fatherless children" substantial and "comfortable experience of his goodness." This volume, printed with great care, was published in 1663. At that time the ancient monarchy was restored in the person of Charles the Second, and with it the Church of England; so that the Episcopal Clergy, many of whom had suffered greatly during the preceding fifteen or twenty years, were restored to their former position, and some of the most eminent among them were rewarded for their loyalty by the highest ecclesiastical preferments. Dr. Sanderson, for instance, whom his biographer describes, during "the late bad times," as appearing in the streets of London "in sadcoloured clothes, and..... far from being costly," who was also occasionally seen as an humble auditor at Farindon's church in Milk-street, was raised to the bishopric of Lincoln; and others, who, like him, had felt the pinchings of poverty, were placed in offices of equal honour and emolument. Considering the ecclesiastical rank which Farindon had formerly sustained, especially in the royal chapel at Windsor, the high respectability of his character, the sufferings which he had endured on account of his principles as a Loyalist and an Episcopalian, and the respect which he had commanded by his talents as a Preacher in London, had it pleased God to spare his life a few years longer, he would, in all probability, have obtained, if not a mitre, such an appointment in the Church as would have elevated him and his family above a state of humiliating and abject dependence. Of the three cordial friends, Hales, Farindon, and Pearson, the learned expositor of the Creed alone survived the civil and ecclesiastical troubles of the country, and was rewarded with a bishopric. Of the other two, one died five years after he had been divested of his richly-deserved preferments, and the other was little better than a lecturer on sufferance; but their names will be had in everlasting remembrance. After the lapse of two centuries, they are ointment poured forth." "as In the year 1674, a third and concluding volume of Farindon's Sermons made its appearance, the first and second volumes having both been reprinted two years previously. With this volume the name of no responsible editor is given; but the publisher, Richard Marriott, pledges himself that the Sermons are all the genuine compositions of Farindon; and he appeals to the taste and judgment of his readers for the correctness of this statement. He adds, "They will soon perceive, that the very same spirit breatheth in all, and that they are all of one strain and style." But in this he is mistaken for, without demurring to the authenticity of one or two others, neither the matter nor the manner of the sermon on Psalm li. 12 (being sermon xci. in this edition) was ever that of Farindon. It is a highly antinomian discourse, which, if found in the hand-writing of Farindon, can only have been transcribed by him for the purpose of refutation and exposure; and the leading tenets which it embodies form a perfect contrast to the general tenor of his teaching. The Rev. Anthony Scattergood, D.D., who was of the same College with our author, and a great admirer of his talents and principles, had in 1663 edited the second volume; in the preface to which, after assuring the reader that the Sermons were "carefully and faithfully set forth," he gives the following intimation :-" If our pains herein give thee content, we shall be encouraged to take the like in perusing the rest of the author's papers, and publishing such as we shall conceive worthy of his name and thy reading." Scattergood lived many years after * Walton's Life of Sanderson, prefixed to Sanderson's Sermons, p. 34, edit. 1689. the publication of this third volume; and the materials of which it is composed had undoubtedly been submitted to his inspection, and had received his disapproval, as being neither so worthy of Farindon's name nor of the reader's patronage as those in the preceding volumes. Encouraged, however, by the rapid sale of its precursors, such an astute bookseller as Marriott was not to be deterred from the publication of another volume, though he could engage none of the author's surviving friends to superintend the edition. His own providential vocation certainly never had been that of selecting the best discourses, but the profitable vending of those which he found in the author's handwriting; yet he has furnished another proof, that even the sweepings of a great man's study, taken up at haphazard, often afford many papers of surpassing value. It is, after all, an excellent volume, though some passages occur in it which are repetitions of such as had been used in the early sermons. It contains fifty discourses, twenty of which are upon the Lord's Prayer. * Within the last age a taste for the learned and argumentative theology of the seventeenth century has revived, so that many of the elaborate and stirring works of that period have been reprinted, and extensively read; and although the Sermons of Farindon were not among the first which the improved public taste demanded, they have for several years been in a course of increasing request; and copies of them, when they have appeared in the market, have been eagerly bought at very high prices. A large class of readers have therefore in vain desired to enrich their libraries with them. They are here reprinted entire; and no pains have been spared to secure that accuracy which is due to a deceased author, and especially an author of Farindon's scholarship and piety. SWISS CHARACTERISTICS. BUT to the customs of the Swiss. There is one connected with education which exerts a wonderful influence on society. In the large towns the children of similar age and sex are gathered together by their parents in little societies, called societés des dimanches. These little clubs are composed of twelve or