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CLXI. TO DR. STENSON.

[Extracts from various Letters.]

LET us gratefully hail the gleams that come to us from a better world, through the gloom of declining age, which is beginning to darken before us, and give all diligence to the preparation for passing the shades of death, confident in the all-sufficiency of Him who died for us, to emerge into the bright economy and the happy society beyond.

Indeed I would regard as something better than enemies, the visitations that give a strong warning of the final and not remote beating down and demolition of the whole frail tabernacle. A salutary impression made on the soul, even through a wound of the body, is a good greatly more than compensating the evil. In the last great account no doubt a vast number of happy spirits will have to ascribe that happiness to the evils inflicted on their bodies, as the immediate instrumental cause.

Let us take the admonition, to do what little we can for our great Master before the night shall come. That it is so little, is one of the things in which we are required to be submissive to his sovereign will. It is part of the doom of our fallen nature-respecting that miserable debility and corruption of which you can find no man to sympathize with your opinions and feelings more emphatically than I do, and the more so the longer I look at it, and especially have my own personal experience

of it.

How unwelcome are these shortening days! The precursory intimations of winter even before the summer itself is gone, and how almost frightfully rapid the vicissitudes of the seasons, telling us of time, the consumption of life, the approximation to its end. That end; that end! And there is an hour decreed for the final one. It will be here-it will be past. And then-that other life! that other world! Let us pray more earnestly than ever, that the first hour after the last may open upon us in celestial light.

How strange and inortifying that progress in personal religion is so difficult! that it should not be the natural, earnest, and even impetuous tendency of an immortal spirit, summoned to the prosecution of immortal interests!

It often occurs to meditative thought, what an instant cure it will be for all the disorders at once, when the frame itself is laid down, and the immortal inhabitant, abandoning it, will care no more about it; will seem not contain both doctrines, the advocates of one or other must give way." The real Danger of the Church of England. By the Rev. W. GRESLEY M.A., Prebendary of Lichfield, London, 1846, pp. 19, 27

to say, "Take all thy diseases with thee now into the dust; they and thou concern me no more."

How very conditionally it is that firm, uninterrupted health is really a blessing. And what a testimony it is against our miserably perverted nature, that a real and eminently great good is so much in danger of proving an evil.

It continually surprises me to think, how little that is remarkable occurs (so as to be known) where a hundred thousand human beings, all busily intent on their purposes, are existing within the circuit of a very few miles. How monotonous is the human condition! In fancy, we might have supposed that among such a multitude of living, thinking, acting creatures there should be a continual succession of something to excite surprise, instead of an endless common-place of existence. But we see business just going on the usual way; sin of all sorts, constant to its customs; religion but little changing its aspects and operations.

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As to religion in this country, and the world at large, how passionately one could long to see some great movement, some striking and prodigious changes, some events answering to the figure of “ a nation born in a day.” It is disconsolate to see, in this respect, the year end nearly as it began; a progress almost imperceptibly slow; such a dead weight on millions of souls; such a vast measure of means consumed in producing so little effect toward the one great end. One envies the people of those future times when a new order of powers and progress will be unfolded on the earth.

... Have you any notion that the world is just on the point of prodigiously mending, or that there is any glimmer of the millennium on the horizon? There is truly little enough of anything of the kind to be seen; but old as I am, and misanthropic, and sceptically given, and all that, I am really willing to hope that some considerable good may not be far off, though it is likely to come by a very rugged and costly process.

CLXII. TO THE REV. JOHN FAWCETT.

Stapleton, near Bristol, April 24, 1830. MY DEAR OLD FRIEND,-I was hesitating whether to look at the date of your letter; I usually avoid, if I can, in self-defence, seeing that part of a letter which I am beginning to answer, because it is almost sure to meet me in the character of reproach. I have not, however, been lucky enough to escape catching sight of the date of yours, and it is just four months since. It gratified me much, both as a proof that friendships of youth may continue alive to far advanced age; and as conveying many interesting particulars of information from the scene of my early life and interests. But how few, how very few, of the persons of my acquaintance

