ed it from the withering ray of persecution and the biting mildew of neglect. But he has kept in his ever warm heart a leaping life-fountain, and in his apostolic epistles has sent forth a living stream of urgent admonition, spiritual sympathy, zealous effort, and signally wise counsel. This, I maintain, distinguished him from most ministers, and hardly ever failed him, the doing the right thing and saying the fit word and suggesting the best plan, often in emergencies of the most difficult nature. At his own post he bore cheerfully, manfully, serenely, triumphantly, every kind of opposition, every domestic privation, every personal hardship; and he bore all, not for a pittance of emolument, which for a time came hardly from a few, not for a name, which the next tide of moving souls may wash away, not to erect any party banner, flapping wildly against the unfettered breezes of this Western thought, but for what he believed, in all sincerity, to be God's highest truth, the truth which he had felt, loved, prayed over, mused upon, proved sufficient in every walk of personal experience or pastoral necessity. He gave to this truth the testimony of a pure, upright, humane, earnest, devout soul, in his hours of health; and when the shadows of the last night began to press heavily on his aching heart, he then showed how cruel the calumny, that the mercy of the Father and fidelity to his Son are not faith enough to soothe the fevered brow and guide the spent spirit to repose. I thank God that he died at his post; the seals of his calling around him; the witnesses of his fidelity bending now in serene trust over a martyr's grave. In this day of ministerial instability and parochial fickleness, we rejoice over one taking leave of his shepherd-crook by his Master's call, among a flock which he had led to the fountains of living water; who, through all discouragement, had held on bravely yet trustingly, heroically yet humbly, to the end; whose ministry on earth was formally closed in preparation for a higher ministry with angels, the sanctuary vestments just laid aside, as an unseen hand clothed him in the pure white of the saints, the altar vessels exchanged for those golden harps which ever breathe the praise of God and the Lamb. Though I feel sadly the chasm that is made, I can but be thankful for the generous, manly, zealous life which has just passed into a wider, happier sphere of existence, in the fittest possible time, by a gentle and blessed gliding away. Truly 'There is no death to those who know of life, No time to those who see eternity.' Justly of him may we now sing the beautiful hymn, 'Servant of God, well done! Rest from thy loved employ: The battle fought, the victory won, S. K. L. ART. X. SERVICE BOOKS.* THERE is, we have reason to believe, a very erroneous idea in the minds of many, connected with the worship of the Sabbath. It is, that the people assemble solely, or principally, to hear; to be listeners, and not to be agents; to be silent spectators of devotion in others, not to engage in it themselves. Undoubtedly the people assemble, or should assemble, in part to hear, to listen to expositions of spiritual truth, to religious counsel and warning. But it is a sad mistake, to suppose that this is the one great object of going to church. The right view of the subject is, that the people assemble, themselves to engage in an act of worship, to become themselves worshippers. This is the Christian view. A Christian congregation is an assembly of worshippers, and not of mere listeners. If this be so, then the Liturgic services of the church, including singing, (and a similar remark may be made of the services of Sunday schools,) should be adapted to excite and aid the devotion of the people, the great body of those present - - - 1. Service Book; for the use of the Church of the Disciples. Taken principally from the Old and New Testaments. The Disciples' Hymn Book; a Collection of Hymns and Chants for Public and Private Devotion. Prepared for the use of the Church of the Disciples. Boston: B. H. Greene. 1844. 16mo. pp. 183 and 378. 2. The Sunday School Service Book. In Three Parts. Part First; Devotional Exercises for the School. Part Second; Hymns for the School. Part Third; Prayers and Hymns for Teachers' Meetings. Boston: William Crosby. 1844. 12mo. pp. 372. 3. Hymns and Tunes for Vestry and Conference Meetings. By EDWIN M. STONE. Boston: William Crosby. 1844. pp. 96. as worshippers. In this respect, we are inclined to believe, with all due deference to the opinions of those who think otherwise, that our Congregational worship, as frequently conducted, is somewhat deficient. The body of worshippers take too little share in it. It can hardly be called social, much less congregational, worship. It is too much the act of a single individual, and leaves the heart of the multitude unmoved. They do not feel that they are themselves worshippers. We must be permitted to say that we think this a great and prevailing defect, and we ardently wish to see it remedied, It has been charged as a defect on Protestant communions generally, that they do not provide sufficiently for the culture of the "devotional feelings," that they address men too exclusively on "the side of the intellect," that they make religion too much a matter of pure reason, Catholicism addresses more the eye and the imagination, and provides more "outward excitements to devotion." One objection to it is, that it relies too much on the outward, and consequently leaves the mind "sluggish," that it encumbers and crushes the spirit of devotion beneath the weight of forms. If we, a portion of the descendants