The third season, "Calling for more than ordinary diligence in keeping the heart, is the time of Zion's troubles-when the church, like the ship in which Christ and his disciples were, is oppressed and ready to perish in the wars of persecution, these good souls are ready to sink and be shipwrecked too, on the billows of their own fears. I confess most men rather need the spur than the reins in this case, and yet some sit down overweighed with the sense of the church's troubles." He adduces, as historical examples of persons so influenced, those of Eli, Nehemiah, and Elijah,-all which he touches with very forcible language, and then comes to the question, "how tender hearts may be relieved and supported when they are overweighed with the burthensome sense of Zion's troubles?" And gives, for his first precept, "Settle this great truth in your hearts, that no trouble befalls Zion, but by the permission of Zion's God; and he permits nothing out of which he will not bring much good at last to his people." And, to such as those who would presume to direct in what manner the affairs of the world should best be ordered, he addresses this wholesome admonition : "As Luther said to Melancthon, 'cease to be the ruler of the world,' so say I to you. Let infinite wisdom, power, and love, alone; for by these all creatures are swayed and actions guided, in reference to the church. It is none of our work to rule the world, but to submit to him that does rule it. The motions of Providence are all well or dered; the wheels are full of eyes. It is enough that the affairs of Zion are in a good hand." The fourth season of danger : The first "Now there are fourteen excellent rules or helps for keeping the heart from sinful fear, when imminent dangers threaten us. is, Look upon all creatures as in the hand of God, who manages them in all their motions, limiting, restraining, and determining them all at his pleasure.' "In Revelations, you read of the white, black, and red horses, which are nothing else but the instruments that God employs in executing his judgements in the world, as wars, pestilence, and death. But when these horses are prancing, and trampling up and down in the world, here is that which may quiet our hearts-that God has the reins in his hand."—" Remember that God, in whose hand all the creatures are, is your Father, and is much more tender over you, than you are, or can be, over yourselves. Let me ask the most timorous woman, whether there is not a vast difference between the sight of a drawn sword in the hand of a bloody ruffian, and the same sword in the hand of her own tender husband?"-" That is a sweet scripture to this purpose. [Isa. liv. 5.] "Thy maker is thy husband, the Lord of Hosts is his name." Who would be afraid to pass through an army, though all the soldiers should turn their swords and guns towards him, if the general of that army were his friend or father? I have met with an excellent story of a religious young man, who being at sea with many other passengers in a great storm, and they being half dead with fear, he only was observed to be very cheerful, as if he had been but little concerned in that danger. One of them demanding the reason of his cheerfulness, " O," said he, "it is because the pilot of the ship is my Father." "Natural fear may be allayed for the present by natural reason, or the removal of the occasion, but then it is but like a candle blown out with a puff of breath, which is easily blown in again; but if the fear of God extinguish it, then it is like a candle quenched in water, which cannot easily be rekindled." "A violent death, you say, is terrible to nature! But what matter is it, when thy soul is in heaven, whether it were let out at thy mouth, or at thy throat?-whether thy familiar friends, or barbarous enemies, stand about thy dead body and close thine eyes? alas! it is not worth the making so much to do about. Thy soul shall not be sensible in heaven how thy body is used on earth; no, it shall be swallowed up in life." We cannot afford space for much more quotation, and have already produced enough to serve as specimens of the style-sometimes (at least according to present apprehension) too low and familiar, but often eloquent, and always earnest and impressive, of this author; whose faults and merits are, in a greater or less degree, common to him with the best theological and ethical writers of the age in which he wrote, with Taylor, Barrow, and Milton; who certainly evinces a deep and thorough acquaintance with the mysterious subject he treats of (the human heart) with all its contradictions and subtleties; whose reasons and arguments have all the force of actual experiences; whose devotion is warm from the heart to which it appeals; and who, in the frequency of allusion and metaphor with which he abounds, cannot be charged in a single instance with adopting, from a vain love of ornament, the figures of speech which rise spontaneously to his service. We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of extracting a few more passages, without further reference to the order of their subjects, and with them we shall close the present article. Speaking of "the season of want," he says: "This affliction, though great, is not such an affliction but God has far greater, with which he chastises the dearly beloved of his soul in this world and should he remove this, and inflict those, you would account your present state a very comfortable state, and bless God to be as now you are. What think ye? Should God remove your present troubles, supply all your outward wants, give you the desire of your hearts in creative comforts, but hide his face from you, shoot his arrows into your souls, and cause the venom of them to drink up your spirits; should he leave you but a few days to the buffeting of Satan, and his blasphemous injections; should he hold your eyes but a few nights waking with horrors of conscience, tossing to and fro till the dawning of the day; should he lead you through the chambers of death, show you the visions of