render it necessary for our convictions to be very strong, and our sense of obligation to be imperative, before the repugnance we feel to them can be overcome. Again-during the period of time now before us, we may expect to be subjected to the buffetings of Satan. He will annoy, if he cannot injure. He will often suggest hard and unholy thoughts of God; attempt to unsettle the faith and agitate the souls of Christians, and prevent their experiencing the joy of salvation. Doubts as to a personal interest in the Saviour, of our own sincerity, of the correctness of our motives, or of our final perseverance, may very probably be awakened. He will strive to make us misconstrue the providences of God, and to believe that in him we have an angry foe instead of a living and faithful friend. The Christian will find, too, that the remaining depravity of his heart will seek occasion to develope itself. The "old man," although smitten with a deadly stroke, dies not in a moment. Our corrupt nature has a wondrous tenacity of life. Frequently it strives, like a pent-up torrent, to burst those barriers, which an enlightened judgment and awakened conscience have raised up; and the soul often trembles at the tremendous shock of the torrent. Such trials in the history of our spiritual being may be expected. We must not think all danger is past, because we have often triumphed, or that the final conflict is fought, and that now nothing remains to be done but to wreathe the chaplet of a conqueror, and bind it upon our brows, while we chant the songs of victory and gladness. This would assuredly be to give our enemy the advantage over us. We must remember we are yet in the flesh, yet in the country of the foe, where his arm can reach us, and his malignity find room and opportunity for exercise. "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off." "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." Then there is, most probably, before us bodily affliction-it may be death. From the former, exemptions are very rare, and much faith and patience are required to endure it; with respect to the latter, "there is no discharge in that war. It may be, both will pass over us before the year is closed. The brightest eyes that glance at this page may be dimmed in death, before half its months have rolled away. Now, with this solemn thought filling the mind, it is infinitely important, and necessary to the peace of the soul, that we be in a position to meet probable suffering, and, sooner or later, certain death! This preparation, however, can never be regarded as complete, until we "have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us" in the gospel. To all those who have believed in Jesus, renounced sin, and joined themselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten, the exceeding great and precious promises come, "As thy days, so shall thy strength be;" "All things work together for good to them that love God." These assurances will be realised when the trials of life approach, and surround the children of God. All things are under the control and direction of infinite Wisdom, and he suffers not a heavier burden to rest on his people than they can bear. Thus it was with David, when pursued by Saul. On a review of the dealings of the Lord, he could say, "In the day when I cried thou answeredst me, and strengthenedst me with strength in my soul." God will give sensible supports to the trembling spirit, by enabling it to bear what is laid upon it, if he does not remove the cause of affliction. This latter may be sometimes wished, as was the case with Paul, smarting with the " thorn in the flesh;" but God may see fit to continue it, and so, instead of removing, he gives grace to endure. He does not promise there shall be no trials, but he does assure us of support under them. "He shall deliver thee in six troubles; yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee." Christian reader, does not your past experience enable you to corroborate the words of holy writ? Then "trust in the Lord with all thine heart" in the coming year; and, however dark the heavens may be above you, however gloomy the horizon around, let faith raise you above fear. When the conflict is maintained with spiritual adversaries, we may assure ourselves of adequate support, of strength as our day. This conviction is of vast importance-without it we should hesitate and tremble to oppose our weakness to the potency of evil and malignant spirits. The stripling, who met the gigantic Philistine in the valley of Elah, would, by his own strength, have been more able to grapple with the huge foe, than we to war against principalities and powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places, alone. But, like David, we meet an adversary "in the name of the Lord of hosts;" and it will be with a similar issue, "if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end." Our God has provided for us armour for defence, and weapons for our warfare. "Take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand." The Saviour, who sees all that is passing, does not forget us. As for Peter, so for us, he prays that our "faith fail not.' He will be "a very present help in trouble." 