lieve; and then I obey because I love. I am indeed ashamed that my obedience is so imperfect, my love, as to its exercise, so weak, my faith so feeble. But the beginnings are from Him, and he will not despise the day of small things. "If we judge of our state by grace received, we should be content with the reality of grace, how ever imperfect. If, allowing ourselves to be believers, we make inquiry after attainments in grace, though we shall have reason to be humbled, we shall not be discouraged. Indeed, except our ex. aminatious proceed upon the hope that we are already believers, we can hardly be honest in the business we shall be unwilling to prove ourselves so very vile, and poor, and helpless as we really are. But the man whose sin is forgiven is free from guile: he is willing to know and to own the worst of himself, that the grace of the Lord his Saviour may be the more mag. nified in his salvation. * "Happy frames, and lively feel ings of the Lord's presence with our souls, are exceedingly desirable; but they are not the proper measure, standard, or criterion of faith or grace. Faith may be strong in an hour of darkness and temptation, when the soul is, as to feeling, destitute of comfort. It was strong faith in Job to say, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." And a greater than Job, He whose faith and love were always perfect, once cried out, that His God and Father had forsaken him. Comfort is desirable; but a humble child-like dependence upon the Lord, with an acquiescence in his appointments and resignation to his will, is still more so. It is a mercy to have the seeds of this gracious disposition sown in our hearts. The life of grace is like the corn, weak in its first appearance, slow in its progress, subject to various dispensations, heat and cold, drought and frost; but the harvest never fails, though ap: pearances are often threatening. Believers are the Lord's husbandry: the weather, as well as the corn, is in his management, and he has promised that all things shall work together for good. "The means are our part; the end, the blessing is the Lord's part. He has connected them together by his power and promise, that none can miss the end in the use of his appointed means, nor obtain it if the means are wilfully neglected. He will do great things for us; but he will be inquired of by us, to do it for us. We are to watch; but our security depends not upon our watchfulness, but His: we are to fight, yet the battle and the victory are not ours but the Lord's: it is he who goes before us to tread the enemy under our feet, and we follow in his strength to gather the spoils, and to sing his praise. Our part is not to question, or to reason, but to believe;-to go forth at his call, espouse his cause, take up his cross, and leave the rest to him, comforting ourselves with the thought, that though we are weak, and foolish, and wavering, the Lord whom we serve is wise, gracious, mighty, and unchangeable. After all, of the two I had rather see people a little in bondage and fear for a time, than self-confident and careless. He that walketh humbly walketh surely; though, perhaps, for want of more faith and knowledge, he is for a season cast down. But it is the Spirit's prerogative, title, and delight to be the Comforter of those that are cast down. And he will be so in his own time; but he keeps the key of comfort in his own hand, and none can impart comfort but himself. We may speak and write and preach to distressed souls; but we cannot comfort them, till He increases faith and opens their heart. The work is all his own, and he deserves all the praise. "I have run on from one thing to another;-in brief, I would not have you indulge doubts; but if you take a hint from them, to seek more earnestly and stedfastly to the Lord, you will get good by them; and in this way you will get the better of them. So far as they are from the enemy of souls, he will desist, if he sees they make you more constant and earnest in prayer." "I am willing to hope I have already acknowledged your last favour, as I do not find any of yours among my large parcel of unanswered letters. But for fear I should have mislaid it, and might appear to you negligent or ungrateful, I snatch a little time to wait upon you with a few lines. I am under a necessity of learning to write as briefly as I well can to all my friends, for a season; for I have a long job in hand, the transcribing and revising my hymns, in which I cannot avail myself of the kind assistance you and Miss P. B have repeatedly afforded me. And if I do not exercise some resolution and self-denial with respect to letter-writing, I should hardly get through it in a twelvemonth. Yet though I might transcribe a hymn or two, while I am writing this, I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of inquiring after your welfare. You will please to remember, I can find time to read long letters, though not to write them. "Last Sunday evening, my thoughts were led to a subject which I believe has very seldom been treated of in a public congregation. It was upon our faculty (if I may call it so) of dreaming. I cannot say that dreaming is an extraordinary phæno. menon, because it happens to most people, and to many people almost every night. Yet if it were not so frequent, it would surely be thought wonderful: yea, it is so; though we are, for the most part, wonderfully inattentive to it. In considering it, I spoke of it as designed by Divine Providence to give us a standing and experi mental proof of two very important points, which are both much contested and denied by the wise infidels and sadducees of the present age. First, I think it an unan swerable evidence of the activity of the soul, that it is distinct from the body, and does not necessarily depend upon the body for its perception. In a dream we