faith and love during his earthly pilgrimage; it will be the completion of his joy to see and to know that his everlasting felicity is shared also by them, who were the sharers of his best happiness in this life. We feel as if our felicity would hardly be complete without them, even as we are assured, concerning saints who have long preceded us, that "they without us will not be made perfect."

There are seasons in life when we find it especially soothing and congenial to contemplate the future and eternal felicity of the saints in light. But we would ever remember that they who shall be counted worthy of that world, begin their blessed career while living here, among the trials and common duties of every day. Do not dream of happiness hereafter, as something separate and apart from the kind of life which a man passes while here. Time future is only a continuation of time present. We call this life time, and that we call eternity. But time is eternity begun. Life runs on interminably, and that is eternity.

True, there occurs a signal change-a break in the journeywhich we call death. It is not the end of the journey, it is only a change in the mode of travelling. Thenceforth life assumes new forms. We quit the world,-we are divested of this mortal body,-delivered from the burden of the flesh,-and we travel onward, as beings destined to a higher order of felicity, and enter another mansion of the Father's house. But still we shall be there our very selves; the same living, conscious beings we are here. Death alters our state, not our character. He that rejoices in Christ there, rejoiced in Christ here. He that wears white robes there, obtained them here, made spotless in the blood of the Lamb. He that there wears the crown, here fought the good fight, and obtained the victory. He that is holy there, was made holy here. The two worlds, like Pharaoh's dreams, are, in fact, but one. This is the scene of preparation; that, of final attainment. Here, sin must be forgiven and conquered; there, the honours of victory are bestowed. At this moment, God has people in both worlds, equally dear to Him, equally safe, though not equally happy. He beholds us in our conflicts; them, in their repose. What seems dark to us, looks all bright to them. We miss their company, and weep to see their places vacant; they look down upon us here, toiling in sorrow, and then upwards at the crown laid up for us, and anticipate the time when they shall see the righteous Judge place it in triumph on our brow. Then let us understand the time, and what we ought to do. This is the time for the sower to sow the seed; that, the time for the reapers to bind up the sheaves. Here, God must be sought; there, He will be enjoyed. Here we walk by faith, often in tears and darkness; there we walk in the light of the Lord. Here is much to suffer-burdens, and conflicts, and weariness,

and desolation; there, in His presence, is fulness of joy. Here, tribulations are many, and our consolations brief; there, at His right hand are the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him, even pleasures for evermore.

"Then let our songs abound,

And every tear be dry;

We 're marching through Emmanuel's land
To fairer worlds on high."

W. B. M.

WATSON'S LIFE OF BISHOP WARBURTON.

The Life of William Warburton, D.D., Lord Bishop of Gloucester from 1760 to 1779; with remarks on his Works. By the Rev. John Selby Watson, M.A., M.R.S.L. Longman and Co. 1863.

AN irreligious age is not unfrequently an age of religious controversy. Men feel the want of some religion, and when they have lost the reality, they cling to the shadow. Controversial piety seems better than none at all, and thousands are contented with it; persuading themselves, no doubt, that in some mysterious way or other it will stand them in good stead at last. Never since the Reformation was religion in a lower state in England than at the middle of the last century; and never, perhaps, was controversial theology more hotly pursued. And, if we may descend to personalities in the case of those who have been long dead, seldom has there been a prelate who displayed in his life fewer Christian graces than bishop Warburton, and never one who pursued controversial theology with a more intense eagerness.

The principal features of his life are well known from bishop Hurd's biography, but we are obliged to Mr. Selby Watson for this new and more candid history of a strange man. There is much amusement in his pages, and they are not without instruction. We are compelled to admire the grandeur of Warburton's intellect. His eccentricities, pride and violence, and consummate self-sufficiency, warn us that a powerful understanding affords no security against the most odious mental vices. On the whole, too, we must add, that his modern biographer seems to understand his character; and to have written with fairness what it was extremely difficult to write at all, except in the spirit of a partisan. Warburton descended from a good family, who had been settled in Cheshire since the days of Hugh Lupus, with whom they had crossed over from Normandy. But he was born at Newark, December 24, 1698, and sent to school in the town. From thence he was sent to the grammar school at Oakham, where

his master, as he told in after years, when the Divine Legation appeared, had always considered him the dullest of all dull scholars. His cousin being appointed head master of the Newark grammar school, he was brought home again, and placed for a time under his tuition. But all that he could say of his distinguished relative and pupil in after years was, that he loved his book and his play as other boys do. His father died when he was little more than eight years old, and he was articled, in his sixteenth year, to an attorney at East Markham, in Nottinghamshire. It was the profession of his father and his grandfather; but he does not appear to have been fond of it, or to have made much progress at any time in the study of the law. Now, however, symptoms of a powerful intellect appeared; he was fond of reading, gave some attention to mathematical and scientific studies, and renewed his acquaintance with the classic authors he had read at school. He became a silent youth; though he still bore the character amongst his acquaintance of an easy good-natured lad, not overloaded with either sense or learning. One day, when his companions were indulging in a little raillery at his expense, he replied, with a firmness to which they were unaccustomed: "I know what you and others think of me, but I shall one day or other convince the world that I am not so ignorant or so great a fool as I am taken to be." His reading now took a theological turn, and he desired to take Orders. His friends thought, as bishop Hurd, his personal friend and first biographer, informs us, that the seriousness of his temper and the purity of his morals, concurring with his unappeasable thirst for knowledge, gave the surest presages of future eminence in that profession. He was ordained deacon in the cathedral of York, but to what parish or cure we are not informed, December 22, 1723. It was the fashion of the times to appear in print, and, the same year in which he was ordained, young Warburton published a volume of miscellaneous translations, in prose and verse, from Roman poets, orators, and historians. He was now five and twenty. Dr. Johnson at about the same time of life published his first work, which was also a translation of a Jesuit father's travels in Abyssinia, in which his biographer, Sir J. Hawkins, remarks, "we see the infant Hercules." In Warburton's first work no traces of the giant's foot appear. The Latin verse is indifferent. The English verse is worse; and the translations are neither good nor bad. He is said to have endeavoured to suppress the volume; but as ill fortune would have it, it fell into the way of the late Dr. Parr, who republished it in a volume of "Tracts of Warburton, by a Warburtonian." In deacon's orders he remained nearly four years, when he was ordained priest by bishop Gibson, in 1726, and presented to the small living of Greasely, in Nottinghamshire, by Sir Robert Sutton, to whom his volume is dedicated,