'Through God we shall do valiantly." "We are more than conquerors through him that loved us.' And, notwithstanding the strength of the enemy, so long as we are found "looking unto Jesus," we can cry, without presumption, in the exulting language of the apostle, "I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Equally consoling is the promise of God with respect to our sanctification. He will strengthen us with all "might by his Spirit in the inner man," and enable us this year, to crucify, yet more effectually, "the flesh, with its affections and lusts." He has said, "Sin shall not have dominion over you.' The struggle may be severe, as it was with Paul; and often the agonised spirit may exclaim, with him, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" But the same Deliverer is at hand, and the Christian may calm and comfort himself with the reply "I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord." "This is the will of God, even" our "sanctification;" and will he not aid us in our attempts to "perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord?" Let us continue to strive, In the hour of bodily and mental suffering, in the conflict and solemnity of death, he will not leave or forsake us. He has said much on these points to comfort his people. "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee: and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle: upon thee.' Whatever Infinite Wisdom may have ordained concerning us that is painful, and that shall come to pass during the year before us, he will so support and console his people, that they shall cry "It is good for us to be afflicted." "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory ;" and when "heart and flesh fail us, he will be the strength of our heart;" when we "walk through the valley of the shadow of death," we need "fear no evil," for his rod and his staff will comfort us. With what illustrious proofs of supporting grace, under circumstances the most trying, have we been familiar! The naturally timid and fearful have passed over Jordan without the slightest alarm. A voice Divine whispered, "Fear not, for I am with thee," and the confiding spirit replied, "I will fear no evil, for thou art with me." And may not we, if "the children of God, by faith in Christ Jesus," calculate on the same gracious support and consolation? Reader! you may this year die. Do you look forward to that event with apprehension? If you are a believer, if sin be forgiven-and it is to every penitent suppliant who kneels at the cross-what have you to fear? To the Christian, "the king of terrors is the prince of peace." Only let sin be pardoned, and you are secure; let a meetness "to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light" be yours, and if "this year thou shalt die," this year thou shalt be with thy Lord in paradise. Oh let there be a grateful acknowledgment of the past grace and mercy of a sympathising Saviour. By him we have been upheld under dangers and difficulties; for having been "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin," he has been able and willing to succour us when tempted. Mercies received should lead us to hope for fresh mercies. At the commencement of a new year, his gracious voice assures us, As thy days, so shall thy strength be." This is cheering, and we may go forward, confident 66 that our God will "supply all our need, according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus." We can "do all things through Christ which strengtheneth us.' 66 'Hitherto the Lord hath helped us," and "Each sweet Ebenezer we have in review Confirms his good pleasure to help us quite through." Wherefore, comfort one another with these words." It is very probable these pages will meet the eye of an unconverted or undecided person. The past years of your life have been lost to God. Shall this be numbered with the barren and unprofitable ones that are gone? Lo, these many years has the husbandman come, seeking fruit of you, but finding none; and again and again the sentence of extermination would have been pronounced and carried into effect, but mercy and longsuffering have pleaded, and you have been let alone another year. This may bring with it the last day of your life. How shall it be spent? Your hours are numbered. They are hastening to a close. The pall of death may be falling over you; and yet sin is cherished, and Christ is rejected. Oh, redeem the time! A few rays of hope gleam through the thick clouds that are gathering around and above you. Trifle a little longer, and they vanish for ever! "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation." For your guilt you require a sacrifice of atonement. "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." You must be born again of the Spirit of God, or you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Your Father giveth the Holy Spirit to them that ask him. 66 Ask, and ye shall receive." You have enemies who are plotting your destruction. Become a child of God, and you shall overcome them all. Under all circumstances; "in all time of tribulation;" when exposed to dangers near or afar off; in seasons of trouble, spiritual or temporal; if a friend of Christ, this year and all years-" as thy days, so shall thy strength be.” SCOTTISH FISHERMEN. T. A. FEW common things impress the imagination more than an excursion through an agricultural district, with its one or two country towns, to some long-established fishing village. Let us instance, just for the recollections it may awaken, a walk taken through the rich agricul tural district in the neighbourhood of Arbroath, to the fishing village of Achmithie. The fields through which we pass, the farm-steadings, the policies of the proprietary, the cottages, the towns, all bear, not only the stamp of their country, but of their country at the present time. The hand of improvement, like that of a horologe, indicates the hour. The agriculture is Scottish agriculture at its present date-agriculture based on the experiments of a century. The carefully husbanded soil, occupied to the extreme edge of the narrow, wellkept hedges, the long-drawn rectilinear