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that there may arise a necessity for the republication of these truths, and this, too, with a voice of loud alarm and impassioned warning. Such were the doctrines proclaimed by the first Christians to the pagan world; such were the lightnings flashed by Wickliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Latimer, and others, across the papal darkness; and such, in our own times, the agitating truths with which Thomas Clarkson and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, fought and conquered the legalized banditti of men-stealers, the numerous and powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine, murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery. Truths of this kind being indispensable to man, considered as a moral being, are above all expedience, all accidental consequences for, as sure as God is holy and man immortal, there can be no evil so great as the ignorance or disregard of them. It is the very madness of mock prudence to oppose the removal of a poisoned dish on account of the pleasant sauces or nutritious viands which would be lost with it! The dish contains destruction to that for which alone we ought to wish the palate to be gratified, or the body to be nourished.

Luther felt, and preached, and wrote, and acted as beseemed a Luther to feel and utter and act. The truths, which had been outraged, he re-proclaimed in the spirit of outraged truth, at the behest of his conscience and in the service of the God of Truth. He did his duty, come good, come evil! and made no question on which side the preponderance would be. In the one scale there was gold, and the impress thereon the image and superscription of the Universal Sovereign. In all the wide, and ever-widening commerce of mind with mind throughout the world, it is treason to refuse it. Can this have a counterweight? The other scale indeed might have seemed full up to the very balance-yard; but of what worth and substance were its contents? Were they capable of being counted or weighed against the former? The conscience, indeed, is already violated when to moral good or evil we oppose things possessing no moral interest. Even if the conscience dared waive this her preventive veto, yet before we could consider the twofold results in the relations of loss and gain, it must be known whether their kind is the same or equivalent. They must first be valued, and then they may be weighed or counted, if they are worth it. But in the particular case at present before us, the loss is contingent and alien; the gain essential and the tree's own natural produce. The gain is permanent, and spreads through all times and places; the loss but temporary, and, owing its very being to vice or ignorance, vanishes at the approach of knowledge and moral improvement. The gain

reaches all good men, belongs to all that love light and desire an increase of light: to all, and of all times, who thank Heaven for the gracious dawn, and expect the noonday; who welcome the first gleams of spring, and sow their fields in confident faith of the ripening summer and the rewarding harvest-tide! But the loss is confined to the unenlightened and the prejudiced-say, rather, to the weak and the prejudiced of a single generation. The prejudices of one age are condemned even by the prejudiced of the succeeding ages: for endless are the modes of folly, and the fool joins with the wise in passing sentence on all modes but his own. Who cried out with greater horror against the murderers of the prophets than those who likewise cried out, Crucify him! crucify him! The truth-haters of every future generation will call the truth-haters of the preceding ages by their true names, for even these the stream of time carries onward. fine, truth, considered in itself, and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived as a gentle spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breathing up into the snowdrift that is piled over and around its outlet. It turns the obstacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way, increases its stream. And should it be arrested in its course by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and awaits only for a change in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards.

The Friend.

In

MILTON.

In Milton's mind itself there were purity and piety absolute; an imagination to which neither the past nor the present were interesting, except as far as they called forth and enlivened the great ideal in which and for which he lived; a keen love of truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbor in a sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit, and as keen a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more depressive, expanded and soared into a love of man as a probationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the conditions under which such a work as the "Paradise Lost" could be conceived and accomplished. By a life-long study Milton had

known

"What was of use to know,

What best to say could say, to do had done.
His actions to his words agreed, his words
To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart
Contain'd of good, wise, fair, the perfect shape;"-

* *

and he left the imperishable total, as a bequest to the ages coming, in the "Paradise Lost." No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal poem without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of Milton's soul, or without feeling how susceptible of domestic enjoyments he really was, notwithstanding the discomforts which actually resulted from an apparently unhappy choice in marriage. He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but, finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal.

Literary Remains.

THE MORALITY OF SHAKSPEARE.

Shakspeare never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day. Shakspeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay must, feel. Let the morality of Shakspeare be contrasted with that of the writers of his own, or the succeeding age, or of those of the present day, who boast their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favor of Shakspeare. Even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites nor flatters passion in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate.

Literary Remains.

THE COMBINATION IN SHAKSPEARE'S CHARACTER.

There are three powers: wit, which discovers partial likeness hidden in general diversity; subtlety, which discovers the diversity concealed in general apparent sameness; and profundity, which discovers an essential unity under all the semblances of difference.

