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sufferings, because he felt assured that "the eternal God was his refuge, and that underneath him were the Everlasting Arms." One day he seemed suffering very much, and said," People tell me sometimes to keep up my spirits, but they do not know what it is to be here for years, without power to work for their families; nor how busy Satan is. A person once observed to me, It is easier to preach than to practise;' Ah! thought I, you are not far from the mark. Sometimes, when all are asleep, and I am lying here, I have such peace and comfort! my sufferings are very great, but they do not distract me as they used to do; it is not that tearing, racking pain." When in some degree free from pain, his visitors always found him with his books around him, particularly his Bible, Hymn Books, and Newton's Letters; and he would often quote very exactly his favourite passages. One day he said he had been reading the First Epistle of St. John; and in speaking of that passage, "Whosoever is born of God sinneth not;"" It cannot mean," said he, "that the believer is without sin, because, in another part of the same Epistle, it is said,' If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father:' but a Christian does not allow himself in sin, he renounces it."

He used to speak with grief of some around him who were living in sin, and seemed much to regret being forced to hear their vain conversation, as they passed by his dwelling.

One of the last times he could hold a long conversation, he talked much of the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, on the resurrection. But the way of salvation, through faith in Christ, was his great theme. One day he said, “But I must ever come back to that great salvation; I must dwell on it." His expression frequently, when asked concerning the state of his mind, was—

"Sweet to lie passive in his hand,

And know no will but His." His exalted patience and liveliness filled all who saw him with astonishment, when contrasted with his pale emaciated countenance, and the interruptions frequently caused by his cough.

When a person, whom he had known from infancy, called to see him, and was about to take a last farewell of him, he looked up, amidst weakness and pain, and said, "I wish you every new-covenant blessing." He said of a relation, "I love him, not merely because he is a relation, but because he is a brother in Christ." When he was told of the ravages the cholera morbus was making in Russia, and that numbers of bodies were thrown together in a pit, without Christian burial, he said, with much earnestness, "But what has become of their immortal souls? It is of little moment how the body is disposed of, so that the soul is safe, in the mercy of God, through Christ Jesus." It

was observed to him, "what delight will the
Christian feel, when delivered from pain,
sorrow, and suffering, and, above all, from
sin, his greatest burden, to find himself in
that world where there is no more sin and
death, and 'where all tears are wiped from
off all faces,' and where he may dwell for
ever in the bosom of his God and Saviour,
in the full fruition of his love!"
remark drew from him tears of joy, be-
lieving, as he did, that such happiness re-
mained for him; and knowing that, amidst
all his sufferings, "the joy of the Lord
was his strength."

This

Christianity, where truly received, has a tendency to enlarge the understanding and improve the heart. Even the labouring poor rise immediately in the scale of being, when they are brought to know the truths of the Gospel. Instead of their former selfishness, they begin to feel for the miseries of others, and to desire that they may become partakers of the benefits which they enjoy. To promote this object (so far as pecuniary means can do so) they are found willing to make personal sacrifices, and, like the widow whom our Lord commended, to bestow a portion of that which he has given them. The truth of this remark was verified in the practice of Lawrence, who for many years contributed an annual sum of ten shillings and sixpence towards instructing the poor and ignorant. This is by no means a solitary example.

Some days previous to his death, I called to see him, and found him labouring hard for breath, and in great bodily weakness and pain. He had not then spoken for hours; and it was thought, by those around him, that his end was near. After looking at him some time, I said, "Still in the body?" he replied, "Yes, how long I know not; I am waiting the Lord's time." I continued, "You appear to suffer much, but you are looking to that world where the inhabitants shall not say I am sick, and where the people who dwell therein are forgiven their iniquity." He added, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." It was said, "You are looking for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God;" he replied, "That is my expectation."

A few hours before he died, he looked up, and, seeing a female attendant by his bed-side, he said, "Will the Saviour be long?" she replied, "Not long :" he repeated "Not long!" and soon after closed his eyes for ever on a world of sin and sorrow *.

The writer of the above, Lawrence's employer, Mr. Joseph Trumper, has printed the above narrative, with some additional particulars, in his own neighbourhood; and will probably be induced to give it a wider circulation.

VIEW OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS.

