and

you will see little reason to be lifted up with any thing."

Again, "Thirdly, the effectual and constant sense of our frailty will quicken us to provide for death and for another world. He can scarce avoid this, who ever looks upon himself as a dying man. . Can any one be so hardy as to think of launching forth into the other world, of entering upon eternity, before he hath made his peace with God by a conquest over his evil habits, obtained an interest in Christ by practising his laws, and some comfortable evidences of the forgiveness of his sins? The serious apprehensions of death will, if any thing will do it, awaken his conscience, rouse up his drowsy soul, and make him seriously thoughtful and solicitous about his eternal concernments. One great cause of the deep slumber and desperate carnal security of most men,―of this wretched neglect of the salvation which Christ in his Gospel offers, and of putting off from day to day the one great business of making their peace with God, and securing the welfare of their immortal soulsof all this the principal cause is, that they put far from them the evil day, and either think not upon death at all, or think of it at a great distance." A sermon upon the crucifixion, the burden of which is, to set on a broader basis of reason and common sense the doctrine of atonement, has the following beginning and conclusion, which if they be original, bespeak a more ranting strain of preaching than he

usually indulged in:-" Who is this that cometh with dyed garments from Bozrah-who is this that cometh from Edom? He that beareth our griefs and carrieth our sorrows-that was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities; that appeaseth the vengeance of an incensed God and taketh away the sin of a condemned world. Sacrifice and burnt offering thou wouldst no longer have-then said I, lo, I come to preach the glad tidings of salvation and seal them with my blood. I come to lay down my life a ransom for many, and offer myself an oblation for the sin of the whole world. It was not enough that the Son of God should take upon him our nature, but that he should share our sufferings too. It was not enough that he should be born to teach, but that he should die to redeem his people -it was not enough that he should die, but that he should give himself to the death of the cross. might all nature sympathize with her expiring Lord -well might darkness overspread the land, and the veil of the temple be rent in twain. The sun saw this and fled, the earth quaked for fear. What aileth thee, O thou sun, that thou fleddest, and thou earth, that thou quakest for fear? The Lord of life endureth death-he who could have summoned the host of heaven to his aid yielded up his soul an offering for sin, and boweth his sacred head upon the cross. This, my brethren, is the great mystery of godliness-this the amazing spectacle of mercy, which the return of this season invites us to." Towards

Well

the conclusion of the same-" Ill fated Jews, well might our Saviour say, thou knewest not what thou didst when thou crownedst with thorns the King of Heaven-thou knewest not when thou inflictedst those stripes by which thou thyself wast healed-thou knewest not when thou laidst the cross upon him, who bore it for thy sake-thou knewest not that it was his death, which was to give light and immortality to thee that piercedst his side-when thou shouldst behold again thy Saviour and thy judge."

Be these sermons whose or what they may, the only effusion to be found at all like them is one of a much later date, and written in a fair hand, in which amongst much rather common-place matter, on the Christian's hopes, with a text from Heb. ii. 15, "And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage;" is the following passage, which is given as a specimen of his attempts at pulpit eloquence; for if this sermon be not his own, it was certainly preached.-"How for example was it with the Apostles, with the primitive converts of the religion, which yet is the same religion, and still offers the same hopes? When we see the first followers of the faith of Christ relinquish their pleasures and renounce their indulgences, exchanging a life of sensuality and voluptuousness, for abstinence, mortification, and self-denial, ease and security for pain and danger-when we see this, we see the power of Christianity to lift the human soul above the world in which we live: but when we

see those disciples of a crucified Lord, following their Master through sufferings and death, when we see them set at defiance the most cruel tortures that barbarity could exercise or ingenuity contrive; lingering in the agonies of death, yet saluting their destiny with songs of triumph, and breathing out their souls in thanksgivings to God, who had accounted them worthy to be partakers of the sufferings of Christ; from this spectacle we learn what faith can do. O faith! thou guardian of a Christian's virtue, thou source and fountain of all his joys, thou balm that healest the ills of life-thou beam that lightest us through the vales of death-by thee we quench the darts of Satan-by thee we surmount the terrors of the grave-by faith with confidence we have access to God. If then these persecuted champions of the Christian faith not only supported death with fortitude when unavoidable, but submitted to a voluntary martyrdom; shall we find the same faith unable to sustain our fortitude in the hour of quiet and natural decease? They met a violent and untimely fate, inflicted by incensed and barbarous enemies; we expect our departure, when God in his own good time shall command us to pass through a peaceable change to a better existence. They wrestled with the waves on splinters of the wreck-we sail on to the shore on beams of cedar." He himself says in one of his charges, "that in most men genius is ripe before judgment. It opens with the bloom of youth, and sometimes does not survive it. On the contrary,

the judgment seldom attains its maturity till much later. Being in a great measure the fruit of experience, it is of slow growth, and is in a state perhaps of constant progress at best, so long as the powers of the understanding remain entire. He therefore who addresses himself to any species of composition in the earlier part of his life, comes to it with the advantage of a fertile and glowing imagination, but often with great imbecility or unsoundness of judgement. Any man who recollects his early compositions will be sensible of this." This florid style, however, is to be received as so far from the usual character of his compositions, that it rather leads to the conclusion, either that he was not in the habit of preaching much on his first taking orders, or that he copied many of them from his senior curate, which has sometimes been hinted, or that he altered his mode of composing them. In the university he had been considered rather more original than eloquent in the pulpit, but sufficiently attractive to draw the attention of both the old and young members of the university. In the college vacation, on coming among his friends he preached with great effect to crowded congregations in the church of his village; and notwithstanding the ease with which such popularity is gained in such a neighbourhood by a man already much admired, yet it was said even then, that he was never well or thoroughly known, till he was heard from the pulpit. But from the date of his taking upon him the more active duties of a clergyman, to the end of his life, his