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society in Vanity Fair holding it in such esteem that the persecution of Faithful was now thought to be the greatest disgrace that had ever befallen the inhabitants. The cage, in which the Pilgrims were once confined as madmen, was now never used, and some said that it had been broken in pieces, but others said that it had been consecrated for church purposes, and put under the cathedral, in a deep cell, from which it might again be brought forth, if occasion required it. The old Lord of the Fair also, seeing how things were going on, now very seldom came thither in person, and was well content, it is

said, to have the people appoint for their mayors and judges persons who had either been Pilgrims themselves or greatly favoured that part of the population.

"There was another very singular thing, that had happened in process of time; for a part of the Pilgrims who remained in Vanity Fair began to visit the cave of Giant Pope, which, you remember, lay at no great distance from the town, so, instead of going farther towards the Celestial City, there became a fashionable sort of pilgrimage to that Cave. They brushed up the Giant, and gave him medicines to alleviate the hurts from those bruises which he had received in his youth; and to make the place pleasanter, they carefully cleared away the remains of the bones and skulls of burned Pilgrims, and planted a large enclosure with flowers and evergreens.

"When this was done, they even denied that there had ever been any such cruelties practised, as were demonstrated by the bones, when Christian and Faithful passed by. The Cave also they adorned, and let in just so much light upon it, as made it appear romantic and sacred, so that some Pilgrims, who came at first only to see the ceremonies, were so much attracted by them as to join in them.

"What greatly aided to render this pilgrimage fashionable, was a large saloon erected about half-way between Vanity Fair and the Cave, where much good society from Vanity Fair were accustomed to stop for refreshment and social converse, where also they had little hermitages and altars, and a certain intoxicating refreshment, called, Tracts for the Times, the effect of which was to make them feel, while pursuing their way to the Cave, as if they were stepping towards heaven. It was said also that there was an underground passage all the way between this Cave and the Cathedral, of which I have spoken, in Vanity Fair, where the twelve apostles CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 104.

were sculptured in stone, and the Cage was secreted; but this passage I never examined.

"Is this a true or false report of some among many things that might be named in the state of society, and the reputation of the Christian pilgrimage now, in Vanity Fair? We will leave conscience to answer this question."

This extract will shew that Dr. Cheever writes with great ability; but not less that he has imbibed strong prejudices which utterly preclude his doing justice to Episcopalians or to National Church Establishments. He confounds good and evil; use and abuse; and the unfair and sarcastic manner in which he speaks of institutions which we believe to be scriptural and of inestimable value, renders much of his volume repellant to our judgment and our feelings. He has spoiled an excellent and interesting book by this miserable spirit of American democracy ;-a spirit utterly opposed to that of the noble-minded Bunyan. We will not, however, stop to jar with him upon these topics; but will do our readers the better service of extracting some miscellaneous passages which will present many edifying remarks, and well reward perusal.

"The Christian life is represented as a race, a work, a labour, a conflict, a warfare. It needs a strong, constant, unwavering purpose, along with the constant, ever present omnipotent grace of God. God is one all in all. Christ's strength must be made perfect in our weakness. So David says, I will run in the way of thy commandments when thou shalt enlarge my heart.' Here is the purpose, I will run;' here is the way, thy commandments;' here is the soul's dependence, when thou shalt enlarge my heart;' and here is the source of power, the grace of God in the heart, in the deep heart. To this Paul answers, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you, both to will and to do.' Blessed harmony of God's working and man's working, of God's grace and man's obedience!

"The Pilgrim's Progress is constructed throughout on this divine harmony, never losing sight of either side of 3 T

the arrangement. So must our indivi-
dual progress through life, in grace, be
of the same divine harmony, a perpetual
strife on our part, and God striving in
us. So says Paul of this progress in his
own person,
'Whereunto I also labour,
striving according to his working, which
worketh in me mightily.' When these
two things are kept together, then there
is joy, joy even amidst great trials and
discouragements. Because we are cast
down, it is not necessary to be destroyed;
and the same Apostle who says, 'Re-
joice in the Lord alway,' says also, with
Barnabas, who was the son of consola-
tion, that we must through much tri-
bulation enter into the kingdom of God.'

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"In all things we are brought to Christ, and thrown upon him; and this is the sweet voice of the Pilgrim's Progress, as of the gospel, 'Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' One consolation amidst our distresses is this, that 'we have not an High Priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us, therefore, come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.' And unto Him that is able to keep us from falling, and to present us faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen." "Let me say a word in regard to that work, Grace Abounding, from which I have drawn my illustrations of Divine Providence and grace in Bunyan's life. I cannot close without recommending it to the very careful perusal of all who would have a deeper relish and more thorough understanding of the beauties of the Pilgrim's Progress. It is a marvellous book, and cannot but be a precious book to every soul that reads it with a sober, prayerful spirit. Its pages are, next to the Pilgrim's Progress, invaluable. It is condensed, severe, and naked in its style, beneath the pent fire of Bunyan's feelings, and the pressure of his conscience, forbidding him to seek for beauty. He says of it himself; I could have stepped into a style much higher than this, in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than I have seemed to do; but I dare not. God did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me, wherefore I may not play in relating of them; but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. He that liketh it, let him receive it; and he that doth not, let him produce a better.'