of the Puritans who may be considered as representing the very van of the Protestant army, are in the other extreme, if we make our worship too little a social exercise — too much a solitary feeling of the heart, if there is too little of warmth and sympathy in it too little to touch the sensibility and awaken and elevate devout feeling, it is certainly desirable that the error should be corrected. For this reason we are friendly to congregational singing as an act of Christian devotion on the part of the visible worshippers. Religion itself is but a higher harmony, the concert of all the inward faculties and feelings breathed upon by the Divine spirit, the union of the soul with the great Source of all order and beauty, its calm dwelling with God, the highest peace; and hence its natural alliance with music, which "Untwisting all the chains that tie at once enkindles devotional sentiment and furnishes a fit expression of it. A hymn is a prayer, yea, often the high est prayer. The best hymns are either ascriptions, or simple breathings of penitence and desire; in them there is the uprising of the soul to God, and that is true prayer. We would then have the music, or singing, and Liturgic services of the church adapted to aid the devotion of the congregation, to make the congregation themselves worshippers. Nothing else satisfies us. We can look with reverence on the most lowly assembly of Christian worshippers lifting up their hearts to God in strains of music, or prayers, the most inartificial. We can sympathise with the devout expression of such music, and such simple promptings of the heart in prayer, and we would choose rather to worship in such an assembly than have our devotional feelings chilled by a mere cold exhibition of the beauties of art in the most gorgeous edifice man ever reared. We join in worship to meet our God there, and if He be not in it, it is no worship for us. Entertaining these views, we are prepared to like the general plan of Mr. Clarke's "Service Book." It answers. the demand made by the heart of the worshipper; it has sufficient variety, yet is simple, both in its matter and arrangement; it avoids the repetition and confusion observable in many of the old prayer-books, and the service is not, as in some of them, made tedious by its length; and it unites the advantages of extempore prayer with something fixed, and especially with well chosen Scriptural aids to devotion. One of its excellencies is that, with the exception of the Te Deum, the Morning and Evening Hymns, and two of the Litanies, one of which agrees in the main with that used at King's Chapel, Boston, (which is taken with few variations, besides the expunging of certain unscriptural doctrines and expressions, from the Liturgy found in the Book of Common Prayer,) the whole of it is from the Bible; consisting of Sentences to be read, a Confession, the Lord's Prayer, Selections from the Psalms, and from the Prophets, Scriptural Litanies, and closing Ascriptions. We are particularly pleased with what the Compiler calls "Litanies from the New Testament," which he says he has "prepared merely by way of experiment." We see not why the language of the New Testament should not be used for purposes of devotion, as well as that of the Old. It is in many respects better suited to the needs of Chris tians, and breathes more of the spirit which may be expect, ed to animate a follower of Christ, 66 We like the principle on which the Hymns (381 in number, which, together with several Chants, are bound in one volume with the Service Book,) are selected, that is, of excluding all merely didactic hymns, and many others which encumber nearly all our Collections, the most improved even, but which nobody, we suppose, ever thinks of using. There are some fifty or a hundred hymns in what are called our best Collections, which we have always wished were out of the way. Some of the hymns in the present Collection are addressed to the Saviour, and to this, which certainly has early usage in its favor, we do not object; though Mr. Clarke seems a little inconsistent, when having assigned as a reason, why the hymns in the volume are mostly direct addresses to God," the fact that "singing is an act of worship," he proceeds in the next sentence to say, "nor have we scrupled to address also our risen Master." That he does not mean such address, however, should be regarded as an act of worship, appears from what he immediately adds, that, according to the teachings of the Saviour himself, "all worship and prayer must be directed to the Father." The term "worship," it is well known, is now used in a much more restricted sense than when our present English version of the Bible was made, so that the instances in which persons are spoken of in it, as falling down and worshipping Jesus, that is, doing him reverence, after the custom of the East, furnish no justification of those who would make him an object of worship, as the term is now used to express supreme religious homage. "See thou do it not; worship God.” The mechanical execution of the book is worthy of notice. It is exceedingly neat and pleasing to the eye; though we could point out a few slight changes or corrections, which, should the work come to a second edition, we should desire to see made, We wish, too, that more pains had been taken to trace the hymns credited to the Sunday School Hymn Book, to their original sources. To mention a single instance, the first three verses of the fiftyeighth hymn, here credited to the "Sun. School H. B." were original in Mr. Sewall's (the New York) Collection, for which they were furnished by one of our best female |