A few nights since we had our attention called to a very pretty spectacle. As it began to grow dark, we observed bonfires lighted in the neighbourhood, and other tokens of festivity. We went to the terrace on the top of the house, which commanded a most extensive view of Mount Lebanon, a view of nearly thirty miles. Along the whole range we could see the bonfires glaring. They looked, on the dark side of the mountain, like stars on the face of the deep blue vault of heaven. I made several attempts to count them; but it was much like counting the stars, which, when a boy, I often attempted to do, but almost always abandoned, before I reached a hundred, from a strange feeling of the difficulty of continuing the enumeration, when the objects lay thus without order. These bonfires were of all sizes, and were often marked by fitful blazes of light, as new fuel was thrown on them. Others would glimmer and expire, while new ones would burst forth, and soon attain to the first magnitude, and then die away, or be subjects of those fitful flashes that indicated the addition of fresh fuel. On inquiry I learned that this was the feast of the Cross, and that these illuminations and bonfires were in commemoration of the finding of the true cross by the Empress Helena. It is said that on her way to Jerusalem she gave orders that preparation should be made that, in case she was successful in finding the cross, the event might be made known by bonfires, and thus the intelligence be communicated to Constantinople. Much of the religion of these people consists in such things. Their fasts--their attending mass--their worshipping and kissing the pictures--keeping the holy days--and counting their beads, constitute the principal part of their religion. As to the pure service of the heart--faith that worketh by love--regeneration by the Spirit--a new moral nature, effected through the word of truth under the agencies of the Holy Spirit, with most if not all the other elements of real genuine piety, they are almost wholly ignorant. It is, indeed, astonishing that a people, who have the book of God in their hands, should so long remain in utter darkness and ignorance of that spirituality which beams forth from all parts of it. This whole region is yet in the dark ages. Let any one who wishes to form a correct idea of the state of things here, read a well-written account of the middle ages--the preliminary dissertation to Robertson's History of Charles the Fifth, and Hallam on the Middle Ages--and he will have before him the leading features of the state of the church and society now found here. The agreement will not, it is true, hold good in all points, but in the main there is a strong family likeness. May the Lord soon raise up reformers!--and may the truth soon go forth as the light, and his revelation as a lamp that burneth! The reformation in Europe was preceded by many things which betokened the coming of day; and there are many things now which bespeak the