as you may see for yourselves if silence the tongues of gainsayers? you will examine the latter part of win over to the truth those who Acts ii. As you read that portion now oppose it? and be instrumental of God's Word, do you sigh to be- in bringing many to believe on the hold a similar state of things to that Son of God, and thus build up the which is there described, in the temple of the Lord? Edify one churches with which you are united? | another. Those who are without, then, after the example of the look at religion as it appears in your members of the church at Jerusalem, lives, and unless in your intercourse be not only conscientious in your with each other you shew them that observance of the public ordinances you are a loving, zealous, and rightappointed by our Lord, but be of minded people they will remain as one accord and of one mind, and they are, far from God and far from evince your affection for each other righteousness. For the effect of the by following the things wherewith influence of your conduct on those one may edify another. What was who are living in sin, remember conducive to the prosperity of the you are responsible, and be careful Saviour's cause in primitive times so to discharge the duties you owe will conduce to its prosperity now; to each other as that if they perish, and it is nothing but downright hy-no guilt shall attach to you. pocrisy for anyone to say that the low state of religion grieves him, and that he desires its revival, if he disregard the direction in the text. Brethren, we hope better things of you, though we thus speak, and trust that your love for Zion will lead you to seek her interests by endeavouring to advance those of each other. Think of the influence a practical regard to the duty inculcated will have on the ungodly. If they see you watching over each other striving together to help one another on in the heavenly road; emulous as to which of you shall be kindest and do the most good to others, what will be the result? Will not your conduct convince those who know not the Lord that you are indeed and in truth the disciples of Jesus, lead them to think highly of the religion you profess, induce them to consider its claims, to yield their hearts to its dominion, and say with respect to you, This people shall be my people, and their God my God? Such indeed may be expected to be the happy fruits of Christians being perfectly joined together in the same mind, and in the same judgment, and displaying their oneness of aim, purpose, and affection, by their zeal to promote their mutual welfare. Do you, then, desire the thoughtless to become serious, and the hardened penitent? Would you Brethren, we have attempted to set before you an important duty; a duty you can, and will discharge if you love the Saviour's cause, and wish well to yourselves, your brethren, and those around you who are perishing in sin. You complain in the states of the churches to which you belong, you from year to year complain of your deficiency in love, zeal, and spirituality. Are you really anxious to secure what you declare you need? then you will not henceforth neglect the duty of mutual edification. We make no pretensions to infallibility; but in our opinion it is because the members of our churches do not edify one another, that as a Connexion we do not enjoy greater prosperity. This being our opinion, we have addressed you as we have done, and if, by means of the present address but one of you should be stirred a remembrance of, and discharge of the duty, our labour will not be in vain. And now we commend you to God and to the Word of His grace, which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified. We have been addressing Christians Are you all entitled to be regarded as such? Have you believed on the Son of God? Have you the spirit of Christ? Do you walk as He walked? Are you not united to up On Behaviour towards the Dead. the Saviour by a true and living faith? Then you are not Christians, but aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Your guilt is great, and your danger is imminent. Repent ye, and believe the gospel. Yield your hearts to Christ. Consecrate your service to Him, and from this time live to His glory. A happiness to which you have hitherto been strangers will then be yours; the peace of God which passeth all 339 understanding will keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Looking forward to the end of your journey and contemplating the prospect before you, you will be heard daily giving thanks to the Most High, saying, Blessed_be_the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to His abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. ON BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS THE DEAD.* 'How sound in heart, how clear in head, WHY is it that as soon as a man dies our sentiments towards him begin to undergo a change? Mainly, because the pressure of his character is taken off from ours, and we feel the withdrawment of it to be a relief. There then sets in, in the direction of the departed object, a reaction of feeling, the converse of that which obtained during life. 'This man can never more intercept my designs, or wound my feelings, or injure me by comparison.' The old proverb says, that the world is wide enough; but it is not-for our selfishness. We all trespass on one another's boundary, we all stand in one another's light. The man who gives place, even by death, earns our respect. Then we could find room for him in our favourite chair, and open the door calling vainly after him in the dark night with terms of endearment and flattery. If alienation or opposition had existed between ourselves and the dead, we experience a pang of affectionate regret. If relations of duty and tenderness had bound us together, we become keenly alive to the obligations of which we had grown almost unconscious, and magnify every instance of their Tennyson. violation. The orphan boy, in his Oh! if she could but come again, The successful backbiter, when at We heartily rejoice that our dear old friend has once more broken his long silence. certain indication that he is renewing his We hope the accompanying paper is a youth, like the eagle.