thought into the invisible world, to remember, that the young as well as the aged die; that they themselves must soon follow him; that life is only the dawn of eternity; and that such as our conduct is, during the morning, will be our lot throughout the day. Most affectingly, therefore, does he warn them to remember their Creator in the days of their youth, before the evil days come, in which they shall say, they barve no pleasure. "The Man of middle age repeats the same solemn lesson concerning the business, the avarice, and the ambition, of that period. Man he holds up to view, cut off in the midst of his schemes of accumulating wealth, and acquiring reputation; his ardent efforts to obtain honour, office, power, and popular favour, and his laborious pursuit of learning, eloquence, and mental distinction. All these he declares to be useless and worthless without piety. The world he pronounces to be a mere toy-shop, stored with baubles, fitted to allure and amuse children, but meriting only the contempt of years and understanding. On the cares and anxieties, the toils and acquisitions, of man, his finger, like the hand which appeared to Belshazzar, inscribes Vanity and vexation of spirit. "At the close of this awful train Age slowly advances, and with a trembling hand points at the hour-glass, which measures human life. On us he calls to mark how fast they run, how many are emptied, and how few remain. What is your life? he cries; It is even a vapour, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. who passed seventy years, know by sure experience, that it is a dream; idly amusing for a moment, and then fleeting before the beams of the morn ing. I, "In this great scene of instructive meditation we behold all ages the promiscuous prey of the tomb. Here, together, the smile of infancy expires, the bloom of youth fades, the vigour of manhood shrinks, and the feebleness of age is finally benumbed. Here the hopes of the ardent, the beauty of the graceful, the learning of the wise, the tongue of the eloquent, the wealth of the rich, the glory of the renowned, and the power of the great, are seen to be all equally vain and useless; equally victims of the king of terrors; gone; forgotten; and only summoned back to remembrance, as solemn monitors to the living. Here, also, arises to view, in immense numbers, the great congregation of the dead. While, fixed in thought, we contemplate this vast assembly, we instinctively cast forward the eye of prophecy, and survey the amazing multitude, which shall stand up at the closing day. We behold the incomprehensible millions come forth out of the grave, repeople the world at once, and for a moment, with endless myriads, and present in a single view the whole family of Adam. We see them arranged on the right hand, and on the left, of the Judge; we hear them acquitted, or condemned; we behold them rise to heaven, or descend to hell." An oration on the death of Mr. Ebenezer Grant Marsh, senior tutor, Hebrew instructor, and professor elect of languages and ecclesiastical history in Yale College, who died on the 16th of Nov. 1803, in the 27th year of his age; pronounced in the College Chapel on the 10th of Jan. 1804. By Bancroft Fowler, one of the Tutors of Tale College. Hartford. Hudson & Goodwin. pp. 13. 8vo. This oration is published in the same pamphlet with the subject of the preceding article. It contains, in a dry and concise style, a particular, and, in our opinion, just account of the talents, pursuits, and acquisitions of the deceased. The following paragraph will give an idea of the performance, and of the uncommon industry of the lamented Mr. Marsh, "His industry was almost without a parallel. Early inured to habits of application, study was his delight, Having imbibed a taste for science, he thought no labour too great for his attainment. 'Aocustomed from childhood to sedentary life, his constitution was gradually adapted to it, and rendered capable of enduring a degree of confinement, which few will support. Finding his health unimpaired by application, he resolved that labour should not be wanting in the pursuit of science. Discarding the unfounded opin ion, that the native powers of the mind are the only cause of distinction among men, he adopted the far more rational one, that eminence is the fruit of industry. Despising the uncertain, short lived reputation of a genius, he resolved by application to maintain that of a scholar. No better evidence of the ardour and industry with which he engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, can be given, than the manuscripts which he left behind him. These, consisting chiefly of the most importent facts and observations which he found in the course of his reading, amount to nearly three thousand quarto pages, exclusive of his sermons and dissertations. To have collected so much valuable matter, at so early an age, notwithstanding he was engaged, for about seven years of his life, in the laborious business of instructing youth, proves the most assiduous applicationan application which, though in itself highly commendable, was, there is reason to believe, too intense for his health, and remotely laid the foundation of his death. But he has set an example of industry worthy of universal imitation, and, with due attention to health, is especially recommended to the youth of this seminary.” The validity of baptism by sprinkling, and the right of infants to that ordinance, supported and defended in two discourses, delivered at Malden, in the beginning of the year 1804; occasioned by the setting up of a Baptist society in that place. By David Osgood, D. D. minister of a church in Medford. Second edition. Charlestown. Etheridge. 12mo pp. 83. This production has been much and, perhaps, justly commended, as a sound and finished fabric, rising on a good foundation, in due proportions and with sufficient beauty. Yet in its very threshold there is something not wholly unexceptionable. In contrasting the baptism of the Holy Ghost with the water baptism, Dr. Osgood says, "the one [he should have said that] was the immediate gift of God, producing a real change in the heart, purging it from sin and dead works, and bringing it to the answer of a good conscience tohave faid this] was to be the wards God; the other [he should work of man, and, of itself, could avail to nothing more than the purifying of the flesh." We have been used to think, that the baptism, or gift, of the Holy Ghost was received, not for the purpose of changing the heart, and but for the sake of enabling the purging it from sin and dead works, recipient to perform miracles, by which to confirm the truth of the gospel. The apostles, Judas excepted, were good men before they received the Holy Ghost; and