which diffused its fragrance, spreading its bland and refreshing influences all around.

"A third point worthy of observation in his ministry, is, that it was not limited to the pulpit, or considered as discharged in the parlour. The blow which he aimed at the mass in public, was followed by successive strokes addressed to the individuals in private. The congregation was not permitted to forget, during the week, what they had been taught on the Sabbath. The man who would have been lost in the crowd, or who might have sheltered himself under the exceptions which belong to a general address, was singled out, convicted, and shut up to the faith, or left to bear the stings of an instructed and alarmed conscience. The young were instructed and led on; the strong were taught to minister to the weak; and the prayers of many a holy band, at once strengthened the hands of their minister, and "girded each other for the race divine." This was truly making full proof of his ministry, and promoting in his congregation the grand objects and aims of the fellowship of Christianity.

"When we thus connect the public talents and private character of Baxter, the energy and point of his pulpit addresses, with the assiduousness, the perseverance, and the variety of his other labours; his devotion to God, his disinterested love to men; what he was as a pastor, with all that he was as a preacher; we cease to wonder at the effects which he produced. No place could long resist such a train and style of aggression. All people must feel the force of such a moral warfare as that which he waged. There are few individuals who could escape without being wounded, or conquered by such an assailant. In comparison with him, how few are there even among the faithful ministers of Christ, who can think of themselves, or their labours, with satisfaction? Yet, was there nothing in Baxter but what the grace and power of God can do for others. There was something in his exertions almost superhuman; yet he seemed to accomplish all with a considerable degree of ease and comfort to himself. He never seems to have been bustled, but he was always busy; and thus he found time for all he had to do, while he employed that time in the most profitable manner. We have only to find an increase of such ministers in the church of Christ, and who will employ the same kind of means, in order to the accomplish

ment in any place, of effects that will not shrink from a comparison with Kidderminster itself in all its glory.

"The effects of Baxter's ministry in Kidderminster, were lasting, as well as extensive. He frequently refers to his beloved flock, long after he had left them, in terms of the warmest affection. Nor did the effects of his exertions expire with that generation. Mr. Fawcett, who abridged the "Saint's Rest," in 1759, says, "that the religious spirit thus happily introduced by Baxter, is yet to be traced, in the town and neighbourhood, in some degree." He represents the professors of that place, as "possessing an unusual degree of candour, and friendship for each other;" thus evincing, 'that Kidderminster had not totally lost the amiable spirit it had imbibed more than a century before.""

ART. II. GIBBON'S INFIDelity.

By Rev. LEONARD WITHINGTON, Newbury, Mass.

BISHOP BURNET, in his preface to the history of his own time, informs us, that he set about that work with the greatest care; "for," says he, "I reckon a lie in history, to be as much a greater sin, than a lie in common discourse, as the one is likely to be more lasting, and more generally known, than the other." Every impartial reader must agree in the justice of this remark. The historian is a witness in a most important court-implicitly sworn, as he hopes for help from God, and reputation from posterity, to deliver the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was a sad day for the interests of knowledge, when the maxim was introduced, that history must be made subservient to some other design. Sallust mentions it as one of his qualifications for the task he had undertaken, that he was free from the spirit of party. In modern times, facts have often as little to do with the writer's representations, as the canvas has with the effect of the images and the colouring of the painter's picture.

Infidelity is such a dry and sterile thing, that unless it comes forth as the appendage of some superiour design, it

can hardly be made interesting to the reflecting part of mankind. It must be grafted on a root, and supported by a trunk, not its own. Of the authors, who have written professedly in behalf of infidelity, few have survived the dust and the cobwebs of some vast library, where they are kept, like serpents and monsters in bottled spirits, only to show what prodigies nature has bred, and make us thankful that such beings, though horrible, are but rare.

I venture to say, that no splendour of diction, no ornaments of fancy, no prodigality of genius, can ever make a book popular and lasting, whose sole object is to disprove the fundamental principles of the Christian system.

Bolingbroke was certainly a fine writer, and one of the best masters of the English language; yet, who reads his philosophical works? They are only consulted by a few restless young men in our colleges, on the same principle that the wife, in the tale of Bluebeard, looked into the fatal chamber, merely because it was forbidden.

Infidels have recently become conscious of this. Knowing that their system is not like a tree, which can stand erect by its own strength; but is like a vine, which cannot grow upright, unless it has something to creep upon, they have made their infidelity subordinate to some better interest. One mixes it in a system of geology; another makes it the moral of a poem; a third teaches it in a work on medicine; and a fourth weaves it into a commentary on the Bible itself. Some accessory interest must always be brought in to arrest the attention, and bribe the feelings of mankind. It is a plant which can never grow, but under the shelter of a nobler shade.