furrows, the rich braird rising in welldefined lines, the absence of choking weeds, the skilfully-arranged steadings, with here and there the tall chimney of a steam-engine rising from their low roofs; the form of the implements employed in tillage; the heaps of drainingtiles, just prepared for laying down; the superior breed of the animals grazing in the fields,—all unite in testifying that the growing necessities of the country-the demand made for larger supplies of food, by its ever-increasing population on the one hand, and for a larger return in the form of rent, by a luxurious proprietary on the other-have called out all the energies of the farmer, and compelled him to press into the service of his profession, whatever in science or art could be rendered available for making two blades grow where only one grew before. Even the farm-servant, though deteriorated, not improved, in character, by the change, bears in his very appearance the impress of the country and of the time. We see that he has become one of the agricultural machines of the new system, and emphatically a hard-working one. In the various towns and villages through which we pass, mechanic labour is busy -we hear from cottage after cottage, in long lines of a quarter of a mile, the ceaseless strokes of the loom, and the monotonous rattle of the shuttle-the cartwright is busy in his shop, and the blacksmith at his forge. Some palefaced weaver-pale, though he lives in the country-may be seen at his window, snatching a hasty glance of his favourite newspaper or magazine, acquainting himself with what Parliament is doing, or what is perhaps more likely-for the chance is that he is a Radical, if not a Chartist---with what Parliament ought to be doing, but what it does not. There sally, by some urchin armed with a dried tangle from the beach. There is nothing particularly malicious intended by the young savages, whose amazing number, in proportion to that of the grown inhabitants of the place, seems, so far as it is real, to be a result, as in Ireland, of the early marriages common to the class, and in the degree in which it is merely apparent to the want of a school, to shut up from the sight, at least, the teachable portion of them. They are all before us, in one noisy, frolicsome mob are comparatively few children in the lanes; but we may hear, as we pass by, the murmur of the village school. The great machine of society is everywhere at work; for the age is peculiarly one in which it cannot afford to stand still. But, while the physical powers of the community are thus employed, the mental faculties, save in a few hapless instances, do not stand still; there is more reading, though perhaps not of the most ennobling kind, than at any former period, and much more political discussion; newspapers and magazines are multiplied far not at all devoid, apparently, of that beyond precedent, and single literary proud sense of superiority so natural to journals possess more readers than com- the wild man everywhere, which employs, posed the whole reading portion of as its proper language in such circumBritain and Ireland, when estimated by stances, the rough practical joke, the Burke, little more than eighty years ago. jeering laugh, the prompt nickname. But The face of the country, and the appear- how striking the contrast between these ance and occupation of the inhabitants-embryo fishermen of the village and their the jealously fenced policy of the proprietor, with its lettered board, denunciatory of pains and penalties against the intruder-not less than the ceaseless clatter of treddles from the low-walled tenements which line the wayside, are characteristic of the Scottish race in their present stage of development, and of the relations which the various classes among them bear to each other. The wayfarers we meet are all Scottish,-the gentleman farmer on his sleek riding horse, or with his family in his drosky; the Secession minister, returning on foot from a catechising; the unemployed journeyman, seeking work with his kit of tools slung over his shoulder; the cottager's wife, in her Sunday gown, bearing her basket of eggs to the market. But we descend towards the cliffs, and enter the straggling fisher village, with its ranges of dingy cottages, and its corresponding ranges of fishy dunghills, heaped high with shells, and sprinkled over with broken tufts of arboraceous zoophytes and fragments of mutilated star-fish. What first strikes the eye, if indeed the ear be not first saluted, is the vast number of ragged children, far beyond the proportion of other villagesdressed up, the boys in their father's cast-off jackets, the girls in their mother's petticoats-and all uproarious, acute, quizzical, and mischievous. They gather around the stranger, full of practical joke and fun; if he chances to be mounted on horseback, there are attempts made to scare the animal, by shaking under its nose a breadth of superfluous jacket, or by some bold blow, dealt at a sudden grave sires! The imperturbably demure tabby, never beguiled into a single frolic, does not less resemble the vivacious kitten, all activity and play. There is a staid, slow-moving noiselessness about the grown men, that belongs to no other class in Britain. Despite of the short blue jacket and glazed hat, it is impossible to mistake them for sailors. The sailor, instinct with a spirit of enjoyment, for his days spent on shore are holidays,-and trained of necessity to maintain a strict watch, that takes cognizance of everything, is quick in his motions, and proverbially observant; whereas the whole air of the fisherman speaks of a sluggish, inert, incurious gravity, that seems apathetically