and in whom he found a patron and a friend. The preferment was of little value, and a few years afterwards he was presented, in exchange for it, by the same patron, with the living of Brant Broughton, near Newark, of the value of 5601. He was

a dutiful and affectionate son and brother; and he now took his widowed mother and sisters into his parsonage, and here he spent eighteen years of the most active part of his life, namely, from 1728 to 1746. Pluralities were no scandal then, nor indeed long afterwards. In 1730, the duke of Newcastle presented him with the living of Frisby, in Lincolnshire. He held it for six and twenty years, but never resided upon it. It added about two hundred and fifty pounds a year to his income.

His ambition at this time appears to have been to figure among men of letters, and he made acquaintance with Pope, Concanen, Theobald, and others, who gave laws to the little but self-important clique who had installed themselves the arbiters of taste and letters; and he published from time to time a variety of books and pamphlets, not one of which would have been heard of now, had it not been that they were the productions of the pen of him who afterwards wrote the Divine Legation. He published a treatise upon the alliance between Church and State. Though now forgotten, this was probably, in its day, the most useful of all his writings. It passed through several editions; but he builds upon an hypothesis which has no foundation, assuming that the Church and the State had voluntarily formed an alliance for the sake of mutual advantage: the notion, in short, long since exploded, of a social contract as the foundation of Government. Horsley admired it, as others have done of Horsley's principles; but we need not analyze, either to refute or eulogize, a work which men of all parties have long since laid aside, and which has been long forgotten. He edited "Velleius Paterculus ;" he wrote notes and emendations on "Shakespeare," in company with Theobald, on which the only question amongst the admirers of the dramatic bard was, whether his or those of his friend Theobald were the worst; and some years afterwards he published a volume of emendations of his own. Dr. Johnson gave the prize of badness to Theobald. Warburton sliced up, he said, would make fifty Theobalds. With more wit and less coarseness, Quin, the comedian, who taught rhetoric to George the Third, remarked, "Warburton should have kept to his own Bible, and let ours alone."

Nothing can be more dreary than these memorials of illdirected industry, of mis-spent talents, and of a life wasted, as Grotius said in his own case (and without reason, as we are fain to believe), on his death-bed, "Laboriose nihil agendo." Yet let us be just to Warburton; his mind wanted early discipline-a public school in those days, such as Oakham,

taught nothing but a little Greek and Latin. The advantage of a university education he never possessed. His degree of Master of Arts was an honorary one, conferred, when he had made himself a name, by the University of Cambridge. Between his character and that of Dr. Parr it would not be difficult to trace a strong resemblance. In their studies the resemblance is perhaps yet stronger; each had a strong coarse mind, which would bear no contradiction; each possessed an enormous mass of ill-assorted learning. The amount of it seemed greater to well-trained scholars, because few of them had traversed those vast, intellectually desert regions, from which the stores had been accumulated. What Mr. Watson has written of Warburton is no less true of Parr :

"His reading was at all times sufficiently miscellaneous. He passed from grave to light, and from light to grave; and when he was weary with Eusebius, or Schulteus, sought relief in Cervantes or Butler. His acquaintance with literature in general became great, though his knowledge of particular subjects, even such as he might be expected fully to understand, was in many cases but partial and superficial, and his judginent in them erroneous. He never became a scholar, in the sense in which a Toup or a Tyrwhitt understood the word; but he had penetrated into numbers of books which many professed scholars had scarcely opened. He made extensive incursions into the regions of letters, though he did not always stay long enough in the same part to secure conquests. But he brought away spoils enough to show the compass of his expeditions, and to adorn and enliven his pages with allusions to all kinds of authors and subjects. He had doubtless felt the want of more knowledge when he was writing his treatise on Prodigies and Miracles;' for its pages are pages of poverty compared with those of the Divine Legation;' and he would thus be the more stimulated to enlarge his acquirements to the utmost."

At length, in 1738, the first volume of that strangest of all strange books, "The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated," was given to the world. It is dedicated to the free-thinkers. They maintained that the Books of Moses made no reference to a future state, and therefore could not be a part of a divine revelation. Warburton undertakes to confute them by a paradox even more extravagant. He not only admits that there is in the laws and religion of Moses, delivered to the Jewish people, the omission of the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments; but from this, he tells us,-for we are quoting his very words,-"I pretend to carry the internal evidence much further than usual, and to the height of which it is capable, of moral demonstration." There is every reason to believe that he was sincere.

"Why I chose this medium-namely, the omission of a future state in the Je ish Dispensation-to prove its divine original, is. First, for the sake of the Deists; being enabled thereby to show them, 1. That