One of the additional interests which have been brought in, of late years, to support it, is history. By some strange fatality, modern history has fallen into the hands of infidels. The fact, it must be allowed, was very different with ancient history. With the exception of Tacitus, I do not remember one of the ancient historians, who does not lean to the side of credulity, on the subject of the popular religion. Herodotus is a perfect old woman. Xenophon is as full of omens and prognostics, as Pagan priests could wish; and all of them, from the warmest conviction, join to support the religion of their country. And even in modern times, previous to the last century, the historian has generally been on the side of Revelation. Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have been

a free-thinker; but nothing of it appears in his history. Lord Clarendon, though a statesman and a tory, talks in a style which would now be thought rather canting; and it is impossible to read the preface of Burnet, without believing that he was a good man, in the evangelical sense of that expression.

But since these days, historians have sustained a very different character, and have written from a very different design. Bayle published his dictionary as a manual of skepticism; though on the whole the fairest of all the unbelieving tribe, from his frigid indifference. Voltaire after some interval followed; and Hume and Gibbon bring up the rear. Knowing that all men read history, knowing too that the negative discoveries of the unbeliever can interest very few; they have combined two designs into one, and have mingled the poison of infidelity in the streams of the purest knowledge.

Hume and Gibbon were however very different men. The one was vastly superiour in genius; the other, in patient application and diligent research. Hume has a style, so simple, so elegant, so easy, always rising with the interest of his story, and then sinking into the tranquillity of calm narrative, that his sentiments fall on the mind like sunlight, which always reveals the object, and never fatigues the eye. Gibbon's more ambitious style meets the mind like the blaze of some splendid conflagration, artificially beautiful and painfully brilliant. We begin to read with pleasure, but are fatigued and overpowered before the chapter is closed.

Hume was by nature and education a sophist. But his mind was far clearer, because superior to that of Gibbon; whose obliquities distorted his very language. Nothing can be more just than his criticism on his own style. "The most serious defect of my Essay (i. e. the first work he published, but which contained no defect which did not, in a degree, adhere to every subsequent performance) is a kind of obscurity and abruptness, which always fatigues, and may often elude the attention of the reader. ** Alas! how fatal has been the imitation of Montesquieu !" "But this obscurity sometimes proceeds from a mixture of light and darkness in the author's mind; from a partial ray which strikes upon an angle, instead by spreading itself over a surface."

Since so many historians have been advocates of infidelity, it may be proper to inquire, whether there is any thing

The

in the study of history which tends to unbelief. answer to this question depends, in some degree, on the position on which the historian stands. In ancient times, it would seem that historical studies had no such tendency; for we have already seen, that most of the early historians, so far as supernatural power was concerned, erred on the side of credulity, and not of unbelief. But in modern times the effect is different. I am inclined to think, that since the corruption of Christianity and the rise of the enormous fabric of Roman power, the study of ecclesiastical antiquity has some tendency to make the mind skeptical. Speaking from my own experience, I have never had so many infidel thoughts pass through my mind, as when reading the histories of Socrates and Sozomen, together with some of the writings of the more credulous fathers. They generate a skepticism, which nothing but a recurrence to the pure and holy oracles of original Revelation can cure.

You read in ecclesiastical history, miracle after miracle; miracles of presumption, and miracles of folly, miracles wrought by the bones of a dead saint, to clothe with flesh the bones of a fat monk. In reading the history of these miracles, which require the most boundless credulity to believe them, your first thought is, that all miracles must be the delusion of human weakness, played on by designing power;-and the Gospel begins to suffer, because it is found in such company. But a little further reflection soon convinces an impartial man, that the first and later miracles have an entirely different character, and stand in a very different relation to human duty and happiness. It seems to have been ordained by the providence of God, that both the Old Testament and New, should be surrounded by a mass of rubbish and folly, in order to force our minds to discrimination, and compel us to separate the chaff from the wheat. The Old Testament comes down to us from antiquity, surrounded with the comments of the Talmud and Mishna; and the New comes incumbered with all the credulous comments of the fathers. But although both these accompaniments bear about the same proportion to the purity of the sacred history, as the weeds which grow on the borders of a field, bear to the wheat, and other grain, which they inclose, -nevertheless, to a heart of a sensual and material turn, careless and indifferent about religion, all this presents an excuse for not seeing the evidences of the Gospel. To a man