are too auxious about their membership, and to anxious about their denomination, and they rush out when they see a man about to give up his sin and return to God, and ask him how he is going to ba baptized, whether by sprinkling or immersion, and what kind of a church he is going to join. Oh! my friends, it is a poor time to talk about Presbyterian catechisms, and Episcopal liturgies, and Methodist lov-feasts and bapt stories to a man that is coming out of the darkness of sin into the glorious light of the Gospel. Why, it reminds me of a mau drowning in the sea, and a lifeboat puts out for him, and the man in the boit says to the man out of the boat: "Now, if I get ashore, are you going to live on my street?' First get him ashore, and then talk about the non-essentials of religion. Who cares what Church he joins, if he only joins Christ and starts for heaven? Oh! you ought to have, my brother, an illuminel face and hearty grip for every one that tries to turn from his evil

way.

Now, I have shown you these obstacles because I want you to understand I know all the difficulties in the way; but I am now to tell you how Hannibal may scale the Alps, and how the shackles may be unriveted, and how the paths of virtue forsaken may be regained. First of all, my brother, throw yourself on God. Go to Him frankly and earnestly, and tell Him these habits you have, and ask Him, if there is any help in all the resources of omnipotent love, to give it to you. Do not go with a long rigmarole people call prayer made up of "ohs," and "ahs," and "for ever and ever, amens." Go to God and cry for help! help! help! and if you cannot cry for help, just look and live. I remember in the late war, I was at Antietam, and I went into the hospitals after the battle, and said to a man : "Where are you hurt?" He made no answer, but held up his arm, swollen and splintered. I saw where he was hurt. The simple fact is, when a man has a wounded soul, all he has to do is to hold it up beforeļa sympathetic Lord and get it healed. It does not take any long prayer. Just hold up the wound. Oh, it is no small thing when a man is nervous and weak and exhausted, coming from his evil ways, to feel that God puts two omnipotent arms around him, and says: "Young man, I will stand by you. The mountains may depart, and the hills be removed, but I will never fail you." And then, as the soul thinks the news is too good to be true, and cannot believe it, and books up in God's face, God lifts His right hand and takes an oath, an affidavit, saying: "As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth." Blessed be God for such a Gospel as this. "Cat the slices thin," said the wife to the husband, "or there will not be enough to go all around for the children; cut the slices thin." Blessed be God, there is a full loaf for every one that wants it! Bread enough and to spare. No thin slices at the Lord's table. I remember when the Master Street Hospital, in Philadelphia, was opened during the war, a telegram came, saying : "There will be three hundred wounded men to-night; be ready to take care of them ;" and from my church there went in some twenty or thirty men and women to look

after these poor wounded fellows. As they came, some from one part of the land, some from another, no one asked whether this man was from Oregon, or from Massachusetts, or from Minnesota, or from New York. There was a wounded soldier, and the only question was how to take off the rags the most gently, and put on the bandage, and administer the cordial.

Then, also, I counsel you, if you want to get back, to quit all your bad associations. One unholy intimacy will fill your soul with mortal distemper. In all the ages of the Church there has not been an instance where a man kept one evil associate and was reformed. Go home, open your desk, take oat letter - paper, stamp and envelope, and then write a letter something like this:

"MY OLD COMPANIONS: I start this day for heaven. Until I am persuaded you will join me in this, farewell."

Then sign your name, and send the letter by the first post. Give up your bad companions, or give up heaven. It is not ten bad companions that destroy a man, nor five bad companions, nor three bad companions, nor two bad companions, but one. What chance is there for that young man I saw along the street, four or five young men with him, halting in front of a gropshop, urging him to go in, he resisting, violently resisting, until after a while they forced him to go in. It was a Summer night and the door was left open. They held him fast, and they put the cup to his lips, and they forced down the strong drink. What chance is there for such a young man?