Give to a subtle man fancy, and he is a wit; to a deep man

imagination, and he is a philosopher. Add, again, pleasurable sensibility in the threefold form of sympathy with the interesting in morals, the impressive in form, and the harmonious in sound -and you have the poet.

But combine all-wit, subtlety, and fancy with profundity, imagination, and moral and physical susceptibility of the pleasurable-and let the object of action be man universal, and we shall have-O! rash prophecy! say rather we have-a Shakspeare.

Literary Remains.

EDWARD IRVING, 1792-1834.

THIS celebrated preacher was born at Annan, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and educated at the University of Edinburgh. After finishing his theological course of studies, he officiated in various churches, until he was recommended to the notice of Dr. Chalmers, who engaged him as his assistant in St. John's parish, Glasgow. Here he gained so much reputation that he was invited to take charge of the Caledonian church in Cross street, Hatton Garden, London; and he entered upon his new field in August, 1822. He had not long occupied it before he attracted very large congregations by the force and eloquence of his discourses, and the singularity of his appearance and gesticulation. Tall, athletic, of a sallow countenance, with a profusion of jet black hair reaching to his shoulders, added to a strong Scottish accent, accompanied with violent and ungraceful, but impressive gestures; while he was constantly straining after original ideas, embellishing his discourses with the metaphors of poets and philosophers, and adding to the piquancy of his censures by personal allusions and homely truthsall these characteristics tended for a time to give him unbounded popularity, and the great and the wealthy thronged to hear him.

But in a few years the tide began to turn: his eccentricity had become familiar, and the curiosity of novelty hunters was satiated. Envy and jealousy watched his course, and he was formally accused of heresy by the Presbytery of London in 1830. The charges were that his views of the "atonement, imputation and satisfaction," were not orthodox, and after a protracted trial he was ejected from his church on the 3d of May, 1832. Soon after this, consumption laid its hand upon him, and he died on the 6th of December, 1834. Dr. Chalmers, on meeting with his senior class at Glasgow, on the morning he heard of Mr. Irving's death, paid the following tribute to his memory: "He was one of those whom Burns calls the nobles of nature. His talents were so commanding, that you could not but admire him; and he was so open and generous that it was impossible not to love him. He was the evangelical Christian grafted on the old Ro

man-with the lofty stern virtues of the one, he possessed the humble graces of the other. The constitutional basis and groundwork of his character was virtue alone; and, notwithstanding all his errors and extravagances, which both injured his character in the estimation of the world, and threw discredit upon much that was good and useful in his writings, I believe him to be a man of deep and devoted piety."

Mr. Irving's publications were-"For the Oracles of God, four Orations: for Judgment to Come, an Argument in nine parts;" also "Last Days, and Discourses on the Evil Character of the Times:" also Sermons, Lectures, and occasional Discourses. But of all that he wrote nothing exceeds, for beauty and eloquence, his Preliminary Essay to an edition of "Horne on the Psalms," from which we extract the following admirably drawn

CHARACTER OF DAVID.

Now, as the apostle, in writing to the Hebrews, concerning the priesthood of Christ, calls upon them to consider Melchizedek, his solitary majesty, and singular condition and remarkable honor; so call we upon the church to consider David, the son of Jesse, his unexampled accumulation of gifts, his wonderful variety of conditions, his spiritual riches and his spiritual desolation, and the multifarious contingencies of his life; with his faculty, his unrivalled faculty, of expressing the emotions of his soul, under all the days of brightness and days of darkness which passed over his head. For thereby shall the church understand how this the lawgiver of her devotion was prepared by God for the work which he accomplished, and how it hath happened that one man should have brought forth that vast variety of experience, in which every soul rejoiceth to find itself reflected. There never was a specimen of manhood so rich and ennobled as David, the son of Jesse, whom other saints haply may have equalled in single features of his character; but such a combination of manly, heroic qualities, such a flush of generous, godlike excellencies, hath never yet been seen embodied in a single man. His psalms, to speak as a man, do place him in the highest rank of lyrical poets, as they set him above all the inspired writers of the old Testament-equalling in sublimity the flights of Isaiah himself, and revealing the cloudy mystery of Ezekiel; but in love of country, and glorying in its heavenly patronage, surpassing them all. And where are there such expressions of the varied conditions into which human nature is cast by the accidents of providence, such delineations of deep affliction and inconsolable anguish, and anon such joy, such rapture, such revelry of emotion, in the worship of the living God!

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