-ED. wide a gulf, that they who have reached its yonder shore, obtain the advantage of that distance which to throw overboard the work of criticism altogether; and it is to rebuke such unfaithfulness that Mors has taken pen in hand. Think how much men differ! The leaves 'Lends enchantment to the view;' the repulsive peculiarities of their of the forest, the clouds of a character are softened down, their summer day, faces, are not so cerimperfections become almost in-tainly different as characters. Every visible, and their memory looms individual has some individuality. upon us from the other world with In history, in circumstance, the roundness of a bland and be- power, in expression, no two are Some are even' in nignant whole. Still, such senti- just the same. ment can scarcely be called opinion. Overweening fondness, "The dregs of foul disdain, Not yet purged off'—, gratitude, or patriotism, of whatever purity or ardour, are not trustworthy agents in criticism. Emotion, in short, is somewhat apt to be out of place here. The estimation and criticism of character is a work of considerable mental difficulty. It requires qualities many. Among them are, acumen, geniality, impartiality, honesty, patience, good-tempered studiousness. The person who combines all these properties, is one of no mean capacity. The element of power and its consequence, success, may exist in a character which we detest; yet fair criticism requires that in depicting the force of such a character our own antipathy be not allowed to weaken the portrait. The man who dares to use such talents, when he has them, is a rarity. The point to secure is an opinion. There is great chance against getting it, but if got in its native purity, it is worth having. It will be sure to be understandable. Not always sure to be pleasant. What is it to thee, O biographer, that the man is dead? Forget the funeral sermon, and write as if thou hadst to live next door neighbour to him for the next twenty years. Thou wilt find thy task a hard one but if it is wrought with honesty, thou wilt express the opinions of many besides thyself, and they will inwardly thank thee. Say not to me pedantically-Nil de mortui, nisi bonum', that is the tenor of their way;' some fitful and crochetty; some like the mildly waxing moon; some like thunderbolts; some clever, some stupid; some, like Paul, spend a large part of life in vehement wrong-doing, and then by sudden conversion, turn its latter end to grand account by saintly zeal, whose works live after them.' Some creep through life, whether virtuously or not can scarcely be told, with a power of vitality barely above the vegetable; some show a fire and energy of purpose which in other circumstances might have made their possessors Crusaders or Cromwells. Yet all these men may be Christians. Why, then, within a week of their death, are they to be reduced to a dead level of perfection, as flat as the road from Boston to Freeston Shore? Is it a fact that all Christians are as much like one another as the cups in a tea-service? O! Editor, it is for a reproach to the Christian world, especially to the literary section of it, that none but the language of praise can be, used towards the professedly Christian dead. Death seems to canonize all. Nemo debet dici beatus ante obitum,' and then let him be as middling a fellow as may be, he may comfort himself with the assurance of being well spoken of. Our magazines swarm with accounts of faultless young Christians, model deacons, examplary Sunday-school teachers, paragon fathers and mothers, venerable pastors, and suchlike characters, as all must agree, wherever they are found, to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.' Can we turn The Dead have a Right to Honest Treatment. to the ranks of our friends and find the living counterparts of such excellence? If so, the case of the world is not so desperate after all; if not, why do we let death so deceive us as well as bereave us? There are many grave objections to this course of undistinguishing panegyric. It is not true; it tends to destroy individuality; it lessons one's sense of the value of reputation, and even of character, seeing how, by this practice, character is made to go for nothing; it discourages efforts after real excellence; it promotes hypocrisy; it disgusts the candid; it is a disgrace to those who are guilty of it. Sensitive persons, both the strong and the weak, shrink from the task of fearlessly analyzing the characters of the dead; the former, from the idea that detraction is cowardly, when the individual spoken of cannot answer for himself; the latter, from the vague superstitious dread which everything connected with the dead inspires. Notwithstanding, the dead have as much right to honest treatment as the living; and if we would paint character with truth, we must paint it in the colours of life. In discussing the merits of a predecessor, without needlessly venturing 'To drag his frailties from their dread abode' for the purpose of ungenerous criticism, still less of savage vituperation, we may, without uncharitableness, apply the same principles of adjudication as would direct us in canvassing one another. We may now argue from what a man did to what he was: and now again, we may give ourselves liberty, from our knowledge of inner character, to put a construction upon many overt acts, which an ignorant spectator would not allow. By their fruits ye shall know them, is the