I counsel you, also, seek Christian advice. Every Christian man is bound to help you. If you find no other human ear willing to listen to your story of struggle, come to me, and I will, by every sympathy of my heart, and every prayer, and every toil of my hand, stand beside you in the struggle for reformation; and as I hope to have my own sins forgiven, and hope to be acquitted at the judgment-seat of Christ, I will not betray you. First of all, seek God; then seek Christian counsel. Gather up all the energies of body, mind and soul, and, appealing to God for success, declare this day everlasting war against all drinking habits, all gaming practices, all houses of siu. Half-and-half work will amount to nothing; it must be a Waterloo. Shrink back now and you are lost. Push on and you are saved. A Spartan general fell at the very moment of victory, bat he dipped his finger in his own blood, and wrote on a rock near which he was dying: "Sparta has conquered." Though your struggle to get rid of sin may seem to be almost a death-struggle, you can dip your finger in your own blood, and write on the Rock of Ages: Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Oh! what glorious news it would be for some of these young men to send home to their parents in the country. They go to the post-office every day or two to see if there are any letters from you. How anxious they are to hear! Nothing would please them half so much as the news you might send home to-morrow, that you had given your heart to God. I know how it is in the country. The night omes on. The catt'e stan 1 under the rack through which burst the trusses of hay. The horses just having frisked up through the meadow at the nightfall, stand knee-deep in the bright straw that invites them to lie down and rest. The perch of the hovel is full of fowl, their feet warm under the feathers. In the old farmhouse at night no candle is lighted, for the flames clap their hands about the great black log, and shake the shadow of the group up and down the wall. Father and mother sit there for half an hour, saying nothing. I wonder what they are thinking of. After a while the father breaks the silence and says: "Well, I wonder where our boy is in town to

night ?" and the mother answers: "In no bad place, I, warrant you; we always could rast him when he was home, and since he has been away there have been so many prayers offered for him, we can trust him still." Then at eight o'clock-for they retire early in the country -at eight o'clock they kneel down and commend you to that God who watches in country and in town, on the land and on the sea.

S me one sail to a Grecian general: "What was the proudest moment of your life?" He thought a moment and said: "The proudest moment of my life was when I sent word home to my parents that I had gained the victory." And the proudest and most brilliant moment in your life will be the moment when you can send word to your parents in the country that you have conq sered your evil babits, by the grace of God, and become eternal victor. Oh! despise not par. nt d auxiety. Tue time will come when you will have neither father nor mother, and you will go round the place where they used to watch and find them gone from the house, and gone from the field, and gone from the neighborhood. Cry as lond for forgiveness as you may over the moun in the churchyard, they will not answer. Dead! Dead! And then you will take out the white lock of hair that was cut from your mother's brow just before they bur.ed her, and you will take the cane with which your father used to walk, and you will think and think, an 1 wish that you had done just as they wanted you to, and would give the world if you had never thrust a pang through their dear old hearts. God pity the young man who has brought disgrace ou bis father's name. God pity the young man who has broken his mother's heart Better if he had never been bornbetter if, in the first hour of his life, instead of being laid against the warm bosom of maternal tenderness, he had been coffined and sepulchred. There is no balm powerful enough to heal the heart of one who has brought parents to a sorrowful grave and who wanders about through the dismal cemetery, rending the hair and wringing the hands, and crying: "Mother! mother!" Ob, that to-day, by all the memories of the past, and by all the hopes of the future, you would yield your heart to God. May your father's God and your mother's God be your God for evər,

LA FONTAINE'S FABLES.

BY ARTHUR TILLEY.

THE interesting, if somewhat child sh, game in which several of our leading statesmen, men of letters, warriors, and schoolmasters recently took part, under the auspices of a London journal, revealed, at any rate, one thing: that our knowledge of the literature of other modern nations is extremely feeble and fragmentary. One conspicuous absentee from the great majority of these lists—I do not, indeed, recollect having seen his name at all-was Li Fontaine. He is, in fact, a notable instance of how entirely, in our estimate of a foreign writer, we are wont to leave out of consideration the verdict of his own countrymen. Our fathers and mothers, perhaps more especially our mothers, had a considerable regard for La Fontaine ; they read him and knew him by heart; and even we of this generation were probably at some period of our existence familiar with "La cigale ayant chanté tout l'été," and "Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché,” though, so far as my experience and recollection serve, we never got further than this threshold of La Fontaine's great building. But when we pass over to La Fontaine's own land, we find a very different state of