in that scene could be found in it if I revisited it now; I should have to read the names on tombstones of most of those with whom I familiarly conversed forty years since. My memory is bad to the most wretched degree; and no small sign of its being so is, that I have a much less power of recollecting circumstances of early life than I have observed to be quite usual in persons of my age. As to things comparatively recent, I experience even more than the usual treacherousness of the memory of a person in age, particularly in respect to names. In meeting persons with whom I have been, or even am at present, familiarly acquainted, I am frequently at a loss for the name; so that, unwittingly asking a husband,—“ How is Mrs.-," or a wife,-"How is Mr.-," I am baffled, stop short, and am driven at last to say-" your wife," or "the good man," or "good lady at home." This has happened to me many a time, with persons whom I knew as well as my own door or my old hat.

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The worst of it is, that it makes reading very nearly useless to me; I retain but a very dim trace of anything I read, even striking matters of fact; and as to matters of thought, some time lately I read on perhaps 100 pages of some book or other (I forget what), without becoming aware, till I came to some remarkable name, or some such thing, that I had read all those pages but a few weeks before. . . . . Have you had any taste or fancy for graphical works, such as splendidly illustrated and picturesque books of travels, antiquity, and the like? This has been my taste quite to a fault; a fault I mean in reference to pecuniary means. .... Pray, do you often preach? I have suffered an almost entire deposition from that office, by physical organic debility as the primary cause, and, as an accessional one by choice, from having felt the great inconvenience and laboriousness of doing occasionally, what I have been so long out of the practice of; so that, for a long time past, I have declined wholly our city pulpits, and never go higher than an easy, unstudied discourse now and then, in one or two of the neighboring country villages, where there is no stated ministry. Mr. Hall is in high physical vigor (for the age of 66), while often suffering severely the inexplicable pain in his back, of which he has been the subject from his childhood. His imagination (and therefore the splendor of his eloquence) has considerably abated, as compared with his earlier and his meridian pitch, but his intellect is in the highest vigor; and the character of his preaching is that of the most emphatically evangelical piety. His friends have now surrendered all hope of his doing anything more in the way of authorship; they have ceased to remonstrate with him on the subject, but most deeply deplore this lack of service to the Christian cause, when they consider that he might have produced half a dozen, or half a score (the more the better) of volumes of sermons, which would have filled a lamentable chasm in that province of our literature, and would have been decidedly, considered in their combination of high qualities, the foremost set of sermons in our language.

Do

you take any more interest in political matters now in later, than

you were inclined to do in earlier, life? Very great things have been done in recent times. America set free-Greece-a humiliation of the Mahomedan empire-the Catholic emancipation—and a great part of the world put in a state of mobility; ominous, all may hope, of prodigious and accelerated changes.

How is my old friend Mrs. Fawcett? On meeting her I should look, with eager inspection, to recognize a countenance than which no one is more indelibly impressed on my memory. Give my most friendly regards to her, with congratulations that she has fought so gallantly through the toils of life.

CLXIII. TO B. STOKES, ESQ.

Stapleton, June 16, 1830. MY DEAR SIR, One of the constellation which is shedding such lustre on our dark world (Dr. Okely*) has withdrawn, or is with

* The Rev William Okely, M.D., was the third son of the Rev. Francis Okely (formerly of St. John's College, Cambridge), a Moravian minister at Northampton. He was born at Bedford, Jan. 25, 1762, and educated first at Fulnec, and subsequently at Niesky and Barby. On completing his studies, he spent a short time at Christianfield in Denmark, and then returned to Fulnec in the capacity of teacher, but soon resigned, in consequence of holding sentiments which were incompatible with that office. After spending two years with a surgeon at Bedford, he removed to Edinburgh, where he prosecuted the study of medicine and took the degree of M.D. During his stay there, he was highly respected and distinguished for propriety of conduct and character, which he always attributed to his early education among the United Brethren. In 1797 he was chosen Phy sician of the General Infirmary at Northampton, and while there, published a sceptical work entitled "Pyrology." Shortly after he became a firm believer in Christian truth, and immediately published a recantation of his • Pyrology."