THIS eventful session of Parliament has closed. The Speech from the Throne is so general as scarcely to invite remark. It alludes modestly to the Reform Acts, hoping that good may result from them, but not using any word that could irritate those who think otherwise. It notices the differences in Portugal, and between Belgium and Holland; but holds out hopes that the peace of Europe will not be broken. It congratulates the country, that, though taxes to a considerable amount had been relinquished, by retrenchment of expenditure the necessity for new burdens had been avoided. It urges the importance of preserving the public peace, and repressing acts of riot and outrage. The only topic which can give rise to much difference of opinion is that fruitful source of contention, Ireland; respecting which the Speech laments the disturbances in that country, applauds the measures adopted for the education of the people, and adds, that the recently enacted Tithe Laws "are well calculated to lay the foundation of a new system, to the completion of which the attention of Parliament, when it again assembles, will of course be directed." Of the Education measure we can only repeat what we have often stated, our deliberate conviction that it is grounded upon unscriptural and anti-Protestant principles. If the "new system" mean only the two postponed bills of commutation and tithe corporations it is well; but if it be meant to pay the Roman Catholic clergy from the public purse, and virtually to make Popery the established religion of Ireland -and the Lord Lieutenant, in a most singular dialogue at Cork, is conjectured to have alluded to something of the kind-it will be a measure calculated, as we believe, to bring down the heavy displeasure of God upon the land. We know, indeed, in what manner those statesmen who reject the Bible as their rule speak of the matter; but among those who believe that Inspired Record, and the Protestant construction of it, there cannot be two opinions on the subject. We purpose discussing the question more at large in a future Number: in the mean time we cannot but express our deepest regret at the way in which Ireland appears to be managed, or mismanaged. The public assistance is withdrawn from Protestant schools, while the Legislature has just renewed its grant to Maynooth men are half-encouraged to rebel, illegal combinations are connived at, the rights of property are violated, and blood is shed; and then, when the insurgents are too strong to be put down, Government begins to bristle, and to talk of

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bayonets, and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. The alleged dialogue of the Lord Lieutenant, above alluded to, is such a singular medley of topics, such a compound of force and fair speeches and both to no purpose, of trimming the Protestant scale at night and the Popish in the morning, that we can only compare it to the tale of Paddy's feasting his pig one day and starving it the next, that there might be "one slice of fat and another of lean," in alternate layers, to suit the tastes of all customers. Such a system will never answer, even politically speaking; and Mr. O'Connel is so plying his revolutionary repeal of the Union, that, if care be not taken, there will be neither fat nor lean left. We should not have written so lightly-for it is no light matter-had not the strange ideas of legislation intimated in Lord Anglesey's speech relaxed our wonted gravity. In the mean time, not tithes merely, but property of all kinds, and life itself, is endangered; and the Tithe-composition Bill, useful as it is, is likely to be so much waste parchment, unless Government and Parliament determine at once to act firmly and justly, and not to connive at illegal conspiracies, with a view to open the way for a plan of robbing the Protestant church and establishing Popery.

Electioneering is busily at work throughout the country. We purpose resuming our remarks upon it: in the mean time we refer our readers to our last Number, and to a very excellent and seasonable" Address to Electors" stitched up with it, which we are happy to learn has been very widely circulated. Christian electors ought to lay this matter very seriously to heart.

The Cholera has been alarmingly on the increase; and, as if to confound the impotent boastings of modern science, that a plague could never again ravage civilized Europe in these days of medical skill and rational habits, it works its way in a manner wholly mysterious, and sets at nought human skill and foresight. One benefit has attended it, that in many parts of the kingdom it has excited a serious and penitent spirit: we hear no more of "cholera humbug," and cholera theatrical farces: the people in many of our towns have attended Divine worship spontaneously on week-days, to implore the mercy of God; not a few of the clergy have issued Scriptural and appropriate addresses on the occasion; the wants of the poor have been relieved; and many, it is hoped, have been led so to number their days as to apply their hearts to heavenly wisdom. May it please God, tha twhile this scourge lasts the stroke

may be every where thus sanctified and overruled for good; and that in His infinite mercy He would speedily remove it from us, if it be His will, notwithstanding we too well deserve His severest inflictions for our sins.