The very extreme plainness of this work adds to its power; never was the inward life of any being depicted with more vehement and burning language; it is an intensely interesting description of the workings of a mind of the keenest sensibility and most fervid imagination, convinced of guilt, and fully awake to all the dread realities of eternity.

"Sometimes, with all its plainness and solemnity, it is almost comic. like Luther's own humour, as in the dialogues of Bunyan's soul with the Tempter. It possesses, indeed, the elements of a great spiritual drama. The Faust of Goethe is not to be compared with it for truth and depth and vividness. There are but few actors, but those how solemn, how grand, how awful! An immortal spirit, and its great adversary the devil, are in almost unceasing conflict; but such a stamp of reality, such discrimination. such flashing of lights, such crossing of the swords of Michael and of Satan, such a revelation of the power of divine truth, and of the blessed ministration of the Spirit of God, you can find nowhere else out of the Bible. It is a great battle: heaven and hell are contending; you have the gleam of armour, the roar of artillery, fire and smoke and blood-red vapour, in which ofttimes the combatants themselves are lost from your view.

"You follow with intense interest the movements of Bunyan's soul. You seem to see a lonely bark driving across the ocean in a hurricane. By the flashes of the lightning you can just discern her through the darkness, plunging and labouring fearfully in the midnight tempest, and you think that all is lost; but there again you behold her in the quiet sunshine; or the moon and the stars look down upon her, as the wind breathes softly; or in a fresh and favourable gale she flies across the flying waters. Now it is clouds and rain and hail and rattling thunder, storms coming down as sudden, almost, as the lightning; and now again her white sails glitter in heaven's light, like an Albatros in the spotless horizon. The last glimpse you catch of her, she is gloriously entering the harbour, the haven of eternal rest; yea, you see her like a star, that in the morning of eter nity dies into the light of Heaven. Can there be any thing more interesting, than thus to follow the perilous course of an immortal soul, from danger to safety, from conflict to victory, from temptation to triumph, from suffering to blessedness, from the City of Destruction to the City of God!

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Bunyan's genius I had almost said was created by his piety; the fervour and depth of his religious feelings form

ed its most important elements of power, and its materials to work upon. His genius also pursued a path dictated by his piety, and one that no other being in the world ever pursued before him. The light that first broke through his darkness was light from heaven. It found him, even that being who wrote the Pilgrim's Progress, coarse, profane, boisterous, and almost brutal. It shone before him, and with a single eye he followed it, till his native City of Destruction could no longer be seen in the distance, till his moral deformities fell from him, and his garments became purity and light. The Spirit of God was his teacher; the very discipline of his intellect was a spiritual discipline; the conflicts that his soul sustained with the powers of darkness were the very sources of his intellectual strength.

"Southey called the experience of this man, in one stage of it, a burning and feverish enthusiasm. The poet Cowper, in one of his beautiful letters to Lady Hesketh, after describing his own feelings, remarks, 'What I have written would appear like enthusiasm to many, for we are apt to give that name to every warm affection of the mind in others, which we have not experienced in ourselves." It would have been the truth, as well as the better philosophy, if Southey had said that the Spirit of God was preparing Bunyan, by that severe discipline, to send forth into the world the Pilgrim's Progress."

"All on earth is shadow, and all in heaven is substance. Truly as well as feelingly did Burke exclaim, 'What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue !' We are encompassed by shadows and flitting apparitions and semi-transparencies, that wear the similitude of greatness, only because they are near us, and interposed between our vision and the world of eternal reality and light. Man of the world! you know not what poetry is, till you know God, and can hail in every created thing the manifestation of omnipresent Deity! Look at the highest creations of the art, and behold how they owe their power over the human soul to the presence of the idea of that Being, the thought of whom transfigures the movements of the imagination with glory, and makes language itself almost divine! The truths that man is fallen, exposed because of sin to the just indignation of God, in peril of his soul for ever, the object of all the stupendous histories and scenes of revelation recorded in the Bible, surrounded by dangers, and directed how to avoid them, pointed to Heaven, and told what to do that he may enter there, and watched in all his

