day and you will find pride introduced among their characteristic features. Look to the contrast, which the scriptures repeatedly mark between the respective rewards, as well as the natures of the Christian and the opposite temper, where it is said, that "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble." Look finally to the reason of all this in the assertion of the text, where St. John coupling "the pride of life" with "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes," in other words with sensuality and covetousness, affirms, that "it is not of the Father, but is of the world:" that it is not of heavenly origin, the valuable and fruitful gift of the Holy Spirit of God; but is, on the contrary, derived from "the god of this world," sinful as a principle, and mischievous in its tendency.' Vol. II. pp. 46, 50. We add one more passage, as a further illustration of Mr. Mant's pointedness and fervour. Now, what is your behaviour with regard to these things? Do you join in the service when you are directed? For instance, do you repeat those parts of the Liturgy which you are required to repeat with the minister, especially the general Confession and the Lord's Prayer? Do you read with him aloud the alternative verses of the Psalms, thus expressing your adoration, petitions, and thanksgiving to God, in the language of inspiration? Do you utter the responses after the minister, especially those addresses to the throne of grace, wherein you are instructed to pray for God's mercy and deliverance from evil in the Litany, and for grace to keep his commandments in the Communion Service? and do you give the sanction of your assent to every prayer which the minister offers in your behalf by pronouncing earnestly Amen, at the conclusion of it? If you thus join in the public worship of the congregation, do you join in such a manner as to shew that you know and feel and pay regard to what you say? Are you never sitting at your ease, when you should be kneeling? Are you never whispering and laughing with your neighbour, when you should be listening with reverence to hear the word of God, or offering him your thanks and prayers? Are you never gazing about you, and suffering any trifling occurrence to withdraw your attention from your devotions, or perhaps not endeavouring to fix it upon them at all?' Vol. II. pp. 177, 179. This is undoubtedly good. The value of the discourses, however, as an addition to the common stock of parochial and domestic instruction, we cannot estimate very highly. Mr. Mant's sermons are plain, not because he simplifies what is difficult or illucidates what is obscure to ordinary minds, but because he deals so largely in truisms---introducing them not for the purpose of useful inference or application, but as if he was really saying something new and striking. He is often, too, very injudicious. For instance, in the sermon on the insufficiency of works of righteousness to purchase salvation,' after showing, in the first part, that we cannot procure salvation by obedience to the revealed will of God, he goes on very gravely and very earnestly to convince his readers that the morality of modern philosophers, such as Hume, is equally insufficient for that purpose. Mr. Mant by no means makes the most of his principles. The love of God and of Christ he applies but sparingly as stimulants to duty. He brings forward but little that is at all adapted to rouse the mind, to touch the conscience, to make the guilty tremble. But the great defect of these sermons, which they share in common with a large mass of oral as well as religious instruction, consists in being inappropriate. They have nothing in them peculiar to those who read them Refutations of errors of which the persons to whom they are addressed never heard, argumentations in favour of what is plain or what they firmly believe, cold general descriptions of vice, bear the same relation to useful efficacious sermons that the declamations of the rhetorician bear to the " sound speech" of the orator. "Rightly to divide the word of truth," is a service requiring no ordinary skill. Much observation on human nature, much reflection on the workings of the mind, much aptitude in laying hold on the peculiarities of character, are necessary to enable a man so to discourse as that each of those who listen, shall hear his conscience pronounce---" thou art the man." In all these respects Mr. Mant has much to learn. He draws nothing from the heart, nothing from existing nature. While addressing a crowd, he cannot analyse it; he never seems to consider an audience as composed of individuals and discourses so generally on the most important subjects, that what he says comes home to no man's "business or bosom," Art. VII. The Beauties of Christianity; by F. A. De Chateaubriand, pp. 970. system, we suppose no man will account it one of them, that in each class of beings that have many general principles of constitution in common, there should be found individuals strikingly contrasted with one another; that there should be laburnums and woodbines as well as oaks---peacocks as well as eagles---antelopes as well as camels and elephants---and Chateaubriand as well as Paley. There is yet room in the system for them all; and there are offices and occupations for them all to fill, and which can be filled by each respectively in a far better manner than by the opposite entities. Let them only avoid mixing and exchanging their vocations, and the economy will go on commodiously. We think M. Chateaubriand has fully made good his claims to a place in this our fine portion of the creation; that he has fallen into the right district of it; that his activity in it has been most laudably, indeed almost heroically, zealous; and that he has transgressed his proper limits only about as much as is commonly incident to the self-deception and ambition of mortals, even when their intentions are the best. He is a singular and interesting man; so sincere, so tender, so impassioned, so enthusiastic, so imaginative, that we admit him among our friends, with less of the cold inquiry and calculation what good he is likely to do us, and among men of genius, with less disposition to put his judgement to any severe proof, than we should entertain in almost any other instance. It is gratifying, too, and excites a strong partiality, that a French infidel of genius should become a Christian almost of any kind, and on any terms. And, provided the simplicity and sincerity of his principles be not injuriously affected by his success, we are pleased that one reward of his honesty and courage has been such a popularity, in France, of his services to a good cause, as to outrival and mortify the base fraternity that he has deserted. His own account, however, of this happy separation, will serve to apprize his pupils that they are not to attend him for the acquisition of logic, and his admirers that they must beware of proclaiming him for a philosopher. My religious opinions have not always been the same they are at present. Offended by the abuses of some institutions, and the vices of some men, I was formerly betrayed into declamation and sophistical arguments against Christianity. I might throw the blame upon my youth, upon the madness of the revolutionary times, and upon the company I kept: but I wish rather to condemn myself, for I do not know how to defend what is indefensible. I will only relate simply the manner in which Divine Providence was pleased to call me back to my duty. My mother, after having been thrown at seventy-two years of age into a dungeon, where she was an eye witness of the destruction of some of her children, expired at last upon a pallet, to which her misfortunes had reduced her. The remembrance of my errors dif fused great bitterness over her last days. In her dying moments, she charged one of my sisters to call me back to that religion in which I had been brought up. My sister, faithful to her solemn trust, com. municated to me the last request of my mother. When her letter reached me beyond the seas, far distant from my native country, my sister was no more; she had died in consequence of the rigours of her imprisonment. These two voices issuing from the tomb, this death which served as the interpreter of death, struck me with irresistible force. