fathers, husbands, and sons—mothers, wives, and daughters— many of the most renowned Saints in the calendar behaved just as ill as they possibly could. The instances of young Saints running off from their parents are numerous. St. Clare fled to a nunnery, or rather to a monastery, in opposition to the commands of her parents. When a girl of seventeen she delighted in midnight conferences with pious men-a favourite practice to this day with those misguided women who hunt after Revival preachers, and which, naturally enough, brings the scandal of the world upon them. And so it did upon St. Clare, when about the period of the Reformation the characters of the Romish Saints began to be irreverently discussed.

In modern days, and amongst many Protestants, a suppression of the natural feelings has been but too frequently inculcated by teachers professing peculiar sanctity. Wesley counselled children not to keep company with ungodly parents, or such as had not experienced a change-in other words, he taught them to rebel against fathers and mothers who did not choose to countenance Methodism. And yet Wesley, in his notions of the treatment which children should receive from their parents, thought that all indulgence and all liberty should be taken from them, and that all amusements, and all noise, in which children delight, should be prohibited -and that the main part of their education should consist in being frequently and severely beaten. Yet this man would encourage children to desert their parents for the sake of Methodism.

All the Saints, however, were not of this description. St. Frances had, at eleven years of age, resolved not to marry; but in obedience to her parents, she gave up what she conceived to be a pious design, and became the wife of a Roman nobleman. She lived, it is said, forty years with her husband, and never, in all that time, gave him occasion to utter an angry word. There are some who would not have enjoyed such a sleepy union. The excellent Dr. Paley, after hearing a blubbering husband declaring that during their long life together he and his wife had never had a cross word, pronounced that their union must have been "shocking flat;" and the best domestic economists are of opinion, that an occasional rough breezefollowed, of course, by long and delightful calms-is necessary to purify the sluggish air of matrimony.

The remark is not a new one, but it has not been sufficiently impressed on the minds of those who have inquired into the nature of religious fanaticism, that the victims of it worship their own tempers and character under the idea that they are worshipping religion. Hence, while we have had some cheerful Saints, we have had a world of melancholy ones, many of whom prided themselves in shedding tears without occasion. The monkish closest of all ties to a deserving female, whom he marries, to read a theological lecture to her, and then leaves a prey to irremediable regret. He associates with a number of squalid wretches, and exists on the precarious bounty of strangers in the most unprofitable, not to say knavish indolence. In the meantime, his broken-hearted parents are devoured by an intense anxiety, of which he is totally regardless. Our " pious Æneas," disguised in the accumulated filth of seventeen years, returns to his father's house. Here he breeds a race of vermin; and luxuriously fattens upon the garbage which the servants, aware of his peculiar taste, plentifully, and one might think, properly, communicated. All this while, he is an eye-witness and an ear witness of the misery his absence occasions: and as if to complete the perfec tion of such a character, he leaves behind him a scroll, of which the only effect must neces sarily be to arouse a keener agony, and to quicken a dying despair. And this is the monstrous compound which a voice from heaven proclaims holy, and which miracles are called in to sanction! This is to be emphatically "a man of God !" He who neglects every relative duty--he who is a cruel and ungrateful son, a bad husband, and careless master: he whose whole life is to consume time, not to employ it--to vegitate, but not to exist--to dream away life, with every sense locked up, every capability destroyed, every good principle uncultivated; and that, too, in the most loathsome and degraded condition--this is to be "a man of God!" (Gesta Roman. I. p. 311.)

historians allege that St. Peter's eyes were red with constant weeping-a circumstance not at all in keeping with the character of the vigorousminded Apostle as pourtrayed in the Scriptures. St. Julian-who to distinguish him from others of the same name, is commonly called Julian the Anchorite-used to destroy the books which he read by obliterating the words with his tears. Many of the Romish saints are celebrated for having a faculty or gift, as it is called, of shedding tears-an endowment which the fair sex have more successfully exercised than those of the "more worthy gender," as the schoolmasters call it. Thus the Scottish Poet Barbour assures us, that women can wet their cheeks with tears whenever they please, while there is nothing at all troubling them; and Chaucer tells us that— Deceite, weiping, spinning, God hath yevin

To women kindly while that they may liven.

And from their possession of this talent some inhuman monster has invented the saying, that "no more pity should be shewn to a woman weeping than to a goose going bare-foot."

Many of the Saints have denounced all pleasuro and all recreation as sinful. Of course, it is but justice to these people to allow, that what is unsuitable to their nature they sincerely believe to be displeasing to Godwhom, to use the strong language of Warburton, "they make after the image of man, and choose the very worst model that they can find, viz., themselves."