The Plurality Bill was silently dropped in the House of Commons. As we predicted at the first, it pleased no one: some opposed it for what it did, and others for what it did not. We regret to lose even the partial improvement contemplated by it; but we trust that a more adequate measure will be brought forward next session. Our chief alarm is, that there will be those who will endeavour to turn Church reform, like all other reform, into ruin. The clergy do not, as a body, enjoy too much of this world's wealth; very far from it; and many even of those who are accused of holding several pieces of what is called "preferment," do not clear as much as many a confidential clerk or second-class tradesman. The evil is in the adjustment; and a due system of augmentation and consolidation, so as to enable each clergyman to live comfortably on one benefice, will never be adopted, till pluralities are forbidden. The present system is cruel to the clergy generally; and not least to many pluralists, who work far harder, and have less emolument, than if they held a fair country living.

There is another subject, which, in this our last remaining paragraph, we have not room for without injury to its importance; and which, therefore, we must reluctantly

defer. We allude to the recent discussions respecting Colonial Slavery, and particularly the disclosures made by the missionaries who have arrived from the West Indies, and poured into the ear of the British public such tales of horror as have ratified more solemnly than ever the doom of this cruel, impolitic, and anti-Christian system. The West-Indian party, both in the islands and at home, tell us they have yet one hope: the Church of England, they say, the Bishops and Clergy, are favourable to them; and they are placarding the walls of the metropolis with extracts from "the Christian Remembrancer" to prove this point. But it will not do; nay, we ourselves can certify, that, though they have had hitherto too much cause for their boast, even this hope is failing them; or should it not, it were easier for bishops and clergymen to pull down the church by attempting to prop up slavery, than to support slavery by the strength of the church. We solemnly consider the sin of too many of our clergy and bishops in this matter to have been great in the sight of God, and it would be hypocrisy in us to deny it. Our hope is, that they will repent, and forsake, and find mercy; and we think we see symptoms which lead us to expect what we hope. But be this as it may, if justice and humanity, if the British constitution, and above all the Gospel of Christ, be not a mockery, the nefarious system of Negro slavery must soon totter to its downfall. "O Lord, how long!"

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.

J. W.; M. G. H.; H. B.; S. E. A.; D. M. F.; A TRACT DISTRIBUTOR; and R. P. B.; are under consideration.

SUPPLEMENT TO RELIGIOUS INTELLIGENCE.

BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE SOCIETY.

We have more than once alluded with much interest to the Bible Society's offer of lending Testaments and Psalters to any families which might require them, with particular reference to the visitation of the grievous disease that continues to afflict our land. The demand, and consequent drain upon the society's funds, have been very large; but let any Christian, after perusing the first paper of this month's Extracts, say whether he thinks the cost ill bestowed. Some special donations were made by a few individuals, towards meeting this extra disbursement without entrenching upon funds intended for the service of the whole world; but the sums thus contributed are far from equal to the exigency, and we trust that they will be greatly increased, and that it will please God in his mercy to dispose the hearts of his servants to cast their mite into the Society's treasury for this purpose.

PRAYER-BOOK AND HOMILY SOCIETY.

We can add nothing to what we have so often said in favour of this institution, except our increasing conviction of its importance in proportion as Bible Societies and Missionary Societies open a way for its exertions, and our renewed attachment to it in these days of wide-spread hostility against that pure and Apostolical Church whose invaluable formularies it circulates. The pressure against the Church Establishment, in regard to its external arrangements, is becoming so strong, that nothing can resist it but that intelligent and Christian regard for the Anglican Church which is grafted upon a knowledge of its doctrines, and a belief of its spiritual utility. We heartily recommend the Prayer-Book and Homily Speeches to the perusal of our readers.

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THE TEARS OF PARENTS-(continued from p. 588.)

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My dear Friend,-My last lachrymatory contained the bitter tears of a