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I allow, to great supernatural illuminations, but my conviction of the truth of Christianity sprung from the heart. I wept, and I believed.' p. xv. This work was an earlier performance than either his Itinerary, or The Martyrs, though it comes later (excepting a detached portion of it) into the English language. The author had contemplated with grief the great practical victory gained over Christianity, in his native country, by the philosophic, the lettered, and the unlettered wits, with Voltaire at their head. He had observed the inefficacy of the vindications of the Christian religion on the ground of historical evidence; vindications so numerous and so conclusive that the argument appeared to him incapable, on that side, of any material addition. But the infidels had rendered these defences in a great measure unavailing, by withdrawing their attacks from that impregnable side, and occupying and seducing the popular mind with a misrepresented, degraded character of the religion. They laboriously defamed it as something mean and barbarous, destructively opposed to all the graces, repressive of genius, estranged from magnificence and sublimity, and congenial with all the harsher principles of the human nature. Here then was the ground for its advocate. He considered all this as the direct reverse of truth, and planned a work to prove that Christianity must be of divine origin, because it is allied and auspicious to every thing that even the wits and geniuses themselves must acknowledge to be graceful, and liberal, and dignified, and grand.---But we shall do right to transcribe his own account. They (the disciples of the sophists) had been seduced by being told that Christianity was the offspring of barbarism, an enemy to the arts and sciences, to reason and elegance; a religion whose only tendency was to encourage bloodshed, to enslave mankind, to dimi nish their happiness, and to retard the progress of the human understanding. It was therefore necessary to prove that, on the contrary, the Christian religion is the most humane, the most favourable to liberty and the arts and sciences, of all the religions that ever existed; that the modern world is indebted to it for every improvement, from agriculture to the abstract sciences; from the hospitals for the reception of the unfortunate, to the temples reared by the Michael Angelos and embellished by the Raphaels. It was necessary to prove that nothing is more divine than its morality, that nothing is more lovely and more sublime than its tenets, its doctrines, and its worship; that it encourages genius, corrects the taste, developes the virtuous passions, imparts energy to the ideas, presents noble images. to the writer, and perfect models to the artist; that there is no disgrace in being believers with Newton and Bossuet, with Pascal and Racine. In a word, it was necessary to summon all the charms of the imagination, and all the interests of the heart, to the assistance of that religion against which they had been set in array. The reader may now have a clear view of the object of our work. All other kinds of apologies are exhausted, and perhaps even they would be of no use in the present times. Who would now sit down to read a work professedly theological? Possibly a few sincere Christians who are already convinced. It is high time that the public should know to what all those charges of absurdity and meanness, that are daily alledged against Christianity, may be reduced. It is high time to demonstrate, that instead of debasing the ideas, it encourages the soul to take the most daring flights, and is capable of enchanting the imagination as divinely as all the deities of Homer and Virgil. Our arguments will at least have this advantage, that they will be intelligible to the world at large, and that nothing but common sense is requisite to determine their weight and strength. In works of this kind, authors neglect, perhaps rather too much, to speak the language of their readers: it is right to be a scholar with a scholar, and a poet with a poet; the Almighty does not forbid us to tread the flowery path in order to lead the wanderer once more to him; and it is not always by the steep and rugged mountain that the lost sheep again finds its way to the fold. We have the vanity to think that this mode of considering Christianity, displays associations of ideas which are but imperfectly known. Sublime in the antiquity of its recollections, which go back to the creation of the world; ineffable in its mysteries; adorable in its sacraments; interesting in its history; celestial in its morality; attractive in its ceremonies, it is fraught with every species of beauty. Would you follow it in poetry? Tasso, Milton, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire (!) revive the images of its miracles. In the belles lettres, in eloquence, history, and philosophy, what have not Bossuet, Fenelon, Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bacon, Pascal, Euler, Newton, Leibnitz, produced by its divine inspiration? In the arts, what mas. ter-pieces! If you examine it in its worship, what ideas are suggested by its antique Gothic churches, its admirable prayers, and its impressive ceremonies! Among its clergy behold all those scholars who have handed down to you the languages and the works of Greece and Rome; all those anchorets of Thebais; all those asylums for the unfortunate; all those missionaries to China, to Canada, to Paraguay; not forgetting the military orders whence chivalry derived its origin. Every thing has been engaged in our cause—the manners of our ancestors, pictures of days of yore, even poetry, romances themselves. We have called smiles from the cradle, and tears from the tomb. Sometimes with the Maronite monk we have dwelt on the summits of Carmel and Lebanon; at others we have watched with the nun, the Sister of Charity, beside the bed of the sick. Here two American lovers have summoned us into the recesses of their deserts; there we have listened to the sighs of the virgin in the solitude of the cloister. Homer has taken his place by Milton, and Virgil beside Tasso; the ruins of Athens and of Memphis have formed contrasts with the ruins of Christian monuments, and the tombs of Ossian with our rural church-yards.'-In short, we have endeavoured to strike the heart of the infidel in every possible way; but we dare not flatter ourselves that we possess the miraculous rod of religion which caused living streams to burst from the flinty rock. |