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space of a few years, Sunday became the travelling day of all who travel in their own carriages. But, why should the humbler citizen, whose scantier means oblige him to commit his person to the crammed stage coach, more than his wealthier neighbour, be exposed to the hardship of travelling on the working days, when the multitude of heavy carts and waggons moving to and fro in all directions, renders the roads unpleasant and unsafe for carriages of a lighter fabric, especially when the only real inconvenience, the danger of such obstructions, is infinitely increased to him by the greater difficulty with which the vehicle in which he makes his uncomfortable journey, crosses out of the way in deep and miry roads to avoid the fatal jostle? The force of these principles was soon perceived; and in open defiance of the laws, stage coaches have for several years travelled on the Sundays. The Wagoner soon understands that the road is as free for him as for the coachman; and the Sunday traveller now breaks the sabbath, without any advantage gained in the safety or pleasure of his journey. In the Country the roads are crowded on the Sunday, as on any other day, with travellers of every sort; the devotion of the villager is interrupted by the noise of the carriages passing through, or stopping at the inns for refreshment. In the metropolis, instead of that solemn stillness of the vacant streets, which might suit, as in our fathers' days, with the sanctity of the day, the mingled racket of worldly business and pleasure is going on with little abatement; and in the churches and chapels which adjoin the public streets, the sharp rattle of the whirling phaeton, and the graver rumble of the loaded waggon, mixed with the oaths and imprecations of the brawling drivers, disturb the congregation, and stun the voice of the preacher?

Bishop Horsley's nerves were of no very delicate texture, yet we cannot avoid recognizing in this singular passage, something of the enraged preacher,' whose voice had actually been stunned by these discordant annoyances; but the strain of reprehension approaches Dearer to satiric poetry than to preaching.

'Inde caput morbi, rhedarum transitus arcto

Vicorum inflexu, et stantis convicia mandra.'-Juv.

To this instance of levity may properly be opposed the awful solemnity of the following passage:

In that moment, therefore, in which his present life ends, every man's future condition becomes irreversibly determined. Let us watch therefore and pray. Neither shall vigilance and prayer be ineffectual. On the incorrigible and perverse, on those who mock at God's threatenings, and reject his promises; on those only, the severity of his wrath will fall. But for those who lay these warnings to heart, who dread the pollutions of the world, and flee from sin as from a serpent, who fear God's displeasure more than death, and seek his favour more than life, though much of frailty will to the last adhere to them; yet these are the objects of the Father's mercy, of the Redeemer's love.

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For these he died, for these he pleads; these he supports and strengthens with his spirit; these he shall lead with him triumphant to the mansions of glory, when sin and death shall be cast into the lake of fire.'

The following may be adduced as a specimen of that noble strain of declamation which this great preacher can always command.

The time shall never be, when a true church of God shall not be somewhere subsisting on the earth; but any individual church, if she fall from her first love, may sink in ruins. Of this, history furnishes but too abundant proof in the examples of churches once illustrious, planted by the Apostles, watered with the blood of the first saints and martyrs which are now no more. Where are now the seven churches of Asia, whose praise is in the Apocalypse? Where shall we now find the successors of those earliest bishops, once stars in the Son of Man's right hand? Where are those boasted seals of Paul's apostleship, the churches of Corinth and Philippi? Where are the churches of Jerusalem and Alexandria? But is there need that we resort for salutary warning to the examples of remote antiquity? Alas! where at this moment is the church of France? Her altars demolished; her treasures spoiled; her holy things profaned; her persecuted clergy, and her plundered prelates, wanderers on the earth?'

The next passage (though our limits will not allow us to insert the whole of it) will shew the depth and clearness of our author's metaphysical talents, as exercised on the most difficult subject in the whole compass of that science, the will of man, and the necessity or freedom of his actions.

