invitation to the Gospel provision is signed and sealed by a covenant-keeping God. Christ is "a just God and a Saviour." Oh, trust Him utterly. Come to Him to-night, just as you are. You may be on the highways and among the hedges, but suffer me, as His servant, to compel you to come in. Look unto Jesus. Believe implicitly on Him. He is God and cannot break His word. My brother, my sister, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." Believe, here is your guarantee. You are living confidently in Jesus. He is a just God and a Saviour. Fling away then all fear and doubt. You are safe in the arms of Jesus. All power in Heaven and Earth is His. He has made you His own now and for ever

more.

May He add His blessing to these words.

IT

JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

T is with much regret that we announce the death, at the age of 45, of Mr. John Richard Green, author of the "History of the English People," who succumbed yesterday, at Mentone, to the disease from which he had been suffering for many years.

He was born at Oxford, in 1837, and received his early education at Magdalen College School, under the Rev. Dr. Millard. A small, sickly, and precocious boy, he seems to have passed most of his childhood alone with his books, avoiding all games and spending the play hours in company with Gibbon and Hume, thus forming and developing his extraordinary power of rapid and omnivorous reading. At 15 he had learnt as much as the school could teach him, and he passed the next three years with private tutors. It was by the advice of one of these that he entered for a scholarship at Jesus College-one of the two or three scholarships at that time open to Englishmen at the Welsh College. It was an unfortunate step, for Green never felt at home there; and having early taken a dislike to the college, be declined to read for any sort of honours. Meantime, he read widely, chiefly on bistorical subjects, and while yet an undergraduate he contributed to the Oxford Chronicle, a remarkable series of papers on "Oxford in the 18th Century," which were afterwards reprinted. Immature as they are they show signs of the same qualities for which the writer was afterwards celebrated the power of seizing the essential features of a past epoch and presenting it in a vividly pictorial way. It seems, indeed, to have been through the historical studies which had led to his writing these papers that he was brought across the only man in Oxford who at that early date appreciated him-Arthur Stanley, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History. The two minds had much in common. Both were really and keenly interested in the past, and used the past to interpret the present. Both were endowed with the most vivid historical imagination, and in width of sympathy and freedom from prejudice they were closely akin. Green was afterwards to develop gifts as a historian to which his Oxford teacher can lay no claim; but he never forgot the help and the encouragement which he had received, as an unknown undergraduate, from the Regius Professor. It was partly, we believe, owing to Stanley's influence that immediately after taking his degree, in 1860, he was ordained to become curate of St. Barnabas', King-square, E.C. Here he remained two years, dividing his time between the watchmakers of that poor and populous parish and the reading. room of the British Museum. In 1862 Bishop Tait-who from this time to the very end of his life entertained towards him a very warm affection-appointed him to a sole charge in Hoxton, and presently to the vicarage of St. Philip's, Stepney. He brought this parish into a high state of efficiency, and in doing so wore out most of the little strength he had; for, as was often said of him, his mind was too large for his body; and one of the virtues of which he was ignorant was that of moderation in work. For, besides his parish duties,-duties made infinitely arduous by the visit of the cholera in 1868,—he still read immensely. A visitor,

at once philanthropical and learned, called one day on him on some benevolent business, and was amazed to find the study into which he great folios of the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum. It may be imagined that he was shown lined with a scholar's historical library, supported on the waited with some curiosity for the appearance of the hard-worked Eastend clergyman who solaced his leisure by such reading; and the interview was the beginning of a long friendship. Tait, then Archbishop, appointed him to the post of Lambeth Librarian, Soon after the cholera time, Mr. Green resigned his living, and Dr. in succession to Professor Stubbs. For long before this he had already made his mark as a learned man, chiefly by his contributions on histori cal subjects to the weekly press. Henceforward he took no more clerical work, partly because his health could not bear it and partly because he had begun to feel the intellectual difficulties of his position. He lived small demands upon his time-while at the same time collecting and for a long time the life of a journalist—for the work of Lambeth made throwing into shape the materials for his projected History. In 1870, after a severe attack of illness, he was for the first time ordered to the South by Dr. Andrew Clark, the devoted friend to whose care he may be said to owe many years of life. But, spite of these "compulsory winterflittings," as he called them in one of his sprightly occasional papers the History went on; and three or four years afterwards it appeared under the name of "A Short History of the English People." Its success was instantaneous. Up to the present time some 85,000 copies of the book have been sold in England-and in the United States, the sale has been very large indeed. The demand still continues, we believe, to be perfectly steady and regular; and, indeed, it is difficult to imagine any revolution in opinion or advance in knowledge which will relegate the " Short History' to the class of superseded books.

44

The next years of Mr. Green's life were occupied with the re-casting of the “Short History " on a larger scale; and the new book appeared at intervals from 1877 to 1880 in four volumes, of which the first bore a dedication to "two dear friends, my masters in the study of English history, Edward Augustus Freeman and William Stubbs." Meantime, he began to receive from various quarters some signs of recognition. The Athenæum Club elected him under Rule 2; his College at Oxford made him an Honorary Fellow; and the University of Edinburgh gave him the Honorary Degree of LL.D. In the year 1877 he married, and in conjunction with his wife (who was a Miss Stopford) a daughter of Archdeacon Stopford, he wrote a "Short Geography of the British Isles." During this time, too, he projected and edited the series of "History and Literature," to which many of our leading scholars have contributed, and which have had so much success. The winters of these years he generally spent at Capri, but in 1880 he unfortunately determined to go to Egypt. The climate did not suit him, he caught cold on his return, and during the summer of 1881 he was extremely ill. In the autumn he went to Mentone and there rallied wonderfully; while so great had been his energy that he was able, a year ago, to publish a remarkable volume on the beginnings of English history. This book, called The Making of England," appealed to a somewhat different audience from that which had delighted in the Short History;" for, while its essential excellence lay in the insight which it showed into the real life of the past, it was more professedly learned than the other volume had been, and amply vindicated the writer's claims to a place in the forefront, not only of literature, but of historical scholarship. It has been attacked by one school of historians on the ground that, in discussing questions of race, Mr. Green pays too little attention to the anthropological evidence, which, according to some of these writers, upsets his theory of the extermination of the Celts by the English. Possibly this objection may be tenable; but it is cer tainly not universally admitted by those who ought to know. And whether on this side Mr. Green fails or not, there can be no question about the extraordinary knowledge which his book reveals, both of prim. itive English Institutions and, to a still greater extent, of the physical features of the country. His descriptions of the forests and the roads, of primeval London and of the most ancient seats of English industry, are wonderful pictures, as unimpeachable as they are original. And this book, as we said, was written when he was in almost the last stage of weakness. Nor did his activity stop here, for throughout last spring and summer he was engaged on a continuation, on a volume which should carry on the story, on the same lines, down to the Norman invasion; and this volume he left, we believe, almost ready for publication.—The Times.