-

gers by which we are surrounded-of the habits, and thoughts of mankind;-manifesting eternal rewards she promises-or of the tem- itself most distinctly in those great exigencies poral blessings she imparts, as an earnest and of life, when disguise is the least practicable. a foretaste of them? "Largior hic campis To refer to an external spiritual agency, deæther." Charles, and Laud, and Cromwell are termining the will to a wise or a foolish choice, forgotten. We have no more to do with anti- is only to reproduce the original question in pædobaptism or prelacy. L'Estrange and another form what is that structure or Morley disturb not this higher region; but man mechanism of the human mind by means of and his noblest pursuits-Deity, in the highest which such influences operate to control or conceptions of his attributes which can be ex-guide our volitions? The best we can throw tracted from the poor materials of human out as an answer to the problem is, that the thought-the world we inhabit divested of the constitution of our frames, partly sensitive and illusions which insnare us-the word to which partly rational, and corresponding with this we look forward bright with the choicest the condition of our sublunary existence, colours of hope-the glorious witnesses, and pressed by animal as well as by spiritual wants, the Divine Guide and Supporter of our conflict condemns us to a constant oscillation between -throng, animate, and inform every crowded the sensual and the divine, between the propage. In this boundless repository, the intima-pensities which we share with the brute creations of inspired wisdom are pursued into all tion, and the aspirations which connect us with their bearings on the various conditions and the author of our being. The rational soul exigencies of life, with a fertility which would contemplates means only in reference to their inundate and overpower the most retentive ends; whilst the sensuous nature reposes in mind, had it not been balanced by a method means alone, and looks no farther. Imagina-' and a discrimination even painfully elaborate. tion, alternately the ally of each, most readily Through the vast accumulation of topics, ad- lends her powerful aid to the ignobler party. monitions, and inquiries, the love of truth is Her golden hues are more easily employed to universally conspicuous. To every precept is exalt and refine the grossness of appetite, than appended the limitations it seems to demand. to impart brilliancy and allurement to objects No difficulty is evaded. Dogmatism is never brought within the sphere of human vision by permitted to usurp the province of argument. the exercise of faith and hope. Her draperies Each equivocal term is curiously defined, and are adjusted with greater facility, to clothe the each plausible doubt narrowly examined. Not nakedness and to conceal the shame of those content to explain the results he has reached, things with which she is most conversant, he exhibits the process by which they were ex- than to embellish the forms, and add grace to cogitated, and lays open all the secrets of his the proportions of things obscurely disclosed mental laboratory. And a wondrous spectacle at few and transient intervals. It is with this it is. Calling to his aid an extent of theological formidable alliance of sense and imagination and scholastic lore sufficient to equip a whole that religion has to contend. Her aim is to college of divines, and moving beneath the load win over to her side that all-powerful mental with unencumbered freedom, he expatiates and faculty which usually takes part with her rejoices in all the intricacies of his way-now antagonist, and thus to shed over every step in plunging into the deepest thickets of casuistic life the colours borrowed from its ultimate as and psychological speculation- and then contrasted with its immediate tendency;-to emerging from them to resume his chosen task | teach us to regard the pleasures and the pains of probing the conscience, by remonstrances of our mortal state in the light in which we from which there is no escape-or of quicken- shall view them in our immortal existence; to ing the sluggish feelings by strains of exalted make things hateful or lovely now, according devotion. as they impede or promote our welfare hereafter. He is a religious, or in the appropriate language of theology, a "regenerate" man, who, trained to this discipline, habitually transfers to the means he employs, the aversion or the dislike due to the end he contemplates; who discerns and loathes the poison in the otherwise tempting cup of unhallowed indulgence, and perceives and loves the medicinal balm in the otherwise bitter draught of hardy self-denial. Good Richard Baxter erected his four folio volumes as a dam with which to stay this confluent flood of sense and imagination, and to turn aside the waters into a more peaceful and salutary channel. When their force is correctly estimated, it is more reasonable to wonder that he and his fellow-labourers have succeeded so well, than that their success has been no greater.

