an intense reality; the soul of every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth had an endowment of immortality; they were precious to the Redeemer, they ought, therefore, to be precious to all the followers of the Redeemer. Charged with these truths, their spirits inflamed to a holy enthusiasm by them, from parlours and drawing-rooms, from the lowly homes and cottages of England, all these new professors appeared to be in search of occasions for doing good; the schemes worked themselves through all the varieties of human temperament and imperfection; but, looking back, it must surely be admitted that they achieved glorious results. [Illustration: John Thornton. ] If the reader, impressed by veneration, should make a pilgrimage to Clapham Common, and inquire from some one of the oldest inhabitants which was the house in which John Shore, the great Lord Teignmouth, the first President of the Bible Society, lived, his soul within him might be a little vexed to be informed that yonder large building at the extreme corner of the common, the great Roman Catholic Redemptionist College, is the house. There, were canvassed and brooded over a number of the schemes to which we have referred. Thither from his own house, close to the well-known “Plough”—its site now covered by suburban shops—went the great Zachary Macaulay, sometimes accompanied by his son, a bright, intelligent lad, afterwards known as Thomas Babington Macaulay. John Shore had been Governor of India, at Calcutta. On the common resided also, for some time, William Wilberforce. These were the great statesmen who were desirous of organising great plans, from which the consummating prayer of David in the 72nd Psalm should be realised. Then there was another house on the common, the mansion of John Thornton, which seemed to share with that of Lord Teignmouth the honours of these Divine committees of ways and means. Before the establishment of the Bible Society, Mr. Thornton had been in the habit of spending two thousand pounds a year in the distribution of Bibles and Testaments—a very Bible Society in himself. It is, perhaps, not too much to say, there was scarcely a thought which had for its object the well-being of the human family but it found its representation and discussion in those palatial abodes on Clapham Common. There were Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson; thither, how often went cheery old John Newton, to whom, first of all, on arriving in London, went every holy wayfarer from the provinces, wayfarers who soon found their entrance beneath his protecting wing, and cheery introduction to these pleasant circles. Beneath the incentives of his animating words, the fervid earnestness of Claudius Buchanan found its pathway of power, and _The Star of the East_—his great sermon on “Missions to India,”—was first seen shining over Clapham Common; and it was the same genial tongue which encouraged that fine, but almost forgotten man, John Campbell, in the enterprise of