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"The author," he says, "was himself an unconverted man, to whom, of course, all that relates to the transcendental part of creation could not but appear confused and unintelligible, and the conduct and language of such as were real followers of Jesus, weak and enthusiastic. By the merciful preservation of God, however, he had continued an honest man, not pretending to know what he did not know; bold enough to assert what he did know, and vain enough to imagine that what he knew was all that could be known. Sup pose such a man tolerably tinctured with the letter of Christianity, but neither understand ing it, nor seeing any beauty in it, except the moral precepts and human character of its Author; at the same time educated in retirement, and ignorant of the world; suppose such a one placed in a sphere calculated for extensive observation of mankind, and resolved to judge of the belief of men from their conduct, and not from their public professions;-the picture such a person would draw of man, would, I believe, be nearly that contained in the Pyrology. It is the picture of a natural man, the slave of Satan, dead in trespasses and sins, without God and Christ in the world, and hastening to endless perdition; it is the picture of a rational brute; it was his own picture. . . . . The immediate sources whence most of the author's mistakes are derived, are first, a presumptuous reliance on the strength of his faculties, and extent of his information; secondly, a want of attention to the detail of the gospel history. The worst consequence of my former doctrine is, that it cuts off the doctrine of the atonement-that main pillar of Christianity."

On renouncing his sceptical views, Dr. O. solicited re-admission to the Brethren's church, and in that communion occupied various stations as minister or director of schools. He was distinguished for logical acuteness, and the fearless investigation of truth. His pulpit discourses were marked

drawing, his share of the lustre. I saw him lately in Bristol, whither he is come in a state of extreme physical debility, from which his friends do not anticipate his possible recovery. He is a Moravian of much knowledge and mental sharpness; at the same time a very worthy man. Dr. Chalmers is to preach this evening for the Auxiliary of the British and Foreign School Society, as he did the day before yesterday, at the opening of a capital new meeting-house, built wholly at the expense of Mr. Hare the great floor-cloth manufacturer, and our most munificent promoter of religious especially, but of all good designs; which he does, apparently, at the expense of far less self-denial than it appears to cost many of our rich professors of religion (especially such as have made their fortunes from nothing by industry) to contribute in a vastly less proportion. Dr. C. retains without the smallest diminution, his simple, friendly, unassuming character and manners. He has with him a delightfully pleasing woman, in the character of his wife, with the addition of his eldest daughter, and two female relations who are on a trip to Scotland for health.

There is very little to be said about anything here. As to matter of health, there is no great variation, except that a cough which I have entirely now got rid of after two years' duration, has been replaced by some other affection, which is probably of a still more fixed character; that is to say, a disordered circulation, a frequently intermitting pulsation, from some unknown and probably organic cause. It is a disorder which suffers great temporary augmentation from very slight occasions, a little sudden, or laboriously hard, corporal exertion, such as walking up a hill, or hastily or eagerly going about anything, or from any uneasy kind of mental exertion. A long, stout evening's talk is a great mischief: as to anything like preaching, I believe, I am never to attempt it again, in any place, little or great. Each medical friend enjoins careful avoidance of all such things, as certain to aggravate the internal cause, while not pronouncing the affection to be exactly of a formidable and ominous character, provided I be systematically careful. I have been cupped and afterwards bled, but without any sensible effect. I am never more to climb a Welsh hill, not to say mountain. As the people say, I look passably well, I guess some of them suspect a little affectation-but they are quite mistaken if they do: I am not, at the same time, suffering any pain. I a little envy you the sight of so much Cambrian scenery as you will pass over, and in sight of, two or three weeks hence; but if I were in the midst of it, I should have the mortification of feeling myself by originality, and rendered highly interesting by bringing the results of his study of human nature to bear on the characters and facts recorded in the scriptures. Besides the Pyrology, his only avowed publications were: 1. A letter to Robert Southey, Esq., &c., on his Life of the late Mr. John Wesley, and especially that part in which he treats of the Moravians. 2. A Sermon on the Incarnation of the Son of God, 1824. He also contributed a valuable article to the Eclectic Review (Jan. and Feb., 1816), on Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works. He died July 9, 1830.

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