monarch, the sweet singer of Israel, the man after God's own heart, over a profligate son, cut off in the flower of his age and the bloom of his unhappy attractions, in an act of rebellion against God and his venerable parent, and, so far as mortal eye can discern, without a ray of hope in his death. This is one of those cases in which "ignorance is bliss;" though I cannot add that "it is folly to be wise;" for though David's pain must have been inexpressibly enhanced by his religious feelings and his awful terrors in regard to the soul of his impenitent child, yet it were infinitely better to know a danger, in order to try to shun it, than to run into it without consciousness. Had David been an ignorant heathen, his tears had lost the direst portion of their poignancy; but a Christian parent is not therefore to account it an unkind infliction that his knowledge sometimes leads to pain, since the merciful intention of that pain may be to conduce to happiness. In the writhings of mental agony over the bier of an irreligious child, the parent may wish that he could banish from his mind all thoughts of judgment, futurity, and the bitter pains of eternal death; but would it really be well that he could do so? May not these severest pangs be the means of stimulating him to work out more diligently his own salvation, and thus prevent himself coming short of the grace of God? May they not also lead to a more anxious care for the salvation of his surviving children, and thus perpetuate spiritual blessings in his family? And may not other parents, without perhaps uttering what passes in their own minds, be stirred up to increased vigilance for the souls of their offspring, test they also should be visited with the same calamity? If the absence of all apprehension on the part of the parent would alter the condition of his departed child, who he fears has died in an unsafe state, then, indeed, there would be infinite reason for his being spared that sorrow: but as his apprehensions can in no manner affect the state of the departed; as they may be either well or ill-founded, but in neither case can disturb the decision of Him who judges in righteousness; the only question is, whether it is more desirable that he should suffer those apprehensions, or that it should be so ordered that he should be spared them—either that no thought should cross his mind of a distressing kind relative to the condition of the departed, or that he should be placed in the condition of the glorified spirits in heaven, who-in some manner we cannot explain-are not permitted to feel sorrow, though some whom they loved upon earth may not be inheritors CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 370.

4 M

with them of the joys of heaven. Now, if the spiritual benefits of the apprehension, to the individual himself and to others, are unspeakably great, as they often are, it seems to me that it would not be really merciful that he should be spared them. If David's anxiety for the soul of Absalom led him to think more earnestly of his own, of those of his surviving children, and of the value of the soul generally, so as to cause him to awaken to increased diligence in promoting in every way in his power the great object of human salvation; and if others—you, for instance, my dear friend, and myself-seeing his agonizing apprehensions, are warned to renewed care to bring up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord; the sorrow was not unavailing: and we cannot say that it was unjustly inflicted, if we view it only as a fatherly chastisement, to make the parent feel his own sin and folly, and to see how fearful a thing it is to offend a righteous God, by neglecting the solemn duties of the paternal office.

Or put the matter thus: If a religious parent were never suffered to have his mind afflicted at the idea of his child being a cast-away, is there not in our fallen nature that innate propensity to indolence and self-indulgence, to taking things easily, to impatience of painful or serious thought, that we should perhaps be led to neglect the souls of our children; to put off till to-morrow what we might have performed to-day; and to trust matters to the providence of God, without adequately using the means of grace? But the thought that their souls will be required of us, though painful, is salutary: nor is it otherwise than salutary, that, if one perishes, or appears to us to have perished, we should be permitted to feel serious alarms, both, as before said, for that fatherly correction which we needed for our former misconduct, and for our future warning and incitement. To all which I may add, that though I have spoken of these distressing apprehensions as often constituting the bitterest part of the cup of bereavement, yet-as human nature can bear but a certain portion of sorrow; and even heathens, without any such feelings of apprehension, and Christians, where from the character of the departed there was no ground for them, have often been brought to the gates of death itself by the loss of a beloved child-it might be too much to say that the whole complex sorrow is sensibly heightened by any one ingredient. I cannot indeed, nor would I, divest myself of the belief that David's keenest pang was in regard to the soul of Absalom; and yet thousands of histories are upon record, even in the case of heathens, in which parental agony was apparently quite as overwhelming as that of David, and which, being without the same religious supports, led to insanity, suicide, or a lingering life of pining under what is called a broken heart. I will not horrify you or myself with illustrations, but will lay down my pen for the present, and pass on to some other topic when I resume it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Taking up my letter, after an interval devoted to other pursuits, I could not, if I would, tie together the broken threads of thought, and I willingly let the skein lie unravelled. On looking back, however, at the last paragraph, I doubt whether I may not have seemed to make a concession as if spiritual sorrow over a departed child were not far greater than merely natural sorrow. Let us try the matter by an example. I have promised you not to select any of the terrific stories of heathen sorrow over the filial bier, but I will take as an illustration only one of those tender and affecting scenes with which your classical readings will readily furnish you; that of Quintillian. You well know how often authors have interwoven in their writings some sad tale of domestic grief; but I scarcely recollect any thing more affecting in the annals of literature, than the proëmium to the sixth book of Quintillian's Institutes of Oratory. After perusing some hundred

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