That expostulations and arguments of which almost all admit the justice, and the truth of which none can disprove, should fall so ineffectually on the ear, and so seldom reach the heart, is a phenomenon worthy of more than a passing notice, and meriting an inquiry of greater exactness than it usually receives, even from those who profess the art of healing our spiritual maladies. To resolve it "into the corruption of human nature," is but to change the formula in which the difficulty is proposed. To affirm that a corrupt nature always gives an undue preponderance to the present above the future, is untrue in fact; for some of our worst passions-avarice, for example, revenge, ambition, and the like-chiefly manifest their power in the utter disregard of immediate privations and sufferings, with a view to a supposed remote advantage. To represent the On his style as an author, Baxter himself is world as generally incredulous as to the reality the best critic. "The commonness and the of a retributive state, is to contradict universal greatness of men's necessity," he says, "comexperience, which shows how firmly that per-manded me to do any thing that I could for suasion is incorporated with the language, their relief, and to bring forth some water to

cast upon this fire, though I had not at hand a from his more severe pursuits. His faithful silver vessel to carry it in, nor thought it the pen attended Baxter in his pastime as in his most fit. The plainest words are the most studies; and produced an autobiography, which profitable oratory in the weightiest matters. appeared after his death in a large folio voFineness for ornament, and delicacy for delight; lume. Calamy desired to throw these posthu but they answer not necessity, though some- mous sheets into the editorial crucible, and to times they may modestly attend that which reproduce them in the form of a corrected and answers it." He wrote to give utterance to a well-arranged abridgment. Mr. Orme laments full mind and a teeming spirit. Probably he the obstinacy of the author's literary executor, never consumed forty minutes in as many which forbade the execution of this design. years, in the mere selection and adjustment of Few who know the book will agree with him. words. So to have employed his time, would A strange chaos indeed it is. But Grainger in his judgment have been a sinful waste of has well said of the writer, that "men of his that precious gift. "I thought to have ac- size are not to be drawn in miniature." Large quainted the world with nothing but what was as life, and finished to the most minute detail, the work of time and diligence, but my con- his own portrait, from his own hand, exhibits science soon told me that there was too much to the curious in such things a delineation, of of pride and selfishness in this, and that hu- which they would not willingly spare a single mility and self-denial required me to lay by stroke, and which would have lost all its force the affectation of that style, and spare that in- and freedom if reduced and varnished by any dustry which tended but to advance my name other limner, however practised, or however with men, when it hindered the main work and felicitous. There he stands, an intellectual crossed my end." Such is his own account; giant as he was, playing with his quill as Herand, had he consulted Quinctilian, he could cules with the distaff, his very sport a labour, have found no better precept for writing well under which any one but himself would have than that which his conscience gave him for staggered. Towards the close of the first book writing usefully. First of all the requisites for occurs a passage, which, though often repubexcelling in the art of composition, as one of lished, and familiar to most students of Engthe greatest masters of that art in modern lish literature, must yet be noticed as the most times, Sir Walter Scott, informs us, is "to have impressive record in our own language, if not something to say." When there are thoughts in any tongue, of the gradual ripening of a that burn, there never will be wanting words powerful mind, under the culture of incessant that breathe. Baxter's language is plain and study, wide experience, and anxious self-obperspicuous when his object is merely to in-servation. Mental anatomy, conducted by a form; copious and flowing when he exhorts; hand at once so delicate and so firm, and comand when he yields to the current of his feel-parisons so exquisitely just, between the im ings, it becomes redundant and impassioned, pressions and impulses of youth, and the tran and occasionally picturesque and graphic. There are innumerable passages of the most touching pathos and unconscious eloquence, but not a single sentence written for effect. His chief merit as an artist is, that he is perfectly artless; and that he employs a style of great compass and flexibility, in such a manner as to demonstrate that he never thought about it, and as to prevent the reader, so long at least as he is reading, from thinking about it either.