fourteen children, selected by their parents with a view to their adaptedness to amuse and benefit each other. They meet in turn at the houses of the different parents every Sabbath evening. Their nurses are with them, and the time is spent in amusements common to children. As they grow older these amusements are combined with instruction. This kind of intimacy creates strong friendships, which last long after they are dispersed and scattered over the world, and even through life. Girls thus linked together in childhood retain their affection in maturer life, and even in womanhood distinguish each other by the tender appellations of ma mignonne, mon cœur, mon ange. This is one great reason why Swiss * Yet Marriott enjoyed the benefit of the following brief and judicious directions concerning the choice of posthumous materials, which Farindon had addressed in 1657 to Garthwaite, when he was employed in collecting the papers which form Hales's "Golden Remains: "-"One caution I should put in, that you print nothing which is not written with his hand, or be very careful in comparing them. For, not long since, one showed me a sermon which he said was his, which I am confident could not be: for I saw nothing in it which was not vulgaris monetæ, ‘of a vulgar stamp,' common, and flat, and low. There be some sermons which I much doubt of, for there is little of his spirit and genius in them; and some that are imperfect." society is so exclusive, and it is so difficult for a stranger to press beyond its mere formalities. The rank of the husband in Switzerland depends altogether upon that of his wife. Immediately on their marriage he steps into her rank, be it above or below that which he formerly occupied. There has been much written about Swiss melodies; and the custom of singing in the open air, in that clear high falsetto, is singularly wild and thrilling. The cow-herds and dairy-maids seem never weary of mingling their voices together in the clear mountain air of the Alps. The effect of it on the traveller is often astonishing. Southey, in speaking of it, says, "Surely the wildest chorus that was ever heard by human ears: a song not of articulate sounds, but in which the voice is used as a mere instrument of music, more flexible than any which art could produce; sweet, powerful, and thrilling beyond description." The Alp horn, which is merely a tube of wood five or six feet long, bound about with birch-bark, is capable of the most melodious sound, when softened and prolonged by the mountain echoes, I ever heard. Nothing in our boyhood captivated our imagination more than the custom which was said to prevail in Switzerland, of the peasantry calling out to each other as the last sunlight left the highest Alpine peak, "Praise the Lord." But it loses some of its poetry heard on the spot. It is confined to the more rude and pastoral districts in the Catholic cantons. Having no church near to ring the accustomed vesper-bell, its place is supplied by the Alp horn. A cow-herd stationed on the highest peak, reclines along some rock, and as the golden sunlight leaves the last heaven-piercing snow-summit, he utters through his mellow horn the first five or six notes of the psalm commencing, "Praise ye the Lord." The strain is caught up and prolonged by the mountain echoes, and answered from other distant peaks, till the soul-thrilling cadences seem to die away on the portals of heaven. The tones of the horn are indescribably sweet and subduing, awaking all the dormant poetry of a man's nature. But the custom which once seemed to me to be the very embodiment of religion and poetry together, appeared, after all, a very business-like and prosaic matter. It being necessary to carry out the Catholic observance, a horn is substituted for the vesper-bell, which one hears ringing every evening in Catholic countries for the same purpose. There is just as much religion in the call of the muezzin from the minaret of some Moslem tower, which one hears at every turn in Turkey. Nay, this very custom, which has been more spoken of, more poetized, perhaps, than all others, prevails in some parts of our own country. We remember being in our earlier youth once in an Indian Missionary station of the Methodist denomination, where a similar expedient was adopted. Strolling at evening along the banks of a stream, we suddenly heard the prolonged blast of a horn, sounding very much like a dinner-horn. Its long continuance at that time of night awakened our curiosity, and, on inquiring the cause of it, we were informed it was to call the Indians to prayer-meeting. A conchshell had supplied the place of a bell. Bending our own steps thither, we arrived just in time to find a low school-house crowded with dusky visages, while the whole multitude were singing at the top of their voices, "Old ship Zion." Here was the Alpine custom on which so much sentiment has been expended, but combined with vastly more sense and religion. At the sound of this vesper-bell, alias Alp horn, the peasants uncover their heads, and falling on their knees, repeat their evening prayers, and then shut up their cattle and retire to their homes. The Ranz des Vaches, which is commonly supposed to be a single air, stands in Switzerland for a class of melodies, the literal meaning of which is "cow-rows." The German word is kuhreihen, “rows of cows." It derives its origin from the manner the cows march home along the Alpine paths at milking-time. The shepherd goes before, keeping every straggler in its place by the tones of his horn, while the whole herd wind along in Indian file obedient to the call. From its association it always creates homesickness in a Swiss mountaineer when he hears it in a foreign land. It is said these melodies are prohibited in the Swiss regiments attached to the French army, because they produce so many desertions. One of the Ranz des Vaches brings back to his imagination his Alpine cottage, the green pasturage, the bleating of his mountain-goats, the voices of the milk-maids, and all the sweetness and innocence of a pastoral life, till his heart turns with a sad yearning to the haunts of his childhood and the spot of his early dreams and early happiness.