practice, supposing it must be right because mine, and others watching for my halting, that they may avail themselves of my misconduct. My outward trials at present are neither many nor great; but the inward warfare is still sharp. I am grieved, that while I say so much about communion with the Lord, my heart is so often distant from him; and that though I am daily speaking of the mind and image of Jesus, I am still so much unlike him. There seems no sufficient reason why it should be so, but so, alas! it is. Surely the Lord's arm is not shortened, nor his ear heavy. He is the same, and his promises as free, as full, as sure as We have encouragement " to ask and receive, that our joy may be full." May he give us liberty of spirit to ask, and make us determined not to stop short, or to stand still, as though we had already attained !

ever.

-We sym

But I

Phebe came to us safe and well. She desires her love to all her friends. Sally and Peggy send love.pathize with the distresses of a people who will ever be dear to us. have a good hope that all shall work for good. The Lord has many at Olney whom He loves, and who love him; but our long state of ease produced some evils which he thought it necessary to check, and I hope has designed to cure by the late dispensations. He woundeth, and his hands make whole.-I hope a day is coming if I live, when I shall see you again, and shall find you rejoicing in his goodness, and shall rejoice with you. Our love to Mrs. Raban, to all

your family, and all friends. I saw
Tommy lately: he was well and cheerful.
The Lord bless you all!
I am,

Your affectionate friend and servant,
JOHN NEWTON.

Hoxton, ye 12th July, '80.
Mr. Raban.

NOTE. The above faithful and affectionate epistle may serve to obviate certain impressions, alluded to in the correspondence of Cowper with his friend Newton,* respecting Mr. Raban's The brief disputes with Mr. Scott. truth is, Mr. R. endeavoured to convince Mr. S. that Mr. Newton's late flock were not Antinomians; and that he would do them no good by scolding them. Now Mr. Cowper also says of Mr. Scott, that "his warmth of temper, indulged to a degree that may be called scolding, defeats the end of preaching." -With respect to Mr. Raban's proposed assistance of Mr. Scott at the Great House Lecture, on Sunday evenings, Mr. Cowper quotes Mr. R. as saying, “that unless he had Mr. Scott's free consent, he should never engage in the office."-Soon after this, however, Mr. R. became the acceptable pastor of the congregation at Yardley Hastings; and both Mr. Bull, and Mr. Newton too, continued their friendship till death. Mr. Cowper's implied censures were, therefore, uncalled for, and might have been suppressed, but for an oversight in his worthy Editor.

J. R.

• See Grimshawe's ed. vol. i. pp. 305, 311,

-

VOL. XXVII.

only a debtor acquitted and set free, but enriched besides with a new and great estate and withal highly preferred and advanced to honour, having a right to the promises, 'to the unsearchable riches of Christ,' as the apostle speaks,

2 M

and is received into favour with God, and unto the dignity of sonship, taken 'from the dung hill and set with princes."-Leighton.

"Keep thine heart with all diligence." "Men are less sensible of heart wickedness, than of open sin: they do not seem to know that the motion of spirits is far swifter than that of bodies. The mind can make a greater progress in wandering from God in one hour, than the body is able to follow in many days.”—Ibid.

"The quickening Spirit."-Though Christ be the Head, yet is the Holy Ghost the Heart of the church, from whence the vital spirits of grace and holiness are issued out unto the quickening of the body mystical."-Heylyn.

The ear, the eye, and the tongue."The ear and the eye are the mind's receivers, but the tongue is only busied in extending the treasure received. If therefore, the resources of the mind be uttered as fast or faster than they are received, it cannot be but the mind must needs be bare, and can never lay up for purchase. But if the receivers take in still with no utterance, the mind may soon grow a burden to itself, and unprofitable to others. I will not lay up too much and utter nothing, lest I be covetous; nor spend much, and store up little, lest I be prodigal and poor."-Bishop Hall.

What we learn from the dying thief. "None should despair, because God can help them. None should presume, because God can cross them."-Philip Henry.

"Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."-" In religion, as

in secular knowledge, he is the best teacher of others, who is best taught himself: that which we know and love we cannot but communicate; that which we know and do not love, we soon, I think, cease to know."-Dr. Arnold.

Do all unto the Lord.-"It is the motive and end of an action which makes it either dignified, or pure."Woman's Mission.

"Let Christ reign in your hearts."— "Desire not the company which would diminish your heavenly acquaintance and correspondence. Be not unfriendly nor self-sufficient and self-confident; but beware, lest under the ingenuous title of a friend, you should entertain an idol, or an enemy to your love of God, or a competitor with your highest and best Friend."-Baxter.

Having a desire to depart."-" The religion of Jesus Christ felt and enjoyed in the heart, can alone make a man willing to die. Hence it became not so much Paul's painful debt as his cheerful vote; he does not say, 'I must depart,' but I desire to depart.” ”—Rev. James Sherman.

Christ makes heaven.-"I will show thee all the glory of Greece, said an ancient to his friend; and so saying, he took him to Solon, the Spartan lawgiver. And is this all? said his friend. Yes, replied the ancient, when thou hast seen Solon, thou hast seen all. And so when the saints see Christ, they see all the glory of heaven in Him; 'the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne, is the light thereof!' What must it be to see His glory!"-Rev. James Sherman. H. H. H.

