of canonical forms, places, and seasons. At six years of age, John was almost miraculously rescued from the conflagration of his father's house, an event which, in after life, impressed him with a strong sense of his peculiar mission and destiny, and was commemorated by himself in one of his engraved portraits, which had a burning-house for its background, with the motto: "Is not this a brand plucked out of the burning?" While he was at school, there occurred at his father's house a series of unaccountable and reputedly supernatural disturbances, probably the result of mischievous contrivance on the part of some of the servants or neighbors, yet adapted to awaken in the mind of a sensitive boy a profound feeling of the realty and nearness of the spiritual world. At Oxford, Wesley, as an undergraduate, was a youth of pure morals and of unblemished sobriety of deportment; but when the time for the choice of a profession drew nigh, he was not sufficiently assured of his own religious state to contemplate the ordination vows without conscientious scruples as to his fitness to take them. The treatise De Imitatione Christi and Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, about this time, led him into regions of more intimate religious experience, and rendered essential aid in his preparation of heart for the sacred office. Shortly after his ordination, he was elected to a Fellowship; and when he returned to Oxford to discharge its duties, he found his brother Charles a member of a religious society among the students, which had received, partly in derision, and partly on account of the methodical and somewhat ascetic life of its members, the sobriquet of Methodists. Of this circle John became the leader. The influences derived from these associates were adapted to strengthen and deepen the devotional element in his character, but at the same time to alienate his sympathies from the world at large, and to shut them up within a sort of close corporation of rigid pietists. Yet this period of his life must have been invaluable as a season of spiritual nurture for his subsequent labors. In after years he was too busy and care-cumbered for prolonged retirement or contemplation, and a superficial piety would have been exhaled in the incessant and monotonous routine of journeying, correspondence, | financial administration, and extemporaneous preaching. This interval, consecrated to devout introspection, religious communion, and the passive luxury of meditation and prayer, rendered his inward life so rich, full, and fervent, that he never afterward sank into the perfunctory discharge of the clerical office, but retained, to the day of his death, the freshness of his zeal and the warm glow of a heart in constant intercourse with heaven. At this period, he shrank from the active duties of his profession, and declined a curacy under his father, with the prospect of succession to his living, on the ground that his own personal salvation would be endangered by intercourse with miscellaneous society. He, however, suddenly adopted the resolution of going to the then newly-planted colony of Georgia, as a chaplain and missionary. On his passage he became deeply interested in a party of Moravian fellow-passengers, united with them in their daily religious services, imbibed much of their social and loving spirit, and learned from them that the active service of man was the true post of loyalty to God. On his arrival at Savannah, he entered upon a course of ministerial and pastoral duty, in which we discern the first distinct foreshadowing of what he afterward became. With punctilious adherence to the rubric of the Church, even where custom had modified it, he connected many extra-ecclesiastical observances and practices. He established a regular system of parochial visitation, and instituted a series of social meetings, not unlike the more recent Methodist class-meetings. He preached earnestly against luxury in apparel, and was himself an example of the severest self-denial in things innocent, as well as in matters of doubtful expediency. His brother Charles, who had accompanied him, pursued a not dissimilar course at Frederica, only with a wilder zeal and less discretion. Such close and merciless censors of manners and morals, such purists of the inmost initiation, were ill adapted to the lax notions and easy habits of a new colony. They encountered serious embarrassment and opposition, and probably never gave so much gratification to the governor and to the major part of his subjects, as when they severally reëmbarked for England. Meanwhile, Whitefield had commenced drawing multitudes to listen to him in Bristol and London. His life-long and unbounded popularity is a mystery, which has never been fully solved. His printed sermons are meager, vapid, and many degrees below mediocrity. His endowments as a pulpit-orator were indeed great, but by no means unique. Yet he could command at once the reverence of the loftiest, and the control of the humblest minds; the hearty admiration of brilliant and accomplished scoffers and infidels, and the rapt attention of the coarsest and most ignorant. We have repeatedly conversed with old people who had heard him preach in their youth; and their uniform testimony has been, that his sermons and their delivery had no one remarkable characteristic exclusively their own, and yet that no eloquence could equal his in its simultaneous influence over persons of every age, condition, and culture. We are disposed to ascribe his power, first, to his intense and vivid realization of the truths of religion as ever-present elements of his own experience, and, secondly, to the fact that in every sermon he arraigned his hearers before the tribunal of the omniscient Judge, and dwelt solely on the relation in which they stood to God, as guilty, accountable, death-bound, and immortal beings. His active religious consciousness imparted that indescribable glow of countenance and manner, which wrought even upon the deaf, and those beyond the sound of his voice, with hardly less power than upon those within reach of his words; while his uniform habit