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beautiful, that we wonder it has never been more widely circulated in a form by itself. It presents a most attractive and encouraging picture of the grace of the Redeemer. One evening, when Cowper went to bid him good night, he resumed the account of his feelings in the following words : “As empty, and yet full; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things; I see the rock upon which I once split, and I see the rock of my salvation. . . . . I have learned that in a moment which I could not have learned by reading many books for many years. I have often studied these points, and studied them with great attention, but was blinded by prejudice; and unless He who alone is worthy to unloose the seals, had opened the book to me, I had been blinded still. Now they appear so plain, that though I am convinced no comment could have ever made me understand them, I wondered I did not see them before."

Another evening he said, "I see now who was right and who was mistaken. What a scene

is passing before me! Ideas upon these subjects crowd upon me faster than I can give them utterance. How plain do many texts appear, to which, after consulting all the commentators, I could hardly affix a meaning; and now I have their true meaning without any comment at all. There is but one key to the New Testament, but one Interpreter. I can not describe to you, nor shall ever

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be able to describe, what I felt in the moment when it was given to me. May I make a good use of it! How I shudder when I think of the danger I have just escaped! I had made up my mind upon these subjects, and was determined to hazard all upon the justness of my own opinions."

He had once read the memoirs of Janeway at Cowper's desire, and he now told Cowper that he had laughed at it in his own mind, and accounted it mere madness and folly. Cowper's own narrative of himself he had also ascribed to the unsettled condition of his intellect, but now he considered his own redemption from such ignorance, darkness and guilt to be more wonderful than even Cowper's. One afternoon, while Cowper was writing by the fire-side, he thus addressed himself to the nurse, who sat at the head of his bed : 'Nurse, I have lived three and thirty years, and I will tell you how I have spent them. When I was a boy, they taught me Latin; and because I was the son of a gentleman, they taught me Greek. These I learned under a sort of private tutor. At the age of fourteen, or thereabouts, they sent me to a public school, where I learned more Latin and Greek, and last of all to this place, where I have been learning more Latin and Greek still. Now has not this been a blessed life, and much to the glory of God?" He was much distressed at the thought of having been for ten years an or

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dained minister, but a blind leader of the blind; intrusted with the care of souls, yet unable to. teach them, because he knew not the Lord himself. He desired and hoped to recover, that he might yet be faithful, and be an instrument of good to others. He said to his brother, "Brother, I was going to say I was born in such a year; but I correct myself; I would rather say, in such a year I came into the world. You know when I was born."

The loss of a brother so inexpressibly dear, at the very moment when he had begun to live, and could fully sympathize with Cowper in all his Christian feelings, would have been an overwhelming sorrow, but for the greatness of the grace attending it. The deep extraordinary experience of Divine mercy in so peaceful and happy a death, confirmed Cowper in his own faith and hope, and prevented the disastrous effect which so great an affliction might otherwise have had upon his mental frame and nervous system. He continued the performance and enjoyment of his spiritual duties, and went on in the composition of the "Olney Hymns." His letters had long breathed a sweet spirit of piety and of affectionate solicitude for others, that they might enjoy the same heavenly hope with himself. And yet at this very time the period was near when the dreadful malady which had carried him to the insane asylum at

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St. Albans, would again seize upon his being, and mind and heart would be involved for a season in the blackness of darkness.

And here we note that if it had not been for the rich and sweet experience of God's loving-kindness in these years of light and peace, that in Huntingdon and Olney, in the Christian society of the Unwins and of Newton, had passed so pleasantly, the dread incursion of his madness would utterly have overwhelmed him, and he must have passed into absolute incurable despair. But during those years of such heavenly Christian enjoyment and frequently unclouded light, God was preparing him for a long and dreary conflict, and at the same time providing for the exercise and development of his genius. In those years, more than in all the rest of his life, he gained that rich spiritual wisdom, that experimental knowledge of divine truth, that acquaintance with the human heart, as touched by divine grace, that affectionate sympathy with and knowledge of the woes of other hearts, and that habit of submissive acquiescence with the will of God, which prepared him to write such a poem as "The Task."

Yet Southey dares to intimate-concerning the Christian experience of Cowper in these delightful years, and especially the happiness of his first recovery-that it was merely the illusion of his madness which ought to have been discouraged. He sets it down (as we have seen) as a perilous relig

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ious enthusiasm, and rebukes the religious friends of Cowper for confirming him in the belief that there was any thing supernatural in his cure. But. certainly it would have been strange comfort, and as dangerous as strange, to tell the victim of religious despair, in the first happiness of a sight of the Redeemer, and the first enjoyment of a serene hope, that the happiness and the hope were both illusive, and that the raptures of a recovery, if deemed real, would only be productive of the perilous consequences of religious enthusiasm. In this and some other passages, Southey goes far toward the hazardous intimation that Cowper's religious experience, instead of being the work of the Spirit of God, was only another form of his insanity, or the confounding of bodily sensations with spiritual impressions.

Now, if Southey could study such a manifestation of grace and truth in Christ Jesus as that revealed and recorded in the lives of such men as Newton and Cowper, and we may add, the German convert Van Lier (whose account of his own Christian experience Cowper translated from the Latin), and yet deliberately sneer at such experience, calling it the "Torrid Zone," and maintaining a mind and heart all the way blinded to the interpositions of grace, divine and supernatural, it is one of the most extraordinary cases of unbelief and darkness ever known. If Southey's