"We must not imagine such an arbitrary exercise of God's power over the minds and wills of subordinate agents, as should convert rational agents into mere machines, and leave the Deity charged with the 'follies and the crimes of men, which was the error of the Calvinists! nor must we, on the other hand, set up such a liberty of created beings as, necessarily precluding the Divine foreknowledge of human actions, should take the government of the moral world out of the hands of God, and leave him nothing to do with the noblest part of his creation, which hath been perhaps the worse error of some who have opposed the Calvinists.

There is yet another error upon this subject, which I think took its rise among professed infidels, and to them, till of late, it hath been confined. But some have appeared among its modern advocates, actuated I am persuaded (for their writings on this subject witness it) by the same spirit of resigned devotion, which gave birth to the plan of arbitrary predestination. Deeply versed in physics, which the Calvinists neglected, these men wish to reconcile the notion of God's arbitrary dominion, which they in common with the Calvinists maintain with what the others overlooked, the regular operation of second causes; and in this circumstance lies the chief, if not only difference between the philosophical necessity of our subtle moderns, and the predestination of their more simple ancestors: and so far as these ne

cessarians

cessarians maintain the certain influence of moral motives, as the natural and sufficient means whereby human actions and even human thoughts are brought into that continued chain of causes and effects, which taking its beginning in the operations of the infinite mind, cannot but be fully understood by him, so far they do service to the cause of truth, placing the great and glorious doctrines of foreknowledge and providence, upon a firm and philosophical foundation. But when they go beyond this, when they would represent the influence of moral motives as the same with that, which excites and governs the motions of the inanimate creation; here they contradict the very principles they would seem to have established. The source of their mistake is this, that they imagine a similitude between things which admit of no comparison, between the influence of a moral motive upon mind, and that of mechanical force upon matter.'

Long as this citation may appear in itself, it contains perhaps fewer words than those in which any other writer could have stated the substance of a most important and long agitated controversy; and though it be sufficiently visible on which side the preacher's mind preponderates, yet the whole representation is conducted with a fairness and candour which does honour to his heart. The brightest and most luminous bodies in the universe have their spots, and even the argumentation of this great reasoner is not always free from paralogisms. Into one of these the preacher has been led by his love of novelty and paradox in his inimitable discourse on the raising of Lazarus. Here, having previously determined, that our Lord's promise to Martha, he that believeth in me shall never die,' is not to be understood of the second death, but that believers shall in no sense die at all; or, in other words, that with them, in the interval between the separation of soul and body and the general resurrection, perception should never cease; he goes on to combat what he truly calls that unintelligible and dismal doctrine of the sleep of the soul,' during the same obscure and awful interval. But this doctrine is that of an universal suspension of perception in the separate spirits of all mankind: if therefore the promise that they should never die, be restricted to believers, and mean only that their spirits alone should be exempt from the general sentence, the inference is the very reverse from what the bishop intended; namely, that the spirits of unbelievers shall remain in a state of sleep between death and the resurrection. The two next discourses, on the story of the Syrophoenician woman, may be selected as unrivalled specimens of penetration and acuteness in analyzing an historical passage of Scripture, and tracing every movement of the heart (even in the human nature of our Lord himself) during a most affecting and interesting scene. In the peculiar strain of rhetoric, however, which pervades these most

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animated compositions, it is impossible not to observe much of the manner of Bishop Hall, in his Contemplations :

"Oh miserable woman, offspring of an accursed race, cease thy unavailing prayers-he hath pronounced thy sentence.-Betake thee to thy home, sad outcast from thy Maker's love. Impatience of thy absence but aggravates thy child's distraction-Not long shall her debilitated frame support the tormentor's cruelty.-Give her while she lives the consolation of a parent's tenderness-it is the only service thou canst render her. For thyself, alas! no consolation remains, but in the indulgence of despair.-The Redeemer is not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to that house, ill-fated Canaanite, thou wast born and thou hast lived a stranger.'