of direct appeal to his hearers, as resting either beneath the condemning sentence or the complacent regard of the Almighty, forced home upon every soul the question which no human being can ever put to himself without the concentration of his whole moral nature upon the answer: "How stand I at this moment in the eye of the omnipresent God?" catechumens. The society embraced at the outset only between forty and fifty persons; but its constitution involved the very same principles which are now embodied in the great Methodist hierarchy on both sides of the Atlantic. The class is the integral element, the paradigm of Methodism. The classes are the integers of the congregation, the congregations of the local conference, the local conferences of the general conference; and at every stage the typical form is repeated, the official heads or representatives of each lower class constituting the members or laity of the next higher. Our limits will not permit us to follow Wesley through the details of a period of active service seldom equaled in duration, and entirely unparalleled in extent, in laboriousness, and in vigor of body and mind unimpaired, till he had completed the full cycle of fourscore years. Second, and hardly second, to John, stands Charles Wesley, in the annals of Methodism. Among rude and unlettered people, the soul is reached mainly by impressions upon the organs of sense, and in no way so effectually as through music. Every popular movement in social reform, political regeneration, or religious revival, has had its own canon of poetical inspiration and its own peculiar type of lyrical melody. Hans Sachs merits a foremost place among the Reformers of the sixteenth century; and Popery might have still been the Paganism of many a village and hamlet in now Protestant Germany, had not the minstrel cordwainer flooded the land with anti-Romish songs and ballads. Among the English poets of the sanctuary, it is almost a mockery to name Tate and Brady; for in the days of the Wesleys, the singing of their psalms merely filled up the robechanging interval in the service of the Church, while all the musical power and the religious impression of the orchestra were concentrated in those majestic chants and anthems, the introduction of which into the worship of Dissenters has transferred new life into their too tame and barren devotional forms. Watts and Doddridge were unsurpassed in their peculiar vein; but their hymns were best adapted to the quiescent condition of the religious communities to which they belonged. They represented the statics of Whitefield had just left London when John Wesley arrived there on his return from Georgia. Whitefield had no administrative talent, and was effective solely as an awakening preacher. Wesley was a methodist by nature, had a genius for system, and attached little value to sporadic and unorganized effort. He at once gathered the new converts into bands or classes, with rules for mutual vigilance and helpfulness in the spiritual life, and with definite forms for the introduction, training, testing, and final reception of piety. Methodism demanded a psalmody which should embody its dynamic forces. This desideratum Charles Wesley supplied. With a rhythmical ear, a clarified taste, and a tender sympathy with every phasis and transition of spiritual experience, an emotional nature always profoundly moved, an intimate conversance with the Scriptures, and a lyrico-dramatic | power of elaborating all their materials, whether of history, doctrine, precept, or prophecy, he became the life and soul of the new movement. In their metrical form, in their musical cadence and mellifluous flow, his hymns occupy the first place, and an almost solitary eminence in the English language. They can hardly be read unmusically, and almost sing themselves. Then, too, it has been well said of them, that they are not written on abstract subjects, such as faith, humility, resignation, but always represent the religious life in some one of its concrete states or movements, so that each might be assumed as a leaf of autobiography. But we can do them more ample justice by the following paragraphs from Mr. Taylor : "Ought not then the disposing hand of God to be acknowledged in this instance, remarkable as it is, that, when myriads of uncultured and lately ferocious spirits were to be reclaimed, a gift of song, such as that of Charles Wesley, should have been conferred upon one of the company employed in this work? To estimate duly what was the influence of this rare gift, and to measure its importance, one should be able to recall scenes and times gone by, when Methodism was much nearer to its source than now it is, and when Hymn 147, page 145,' announced by the preacher in a tone curiously blending the perfunctory with the animated, O love divine, how sweet thou art!' woke up all ears, eyes, hearts, and voices, in a crowded chapel. It was, indeed, a spectacle worth the gazing upon! It was a service well to have joined in (once and again) when words of such power, flowing in rich cadence, and conveying, with an intensity of emphasis, the loftiest, the deepest, and the most tender emotions of the divine life, were taken up feelingly by an assembly of men and women, to whom, very lately, whatever was not of the earthearthy' had neither charm nor meaning. it, that had an eye to read the heart in the beaming countenances around him? Thus it was that Charles Wesley, richly gifted as he was with graces, genius and talents, drew souls thousands of souls-in his wake, from Sunday to Sunday, and he so drew them onward from earth to heaven by the charm of sacred verse! "It may be affirmed that there is no principal element of Christianity, no main article of belief, as professed by Protestant Churchesthat there is no moral or ethical sentiment, height or depth of feeling, proper to the spiritpeculiarly characteristic of the gospel-no ual life, that does not find itself emphatically, and pointedly, and clearly conveyed in some stanza of Charles Wesley's hymns. These compositions embody the theory, and the prac tice, and the theopathy of the Christian system; and