Mr.

The canons of criticism, which the great nonconformist drew from his conscience, are however, sadly inapplicable to verse. James Montgomery has given his high suffrage in favour of Baxter's poetical powers, and justifies his praise by a few passages selected from the rest with equal tenderness and discretion. It is impossible to subscribe to this heresy even in deference to such an authority; or to resist the suspicion that the piety of the critic has played false with his judgment. Nothing short of an actual and plenary inspiration will enable any man who composes as rapidly as he writes, to give meet utterance to those ultimate secretions of the deepest thoughts and the purest feelings in which the essence of poetry consists. Baxter's verses, which however are not very numerous, would be decidedly improved by being shorn of their rhyme and rhythm, in which state they would look like very devout and judicious prose, as they really are.

Every man must and will have some relief

quil conclusions of old age, bring his career of strife and trouble to a close of unexpected and welcome serenity. In the full maturity of such knowledge as is to be acquired on earth, of the mysteries of our mortal and of our immortal existence, the old man returns at last for repose to the elementary truths, the simple lessons, and the confiding affections of his childhood; and writes an unintended commentary, of unrivalled force and beauty, on the inspired declaration, that to become as little children is the indispensable, though arduous condition of attaining to true heavenly wisdom.

To substitute for this self-portraiture, any other analysis of Baxter's intellectual and moral character, would indeed be a vain at tempt. If there be any defect or error of which he was unconscious, and which he therefore has not avowed, it was the combination of an undue reliance on his own powers of investi gating truth, with an undue distrust in the result of his inquiries. He proposed to himself, and executed, the task of exploring the whole circle of the moral sciences, logic, ethics, divinity, politics, and metaphysics, and this toil he accomplished amidst public employ ments of ceaseless importunity, and bodily pains almost unintermitted. Intemperance never assumed a more venial form; but that this insatiate thirst for knowledge was indulged to a faulty excess, no reader of his life, or of his works, can doubt. In one of his most re markable treatises "On Falsely Pretended Knowledge," the dangerous result of indulging

this omnivorous appetite is peculiarly remark- | opinion on subjects beyond the cognisance of able. Probabilities, the only objects of such the bodily senses, and of daily observation. studies, will at length become evanescent, or They have taught us all to acknowledge in scarcely perceptible, when he who holds the practice, though some may yet deny in theory, scales refuses to adjust the balance, until satis- that as long as men are permitted to avow the fied that he has laden each with every sugges- truth, the inherent diversities of their undertion and every argument which can be derived standings, and of their circumstances, must from every author who has preceded him in impel them to the acknowledgment of corresthe same inquiries. Yet more hopeless is the ponding variations of judgment, on all quessearch for truth, when this adjustment, once tions which touch the mysteries of the present made, is again to be verified as often as any or of the future life. If no man laboured more, new speculations are discovered; and when or with less success, to induce mankind to the very faculty of human understanding, and think alike on these topics, no one ever exthe laws of reasoning, are themselves to be erted himself more zealously, or more effectuquestioned and examined anew as frequently ally, than did Richard Baxter, both by his life as doubts can be raised of their adaptation to and his writings, to divert the world from those their appointed ends. Busied with this im- petty disputes which falsely assume the garb mense apparatus, and applying it to this bound- of religious zeal, to those eternal and momenless field of inquiry, Baxter would have been tous truths, in the knowledge, the love, and bewildered by his own efforts, and lost in the the practice of which, the essence of religion mazes of a universal skepticism, but for the consists. ardent piety which possessed his soul, and the ever recurring expectation of approaching death, which dissipated his ontological dreams, and roused him to the active duties, and the instant realities of life. Even as it is, he has left behind him much, which, in direct opposition to his own purposes, might cherish the belief that human existence was some strange chimera, and human knowledge an illusion, did it not fortunately happen that he is tedious in proportion as he is mystical. Had he possessed and employed the wit and gayety of Boyle, there are some of his writings to which a place must have been assigned in the Index Expurgatorius of Protestantism.

