understanding; a correct acquaintance with scriptural doctrine; a fair portion of reading, general and theological; a reasonable knowledge of the human heart; a willingness to exercise patient study and attention; a preference for what is simple and useful, above what is ostentatiously shewy or elaborate; a real wish, in short, to do good as a faithful minister of Jesus Christ, in the humble and diligent exercise of the pastoral function. In one sense, indeed, namely, in the light of Christian virtues, these principles and attainments, we admit, are not a little exalted; yet in truth they involve nothing beyond what every conscientious clergyman may, by the blessing of God on his careful endeavours, make his own. And deeply are we persuaded, that sermons written and preached under these habitual impressions, will, and must, in the end effect extensive good. The preacher may not, indeed, hear of many and surprising sudden conversions: he may, even for a series of years, study, and write, and preach in comparative sorrow, and often perhaps lay his weary head on his pillow at the conclusion of his Sunday's labours, with the dejected exclamation, "Who hath believed our report, and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?" But in the mean time the ground is in a hopeful course of culture; the seed is silently springing up: those who had long neglected Divine worship begin to attend it; those who had attended it in a careless perfunctory spirit are gradually and almost insensibly forming to higher principles and motives: formalists come to the holy table as before, but they are formalists no longer; the incredulous have been imperceptibly persuaded; the ignorant taught; the careless aroused; the prejudiced convinced; and, above all, the children and youth of his congregation are entering life with principles formed under his ministry, and with CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 256.

an abundant promise of becoming his crown of rejoicing in the day of the Lord Jesus.

More rapid, and, for a time, apparently more splendid, success may on some occasions be witnessed; but it is to this gradual, permanent, and deeply rooted establishment or revival of religion in his parish that a faithful and diligent clergyman will mainly look in the regular course of his ministerial capacity; and it is this sort of progressive influence which discourses like these before us seem calculated, by the blessing of God, to secure. May their pious author meet with this reward abundantly!

We shall select a single discourse as a specimen of Mr. Buddicom's volumes, preferring for that purpose one of apparently a more ethical than doctrinal cast; with a view, among other reasons, to shew how naturally a faithful Christian pastor grounds even his ethics on the irreversible basis of scriptural doctrine, and interweaves almost unconsciously the credenda and agenda of the Gospel in one uniform texture of what is good and what is lovely, what is enjoined and what is delightful and beneficial. Some preachers have been accused of almost always selecting doctrinal topics, and seldom or never carrying them out into the details of practice: others have been equally accused of too generally choosing practical topics, and forgetting to urge them upon Christian grounds. We hope, and we fully believe, that the number of these ultras on either side is greatly decreased and decreasing; but we would venture to submit for consideration whether there is not still a habit prevailing in many minds of avoiding one class of texts and preferring another, to the exclusionif not of any essential truth-at least of due variety and with an injurious influence as respects general edification. It may be said indeed to come to the same thing in the end whether a minister selects 2 L

of Bethlehem? Who has not, in the unguarded hours of his life, desired something placed beyond his reach and attainment, unless he broke through the laws and sanctions with which the word of God, like the Philistines in the gate of Bethlehem, would prevent approach and transgression? Who has not felt a lurking wish for some gratification which he could not compass, and cried with David, "O that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate! Can any one, not wholly estranged from the history of his own heart, deny his recollection of any such impulse, or the strong endeavour with which it aimed at victory over his principles, and his fear of God? Who has not also felt some powerful disposition to yield to the seduction, which the crafty suggestions invested with an importance utterly undeserved by the intrinsic merit of the brief and unworthy gratification which its indulgence would produce? Feed me,. I pray thee, with that same red pottage, for I am faint. And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birth-right. And Esau said, Behold I am at the point to die, and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And Jacob said, Swear unto me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright, and did eat and drink, and rose up and went his way.' There is an universal proneness to feel in some degree the kindlings of a spirit like that of Ahab, which, ungratified with all his possessions, and restless, even upon the throne of Israel, coveted the little vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. If the unblest desire has not ripened into act, the praise is due to the powerful agency of the Holy Spirit in its restraining or sanctifying influence. Temptation looks so fair, and anticipation bedecks with hues so brilliant the distant object of our wishes, that we are eager to attain it. O that one would give me to drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!" pp. 203-205. "Had David contemplated the danger to which his faithful soldiers would be exposed by this rash desire, he had surely never given it utterance; he had surely buried it in the deepest silence of his heart. In vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.' If men were instructed to look into the future with the eye of truth, and mark the consequences of indulging forbidden wishes, instead of being guided by the eye of sense, which regards only the present, they would shrink in salutary alarm from attractions which seem to solicit so fairly, and to bid so highly for