they do so with extremely little admixture of what ought to be regarded as questionable, or that is not warranted by some evidence of Scripture. What we have here be fore us is a metrical liturgy; and by the combination of rhythm, rhyme, and music, it effectively secures to the mass of worshipers much of the benefit of liturgical worship. Such a liturgy, thus performed by animated congregations, melted itself into the very soul of the people, and was perhaps that part of the hour's service which, more than any other, produced what, to borrow a phrase, we might call digestive assimilation. It would secure this, its beneficial effect, in molding the spirits of style, and by aid of the pleasurable excitements the people, by its iteration, by its emphatic of music." THE MOUNTAINS OF PALESTINE. PALEST ALESTINE surprises one unfamiliar with its features by its hilliness. Two ranges of mountains run through it from north to south, some of them exceedingly difficult of ascent, and frightful from their frequent precipices, but passed by the strongly-shod Syrian horse in perfect safety. These lofty and bold heights leave a grand impression. Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon tower sometimes eleven thousand feet above the sea, and wear their snow-caps, in spots, nearly all the year. Hermon is now termed the Sheikh's Mountain, and rises above the rest of the Lebanon range, reminding some travelers of Mont Blanc, but not seen so advantageously upon its own elevated plain. Tabor is a model of beauty; a truncated cone, with some ruins of crusaders' fortifications, and shrines of various ages, well wooded, and seemingly fertile; dividing the waters of the east from those that empty into the Mediterranean, it never fails to fill the traveler's eye. It is one thousand feet above the level of the country.-Christian "Rugged forms were those that filled the benches on the one hand; nor were they the fairest in the world that were ranged on the other; but there was soul in the erect posture when the congregation rose to sing, as well as in the glistening eye; and it was a cordial animation that gave compass to the voices of these, the ransomed of Methodism. Perhaps it was a little more than a particle of meaning that some gathered from the hymn. But to the hearts of many, its deepest sense-the poet's own sense of the words-was quite intelligible, and was intimately relished. Who could doubt. Examiner. WASHINGTON. FACTS RESPECTING HIS RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. A VOLUME has been published respecting the religious sentiments and character of Washington. A writer, in a late article in the Boston Christian Witness, reviews the subject briefly, giving, besides some well-known facts, further and very interesting evidence of the piety of that greatest of modern men. The writer says: "Numerous extracts illustrating this subject are brought together in Washington's Writings, vol. xii, pp. 401-485. See also in the same volume (p. 408) an interesting letter from Bishop White to the Rev. B. C. C. Parker, on the same subject. The House of Burgesses, of which he was a member, passed an order, May 24th, 1774, in reference to the act of Parliament for shutting up the port of Boston, that 'the first day of June should be set apart as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, devoutly to implore the divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatened destruction to their civil rights, and the evils of civil war. On the day appointed, he writes in his diary: Went to church, and fasted all day,' thus conforming not only in spirit, but to the strict letter of the order. This diary was kept for many years with much particularity. A Sunday rarely occurs in which he did not attend church. If there was an omission, it was caused by the weather, or badness of the roads; the nearest church being seven miles from his residence. While attending Congress, he adhered to the same practice. For a full knowledge of his religious opinions and habits during the Revolution and afterward, and of the importance he attached to the principles and observances of religion, the reader is referred to his published writings. After an attentive perusal of them, no doubt can be left in any candid mind. To say that he was not a Christian, or at least that he did not believe himself to be a Christian, would be to impeach his sincerity and honesty. Of all men in the world, Washington was certainly the last whom any one would charge with dissimulation or indirectness; and, if he was so scrupulous in avoiding even a shadow of these faults in every known act of his life, however unimportant, is it likely, is it credible, that in a matter of the highest and most serious importance he should practice, through a long series of years, a deliberate deception upon his friends and the public? It is neither credible nor possible. I shall here insert a letter on this subject, written to me by a lady who lived twenty years in Washington's family, and who was his adopted daughter, and the grand-daughter of Mrs. Washington. The testimony it affords, and the hints it contains respecting the domestic habits of Washington, are interesting and valuable :— "WOODLAWN, February 26, 1833. last evening, and hasten to give you the in"'SIR, I received your favor of the 20th formation which you desire. Truro Parish is the one in which Mount Vernon Pohick Church and Woodlawn are situated. Fairfax Parish is now Alexandria. Before the Federal District was ceded to Congress, Alexandria was in Fairfax County. General Washington had a pew in Pohick Church, and one in Christ Church at Alexandria. He was very instrumental in scribed largely. His pew was near the pulpit. establishing Pohick Church, and I believe subI have a perfect recollection of being there, before his election to the presidency, with him a beautiful and my grandmother. It was church, and had a large, respectable, and wealthy congregation, who were regular attendants. He attended the church at Alexandria when the weather and roads permitted, a distance of ten miles. In New-York and Philadelphia he never omitted