Amongst his contemporaries, Baxter appears to have been the object of general reverence, and of as general unpopularity. His temper was austere and irritable, his address ungracious and uncouth. While cordially admitting the merits of each rival sect, he concurred with none, but was the common censor and opponent of all. His own opinions on church government coincided with the later judgment, or, as it should rather be said, with the concessions of Archbishop Usher. They adjusted the whole of that interminable dispute to their mutual satisfaction at a conference which did not last above half an hour; for each of them was too devoutly intent on the great objects of Christianity to differ with each other very widely as to mere ritual observances. The contentions by which our forefathers were agitated on these subjects, have now happily subsided into a speculative and comparatively uninteresting debate. They produced their best, and perhaps their only desirable result, in diffusing through the Church, and amongst the people of England, an indestructible conviction of the folly of attempting to coerce the human mind into a servitude to any system or profession of belief; or of endeavouring to produce amongst men any real uniformity of

One word respecting the edition of his works, to which we referred in the outset. For the reason already mentioned, we have stuck to our long-revered folios, without reading so much as a page of their diminutive representatives, and can therefore report nothing about them. But after diligently and repeatedly reading the two introductory volumes by Mr. Orme, we rejoice in the opportunity of bearing testimony to the merits of a learned, modest, and laborious writer, who is now, however, beyond the reach of human praise or censure. He has done every thing for Baxter's memory which could be accomplished by a skilful abridgment of his autobiography, and a careful analysis of the theological library of which he was the author; aided by an acquaintance with the theological literature of the seventeenth century, such as no man but himself has exhibited, and which it may safely be conjectured no other man possesses. Had Mr. Orme been a member of the Established Church, and had he chosen a topic more in harmony with the studies of that learned body, his literary abilities would have been far more correctly estimated, and more widely cele brated. We fear that they who dissent from her communion, and who are therefore excluded from her universities and her literary circles, are not to expect for their writings the same toleration which is so firmly secured for their persons and their ministry. Let them not, however, be dejected. Let them take for examples those whom they have selected as teachers; and learning from Richard Baxter to live and to write, they will either achieve his celebrity, or will be content, as he was, to labour without any other recompense than the tranquillity of his own conscience, the love of the people among whom he dwelt, and the approbation of the Master to whom every hour of his life, and every page of his books, were alike devoted.

PHYSICAL THEORY OF ANOTHER LIFE."

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1840.]

In a series of volumes of later birth than | fashioned meeting-house, coeval with the ac that from which the author of the "Natural cession of the House of Hanover-and near History of Enthusiasm" takes the title of his it the decent residence, in which, since that literary peerage, he has bent his strength to auspicious era, have dwelt the successive pasthe task of revealing to itself the generation to tors of that wandering flock-fanning a genewhich he belongs. A thankless office that of rous spirit of resistance to tyrants, now happily the censorship! A formidable enterprise this, to be encountered only in imagination, or in to rebuke the errors of a contentious age, the records of times long since passed away. while repelling the support of each of the contending parties! To appease the outraged self-complacency of mankind, such a monitor will be cited before a tribunal far more relentless than his own. Heedless both of contumely and of neglect, he must pursue his labours in reliance on himself and on his cause; or, if fame be the reward to which he aspires, he must content himself with the anticipation of posthumous renown. It is not, however, easy for the aspirant himself to find the necessary aliment for such hopes. The writer of these works will therefore indulge us in a theory invented for the aid of his and our own imagination. Let it be supposed, that, instead of yet living to instruct the world, he was now engaged in bringing to the test of experiment his own speculations as to the condition of mankind in the future state. He reappears amongst sublunary men under the auspices of some not unfriendly editor; who, however, being without any other sources of intelligence respecting his course of life and studies, has diligently searched his books for such intimations as may furnish the materials for a short "Introductory Notice" of him and of them. The compiler is one of those who prefer the positive to the conjectural style of recounting matters of fact; and has assumed the freedom of throwing into the form of unqualified assertion the inferences he had gleaned from detached passages of the volumes he is about to republish. With the help of this slight and not very improbable hypothesis, the author of these works, while still remaining amongst us, may suppose himself to be reading, in some such lines as the following, the sentence which the critic of a future day will pass on his literary character.