see, hear, speak, and feel, as distinctly as when we are awake. How wonderful is this! How analogous, in all probability, to the mode of com munication which subsists among disembodied spirits! What con founding and diversifying of images; what various scenes and prospects; what real impressions of joy, sor row, fear, and surprize, do we meet with in our sleeping excursions! Secondly, I consider it a proof not to be gainsaid, that we are surrounded with invisible and powerful agents, who certainly, sometimes at least, are concerned in producing the impressions we feel, and pers haps always. It is evident, I think, that some dreams, even in modern times, are monitory and prophetical; which therefore can, with no ap pearance of reason, be ascribed to the desultory workings of our own imaginations. And the dreams which are confused, wild, and trivial, yet, with respect to their texture and machinery, are so much of the same nature with those which are more important, that I think it highly probable they are all equally the effects of a preternatu. ral power which has such an access to us, when our bodily faculties are locked up in sleep, as it can. not obtain when we are distinctly awake, except when the bodily organs are much indisposed, as in the case of deliriums, epilepsies, madness, &c. which may, in my view, be ascribed to the same cause. I can only start a hint, for you to pursue in your thoughts. We live in the midst of invisiblesbut not the less realities for being, invisible. We have legions of good and evil spirits around us; and the latter only wait the opportunity of sleep, or indisposition, and then, if the Lord permits them, they are capable of filling us with distress and horror! We know not fully how entirely it is owing to his goodness and care over us, that we enjoy one peaceful hour either by night or by day." "I thank you for your obliging letter. Surely never dog dreamed so opportunely and a-propos as your Chloe. I should be half angry with her, if I could believe she knew your intention of writing upon the subject, and wilfully dropped asleep in the very nick of time, out of mere spite to my hypothesis, and purposely to furnish you with the most plausible objection against it. I admit the probability of Chloe's dreaming: nay, I allow it to be possible she might dream of pursuing a hare; for though I suppose such an amusement never entered into the head of a dog of her breed, when awake, yet as I find my powers and capacities when sleeping, much more enlarged and diversified than at other times; (so that I can then fill up the characters of a prime minister, or a general, or of twenty other great offices, with no small propriety, for which, except when dreaming, I am more unfit than Chloe is to catch a hare ;) her faculties may, perhaps, be equally brightened in her way, by foreign assistance, as I conceive my own to be. But you beg the question, if you determine that Chloe's dreams are produced by mere animal nature. Perhaps you think it impossible that invisible agents should stoop so low as to influence the imagination of a dog. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the laws and the ranks of being, in that world, fully to remove the difficulty. But allow it possible, for a moment, that there are such agents, and then suppose that one of them, to gratify the king of Prussia's ambition, causes him to dream that he has overrun Bohemia, desolated Austria, and laid Vienna. in ashes; and that another should, on the same night, condescend to treat Chloe with a chace, and a hare at the end of it; do not you think the latter would be as well and as honourably employed as thie former? a convert "But as I have not time to write a long letter, I send you a book, in which you will find a scheme, not very unlike my own, illustrated and defended with much learnng and ingenuity. I have some hope of making you to my sentiments; for though I confess they are liable to objection, yet I think you must have surmounted greater difficulties before you thought so favourably of the sympathetic attraction between the spirits of distant friends. Perhaps distance may be necessary to give scope to the force of the attraction: and therefore to object that this sympathy is not perceived between friends in the same house, or in the same room, may be nothing to the purpose. I think Mrs. Newton and I are tolerably in union to each other; and yet often when her spirits are sadly hurried, I who am very near her, have no more sympathy with her in her distress (till she tells me of it) than if I was made of marble. And about ten days ago she was suddenly attacked with a disorder, which might have been quickly fatal; while I at the same time was drinking tea at Mrs. Unwin's, and chatting and smiling as if nothing had been the matter. "I but seldom fill up so much of a letter in a ludicrous way: I cannot call it a ludicrous subject, for to me it appears very striking and solemn. The agency of spirits is real, though mysterious; and were our eyes open to perceive it, I believe we should hardly be able to attend to any thing else: but it is wisely and mercifully hidden from us. This we know, they are all under the direction and controul of Him who was crucified for us. His name is a strong tower, and under the shadow of his wings we are in safety. They who know, and love, and trust Him, have nothing to fear. "The Lord favoured you with a near sense of Divine things, while you were at C- -, to preserve you from being ensnared. It is now withdrawn or weakened, to remind you that it is not of your own stock or at your own command. Different dispensations and frames are as needful for us as the different seasons of the year are for plants. He does all things well. I trust you will continue waiting in the usual course of appointed means, (of which secret praver and the