the soul. The spirit of evil, therefore, brings the temptation prominently into view, and bids his intended victim look no farther: The God of this world blinds the eyes of them who believe not.' Look well then, my dear hearers, to your own case and circumstances. Have you been thus tried and tempted? Have you been solicited thus unthinkingly to walk along the highway of death? Has the natural infidelity of the human heart been fed and fostered by the hope of present attainment and future impunity? Have you opened your ear for a moment to the suggestion of your worst enemy, and re-echoed the whisper of his dark design, I shall have peace though I walk in the imaginations of my heart.' Are these things so? Then you have placed your eternal welfare in a state of hazard, from which you cannot too speedily or too determinately withdraw it." vol. ii. pp. 207, 208.

In describing David's victory over himself, Mr. Buddicom mentions three considerations which appear, he thinks, to have weighed on the monarch's mind; first, that the water so unguardedly desired, and for which so much hazard had been incurred, ought to be regarded virtually as the blood of the heroic men who had undertaken the dangerous service of procuring it; secondly, that under these circumstances an indulgence in the costly draught would have been, in its degree, injurious to David's own soul, as a surrender of principle and salutary self-denial to an impetuous inclination, there being no proof that other water, though perhaps less palatable, was not to be procured, without the risk of bloodshed; and thirdly, that by the act of" pouring it out before the Lord," he not only gained a victory over his own temptation, but offered a delicate and affectionate rebuke for that precipitate regard to himself which had induced the rash exploit of his captains, and which made them run the risk of shedding human blood, for the sake of gratifying an inordinate wish of their leader. We cannot detail Mr. Buddicom's remarks under each of these heads. The spirit of them may be gathered from the following sentences, to

wards the conclusion of the dis

course :

"David poured the water out unto the Lord.' What does this phrase imply? He offered it as a solemn drink-offering to the Most High. He made the very temptation by which he had been assailed, and by which he had been in some degree subdued, a mean of praising God by an act of self-denial, which Divine grace enabled him to practise. Be this conduct, my dear hearers, the model of your own. Sacrifice every unholy desire, and every incitement to sin, to that God in whose strength you must overcome them. Crucify them upon the cross of your Saviour's love. Convert into an offering of praise the occasions of evil; and glorify God by the very snares which the enemy of man has laid for your souls."vol. ii.pp.214, 215, We have selected this sermon for remark, not because it is the best, or the most regularly worked out, of our author's discourses-indeed the contrary is the case-but chiefly as an illustration of the many rich and striking topics afforded to the Christian preacher in some of the less frequented paths of Scripture narrative. There is, even in the present age, a vast and inexhausted field for the researches of a studious divine in the sacred volume, especially in the Old Testament. We believe that novelty itself, that popularly attractive charm, would not be unattainable in sermons, familiar as are all their legitimate topics, if ministers would only be at greater pains in breaking up new ground, instead of always practising an indolent established routine of clerical cropping; cultivating, if we may so speak, but a few acres of the sacred text, instead of "going through the good land in the length thereof, and the breadth thereof," seeking for its indigenous treasures, digging its golden mines, and furnishing us with more of its racy clusters, rather than passing off in place of them the repeated distillations of an indolent theology. We wish for nothing new in doctrine or in morals; and, in the best sense, the topies contained in the most popular and oft-recurring texts can never

be exhausted.

Neither do we wish

again to witness that most injurious habit, coeval with the age of the Commonwealth, of choosing farfetchedtexts andfanciful adaptations. But still there is much interesting matter in Scripture, not currently touched upon by divines, and which might be more often discovered, if, amidst the incessant occupations of an active clergyman's life, the business of sermon-making were not too frequently deferred to a period of the week when it becomes necessary to ask rather which text may be most easily done into a sermon, than which, if diligently and deliberately wrought out, would best answer the purpose of exciting attention and administering to edification.