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In the famous Antoinette Bourignon the world had a specimen of one who founded her claims to be considered a Saint on her ill-nature, her cruelty, and her avarice-all which vices she not merely practised to perfection through life, but defended upon religious principle. She justified her cruelty by reference to passages in the Old Testament, and her hoarding up of money on the ground that she could get no poor people to bestow upon, with any expectation that they would spend it in such a way as to promote what she said she had exclusively at heart-the glory of God. Bourignon, though she has been worshipped as a Saint even in Protestant Scotland, was in every way an odious wretch; but in the common usage of the terms, the profession of a high degree of piety is not considered at all incompatible with habitual ill-temper. Dr. Watts-himself an amiable man-somewhere speaks of the union of the two in one person, as if they were quite reconcileable together. As a curious instance of the way in which this subject is regarded in general, we may quote the following character given to Calvin by Dr. Maclaino in his Annotations on Mosheim. “He was," says the doctor, a man whose extensive genius, flowery eloquence, immense learning, extraordinary penetration, indefatigable industry, and fervent piety, placed him at the head of the Reformers; all of whom he surpassed, at least in learning and parts, as he did the most of them in obstinacy, asperity, and turbulence." Now, we will not stop here to discuss whether or not this is a genuine portrait of Calvin; but will merely observe that it is a most awkward notion of fervent piety to assert that it may be found in connection with "obstinacy, asperity, and turbulence." To our humble apprehension, it appears that those who thus hold that fervent piety and bitter ill-nature may burn harmoniously together in one breast, however well they may understand what ill-nature is, must have taken their notions of piety from some other authority than the Word of God. Both Scripture and reason teach us that a man may fall into great sins and yet be a pious man; but to indulge in love to God and hatred to man at the same time is, we submit, declared by the Scriptures of truth to be an impossibility, if we understand properly the solemn declaration, “If a man say I love God and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that

loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Of all classes of men, professed theologians seem least of all to understand, and most of all determined to neglect, the plain passages of Scripture.

The Anchoret Arsenius, who wore away his eyelashes weeping for the sins of the world, believed that to lay one leg across another when sitting was a wicked indulgence, betokening a worldly soul, unmortified to the lusts of the flesh. The notion is a ridiculous enough one, but a very fair specimen of the puritanical spirit which has pervaded the minds of thousands in all ages-Romanists, Puritans, Methodists, Quakers, and Covenanters. This is the spirit which has waged war against all amusements, sports and pastimes, dancing, singing and laughing-against all that is elegant and refined, and against almost everything that is rational and calculated to keep the soul and the body in good health. By a great error committed at the Reformation the art of painting has been almost banished from the service of the Protestant religion

"I do not doubt," says Horace Walpole, "but if some of the first Reformers had been at liberty to say exactly what they thought, and no more than they thought, they would have permitted one of the most ingenious arts implanted in the heart of man by the Supreme Being to be employed towards his praise. But Calvin, by his tenure as head of a sect, was obliged to go all lengths. The vulgar will not list but for total contradictions. They are not struck by seeing religion shaded only a little darker or a little lighter."

Several of the Saints, both Romish and Protestant, have avowed and gloried in their ignorance of all sort of knowledge, except the divine. St. Anthony could neither read nor write, and resolutely refused to learn to do either. Like Scipio in Gil Blas, he had no objection to being a hermit provided that he was not obliged to learn Latin. St. Augustine, however, tells us that he had learned the whole Scriptures by heart from hearing them read. It is of Anthony that it is said that he declared that a prayer which was comprehended by the person praying was good for nothing. Those who have heard the rhapsodies of the performers at our modern Revival meetings will acknowledge that St. Anthony has not been singular in this notion. The monks of the Order of Ignorance are mentioned in ecclesiastical history as a body who held that man's great happiness consisted in knowing nothing. The Council of Carthage, as we are told by Bingham in his Antiquities of the Christian Church, issued an order forbidding bishops to read Gentile writers. St. Gregory, justly called the Great in many respects, declares his contempt for grammar, but he does so with a vigour and pointedness of expression worthy of Gibbon himself:"Situs, motusque præpositionum, etiam casusque servare contemno, quia indignum vehementer existimo ut verba cælestis oraculi restringam sub regulis Donati." St. Jerome, whose learning is celebrated, declares that he was seized in a vision, and scourged before the tribunal of Christ, for reading the classics. This holy father never wanted a vision or anything else that he thought necessary for the purpose which he had in hand. Amongst a class of the Puritans-certainly not amongst all of them-the want of human learning was considered to be an evidence of the possession of heavenly knowledge. With them," says South, in an exquisite passage, "the best preachers were such as could not read, and the ablest divines such as could not write. In all their preachings, they so highly pretended to the spirit that they could hardly so much as spell the letter. To be blind, was with them the proper qualification of a spiritual guide; and to be book-learned, as they called it, and to be irreligious, were almost terms convertible. None were thought fit for the ministry but tradesmen and mechanics, because none else were allowed to have the spirit. Those only

were accounted like St. Paul, who could work with their hands, and in a literal sense, drive the nail home, and be able to make a pulpit before they preached in it." In more recent times, Wesley, at one period, doubted the utility and questioned the usefulness of secular studies; and he wrote to his brother Samuel, beseeching him, "by the mercies of God," to banish the classics from his school. The Quakers, both in theory and in practice, seem to be disciples of this faith.