indifferent to every object around him. Even when employed in repairing his nets, or baiting his lines, his motions appear rather automatical than the efforts of volition. But in order rightly to transfer his peculiarities of mien and aspect, one would require rather the calotype than the pen. We know no instances in which they have been rendered with half such truthfulness of effect, as in Mr. Hill's exquisite calotypes of our Frith of Forth fishermen ; and it is a fact curiously illustrative of the supposed foreign character of the class, that these pictures, pencilled by the agency of light, without exaggeration or error, always remind the connoisseur, not of the productions of the British, but of the Dutch school. The figures seem invariably those of Dutch fishermen, as drawn by Ostade or Teniers. The women of the village we have come to visit, are found, like its adult male inhabitants and its children, to have a character of their own. The sex occupy among the fisher population a much more prominent place than the humbler women of the country generally. We find them busied at the out-door employments of the fishermen, preparing the solution of tan with which he imparts durability to his net yarns, or weaving, or preparing the nets themselves, or bringing from the shore the shell-fish with which he baits his lines, or engaged in transferring the naked mollusca to the hook, or setting out to market with a load of fish on their back. Their employments are slavish, but not so their position in the community. They form the agents through which all its sales are effected-its men of business, who occupy the important place between the class who produce, and the classes who consume, and through whose hands all the money of the village must pass. And hence, apparently, the well-marked energy in their physiognomy and action, which contrasts so strongly with the staid and silent gravity of their husbands and brothers. The women, like the men of the village, bear a peculiar air, the blended result of the character of their vestments, and of their robust and active frames, strongly developed by their masculine labours. The petticoat, shortened to adapt it to their laborious employments, especially to the gathering of shell-fish, and the digging up the sand-worm for bait, amid the wet sands of the ebb, falls, as in many of the nations of the Continent, only a little below the knee, and imparts to them a foreign look. Their love, too, of flaring colours-stripes of the broadest and brightest, flaunting calicos, and gay napkins, adds further peculiarity to their costume. Among the many thousands who crowded from all parts of the country to Edinburgh, two years ago, to see the queen, her majesty singled out, as strikingly different in appearance from any of the others, the fisherwomen of Musselburgh and Newhaven. There is a picturesqueness in the accompaniments of the picture-in the backgrounds, which relieve the various groups of figures, that greatly deepens the general impression; -the rude and not overclean huts, little touched by the improvements of centuries-the various rude implements of the profession scattered in front-the nets hanging in brown wreaths from the horizontal pole-the large oblong baskets with their coiled lines in the centre, and bearing their adroitly-baited hooks ranged in triple tiers on the edge-the pile of spare oars-the spread sail the huge pot of boiling tan, sending up its seething steam in the sunshine from some quiet recess; and away in the distance, under the shadow of the overhanging cliffs, the boats of the community drawn up high on the beach. What mainly strikes in such a survey, after we have first marked the external peculiarities, is the stationary character of the fisherman, compared with that of all the other working men of the country. There have been scarcely any improvements in the profession of the white-fisher for centuries. His circle of art is the identical circle of his great-grandfather, who plied his lines and nets when, according to Goldsmith, the herring-fishery employed all Grub-street; he is acquainted with exactly the same fishing banks, and exactly the same phenomena of tides and winds; he sails in a boat of the same rude construction, and employs implements that have undergone no change. His modes of thinking, too, have remained as stationary as his profession. In these times of general reading, there are not many fishing communities in Scotland that receive their magazine, or newspaper. The news of the day reaches them at but second-hand, or reaches them not at all; but, as if in some sort to make amends, we may find among them more of the worn-out prejudices and opinions of the past-in some instances more of its obsolete language even, than anywhere else. The superstitions of a district die last among its fishermen. If one wishes to acquaint oneself better than by books with the modes of thinking, and the degree of culture which characterised our common people, ere the Reformation had given the country its parish and grammar schools, or theological truth agitated and exercised. the popular mind, the fisher communities of our coasts may be found the best possible spheres of observation. They are isolated fragments of the past, carried down to the present, on the current of time, like sheets of ice, river-borne to the sea, from some inland lake, that continue to bear, amid the brine in their frozen folds, the reeds, and heaths, and mosses, that had congregated around. them in the far distant scene, in which they first acquired form and consistence. Whatever illustrates the formation of character by exhibiting the influence of the agencies, physical and moral, whose |