nothing of, and from having no experience of them, it too often proceeds to their denial. The living beauty of the Word of God is neither witnessed nor felt; it is a hidden beauty, hidden, like the life of the saint who feeds upon it, with Christ in God. Hence the necessity of Christian grace in lively exercise, for a discovery or relish of the divine beauty of the Scriptures. Where faith is dim, or the heart worldly, or a besetting sin stands over the soul like a task-master, the Bible to the spiritual vision, is like a dead painting to the eye; there seems in it neither life nor beauty. Let the same passage be read in the exercise of lively faith, when the soul is victorious over sin, when Christ is near, and the heart filled with his love, when heavenly hope is strong, and the view of eternal realities vivid, and then it sparkles with glory; it is a revelation of heaven, a sudden shining out of Jehovah from between the cherubim; every verse, line, word, is instinct with the sacred fire, and condensed with meaning. Selfishness must necessarily cloud the mind to religious truth; just as mists overshadow the beauties of evening. Sweep away those clouds, let the heart be open to the love of God; let it enter, and imbue, and purify the soul, and the stars of truth shall take their place clearly, one after another, in the soul's moral hemisphere, till the expanse is hung with serene orbs, whose light shines sweetly in the path we tread, and whose celestial beauty transports the affections to Heaven. As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of regenerate man to the light, and power, and glory of God's word. The human heart unregenerate is as a mirror, over which you have hung a long black pall. Hold up that mirror to any object in God's creation, to the trees, or the sky, or the sun at noon-day, and there would be no reflection. Hold it up to the stars at evening, and through the cloth that covers it there is no answering image. Now remove the covering, and hold up the mirror without its veil, and there is the image, clear and bright as the reality. Just so, the pall of sin is on the heart of the sinner. Hold up before it every doctrine of the Bible in succession, with the eloquence of an archangel, and you would not reach it; there could be no experience or reflection of the truth. God in Christ might be exhibited before the mind with great power and glory; all those glorious realities that require a spiritual faith for their discernment, might be displayed in the vividest colour ing that language can bear; and still there could be no answering image through the gloomy veil of sin. But now remove that veil. Make the heart submissive to Christ, and then hold up to it the Scriptures; regeneration, the atonement, the punishment of sin, the holiness and sovereignty of God; and what do we see? A clear, sweet, living image of the glory of the Saviour, and the truth of every page. Whatever be the object first presented to the mind, after the veil of selfishness is withdrawn, there will be a calm and delightful reflection of it. The spirit of caviling is gone, objections are done away, and the heart rests upon the Saviour, in grateful obedience to his will, and adoration of his Divine Glory. Spirit of Love, thou Power Divine, come down; And where thou walk'dst a sufferer, wear thy crown: O, give that peace the world knows not, and throw, Shine through the 'wildered mind, that man may see DANA. There is nothing in the world, that has such an array of argument in its favour, as the system of evangelical religion revealed in the Gospel. The display of its evidences is one of the brightest tissues of demonstration ever spread out before the admiring mind. The obligations under which we lie with respect to it are infinite; nor is it a matter left to our option, whether we will receive it or not. It comes to us with all the authority of the Author of our being, as a gift from him, and a revelation of his will, to teach us our duty, and to point out the only way by which we can enter heaven; and if, while we profess to receive it, we scorn its medium of mercy, or retain a heart at enmity against God, the enjoyment of its light will only intolerably augment the guilt of disobedience and consequent perdition of the soul. ART. V. BAXTER'S SAINTS' REST. By Rev. JOHN WOODBRIDGE, D. D., New-York. The Saints' Everlasting Rest, by the Rev. Richard Baxter, abridged by Benjamin Fawcett, A. M. New-York, published by the American Tract Society. THE leading Puritans of the seventeenth century were extraordinary men, from whom, since the peculiar controversies of those times are viewed in the calm light of history, the successors of their most violent enemies will scarcely presume to withhold the eulogium due to distinguished wisdom, intrepidity and piety. They were indeed a race of moral heroes, genuine chevaliers of the cross, whose names, however assailed by the advocates of arbitrary principles on the one hand, and ferocious infidels on the other, will ever be dear alike to the lovers of evangelical truth, and the intelligent friends of civil, political and religious liberty. The memory of no one of these worthies is more precious than that of Richard Baxter, the humble pastor of Kidderminster, who watched for souls as one who must give account. "The proud he tam'd, the penitent he cheer'd, His preaching much, but more his practice wrought, We may, with the strictest propriety, apply to him the words of another, descriptive of the pulpit performances of a celebrated preacher in our own country.