So would I speak, brethren, to you and to myself at this time. Assuredly God’s visitation is upon us. It may be all favour like Job’s trials, nothing may have provoked His wrath, He may simply be fitting us for and leading us on to greater blessedness. (We shall hardly, however, persuade ourselves that we are so righteous in His sight!) It may be loving correction, meant to make us abandon certain paths that lead downwards out of His favour. Or it may be wrath that can no longer spare the guilty. From what we know of ourselves, brethren, do we not fancy that there is a probable explanation of it all, in the growing contempt for God’s sanctions and restrictions in our law-making (as for instance in the marriage laws) in the wide-spreading persuasion that all that happens on earth can be accounted for without supposing the intervention or even the existence of a God, in the self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-laudation which characterise us in our living only for time and for ourselves? What is needed, then, is that we should turn indeed to God, that we should see and acknowledge His hand in all our circumstances, that we should live under His rule and by His laws, that we should _exhibit_ His rule and proclaim His praise, and spread far and wide His glory; that we should feel that we exist for these ends; that, if we forget God’s purposes respecting us, we must expect Him to remind us of them in the ways He has ever followed; that, if we frustrate His purposes, He will most surely visit us with His wrath. This, my brethren, is our Nation’s duty, and its several parts are ours to do. Let each of us then set about examining ourselves; and, trying to discern what _in us_ provokes God’s visitation, let us humble ourselves before Him on account of it and repent of it, and resolve to forsake it, and ask for grace to do so; let us pray to Him to make us think and speak and move henceforth in the remembrance that, in Him, we have our being; that He is our God, and we are His people. * * * * * * * * * * PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET. THE LITERARY CHURCHMAN, NOW PERMANENTLY ENLARGED AND UNDER A NEW EDITORSHIP. PUBLISHED EVERY ALTERNATE SATURDAY. Price 4d.; by post 5d. Sent free by Post for One Year for TEN SHILLINGS. * * * * * A SPECIMEN NUMBER WILL BE SENT ON RECEIPT OF POSTAGE STAMPS. * * * * * THE ‘Literary Churchman’ is the only Church periodical which does for Churchmen what the ‘Athenæum,’ the ‘Reader,’ and the ‘Saturday Review’ do for their respective classes of supporters, with special reference—