course with anxiety by heavenly spirits, do, rightly considered, throw round every spiritual movement a thrilling, absorbing interest! an interest, for the individual who knows and feels it personally, too deep and awful, till he is in a place of safety, to be the subject of poetry. It was not amidst his distressing conflicts with the enemy, when it seemed as if his soul would be wrested from his body, that a thought of the Pilgrim's Progress came in upon the Author's mind. It was when the Fiend had spread his dragon wings and fled for ever, and the hand came to him with leaves from the Tree of Life, and the presence of God gladdened him, and on the mountain summit, light shone around him, and a blessed prospect stretched before him, with the Celestial City at its close, that that sweet vision rose upon his view. To the Pilgrim, looking back from a safe resting-place, all the way is fraught with poetical recollections and associations. His imagination now sees a spiritual life full of beauty. In the new light that shines upon him, he loves to retrace it again and again, and to lift his hands in grateful, speechless wonder at the unutterable goodness of the Lord of the Way. He is like Jacob, sleeping in the open air of Padan-aram, and dreaming of heaven. Angels of God are ascending and descending continually before his sight. His are no longer

the

"Blank misgivings of a creature,

Moving about in worlds not realized,' but the rejoicings of a weary Pilgrim, on whose forehead the mark of Heaven has been placed, and who sees close at hand his everlasting rest. Once within the strait gate, and in the holy confidence of being a Pilgrim bound from the City of Destruction to the City of Immanuel, and all past circumstances of trial or danger, or of unexpected relief and security, wears a charmed aspect. Light from a better world shines upon them. Distance softens and lends enchantment to the view. Proof from experience, as well as warnings from above, show how many dangerous places he has passed, how many concealed and malignant enemies were here and there lying in ambush around him, and in how many instances there were hair-breadth escapes from ruin. There were the Slough of Despond, the fiery darts at the entrance to the Wicket Gate, the hill of Difficulty, that pleasant arbour where he lost his roll of assurance, the lions that so terrified him, when in the darkness of evening he could not see that they were chained; there was that dark valley of the Shadow of Death, and that

dread conflict with Apollyon before it. There were those fearful days and nights passed in the Dungeon of the Castle of Giant Despair, and the joyful escape from his territories. There were the Land Beulah, and the Delectable Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground, and all the glimpses of the Holy City, not dream-like, but distinct and full of glory, breaking in upon the vision, to last in the savour of them, for many days and nights of the blessed pilgrimage! Ingenious Dreamer, who could invest a life of such realities with a colouring so full of Heaven!”

"Let us see another material, which Satan's devilish ingenuity had to work upon in Bunyan's composition, indeed in the very constitution of all our minds. There is a morbid disposition in the mind, when in an anxious state, or under great trials, to fasten upon any evil imagination, or conjecture, or suggestion which it dreads greatly, and to clasp it as it were, and to hold to it. There is a sort of feverish state of the mind, which holds these phantasms, as a fever does in the body. In such a state, evil suggestions, though rejected, have a most horrible pertinacity in cleaving to the mind; and the more the mind dreads them, and tries to avoid them, the more palpable they become. They really seem like fiends pursuing the soul, shouting over the shoulder, hissing in the ear. And I say the more direct and intense efforts a man makes to reject and avoid them, the more palpable and fiend-like they be

come.

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upon Bunyan the hell of his own soul more fully than ever he did upon any other mortal. Certainly, he made use of this morbid self-reproaching disposition of Bunyan's mind to the utmost. He plied him, vexed him, overwhelmed him with devilish suggestions, well knowing that Bunyan would start from them as if an adder stung him, and yet that they would possess a sort of fascinating, icy, paralyzing power, like that which dwells in the eye of a rattle-snake. Now, if Bunyan could but have had his attention turned away from the eye of the temptations, from the face of the Tempter, from the point of almost morbid lunacy, as it were, the horrid charm would be broken. If at this time Bunyan's mind could have been strongly arrested and filled by a presentation of Christ crucified, Satan would have found himself quite unnoticed, and all his temptations unnerved; but he succeeded in getting the morbid attention of Bunyan fixed on himself, and his own detestableness and diabolical malignity and blasphemy, and then he could fasten his serpent's fangs in him, and nothing but Christ by his word and Spirit ever did or could deliver him.

"In regard to these temptations, Bunyan was sometimes just like a scared child, that thinks it sees a ghost, or like a timid person in a wood by twilight, that sees in the stump of a tree a man couched and lying in wait, and instead of daring to go boldly up to it, to see what it is, stands shivering and almost dead with terror. Who has not realized this in his own experience, timid or brave? And just so, Bunyan did not dare to go up to, and examine and look in the face, the shocking blasphemies, accusations, and wrathful passages, that Satan would be ever thrusting into his soul; but went cowering and shivering, and bowed down as a man in chains under the weight of them. There was a time when all that Satan said to him be seemed morbidly inclined to take upon trust; and if it were a fiery passage of God's word, so much the worse; for instead of coming up to it as a child of God to see what it was, and whether it were really against him, he fled from it at once, as from the fiery, flaming sword in the gate to Eden. And nothing can be more curious, more graphic, more affecting in its interest, more childlike in its simplicity, than the manner in which Bunyan describes the commencement and progress of his recovery out of this state of condemnation and terror; how timidly and cautiously, and as it were, by stealth, he began to look these dreadful passages in the face, when they "It would seem as if Satan disgorged had ceased pursuing him; standing at