afterwards they were nowise exempt from human infirmities. There have doubtless been thousands of saints, both before and since the apostolic age, who nev er were privileged with particular inspiration. The inaccuracy of this theological opinion has no effect on the tenour of the discourses. The Doctor in the first discourse has happily condensed the usual argumentation in favour of sprinkling; and whatever his opponents may think of his design, they can hardly refuse him the credit of a powerful executioner. Haste obliges us, for the present, to conclude our remarks on this interesting performance with an extract, in which the absurdity of supposing the jailor's family to have been baptized by immersion, is strikingly displayed. "Equally improbable is it that the jailor and his household, mentioned in Acts xvi. were baptized by immersion. For this seems to have been done in the middle of the night. The apostles, Paul and Silas, had been committed to his custody. Having received a charge unusually strict, he thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks. At midnight, a great earthquake shook the prison to its foundations; all the doors flew open, and every one's bands were loosed. The keeper awoke in a great fright, and was about to dispatch himself. But when he perceived that the prisoners had not made their escape,nor were disposed to attempt it, his opinion of them was suddenly altered. A very different concern took possession of his mind. Having brought them out of the dungeon, or from what is called the inner prison, with the deepest humility, he inquired of them the way of salvation. They directed him to faith in Christ, and, says the history, "spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway." there a single hint in this account which can give us the idea of immer sion? Nay, with what eyes must they look at this passage of scripture, who can see the jailor with his whole family, and his prisoners, whom he was charged to keep at his peril, and whose Is backs were covered with blood and wounds from their severe scourginghaving been beaten with rods, and received many stripes but a few hours before ;-all this company thus circumstanced, turning out at midnight, groping their way in the dark, or going with lanterns, or torches, to a river or pool, no one knows where-through a city, just waked up by a great earthquake, and the streets probably filled with the terrified inhabitants? Would Paul and Silas have done such a thing? As was observed before, such representations make the apostles to have acted a strange and unaccountable part, inconsistent not only with reason and common sense, but with themselves;, for we find, in the morning, that they refused to leave the prison, till the magistrates came themselves to take them out. How absurd, then, is the supposition of their having gone abroad in the night to plunge their converts? Do not all the circumstances mentioned in this history, tend strongly to confirm us in the belief that the jailor and his family were baptized by sprinkling or affusion ?" (To be concluded in our next.) LONDON REVIEW. AS literary men are commonly curi ous to learn the opinion of foreigners respecting the scientific character of their country, the readers of the Monthly Anthology are here presented with an extract from the London Catalogue of the New London Review for part of the year 1799. DAVID HUME, to dissuade GIBBON from writing, rather in the French, than in the English language, foretold to him, with exultation, that the empire of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE Would one day be prodigiously strengthened and en larged by means of the British settlements in America and in India. It has happened as he foretold. From the port of London, from Glasgow, from Liverpool, there is a very large annual exportation of British books to NORTH AMERICA. In Philadelphia, at New-York, and in the other more considerable towns of the American States, a very great diversity of English publications continually issue from the press; newspapers, magazines, reviews, and annual registers, the usual variety of periodical works, are all published, in great abundance, among the Americans. And, though much of the literary matter which they contain, is borrowed from European books; yet a great quantity of very excellent original communications likewise appears in them. The transactions of the American Philosophical Society are regularly published, after convenient intervals; nor can they fail to interest, in a very high degree, the curiosity of the philosophers of Europe. Morse has successfully laboured to illustrate the history and the geography of America. Smith, a philosopher of the school of Kaimes, Hume, and Robertson, has in some dissertations and sermons, exhibited a spirit of research, a vein of original thinking, and a manly vigour of composition, not unworthy of his masters, even where he contests their opinions and corrects their errours. Joel Barlow who came to Europe, as an apostle of democratical reform, had before distinguished himself, as the author of some excellent poesy, of genuine American growth. Dwight's Conquest of Canaan, and other poems more recently written, are certainly not inferiour in merit, to much of the contemporary poetry of Britain. bul's Mac Fingal has risen to the rank of a classic in America, as a mock-heroic poem; and is even well-known in this country. Yet, in truth, it appears to us, Trum not so surprising, that these poets have already thus adorned the English literature of America; as that a region where life is still so considerably rural, where the beauties of nature are so wild, so luxuriant, so sublime and picturesque, so endlessly va ried, where there is so much to favour their melancholy musing which elevates the soul to poetic ecstasies; should not yet have produced poetical excellence even of a higher class than has appeared in the old world, either in ancient, or in modern times. Medical literature, too, has been very much cultivated in America, though the physicians of Philadelphia and New York, have, indeed, been hitherto, unable, to extirpate those dreadful, epidemical disorders, by which the ranks of life are, there, from time to time, so terribly thinned; they have, however, recorded a number of very interesting medical facts respecting the aconomy of human health; and have arranged these under several theories not destitute of ingenuity. Among those who have the most ardently cultivated the nat ural history of America in its connexion with medicine, is Dr. "The happiness in which I rest More noble they, whose active aim He had flail'd the rye, con'd haycocks Convincing signs of anxious thought, That bleeding in his bosom wrought; Or else exalt its godlike height, |