TO THE MEMORY OF A BELOVED BROTHER.

THE summer sun is shining all glorious and bright,

But summer, with its thousand charms, can give me no delight;

For all things bright and beautiful must wear a shade of gloom,

Since thou, my dear, my precious one, art shrouded in the tomb.

How memory loves to linger on scenes for ever past!

When pleasure beamed around me, or sorrow overcast,

Thy smile or tear of sympathy would always have a charm,

To render sunny hours more bright, or threat'ning clouds disarm.

But now I know that thou art dead, and I no

LINES ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD AGED THREE YEARS.

DEATH found strange beauty on that cherub

brow,

And dashed it out. On cheek and lip

ice,

There was a tint of rose he touched the veins with

And the rose faded. Forth from those blue

eyes

There spake a wishful tenderness, a doubt
Whether to grieve or sleep, which innocence
Alone can wear-with ruthless haste he bound
The silken fringes of their curtaining lids
For ever. There had been a murmuring sound,
With which the babe would claim the mother's

ear,

Charming her even to tears-the spoiler set His seal of silence. But there beamed a smile So fixed and holy from that marble brow, Death gazed and left it there--he dared not steal

The signet-ring of heaven.

From the Northern Citizen.

A SONG FOR THE SEA.

WHEN the lonely watch we keep,
Silent on the mighty deep-
While the boisterous surges hoarse
Bear us darkly on our course-

Eye that never slumbers! shed
Holy influence on our head!
When the Sabbath's peaceful ray
O'er the ocean's breast doth play,
Though no throng's assembled there,
No sweet church-bell warns to prayer,
Spirit! let thy presence be
Sabbath to the muttering sea!
When the raging billows dark
Thundering toss our threatened bark,
Thou, who on the whitening wave
Didst the meek disciple save-

Thou who hear'st us when we prayJesus! Saviour! be our stay! When in foreign lands we roam, Far from kindred and from home, Strangers' eyes our conduct view, Heathen bands our steps pursue, Let our conversation be Fitting those who follow Thee!

LIFE and DEATH; or, THE THEOLOGY of the BIBLE in relation to HUMAN IMMORTALITY. Three Lectures delivered by J. PANTON HAM, 1849.

It seems to be the fashion of the present age, in countries where opinions are not stereotyped, and where the freedom of thought is not crushed nor checked by superstition, for men, and, not least, religious men, to let loose the reins of reason, and to roam, in theory, over tracks untrodden for many ages, if trodden at all. The reaction has set in so strongly against systems which hoar antiquity has sanctioned, and around which she has cast a false halo of glory, that the advancing tide seems to threaten even those eternal truths which are for walls and buttresses to the church of the living God. There are pious, well-meaning men, who, sympathizing in some degree with those on whose banner are the inspiring words, "Civil and Religious Liberty," are led with them to profess a dislike of all ancient constitutions and creeds. Many, who do not hold what may be styled "German views," are, notwithstanding, ready to speak slightingly of a basis of religious doctrines of any kind. If men are professedly believers in the gospel of Christ, and live consistently with that profession, they think it unnecessary to require that every doctrine, commonly called "orthodox," should be held,-that, for instance, a doctrine such as that of the eternity of future punishments should be called fundamental, and its denial regarded as so blameworthy. On exactly similar grounds it might be said that Martin Luther's views on consubstantiation need not be taken into account, because the cardinal doctrine of the reformers is in itself sufficient to stamp a man a Protestant Christian. But are there many evangelical Protestants in our country and in our day who would say this?

The question is, whether this or that doctrine is plainly deducible from the Word of God, the sole standard of appeal; and it surely is not the province of finite beings like ourselves to say what are, or what are not fundamental truths.

With some we may have more immediately to do, but the groundwork of these may be quickly loosened, if others are set aside. Stone fits so compactly into stone, that if one be rudely handled, that one may involve the destruction of the entire religious system embraced by any mind.

The late John Foster, who doubted the eternity of future punishments, owned that

"the language of Scripture was formidably strong" on the other side. But of what value are all the imagined deductions of human reason, if revelation does not coincide? The third volume of the British Quarterly, p. 4, has a passage bearing on this point, which we think much to the purpose. "The statements of revelation, on a given point, may contradict the conclusions at which he (a man) has arrived in the absence of sufficient light; but this agrees with the history of the progress of truth in all departments, the discoveries of one mind overturning the opinions entertained by other minds, and by itself, before the discoveries revealed the truth. Since it is an affair of constant experience for the reason of one set of men to be vanquished by the higher reason of another set of men, need we marvel if the embodied reason of all men, on large classes of mental inquiry, should vanish before the perfect intelligence of God?" Unaided human reason may take exception at some of the most prominent doctrines of the Sacred Scriptures, which can only be "spiritually discerned" by faith.