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The next discourse (more celebrated in its day than any occasional sermon within our recollection) is that on the Principle of Life, preached before the Humane Society, which gives a deadly blow to the unscriptural and unphilosophical doctrine of materialism. Yet, even here, we are hurt by a blemish arising out of the unhappy choice of a term. The bishop begins with assigning, as the lowest principle of vitality in man, vegetable life, by which is to be understood that species of life which animals and vegetables possess in common, whereas, in common acceptation, it certainly means that which the one class of organized beings possess as distinct from the other. In the following passage, this infelicity leads the preacher into another. The vital principle may remain in a man for some time after all signs of vegetable life disappear in his body.' With due deference to Dr. Horsley, we should have thought the contrary. Vegetables have no locomotion, no pulsation, no perceptible respiration, and therefore, when all these symptoms have disappeared in a suffocated animal, the vegetable principle of vitality may yet subsist. But for this casual lapse we are amply rewarded by the sublime account of the symptoms of apparent death in such unhappy subjects, which immediately follows:- What have hitherto passed, eveu among physicians, for certain signs of a complete death —the rigid limb, the clay-cold skin, the silent pulse, the breathless lip, the livid cheek, the fallen jaw, the pinched nostril, the fixed staring eye, are uncertain and equivocal.' To this we shall oppose a noble passage from the Prognostics of Hippocrates, describing the symptoms of approaching, not apparent, death, on the human countenance, and then inquire of our critical readers first, whether in terrific grandeur the modern divine has not equalled the old physician, and secondly, whether the coincidence appears to have arisen from imitation or casual resemblance. Ρις οξεία, κρόταφοι ξυμπεπτωκολες, ωία Ψυχρα και ξυνεςαλμένα, και οι λοβοί των ωίων απεςραμμένοι και το δέρμα το περι το μείωπον σκληρον τε και περιλλαμενον και καρφαλέον εον, και το χρώμα χλωροντε η και μελαν τον και πελιον η μολιβδωδες. More

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More examples of excellence, and more also of haste and carelessness, might be produced from these volumes; but to detail the first would be to reprint half their contents, and to bring forward the last, would only prove (what surely is needless) that no work of uninspired man is perfect. We now, therefore, take leave of Bishop Horsley, with the respect and admiration due to a theologian, whom, in an age of audacious innovation, counteanced by a perverse antipathy to every thing ancient and venerable, we consider as having been raised by Providence to an exalted station both in rank and literature, that by a rare combination of opposite but not inconsistent qualifications, by a reason the most profound, and an eloquence the most attractive, he might at once convince the understanding and charm the heart; that by a faithful and courageous exposition of the genuine doctrines of the church of England, he might at once demonstrate their truth and enforce their vital importance, a striking contrast to every modern inroad upon revealed truth, which has uniformly been characterised alike by imbecility and coldness, and has left behind a system, if it deserve the name, as uninteresting to the heart as it is unfounded in Scripture.

One word more. The editor of Newton, who dared to call his author,' out of mathematics, an ordinary man,' has, in these volumes, certainly dared to say many things which a man of smaller powers would have declined, and from which he himself, with smaller confidence in his own powers, would, perhaps, have shrunk. To genius, however, like that of Bishop Horsley, almost every thing may be forgiven: in such hands, paradox may be safe, experiments in language may be graceful, and trespasses upon decorum may only excite a smile, but let ordinary men beware' In that circle Bone can walk but he.'

ART. III. Li Romani nella Grecia. Barzoni. 8vo. pp. 41.

IT is lamentable to think how little has been done by Great Britain towards disabusing the people of the continent, by a detection of the designs and weakness of the enemy; while his press has been incessantly employed in rivetting that yoke upon the nations for the reception of which it had previously prepared them. Every servile encomium on the government of Buonaparte, every calumny on his enemies, every exaggerated statement of his strength and of their imbecility, in short every falsehood vented in the Moniteur, is taken up by a succession of tributary echos, and passed from Paris to Vienna, Madrid, Petersburg and Constantinople. Every ephemeral

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