Having thus adverted to a discourse of our author's on a somewhat unusual, and, as respects matters of doctrine, apparently unpromising text, it would be unfair to him if we did not give at least one short passage from a discourse of a different cast. We take the following, almost without selection, from the next sermon but one, on that justly popular and interesting passage, "What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ; yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord."

"I raise my voice to warn you against the fearful mistake of trusting to a wellspent life as your plea and justification in the day of God, instead of depending solely for acceptance upon the righte ousness and death of Jesus Christ. Will your goodness bear to stand side by side, and measure stature with that of St. Paul? Touching the righteousness that was in the Law, he was blameless. Do your consciences give in the same attestation? If not, your claim is inferior to that which the Apostle might have urged; but which, taught as he was by Truth infallible, he utterly renounced. Remember that by

the works of the Law shall no flesh be is to decide upon your pretensions to a justified. Remember, also, that He who reward of merit is of purer eyes than to behold the least iniquity. How, then,

should man be just before God? The Gospel commands the renunciation of this illusory hope. It tells you, that as all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,' so all must be justified freely, not by their own merits, but by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." vol. ii. pp. 254, 255.

"The sacrifices made by St. Paul were far from being worthless; their value had long endeared them to his esteem: but there was a standard by which an enlightened judgment and converted heart were compelled to measure them; and they were found deficient. Compared with the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Saviour, they shrank into a minuteness of dimensions which made them almost, if not altogether, invisible to an eye fixed upon the magnificent realities of heaven, the glory of an everlasting possession, and the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory." pp. 255, 256.

"St. Paul, indeed, when he became a Christian, renounced not his Jewish privileges, but merely his unholy reliance upon them. He quitted not the exercise of morals and virtue, to surrender himself to intemperance, and riot, and self-indulgence. The change which the principles of salvation had produced made him only more unceasingly zealous toward every good word and work. He was merely divested of that unblest presumption which his legal righteousness had served to produce, associated, as it was, with an entire ignorance of the demand and spirituality of the law of God. The new

6

religion of the Apostle was eminently that of action and practice. It aimed at a conformity to the death of Christ; that what the crucified Saviour underwent in the body, his disciple might undergo in the spirit of his mind; that he might be dead indeed unto sin, that henceforth he should not serve sin.' He desired to know also the power of the resurrection— 'that like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so he also should walk in newness of life-that as his Redeemer and his Exemplar, in his risen and ascended state, lived with God and to God, so his own conversation might be in heaven, until the Spirit of him who raised up Jesus from the dead should also quicken his mortal body' in the general resurrection,

and make him partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light.' And when a Christian extols the righteousness of faith, it is not to blame or deny moral duties, (God forbid!) but only to strip them of that quality (with which the proud independence of man would invest them) of justifying before the Most High; and to compare them, considered as man's possession, with the love of the Father, the atonement of the Son, the sanctification of the Spirit, the adoption of children, and the reversion of heaven." pp. 256, 257.

Discourses thus excellent and scriptural, thus devout and edifying, well deserve, and we trust will obtain, a wide circulation and just degree of public regard.

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GREAT BRITAIN. PREPARING for publication :-Memoir of Dr. Aikin; by Miss Aikin; - Numismata Orientalia; by W. Marsden ;-Lectures on Genesis; by Dr. Rudge;-Sabbaths at Home; by H. Marsh.

In the press :-An Appeal for Religion; by the Rev. E. Irving;-Nature Displayed; by S. Shaw; Captain Franklin's Journey from Hudson's Bay to the Coppermine River.

A Society has been founded by the name of the "Asiatic Society of London," upon the principle of that which has ex

isted long in Bengal, for the encouragement of literature, science, and arts, in connexion with India and other countries eastward of the Cape of Good Hope. It already includes a highly respectable list of members.

It has been lately ascertained, that a round galvanic conductor of the electric fluid is, in every portion of its surface, equally fitted to act on the magnetic needle; and likewise that the poles of a magnetised steel bar are not necessarily situated at its extremities, but that, by a particular mode of touching, the two ends will have similar poles, whilst the