The work at the head of this article shows the tendency of the theory of Non-Eternitists, as it involves the denial of the natural immortality of the soul, and of the separate state of being. The writer, however, contends throughout that the Bible is his stronghold, and intimates that in the "orthodox 'stereotyped view," the Bible is shelved. The doctrine of the eternal duration of future punishments is, it seems, a philosophical conceit," "a philosophical refinement which started into existence when Platonism meddled with the simplicity of the Scriptures.' "The Platonism of the second century was the father, and a Lateran council under Pope Leo X., in the sixteenth century, was the foster-father of this so-called Bible doctrine." Now that the Platonists of the second century were at great pains to prove their favourite tenet may be very true, but it is rather a hasty deduction to make, that then and thence the doctrine had its rise, and that to violent disputants the belief in it was confined. We much mistake, if the conclusions of enlightened reason do not fully accord with the "deliverance" (to adopt a Scotch phrase) given upon the case by revelation.

I. As to the question of man's natural immortality. Passages are adduced from Holy Writ, in order to show that immortality attaches to none but believers in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This question lies at the ↑ Vide p. 18.

⚫ Vide pp. 28 and 91.

root of the whole matter. Are we in our nature necessarily immortal, destined to live for ever amidst the felicities of heaven, or amidst the miseries of hell? Bishop Butler, in the first chapter of his "Analogy," has shown the extreme probability, supplied by the light of reason, that man is made immortal. The opposers of the orthodox view appear to make little of the distinction between "the destruction of the living being, and the destruction of those means and instruments by which it is capable of its present state of perception and of action." Mr. Ham is unable to conceive of man except as the compound being which he appears to be now; and so far from thinking that the soul is the man, he speaks of "the personality of the first Adam as involved in his perishable and mortal nature." "Dust thou"-thyself, thy personality-"dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."* His argument appears to us puerile in the extreme, and has certainly failed to convince us "that our constitutional alliance is less with the immortal Deity than with the mortal and perishable earth," especially with Gen. i. 26 in our eye: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Keeping to this idea, that the soul and body are indiscerptible, the separate state of existence is denied; for the souls of the righteous, equally with those of the wicked, must, on and after the body's decay, enter on a state of perfect inactivity and torpor. It is most difficult to conceive of souls continuing for so many ages in this state of stupefaction, to be resuscitated, and arraigned along with their resurrection bodies, as if apart from them they were incapable of exercising understanding, or memory, or volitionas if they could not possess a conscience, as well as a consciousness, in union with some other tenement than this. Would such a resuscitated spirit be sure of its own identity and accountability? or of the freedom of its individual will? properties which we are wont to consider essential to our nature, and the knowledge of our having which does seem to indicate an immortality of being; and if an immortality, then surely an uninterrupted possession of the reasoning and moral faculties of our souls, in full activity.

If we consult the Book of revelation, the doctrine respecting the separate state is declared in explicit terms. What means the promise to the expiring malefactor, and what the longing of the apostle to "depart from this tabernacle ?" "Absent from the body," are not Christians " present with the Lord?" is not the God of Abraham, "God of the living " Are there not "spirits" now "in prison?" did not the rich man pass imme

Vide pp. 9, 10; vide also the foot note. The italics are his.

diately into hell, and Lazarus into heaven? But all such statements are rendered nugatory by writers like Mr. Ham. To say that "with God a thousand years are as one day," and therefore that to the penitent thief it will seem but a day between his death and resurrection, appears to us a mode of reasoning worthy of a Jesuit; and yet such are the arguments to which the framers of this new systematized theory must have recourse." It grieves us exceedingly to find the present writer so set aside the meaning of our Lord's words respecting the rich man and Lazarus, as to say, 66 Our Lord seems design

*

edly to have introduced a number of obvious incongruities to guard against the possible danger of its being taken in any other sense than a mere parable." "Hell, the place of the punishment of the wicked, does not yet exist." What authority has he for saying that Hades may not denote the place of torment, comprehending, as it does, both states of being, but here, as the context shows, referring to the state of the wicked? Parable or not, the groundwork of the narrative is replete with portentous meaning; and it is deeply to be deplored that a minister of religion should so misconstrue, and lead others to misconstrue, the plain declarations of the Word of God. Strangely enough, in this very passage, Hades is called "the place of disembodied spirits," in palpable contradiction to the writer's former statements about the necessarily compound nature of man. It is one of many instances of a similar kind which indicate a confusion in the writer's mind, as if his views were imperfectly and crudely formed.

II. Eternal Life, the Gift of Christ, is a prominent doctrine of the Dobney school. The present writer tells us that "the actual condition into which the entire human race has been brought is an exposure to suffering issuing in an everlasting decease." "The wages of sin is death- -a final cessation of existence," and hence, it is said, arises the glory of the gospel, in conferring on the believer an immortality of existence. "The Bible represents the deliverance of man as a personal existence, from death, as being not, indeed, the exclusive, but the great object of our Lord's redemption. The resurrection of Christ is called "the chief part of the theory of redemption;" and too great proportional prominence has, it seems, been given to the doctrine of the atonement, in comparison with that of the resurrection of Christ. Whatever may be thought of the plausibility of such a view, does it not involve strange consequences? When is the immortal nature im