This is in part our very constitution, in the memory as well as imagination; for, let a man try to forget any dreadful thing, of which he hates the remembrance, and the more he tries to forget it, the more surely he remembers it, the more he bodies it forth, and every thrust he makes at it causes it to glare up anew, reveals some new horror in it. Doubt less, this peculiarity in our mental constitution is destined to play a most terrific part in the punishment of men's sins in eternity; for there can be nothing so dreadful as the remembrance of sin, and nothing which men will strive with more intense earnestness to hide from and forget, than the recollection of their sins; and yet every effort they make at such forgetfulness only gives to such sins a more terrible reality, and makes them blaze up in a more lurid light to the conscience. Oh, if they could but be forgotten! But the more intense is the earnestness of this wish, the more impossible becomes the forgetfulness, the more terrible the dreadful evil stands out.

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first afar off, and gazing at them, and then, as a child, that cannot get rid of its fears, slowly drawing near, and at length daring to touch them, and to walk around them, and to see their true position and meaning, but always conscious of their awful power."

"How is it possible, it might have been asked, that this illiterate man, familiar with none of the acknowledged models of his native tongue, can have acquired a style which its most skilful and eloquent masters might envy, for its artless simplicity, purity, and strength! It was because his soul was baptized by the Spirit of God in its native idioms; because he was familiar as no other man of his age was, with the model, the very best model of the English tongue in existence, our common English Bible! Yes! that very Bible, which some modern infidel reformers would exclude from our schools, and from its blessed place of influence over the hearts and minds of our children! The fervour of the poet's soul, acting through the medium of such a language as he learned from our common translation of the scriptures, has produced some of the most admirable specimens in existence, of the manly power and familiar beauty of the English tongue. There are passages even in the Grace Abounding, which for fervidness and power of expression might be placed side by side with any thing in the most admired authors, and not suffer in the comparison. Now here are great lessons for all our minds. We say to every young man, whose intellectual as well as moral habits are now formed, Do you wish to gain a mastery over your native language in its earliest, purest, freshest idioms, and to command a style, in which you may speak with power to the very hearts of the people? Study your Bible;

your English Bible; study it with your feelings, your heart, and let its beautiful forms of expression entwine themselves around your sensibilities, your very habits of thinking, no more to be separated from them, than sensibility and thought itself can be separated from your existence. We stand in amazement at the blessed power of transfiguration which the Bible possesses for the human intellect. And yet we are not amazed, for the Bible is the voice of God, and the words of the Bible are the words of God, and he who will give himself up to them, who will feed upon them, and love them, and dwell amidst them, shall have his intellect and his soul transfigured with glory and blessedness by them."

"There were many things which may constitute a Valley of the Shadow of Death to the believer. There may be such an array of external evils as to do this. Sickness, poverty, want like an armed man, desertion and loss of friends, the disappointment and failure of all natural hopes and sources of enjoyment, the utter destruction of all schemes of usefulness and plans of life, the triumphing of the wicked, and the apparent prostration of the cause of God; all these things, or any of them, may almost overwhelm the soul, and be to it as a death-darkness. Elijah, Jeremiah, Job, David, were stricken down beneath such evils, sometimes accumulated together, so that they were ready to cry out for Death as a friend. But these things are not the real Valley; this is not the hiding of God's countenance; there may be all these things, and yet heaven's sunshine in the soul. But when God departs, or when the soul loses sight of him, then begins the Valley of the Shadow of Death. For, who can stand against such abandonment ?"

VIEW OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS.

AT the conclusion of our last Number, the Corn-law and Customs Bills had been carried; but the Irish Coercion Bill had been negatived. In consequence of this reverse the Peel Ministry resigned office, and Lord John Russell was empowered to form a new cabinet, which Sir R. Peel expressed his intention of supporting in the development of those views of national policy, the type of which is found in his own recent free-trade measures, and still more in his unhappy Maynooth scheme, and his general severance of political expediency from scriptural obligation.

In

The Russell cabinet has come into office, and got under weigh, with a facility and with favouring breezes, which, a few weeks ago, no man could have predicted. Its parliamentary members having gone back to their constituents, have been re-elected in every instance, and almost without opposition. Edinburgh Sir Culling Smith opposed Mr. Macaulay upon the Maynooth question, but was rejected by a large majority. The new ministers have postponed some of the measures of the late administration; taken charge of others, with or without modifications; and proposed

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