St. Cyprian, St. Chrysostom and Tertullian, amongst the Fathers, are cited amongst the enemies of the stage. There was surely some inconsistency in John of the Golden Month, vehemently denouncing the stage; while such was the estimation in which he held the poet Aristophanes that he had a copy of his profligate comedies constantly lying under his pillow at night. It must however be recollected, that, as far as the fathers of the Church are concerned, it was against the Pagan theatre that their denunciations were directed, as they considered it to be the ally of the superstitions and immorality of the heathen religion. The modern stage owes its origin to a canonised Saint-Gregory of Nazianzen-the oldest of modern play writers. Amongst the Roman Catholics, several of the Jansenists have condemned the stage as unchristian; and by the followers of Wesley and Whitfield, it has been bitterly assailed and calumniated. Amongst its assailants must not be reckoned so good a man and vigorous a writer as Jeremy Collier, who showed himself the friend of the stage by denouncing its immoralities. While the Scripture is silent on the character of the stage it seems rather to enjoin music and dancing. But dancing was prohibited by our covenanting forefathers on the ground that the daughter of Herodias danced off the head of John the Baptist; and instrumental music seems to have been considered sinful for what reason cannot well be learnt-probably just because it is not disagreeable. The Puritans wrote against May games and drinking of healths-usages which no doubt are of heathen origin, but which Christians have tolerated without idolatry. In "the best and purest days of the Church" of Scotland, the records of the church courts are full of notices of the severe punishment of those wicked lads and lasses who celebrated the first morning of May.

LETTERS TO A YOUNG MINISTER.

LONDON, February 1846.

MY DEAR SIR,-As you still are anxious I should proceed in writing to you respecting the various important duties of your new office, I shall gladly comply with your wish. You will keep in mind, however, that completeness is not to be looked for in my observations; as I propose not to write a treatise on the duties of a clergyman, which is neither wanted, nor am I competent to the task, but only such hints as may have occurred to myself in the course of my own observations. You desire that I should inform you what books you should study. I will, with your leave, reserve this subject to a future period; only remarking at present, that now and through your whole life the Scriptures should be your chief study. It is grievous to think how superficial a knowledge of these books many clergymen possess. And this it is that makes preaching so laborious to them, and their performances

in that department so poor. Your knowledge of Greek is accurate, and though not a Hebraist, in the sense of Gesenius, or De Wette, you can read Hebrew with not very much trouble. Begin both Testaments-read them daily-devote a set time to this study, and let nothing interrupt it. Make yourself a critic in the languages of both Testaments; even a good Grecian has much to learn when he commences to study the writers of the New Testament. Indeed, these books cannot be understood fully without an intimate acquaintance with the Hebrew idioms of the Old Testament, and the renderings of these in the version of the Septuagint. I advise you, therefore, to read the Hebrew Bible with the Septuagint version constantly before you. Your own attentive reading and comparison of these two will teach you a great deal, and will prepare you to relish and judge of works of criticism. But, in the meantime, I would, by no means, recommend your study of the latter to any great extent at least. For a knowledge of the text is a necessary preparation for enjoying these, and profiting by them. Besides, you will admit at once that your mastery of the languages in which the Holy Scriptures are written, is an indispensable preliminary to any thorough understanding of them by yourself, or any satisfactory exposition of them to others. It was asked long ago, by a writer of your church, whose fame, though great, is much less than it ought to be, Dr. George Campbell," How can any one without presumption set himself up as the interpreter of a book which he himself cannot read without an interpreter ?" It is true, no doubt, that many prove useful and respectable ministers who are very difficient in Biblical science. So there are many good men who have very considerable failings and faults. But, as in the latter case, the man is good not because of his failings, but in spite of them; so in the former, the ignorance cannot be commended, however it may be excused. And you never knew any one who could preach well without that kind of accomplishment, but would have preached much better if he had possessed it. Indeed, destitute of this, it is impossible any one should avoid manifold and serious blunders. I have heard a very eloquent preacher, then of your own church, again and again, elaborately maintain the proposition, that belief is a moral act, and partakes of an emotional character, founding his doctrine on the text, "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness." So childish a mistake no one could commit who either took time to look at the text with sufficient attention to observe what is the antithesis to heart in that passage; or who had so much knowledge of Greek as to be aware that zagota (like ) is not an equivalent to the English heart. I advise that before you preach on any text, especially before you write an eloquent sermon on it, you take time to ascertain what is the meaning of the words on which your discourse is founded. Can you imagine a more disgusting combination of ignorance, sloth, and presumption, than for a person to found a discourse upon the meaning of a text, which a very little examination would have shewn him was not, and could not be, its true meaning? Be careful never even to appear to discharge carelessly so important a trust as is the exposition of the Word of God.

Though I am not at present to enter on the consideration of your studies, and of the books you should read, I may mention one author, with whom you cannot be too soon or too deeply acquainted. 1 mean Dr. G. Campbell. His Dissertations on the Gospels, are superior, in my opinion, to any work of their kind in the English language; and I am not sure if even in Germany, it would be easy to name a work superior to them. Far profounder scholars, no doubt, there have been many-men, too, animated by a deeper spirit of criticism; but for clear, perspicuous good sense; candour; freedom from the bias of prepossession, systems and theories, his own or other men's for genuine love of truth-for all these invaluable qualities,