One of those seemingly motionless rivers which wind their way through the undulating surface of England, creeps round the outskirts of a long succession of buildings, half town, half village, where the monotony of the wattled cottage is relieved by the usual neighbourhood of structures of greater dignity;the moated grange-the mansion-house, pierced by lines of high narrow windows-the square tower of the church, struggling through a copse of lime trees-the gray parsonage, where the conservative rector meditates his daily newspaper and his weekly discourse-the barn

* Physical Theory of Another Life. By the author

of "Natural History of Enthusiasm." 1839.

8vo. London,

Towards the close of the last century, a mild and venerable man ruled his household in that modest but not unornamented abode; for there might be seen the solemn portraits of the original confessors of nonconformity, with many a relic commemorative of their sufferings and their worth. Contrasted with these were the lighter and varied embellishments which bespeak the presence of refined habits, female taste, and domestic concord. There also were drawn up, in deep files, the works and the biographies of the Puritan divines, from Thomas Cartwright, the great antagonist of Whitgift, to Matthew Pool, who, in his Synopsis Criticorum, vindicated the claims of the rejected ministers to profound Biblical learning. This veteran battalion was flanked by a company of recruits drafted from the polite literature of a more frivolous age. Rich in these treasures, and in the happy family with whom he shared them, the good man would chide or smile away such clouds as checkered his habitual serenity, when those little nameless courtesies, so pleasantly interchanged between equals, were declined by the orthodox incumbent, or accepted with elaborate condescension by the wealthy squire. The democratic sway of the ruling elders, supreme over the finances and the doctrines of the chapel, failed to draw an audible sigh from his resolute spirit, even when his more delicate sense was writhing under wounds imperceptible to their coarser vision. He had deliberately made his choice, and was content to pay the accustomed penalties. A sectarian in name, he was at heart a Catholic, generous enough to feel that the insolence of some of his neighbours, and the vulgarity of others, were rather the accidents of their posi tion than the vices of their character. Vexations such as these were beneath the regard of him who maintained in the village the sacred cause for which martyrs had sacrificed life with all its enjoyments; and who aspired to train up his son to the same honourable service, ill requited as it was by the glory or the riches of this transitory world.

That hope, however, was not to be fulfilled. The youth had inherited his father's magnanimity, his profound devotion, his freedom of thought, and his thirst for knowledge. But he disclaimed the patrimony of his father's ecclesiastical opinions. His was not one of those mould early habits may have prepared for minds which adjust themselves to whatever them. It was compounded of elements, be

To one worthy of the much prostituted name of poet, no forms of society are without their interest and their charm. But he whom the gods have not made poetical may be kindhearted and wise, and even possessed by many a brilliant fancy, and by many a noble aspiration; and so it fared with this scion of a non

spiritual democracy, from the parsimonious simplicity of their sacred edifices, from the obtrusive prominence of the leaders of their worship, and from their seeming isolation in the midst of the great Christian commonwealth, his thoughts turned to those more