attendance at church in the morning, unless detained by indisposition. The afternoon was spent in his own room at home; the evening with his family, and without company. Sometimes an old and intimate friend called to see us for an hour or two; but visiting and visitors were prohibited for that day. No one in church attended to the services with more reverential respect. My grandmother, who was eminently pious, never deviated from her early habits. She always knelt. The General, as was then the custom, stood during the devotional parts of the service. On communion Sundays, he left the church with me, after the blessing, and returned home. He sent the carriage back for my grandmother. It was his custom to retire to his library at nine or ten o'clock, where he remained an hour before he went to his cham ber. He always rose before the sun, and remained in his library until called to breakfast. I never witnessed his private devotions. I never inquired about them. His life, his writings, prove that he was a Christian. My mother resided two years at Mount Vernon after her marriage with John P. Custis, the only son of Mrs. Washington. I have heard her say that General Washington always received the sacrament with my grandmother before the Revolution. When my aunt, Miss Custis, died suddenly at Mount Vernon, before they could realize the event, he knelt by her, and prayed most fervently, most affectingly, for her recovery. Of this I was assured by Judge Washington's mother, and other wit nesses. He was a silent, thoughtful man. He spoke little generally-never of himself. Grandmother was a model of female excellence. She never omitted her private devotions or her public duties; and she and her husband were so perfectly united and happy, that he must have been a Christian. She had no doubts, no fears for him. After forty years of devoted affection and uninterrupted happiness, she resigned him without a murmur into the arms of his Saviour and his God, with the assured hope of his eternal felicity. With sentiments of esteem, I am, &c.' ble. Witt Clinton, and related in the words of the Rev. Samuel H. Cox, who communicated it to the author, establishes this fact. I have the following, says Dr. Cox, from unquestionable authority. It has never, I think, been given to the public; but I received it from a venerable clergyman, who had it from the lips of Rev. Dr. Jones himself. To all Christians, and to all Americans, it cannot fail to be acceptaWhile the American army, under the command of Washington, lay encamped at Morristown, N. J., it occurred that the service of the communion (then observed semi-annually only) was to be administered in the Presbyterian church of that village. In the morning of the previous week, the General, after his accustomed inspection of the camp, visited the house of Dr. Jones, then pastor of the church, and, after the usual preliminaries, thus accosted him: Doctor, I understand that the Lord's Supper is to be celebrated with you next Sunday; I would learn if to admit communicants of another denomination?' The Doctor rejoined: Most certainly; ours is not the Presbyterian table, General, but the Lord's table; and we hence give the Lord's invitation to all his followers, of whatsoever name.' The General replied, 'I am glad of it; I thought I would ascertain it from yourself, as I propose to join with you on that occasion. Though a member of the Church of England, I have no exclusive partialities.' The Doctor reassured him of a cordial welcome, and the General was found seated with the communicants the next Sabbath." "It seems proper to subjoin to this letter what was told to me by Mr. Robert Lewis, at Fredericksburg, in the year 1829. Being a nephew of Washington, and his private secretary during the first part of his presidency, Mr. Lewis lived with him on terms of intimacy, and had the best opportunity of observing his habits. Mr. Lewis said he had accidentally witnessed his private devotions in his library, both morning and evening; that on those occasions he had seen him in a kneeling posture with a Bible open before him, and that he believed such to have been his daily prac-it accords with the canon of your Church tice. Mr. Lewis is since dead, but he was a gentleman esteemed for his private worth and respectability. The circumstance of his withdrawing himself from the communion service, at a certain period of his life, has been remarked as singular. Whatever his motives may have been, it does not appear that they were ever explained. It is probable that, after he took command of the army, finding his thoughts and attention necessarily engrossed by the business that devolved on him, in which frequently little distinction could be observed between Sunday and other days, he may have believed it improper publicly to partake of an ordinance which, according to the ideas he entertained of it, imposed severe restrictions on outward conduct, and a sacred pledge to perform duties impracticable in his situation. Such an impression would be natural to a serious mind; and, although it might be founded on erroneous views of the nature of the ordinance, it would not have the less weight with a man of delicate conscience and habitual reverence for religion. There is proof, however, that, on one occasion at least, during the war, he partook of the communion; but this was at a season when the army was in camp, and the activity of business was in some degree suspended. An anecdote contained in Dr. Hosack's Life of De HOME.-Love watches over the cradle of the infant, over the couch of the aged, over the welfare and comfort of each and all; to be happy, man retires from the outdoor world home. In the household circle, the troubled heart finds consolation, the disturbed finds rest, the joyous finds itself in its true element. Pious souls, when they speak of death, say that they go home. Their longing for heaven is to them a home-sickness. Jesus also represented the abode of eternal happiness under the picture of a home, a father's house. Does not this tell us that the earthly home is appointed to be a picture of heaven, and a foretaste of that higher home? |