habit is added, the determination becomes invincible, and seems to assume rank with the great laws of nature, making it nearly as certain that such a man will persist in his course as that in the morning the sun will rise. In this distinction no man ever exceeded, for instance, or ever will exceed, the late illustrious Howard. The energy of his determination was so great, that if, instead of being habitual, it had been shown only for a short time on particular occasions, it would have appeared a vehement impetuosity; but by being unintermitted, it had an equability of manner which scarcely appeared to exceed the tone of a calm constancy, it was so totally the reverse of anything like turbulence or agitation. It was the calmness of an intensity kept uniform by the nature of the human mind forbidding it to be more, and by the character of the individual forbidding it to be less. The habitual passion of his mind was a measure of feeling almost equal to the temporary extremes and paroxysms of common minds: as a great river, in its customary state, is equal to a small or moderate one when swollen to a torrent. The moment of finishing his plans in deliberation, and commencing them in action, was the same. I wonder what must have been the amount of that bribe in emolument or pleasure, that would have detained him a week inactive after their final adjustment. The law which carries water down a declivity, was not more unconquerable and invariable than the determination of his feelings toward the main object. Unless the eternal happiness of mankind be an insignificant concern, and the passion to promote it an inglorious distinction, I may cite George Whitefield, as a noble instance of this attribute of the decisive character, this intense necessity of action. The great cause which was so languid a thing in the hands of many of its advocates, assumed in his administrations an unmitigable urgency. Many of the Christian missionaries among the heathens, such as Brainerd, Eliot, and Schwartz, have displayed memorable examples of this dedication of their whole being to their office, this eternal abjuration of all the quiescent feelings. This would be the proper place for introducing (if I did not hesitate to introduce in any connection with merely human instances) the example of him who said, 'I must be about my Father's business. My meat and drink is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work. I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.' Essays. Essay ii. letter 3. The Cause of Religion injured by the general inferiority of Evangelical Writers. I suppose it will be acknowledged that the evangelical cause has been, on the whole, far from happy in its prodigious list of authors. A number of them have displayed a high order of excellence; but one regrets, as to a much greater number, that they did not revere the dignity of their religion too much to beset and suffocate it with their superfluous offerings. To you I need not expatiate on the character of the collective Christian library. It will have been obvious to you that there is a multitude of books which form the perfect vulgar of religious authorship; a vast exhibition of the most subordinate materials that can be called thought, in language too groveling to be called style. Some of these writers seem to have concluded that the greatness of the subject was to do everything; and that they had but to pronounce, like David, the name of the Lord of Hosts,' to give pebbles the force of darts and spears. Others appear to have really wanted the perception of any great difference, in point of excellence, between the meaner and the superior modes of writing. If they had read alternately Barrow's or South's pages and their own, they probably might have doubted on which side to assign the palm. A number of them, citing, in a perverted sense, the language of St. Paul, 'not with excellency of speech,' 'not with enticing words of man's wisdom,' 'not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth,' expressly disclaim everything that belongs to fine writing, not exactly as what they could not have attained, but as what they judge incompatible with the simplicity of evangelical truth and intentions. In the books of these several but kindred classes, you are mortified to see how low religious thought and expression can sink; and you almost wonder how it was possible for the noblest ideas that are known to the sublimest intelligences, the ideas of God, of Providence, of eternity, to shine on a serious human mind without imparting some small occasional degree of dignity to the strain of thought. Essays Essay iv. letter 4. Uneducated Households. How many families have we seen where the parents were only older and stronger animals than their children, where they could teach nothing but the methods and tasks of labour! They naturally could not be the mere companions for alternate play and quarrel of their children, and were disqualified by mental rudeness for being their respected guardians. There was about them the young inextinguishable principle which was capable of entering upon an endless progression of wisdom, goodness, and happiness, needing numberless suggestions, explanations, admonitions, and brief reasonings and training to follow the thoughts of written instruction. But nothing of all this was from the parental mind. Their case was as hopeless for receiving this benefit as the condition for physical nutriment of infants attempting to draw it (we have heard of so affecting and mournful a fact) from the breast of a dead parent. The unhappy heads of families possess no resources for engaging and occupying, for at once amusing and instructing the younger minds; no description of the most wonderful objects, or narrative of the most memorable events, to set for superior attraction against the idle stories of the neighbourhood; no assemblage of admirable examples from the sacred or other records of human character to give a beautiful real form to virtue and religion, and promote an aversion to base companionship. Now conceive a week, month, or year of the intercourse spent in such a domestic society, the course of talk, the mutual manners, and the progress of the mind and character; where there is a sense of drudgery approaching to slavery, in the unrelenting necessity to labour; where there is none of the interest of imparting knowledge or receiving it, or of reciprocating knowledge that has been imparted and received; where there is not an acre, if we might express it so, of intellectual space around them clear of the thick universal fog of ignorance; where especially, the luminaries of the spiritual heaven, the attributes of the Almighty, the grand phenomena of redeeming Mediation, and the solemn realities of a future state and another world are totally obscured in that shade; where the conscience and the discriminations of duty are dull and indistinct, from the youngest to the oldest ; where there is no genuine respect shown on one side, nor affection unmixed with vulgar petulance and harshness, expressed perhaps in wicked imprecations on the other; where a mutual coarseness of manners and language has the effect, without their being aware of it as a cause, of debasing their worth in one another's esteem all round, and where, notwithstanding all, they absolutely must pass a great deal of time together to converse and to display their dispositions towards one another, and exemplify what the primary relations of life are reduced to, when divested of all that is to give them dignity, endearment, and conduciveness to the highest advantage of existence. Essay on Popular Ignorance, sec. ni. Presumption of Atheism. It is heroism no longer if the atheist knows there is no God. The wonder turns on the great process by which a man could grow to the immense intelligence that can know there is no God. What ages and what light are requisite for this attainment! This intelligence involves the very attributes of a Divinity, while a God is denied. For unless the man is omnipresent, unless he is at this moment in every place in the universe, he cannot know but there may be in some place manifestations of a Deity by which he would be overpowered. If he does not know absolutely every agent in the universe, the one that he does not know may be God. If he is not in absolute possession of all the propositions of universal truth, the one that he wants may be, that there is a God. If he cannot with certainty assign the cause of everything that exists, that cause may be God. Thus, unless he knows all things—i.e., precludes another Deity by being one himself-he cannot know that the Being whose existence he rejects does not exist. Ib. Love of Money. When we mention the Love of Money, as another chief prevention of the required assistance of our cause, we may seem to be naming a thing not more especially adverse to this than to any other Christian design. A second thought, however, may suggest to you a certain peculiar circumstance in the resistance of this bad passion to the claims of a scheme for converting the heathen. By eminence among the vices which may prevail where the true God is not unknown, this of covetousness is denominated in the Word of God, Idolatry. Now as it is peculiarly against Idolatry that the design in question is aimed, the repugnance shown to it by covetousness may be considered as on the principle of an identity of nature with its enemy. One Idolater seems to take up the interest of all Idolaters, as if · desirous to profit by the warning that if Satan be divided against himself he cannot stand. On the Propagation of Christianity in India. 211. William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. (Handbook, pars. 107, 231.) Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more! The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose; The Moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. . . . Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, |