WE have just come across the following note in The Watchword, the able anti-union magazine of old-time. The extract is from the late Dr. Guthrie—not a safe guide in several things—yet here he directs attention, in felicitous language, to something worthy of our consideration at the present crisis in the churches :—“The water is purest at its fountain among the mountains, where it gushes cold from the rock, or bubbles up at the mossy spring ; the nearer to the source the clearer is the spring. By every mill it rolls, it grows in volume ; till the streamlet, which a child could leap, fed by many tributaries, has swollen into a broad river, on whose bosom, as it nears the sea, fishermen shoot their nets, and the ships of nations ride. But what the water has acquired in depth and breadth, it has lost in purity, growing the muddier the further it goes. How like to what happens with Churches,—which, as they become larger, usually become more loose in doctrine, and more lax in discipline. With an increase of numbers, they often present such an increase of corruptions, that to find the purest days of many a sect we must turn our steps backward to the period of its rise.”