study of the Scriptures are the chief,) and your sun will in due time break out again." (To be continued.) MISCELLANEOUS. For the Christian Observer. ON SACRED POETRY. IT has for many years been a general observation among literary persons, that the flowers of Parnassus cannot thrive in the garden of Religion. The soil of Paradise is represented as unfit for the rearing of these tender plants: they can grow only, we are told, in the ensanguined plains of war, or the fairy scenes of fiction. An attempt to enforce or illustrate the sublime doctrines of the Gospel with the graces of poetry, discovers, in the estimation of many critics, a taste deplorably vitiated and depraved. Others reject it with abhorrence, and are almost shocked with it as impious. Now it is true that the invocation of Apollo, or the Maids of Helicon, at the commencement of a Christian poem, would not only be little less than impious, but it would be ab. surd and disgusting in the highest degree. Examples may, indeed, be adduced from some admired pieces of "Devotion's bards," wherein the names of the heathen deities, or some mythological allusions have been injudiciously introduced. In that fine fragment, for example, of the late Henry Kirke White, in which Satan is represented as giving his "bold compeers" an account of the failure of his attempt Here is evidently a gross impropriety; for, to say nothing of the introduction of a mere imaginary and fictitious deity in an affair of such importance, he who had once been an angel of light could not, surely, be supposed to be ignorant that Jove was nothing more than an empty name. Besides, the way in which Jove is mentioned seems to intimate that he was a being of superior prowess to Satan himself, which the prince of the infernal powers, he who had dared to cope with Omnipotence, could not, we may conceive, be very ready to allow. But does it hence follow that the subject itself was ill chosen, and incapable of poetical ornament without having recourse to classical fiction? This question receives its best answer in the poem itself; in the boldness of its imagery, and the beautiful simplicity of its allegories. It is probable, indeed, that riper years and judgment would have induced the ingenious author to avoid blending heathenism with Christianity; but I cannot think that he would ever have been induced to change his sentiments respecting the propriety of his sub. ject: on the coutrary, we have reason to imagine, from the two last affecting stanzas, that it was his de. termination to employ those poetical, as well as other talents, with which he was so eminently blessed, in the service of Him who gave them; and that he considered the productions of his younger years comparatively trifling, and beneath the dignity of his profession. The above-mentioned objection to sacred poetry was, perhaps, first started by Boileau. He tells us, "De la foi d'un Chrétien les mystères terribles The ornamental trappings of the muse. In a country where levity and fashionable folly prevailed to such a degree as was then the case in France and at a time, too, when religion was buried under the clouds of mysticism, and every thing sacred was viewed with a supersti tious dread--such a declaration was not astonishing, especially as it comes from a person, who, with all his wit and learning, had certainly very inadequate views of the mysteries of which he was speaking, and who, it is to be feared, left the world, to say the least, very little better than he found it. But that Dr. Johnson could entertain such an opinion is more surprising. He thus objects to devotional poetry in a strain similar to that of Boileau: "The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction." Is it possible that any man who has taken an ample survey of the Divine perfections, or cast an eye over the diversified landscape of Divine goodness, and the ample field of grace which is exhibited in the recovery of fallen man, can talk of paucity of topics? Is it possible that any CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 190. one who has read the rapturous strains of Isaiah, or the still sublimer songs of Jesse's son, can say that religion rejects the ornaments of figurative diction? Though Dr. Johnson was a man of gigantic tas lents, and a Colossus of philologi cal learning, yet he does not seem to have been much distinguished for liberality of sentiment, or fervour of devotion; and with Cowper, who certainly excelled him in both these respects, I am inclined, in some instances, to question the cor. rectness of his taste. To make Divine truth palatable to those who have no relish for it, or rather have a radical dislike to it, is, indeed, out of the power of language or poetry. They cannot desire to see God set forth under his various attributes of power, wisdom, justice, or even of mercy. They cannot, with complacency, read any thing which treats immediately of Jesus Christ, and the invaluable blessings of salvation; and it must be remembered that for such persons, among others, if not chiefly, Johnson was writing. If he had perused with a candid and unbiassed mind, what Cowley, Watts, and Blackmore have said upon this subject, he might, probably, have been induced to modify his opinion, or, at least, to speak with more candour. After a deserved eulogium which he passes on the second of these writers, as a scholar and divine, he will hardly be thought to have done justice to him as a poet, when he ranks him among those with whom youth and ignorance may be safely pleased. In the Hora Lyricæ, there are some pieces which would have added to the laurels of our justly-admired moralist himself. What, for example, can be more truly sublime and poetical than the hymn on God's dominion and decrees, especially the two following stanzas of it! Chain'd to his throne a volume lies, 4 P |