great key which explains the active class of characters, and he who runs may read,' the lessons it throws But there have appeared in this world many very great men, of open. 341 quiet exterior, of uneventful life, whose greatness, stupendous as it may be in the opinion of the most competent judges, has consisted rather in what they were, than in anything they did. Both virtue and genius sometimes present themselves as specimens of what the artists call still life.' What would your noisy workmonger, your admirer of Napoleon, say of such men as Pascal, Goethe, or John Foster? Yet over these it is that the most reflective historian falls to quoting Hamlet-and says 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In apprehension, how like a God!' In whichever of the two directions the development of the character proceeds, the interest of our inquiry into it arises from the fact that men are not born what they are; but that they become so. The plot of the drama is probation, of which this world is only a wide and crowded stage. Men become what they are by the exercise of will, effort, patience, abilities. The presence or absence of these seminal qualities determines the future result. It requires some time to determine what they will become. They are affected by many external circumstances, such for instance, as accidents, opportunities, the influence of friends, hereditary temperament, national character. The result, however arrived at, and whatever share these different forces may have had in producing it, is character. Character, though sometimes very complex, is a definite thing. No two men are alike; and though it may be impossible sometimes to describe or analyze a man's character, you cannot mistake it for that of some one else. The synthesis of him has an identity which distinguishes him from all the world besides. The pleasures, the disappointments, the whirl of change, the hair-breadth chances, through which a man has gone, all leave their mark upon him. A man, too, may have in his composition a strong under-current of what is bad, which contrast is wide, but even among those whom religious profession compels us to class as Christians, the degrees of excellence, or even of respectability are numerous, and the scale wide enough to reach, from downright worthlessness to resplendent virtue. The large majority fill the intervening space. Few, few, indeed, are those upon whose departure we are compelled to say, 'Bright was his star; is just, and but just, overcome by the good principle which counteracts it; and thus though the result may be a good and great character, the history may be tarnished by dark blots of inconsistency, and these sometimes often repeated. Most good men have before them a rule of life, which they are always trying to work up to, and those who know how much it has cost them to get the victory over one little failing, and that victory, after all their pains, perhaps far from being a complete one, will estimate at great And long the track of light he left behind." price any character which presents in a striking degree the two features of power and consistency. It is the having such a rule, and trying to follow it or not, which forms the grand line of distinction between men. With those who have it, the whole of life becomes a course of moral training, those without it are waifs, blown with the wind and tossed,' idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves.' It is a trite remark, but must be repeated here, also, that every struggle which ends in victory, strengthens the winning party, and every fresh line drawn in the design is a step towards finishing the picture. A man at the commencement of life, has before him a miscellaneous crowd of items in the sum for him and against him; he now earns slowly an honest gain; then borrows imprudently what he pays back with wasteful interest; spends a large part of life in regrets, sufferings, the correction of errors, and at length in determined fruitful toil; and the final point in which these processes end is the acquirement of an unmistakeable, inalienable, individuality. In the case of the good, Scripture compares this course to light, overclouded at dawn, which gradually breaks through early mists, rises over intervening obstacles, eventually frees itself from all obscurity, and shines more and more unto the perfect day.' But this is not the uniform course of men's lives. Between the large classes of good and bad people the The general purport of biography, after administering justice to the subject of it, and its most valuable end, is 'to point the moral,' rather than to adorn the tale.' To point out rocks, the scenes of former shipwrecks, to unmask specious delusions, to denounce mischievous precedents, in short, to tell the truth, and draw the largest amount of instruction from human experience, are worthy aims of obituary writing. To do it well is sometimes to make the lips of the dead speak in powerful tones to hearts who are heedless of all living voices. But the great temptation is to sink all in compliment. We study how to throw known defects into the shade; to omit the mention of disreputable facts without letting the omission seem too glaring; in fact, to do the polite thing. Badly as this vice has infected the literary world, it has corrupted the religious part of it worst. Perhaps this arises from the circumstance that writing of the dead, whether in the brief lines of the tomb-stone or the more extended paragraphs of the memoir, seems to have assumed the hue of a religious office, and so a literary fault has been unjustly transformed into a reproach against religion. Anyhow, the records of the dead, whether religious or otherwise, are corrupt in this way, almost universally. The penmen have become worthy rivals of the mercenary sculptors, by whose art |