-Rev. J. T. Headley. RECOLLECTIONS OF RICHARD WATSON. (No. I.) (To the Editor of the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine.) ONE of the most talented and devoted young men at the Wesleyan Mission-House, London, in 1829 and 1830, was the Rev. John Sarjant, of Norwich, whose life and labours are beautifully described in Numbers 335 and 336 of the Wesleyan Tracts, by my old friend, the Rev. A. E. Farrar. It was my privilege to be acquainted with Mr. Sarjant; and I remember how he shrunk from the fiery trial he had to pass through in being examined for the Christian ministry by the great man whose name stands at the head of this paper. I was present at his ordination in WildernessRow chapel, in the City-Road Circuit, in 1830, and distinctly recollect the charge delivered to him by Mr. Watson on that interesting occasion. Mr. Watson had long been familiar with the evils of slavery, and appeared to throw his whole soul into his eloquent address, in describing what the young Missionary would be called to pass through in the discharge of duty, in one of the most degraded islands in the world, the Isle of France. He depicted the misery of the poor slaves, their sufferings, &c., under the lash, in language which pierced the heart of Sarjant, and which produced a thrill of horror in the minds of all present, who appeared to sympathize most deeply with the young Minister. He described the antipathy which the slave-holders and masters might exhibit on his proposing to preach to the slaves, by exhorting them to forsake the slavery of sin, and receive the Gospel. The chapel on this occasion might be called "a Bochim:" all appeared to be suffused in tears. "You are going," said Mr. Watson, "to a French isle, an isle of slaves, to a people destitute of all instruction, except what little they have received from Popery; among whom there are more cruelties practised than in any of our colonies. To a deeper hell on earth you cannot go! Consider, then, the prudence, the patience, that will be requisite; the opposition, and perhaps the death, to which you will be subjected." This was overwhelming! The young man was deeply affected, and, in relating his experience, observed, "It has been said this evening, (and the words sunk deep into my heart,) that we are going to the deepest hell upon earth. Then to that hell let me go; and if I may only pluck immortal spirits from its blackness, and place them before the throne of God, my joy is fulfilled." Mr. Watson's emaciated but benignant countenance, pale and wan with pain, exhibited a significant and pleasing smile on the young man thus expressing himself. His anticipations were quite prophetic, as in that isle he found an early grave. Mr. Watson's colleague present on the occasion was the Rev John James, who wrestled most earnestly with God in prayer at the close of the service for Mr. Sarjant, and for his excellent colleague, the Rev. H. D. Lowe, that they might be a blessing, and succeed in their important enterprise. That night I shall never forget. WILLIAM WOON. Waimate, Taranaki-South, New-Zealand, January 15th, 1848. SKETCHES OF SOUTH AFRICA. BY THE REV. THORNLEY SMITH. (To the Editor of the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine.) CHAPTER III.-THE COLONY AND ITS MISSIONS. MISSIONS to our colonies are of considerable importance, viewed only in their relation to the settler and the emigrant. Hundreds of the population of this highly-favoured land annually forsake its shores in quest of other homes, carrying with them their wives and children, and bidding adieu to all those scenes around which the recollections of by-gone days have flung a sacred charm. And most of them forsake not country only, but sanctuaries, and Sabbaths, and Christian ordinances, not knowing whether they shall meet with them elsewhere, or whether they will be obliged to worship God in some solitary spot, alone. That they should be accompanied or followed by the heralds of the Cross, is, therefore, of the utmost moment; and hence the establishment of Colonial Missionary Societies, and the efforts now made by different sections of the church to furnish pastoral aid to the population of our colonies, cannot but give joy to every Christian's heart. Several of You But our colonies are not merely inhabited by emigrants. them contain a mixed population. There are not only found in them the refined European, but also the rude and barbarous Kaffir, the swarthy Negro, and the idolatrous Hindoo. You have a foreign element with which to deal. You come in contact with a new order of mind. find, in fact, the very objects to which Missions are professedly directed. On your right hand, and on your left, are multitudes of Heathen, to whom, in consequence of their local connexion with you, you have, or may have, instant and immediate access. A field for Missionary operations of the most promising character thus presents itself before your view, which to patient and persevering toil will ultimately yield an ample recompence. It is this feature in the condition of the Cape Colony, that gives to its Missions an air of special interest and importance. Whilst perhaps we may consider the primary object of the Christian Minister here to be the spiritual instruction of the Colonists themselves, yet he is necessarily led to think of the numerous families of Hottentots, Fingoes, and Bechuanas, by whom he finds himself surrounded, and to extend his labours so as to embrace these likewise, since they are redeemned by the same Saviour, and are subjects of the same Lord. |