* "Mount Sinai seemed to thunder from his lips when he denounced the tremendous curses of the law, and sounded the dreadful alarm to secure impenitent sinners. The solemn scenes of the last judgement seemed to rise in view, when he arraigned, tried, and convicted self-deceivers and formal hypocrites. And how did the balm of Gilead distil from his lips, when he exhibited a bleeding, dying Saviour, to sinful mortals as a sovereign remedy for the wounded heart? He spake as on the border of eternity, and as viewing the glories and terrours of an unseen world." For original force * Character of Rev. S. Davies, by Rev. D. Bostwick. and activity of mind, high intellectual acquirements, industry, firmness of religious principle, unflinching integrity, simplicity that knows no guile, benevolence, tenderness and ardour of piety, and the consecration of all his powers to the best of causes; Baxter stood pre-eminent among as noble a company of confessors, as the world in later ages has ever witnessed. Had his lot been cast among the early Christians, he would have been not an inferiour associate in the honours of an Ignatius, a Polycarp, a Justin, and a Cyprian. This venerable and apostolic man lived in a very momentous period, when commotions in the social system were casting off ancient abuses, and preparing the world for the permanent establishment of free institutions, and the wide diffusion of the principles of the Gospel. He was born in 1615, five years before the landing of the pilgrims on the rock at Plymouth, and closed his laborious and useful life in 1691; leaving in his numerous writings, all of which treated of subjects worthy of his pen and heart, a rich legacy to future generations. His SAINTS' REST is one of the most popular, practical and valuable of his publications; and will probably be read with ever increasing interest in proportion as piety advances. It was first written, when he was little more than thirty years of age, being withdrawn from public labours on account of ill health, and in almost continual expectation of the glory which filled his soul, and gave him a pen, dipped in its own soft and radiant colours. He was from home, and had no opportunity of consulting any other books than his Bible and Concordance. He afterwards preached the substance of his treatise, in a course of weekly lectures, to his people in Kidderminster; and he printed it in 1650, it being the first of his practical publications. The following is his own account of the circumstances in which it was composed. While I was in health I had not the least thought of writing books, or of serving God in any more public way than preaching, but when I was weakened with great bleeding, and left solitary in my chamber at Sir John Cook's in Derbyshire, without any acquaintance but my servant about me, and was sentenced to death by the physicians, I began to contemplate more seriously on the everlasting rest, which I apprehended myself to be just on the borders of. That my thoughts might not too much scatter in my meditation, I began to write something on that subject, intending but the quantity of a sermon or two; but being continued long in weakness, where I had no books and no better employment, I followed it on, till it was enlarged to the bulk in which it is published. The first three weeks I spent in it was at Mr. Nowel's house, at Kirby Mallory, in Leicester shire; a quarter of a year more, at the seasons which so great weakness would allow, I bestowed upon it at Sir Thomas Rous' house at Rous Lench, in Worcestershire; and I finished shortly after at Kidderminster. "The marginal citations I put in after I came home to my books, but almost all the book itself was written when I had no books but a Bible and a Concordance; and I found that the transcript of the heart hath the greatest force on the hearts of others. For the good that I have heard that multitudes have received by that writing, and the benefit which I have again received by their prayers, I here humbly return my thanks to Him that compelled me to write it."* Baxter aimed at no display. He was above it. He reflected, he reasoned, he felt deeply; he longed to communi cate to others the emotions of his own soul; his rhetoric was that of his heart, and of the imagination kindled by the inexpressible interest, attractiveness and grandeur of his subject. In the rapidity and force of his movements, you are reminded of the cataract; in his vehement addresses to the conscience, you seem to hear the thunder's reiterated peals; in the glory of the themes he presents, and the benevolence of his spirit, you are cheered as by the beauty and gladness of nature, in summer's loveliest morning. We have, we think, sometimes heard him called the Demosthenes of the English pulpit. He had the native energy, without the secular aims, the pride, the ambition, the elaborate diction, and the studied point of the illustrious Athenian. Demos thenes lived for the earth; Richard Baxter for heaven. The former sought to serve a state; the latter, a world, alienated from God, and perishing in its guilt. "He was," says Dr. Bates, as quoted in Fawcett's Preface, "animated Narrative, as quoted by Rev. L. Bacon, in his life of Baxter, pp. 92, 93. "There are few testimonies," Mr. Bacon very justly observes, "to the great intellectual vigour, and the extraordinary industry of Baxter, more surprising than the fact, that 'The Saints' Everlasting Rest,' which at its first publication was a quarto volume of eight hundred pages, was written in six months while the author stood languishing and fainting between life and death." 59 VOL. II. |