'It was my worst, my weakest moment, my own Lucy,' returned Wentworth. 'Death seemed at hand, sometimes even the promises disappeared, and my soul "chose strangling rather than life;" but "the Lord never suffers us to be tempted above that we are able." He made a way to escape.'

THE TOWER OF CONSTANCE.

DURING the atrocious persecution which followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and which at length was only stopped by the universal horror it caused among the mass of the French, the tower of Constance always contained within its walls a considerable number of Protestant women. Huddled together in the two rooms of this tower, where air and light could scarcely penetrate, reduced to the coarsest nourishment, and deprived of the most indispensable conveniences of life they saw the whole course of their miserable existence, waste away without hope or consolation.

We cannot describe the situation of these unhappy people clearer than by giving a sketch of it, as traced by an eye-witness, M. de Boufflers, who visited their prison in the year 1768, when the persecution began to slacken.

'I accompanied,' he says, ' M. D. Beauvau in a survey of the coasts of Languedoc. We reached the tower of Constance by Aiguesmortes. We found a jailor at the entrance of the tower, who after leading us up a dark and winding staircase, opened, with dreadful noise, a great door, on which we might fancy we read the inscription of Dante

'All hope forsake who enter here.'

Colours are wanting to depict a scene to which we were so unaccustomed; it was a hideous but most affecting picture, the interest of which was heightened by disgust. We saw a large round chamber, deprived of air and

light, where fourteen women languished in misery and tears. The governor could scarcely repress his emotion, and, for the first time, doubtless, these poor creatures perceived compassion in a human countenance. I still see them, at his sudden appearance, fall together at his feet, which they drown with their tears, and, attempting to speak, find only sobs. Then, emboldened by our sympathy, they all narrated to us their joint sorrows. Alas! their whole crime was to have been brought up in the religion of Henry IV. The youngest of these martyrs was more than fifty years of age; she was only eight when she was seized, going to hear a sermon with her mother, and the punishment for it still continued.'.

Let us pause a moment to give rein to our imagination over this most disproportionate punishment. Fortytwo years imprisonment for going to hear a sermon ! The criminal only eight years of age at the period of committing the offence! The country where she was imprisoned, and which she was forbidden again to gaze upon, one of the most beautiful in the world! The nation to which she belonged, the liveliest on the face of the earth! What must have been her feelings at eighteen? What at eight-and-forty? I should like a portrait of her; her story touches me. To grow up within sound of the Mediterranean, but never to see it; within reach of the vines and olives of the south, but never to gather a leaf from a tree of any sort, or to feel the blessed influences of earth, and air, and sky! She must have remembered the face of nature, as women remember the face of a father lost in early childhood. It is a vague and shadowy form that affection touches and fills up with its own lines and hues; imperfect it may be and most unlike, but still bright and warm

with reality-with more than reality; for it is an everlasting creation: not an image transmitted by memory, with the light and shade of all earthly things; but a glorious personification of all that is beautiful, and true, and holy in the relationship, safe from cloud or change by season or time. And there was this beloved, this venerated parent, waiting for two-and-forty years outside the prison-door of this poor Frenchwoman, and she, 'fast bound in misery and iron,' cannot cross the threshold.

How precious in the tower of Constance must have been the passages from the Bible, which, no doubt, many of these fourteen women could repeat! That child knew some verses and some hymns most likely. How keenly must they all have fed upon the promises in scripture of protection to those who trust in God, "who will make all things work together for good to those that love him." But how difficult at times must it have been to them to realize the truth of this to their hearts, under their mysterious punishment !

That youngest woman (I cannot forget her) was fifty in 1768, she would then be seventy in 1788. Did she live on to the time when the Most High remembered them?-when He "made inquisition for blood? when prince and noble of the land in which she suffered were swept away like chaff before the wind. But we will not pursue such a subject, neither will we afflict ourselves longer about these fourteen poor women, who would all have died a natural death long before this. They have passed away from the theatre of this world, like the Plantagenets, or the Pharaohs, or the giants before the flood. They have finished their course, and "through much tribulation have entered," we trust, 66 on their rest."

THOUGHTS ON COMING EVENTS.

DID it occur to you that it is not a single person or Pope, who is one of the Antichrists, but the PAPACY? Without entering on the subject of the "many Antichrists," may I say on Rev. xiii. (a most remarkable chapter at this period) that the Power or Potentate on the seat, or throne, given by the dragon, had his whole history in its reverse as to empire, from Dan. vii. ; and adds his wound unto death, followed by a long parenthesis (verses 4-10), which delineates the particulars :-first, the object worshipped-i. e. the dragon, during both the Pagan and the Papal state of the fourth empire, styled the Beast,' also the conduct of its seventh head, from the time the 1260 years began till its close. The BEING who is blasphemed, clearly specified, and no less so, those canonized and made occasions of blasphemy, as robbing the one only Mediator of his rights.

Verse 7 shows that Providence permitted his prevailing war against the saints of Dan. vii., till Daniel's people shall possess the kingdom. What kingdom? surely that described in Dan. ii. 44, 45.

Verse 8 describes the conduct of those who dwell on the earth of all that empire, which engrossed the territories of its predecessors, and assumed universal supremacy; also the success of his pretensions over all but the ELECTION OF GRACE. For, who besides those re