tween which there are no apparent affinities, but the reverse; and which, for that reason, produce in their occasional and unfrequent combination, a character substantive, individual, and strongly discriminated from that of other men. Shrinking from the coarse familiarities of the world, he thirsted for the world's applause at once a very libertine in the un-conformist race. From the coarseness of a fettered exercise of his own judgment, and a very worshipper of all legitimate authorityalternately bracing his nerves for theological strife, and dissolving them in romantic dreams -now buried in the depths of retirement, that he might plunge deeper still into the solitudes of his own nature; and then revealing his dis-august communions, where the splendours of coveries in a style copied from the fashionable models of philosophical oratory;-the young man of whom we tell might be described as a sensitive plant grafted on a Norwegian pine, as a Spartan soldier enamoured of the Idylls of Theocritus, or as an anchorite studious of the precepts of the cosmetic earl of Chesterfield. Nature and accident combined to produce this contrast; integrity and truth gradually blended it into one harmonious, though singular whole. The robust structure of his understanding might have rendered him a rude dogmatist, if the delicate texture of his sensitive or spiritual frame had not forbidden every approach of arrogance. Exploring with intrepid diligence the great questions debated amongst men regarding their internal interests, he recoiled with disgust from the unmannerly habits, the sordid passions, and the petty jealousies which proclaim, but too loudly, that while we dispute about the path to heaven, we are still treading the miry ways of this uncelestial world. Angelic abodes, and holy abstractions, and universal love, were the alluring themes; but, handled as they were by polemics in the language of Dennis, and in the spirit of the Dunciad, our theological student was sometimes tempted to wish that the day on which he was initiated into the mysteries of the hornbook might be blotted from the calendar. Thrown into early association with the depressed and less prosperous party in the ecclesiastical quarrels of his native land, the asperities of the contest presented themselves to his inquisitive and too susceptible eye, unmitigated by the graceful and well-woven veil, beneath which sophistry and rancour can find a specious disguise when allied to rank and fortune and other social distinctions. Episcopal charges and congregational pamphlets might vie with each other in bitterness and wrong; but there rested with the mitred disputant an unquestionable advantage in the grace and dignity and seeming composure with which he inflicted pain and quickened the appetite for revenge. By the unsullied moral sense of the young divine, either form of malevolence might be equally condemned; but to his fastidious taste the ruder aspect which it bore amongst the advocates of dissent was by far the more offensive.

earth symbolize the hierarchies of heavenwhere the successors in an unbroken lineage of apostles and martyrs are yet ministering at the altar-where that consecrated shrine echoes to the creeds and the supplications of the first converts to the faith-and where alone can flourish those arduous but unobtrusive virtues, of which an exact subordination of ranks forms the indispensable basis. Already halfdiverted by such yearnings as these from his hereditary standard, his return to the embrace of the Episcopal Church was further aided by a morbid dislike, unworthy of his powerful intellect, of falling into common-place trains of thought or language. Educated in a body through which religious opinions and pious phrases but too lightly circulate, his instinctive dread of vulgarity led him into speculations where such associates would be shaken off, and to the use of a style such as was never employed by the dwellers in tabernacles. Of a nature the most unaffected, and irreproachably upright in the search of truth, he conducted his inquiries with such elaborate fineness of speech, and with such a fear of acquiescing in the bare creed of the school in which he had been bred, that his fellow-scholars must have formed an unjust estimate of their companion, had he not been withdrawn in early life to other associations, and to far different studies from those which they had pursued in common. From his parental village, the future author was transferred to the remote and busy world in which our English youth are instructed in the unjoyous science of special pleading, and trained for the dignities of the coif.

By the unlearned in such matters, more distinct evidence of this passage in his life may perhaps be demanded than the indications which his writings afford of a technical acquaintance with the law. But every "free and accepted brother" of the craft will recognise, in his frequent and curiously exact use of forensic language, a confidence and a skill which belong only to the acolite in those studies. That the Term Reports would be searched in vain for the specimens of his dialectic powers may, however, be readily believed. Thurlow had as little to fear from the rivalry of the author of the "Task," as Lord CottenFeelings painfully alive to the ungraceful ham from that of the author of the "Natural and the homely in human character, invariably History of Enthusiasm." Westminster Hall indicate an absence of the higher powers of is no theatre to be trodden by men of pensive imagination. To a great painter the counte- spirits, delicate nerves, and high-wrought sennance of no man is entirely devoid of beauty.sibilities. It is to England what the plain of