darkness, and make his terrors set themselves in array against you then tell men if you would not count it a choice mercy to be back again in your former necessitous condition, with peace of conscience; and count bread and water, with God's favour, a happy state? O then take heed of repining. Say not God deals hardly with you, but you provoke him to convince you, by your own sense and feeling, that he has worse rods than these for unsubmissive and froward children." In a season of duty "Beg of God a chastised imagination. A working fancy, how much soever it is extolled among men, is a great snare to the soul, except it work in fellowship with right reason and a sanctified heart. The imagination is a power of the soul placed between the senses and the understanding. It is that which first stirs itself in the soul, and by its motions the other powers are stirred. It is the common shop, where thoughts are first forged and framed; and as this is, so are they: if imaginations be not first cast down, it is impossible that every thought of the heart should be brought into obedience to Christ. The fancy is naturally the wildest and most untameable power in the soul. And truly, the more spiritual the heart is, the more it is troubled about the vanity and wildness of it. O what a sad thing is it, that thy nobler soul must follow up and down after a vain and roving fancy! that such a beggar should ride on horseback, and such a prince run after on foot! that it should call off the soul from attendance upon God, when it is most sweetly engaged in communion with him, to prosecute such vanities as it will start at such times before it!""A man who is praying, says Bernard, should behave himself as if he were entering into the court of heaven, where he sees the Lord on his throne, surrounded with ten thousand of his angels and saints ministering unto him."- "If thou wert petitioning the king for thy life, would it not provoke him to see thee playing with thy bandstrings, or catching at every fly that lights upon thy clothes, whilst thou art speaking to him about such serious matters? Why did God descend in thunderings and lightnings, and dark clouds, upon Sinai? Why did the mountains smoke under him; the people quake and tremble round about him; yea, Moses himself not exempted-but to teach the people this great truth, "Let us have grace, whereby we may serve him acceptably, with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire!" "The tenth special season, to keep the heart with all diligence, is the time of spiritual darkness and doubting, when it is with the soul as it was with Paul in his dangerous voyage-neither sun, nor moon, nor star, appearing for many days; when, by reason of the hidings of God's face, the prevalency of corruption, and the inevidence of grace, the soul is even ready to give up all its hopes and comforts for lost, to draw sad and desperate conclusions against itself, to call its former comforts vain delusions, its grace, hypocrisy ; when the serene and clear heavens are overcast with dark clouds, yea, filled with thunders and horrible tempests; when the poor pensive soul sits down and weeps forth this sad lamentation, My hope is perished from the Lord."-" Do you rashly infer, that the Lord has no love for you, because he hides his face from you? that your condition is miserable, because dark and uncomfortable?-Do you not know, that the sun still keeps on his course in the heavens, even in dull and close weather, where you cannot see him? May I not as well conclude in winter, when the flowers have hid their beautiful heads under ground, that they are quite dead and gone, because I cannot find them in December where I saw them in May?" In a season of sickness "Rouse up, dying saint! When thy soul is come out a little farther, when it shall stand like Abraham at its tent-door, the angels of God shall soon be with it. The souls of the elect are, as it were, put out to the angels to nurse, and, when they die, their angels carry them home again to their Father's house. If an angel were caused to fly swiftly to bring a saint the answer of his prayer [Dan. ix. 22.], how much more will the angels come in haste from heaven, to receive and transfer the praying soul itself!" It has, sometimes, occurred to us, in our perusal of this little treatise, that Quarles, the author of Divine Emblems, was not unacquainted with the works of Flavel. Many of the figurative illustrations, which we find scattered through them, seem expressly to invite the aid of those precious little wood-cuts, which instructed the infancy of our grandfathers and grandmothers; in which "the naked winged soul" is represented under the image of childhood, undergoing its various dispensations on earth. And, when we are beautifully taught that, whatever our sin or trouble is," (in a season of spiritual darkness, already referred to,) it should rather drive us to God, than from God," how does it remind us of those exquisitely tender and affecting lines of the poet, 66 66 "The ingenuous child, corrected, doth not fly ART. IV.—The Annals of Newgate; or, Malefactor's Register. Containing a particular and circumstantial Account of the Lives, Transactions, and Trials of the most notorious Malefac tors, who have suffered an ignominious Death for their Offences, "Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, London, 1776. Pope. In an article in a late number upon John Everett, a gentleman who kept the Cock alehouse, in the Old Bailey; and from the Cock took to the tap in the Fleet, and from the tap took (no unusual consequence) to Tyburn;-we were led to remark, that “The glory of the class of men to whom he belonged is departed. The heroes of Hounslow Heath and Wimbledon Common no longer take the air; the very memory of their exploits is fast fading, or only recorded in the Newgate Calendar." On reperusing this passage, we have been touched with its pathos; and the same feeling that made uncle Toby grieve that the devil was damned, has inspired us with, perhaps, the questionable regret, that glory of any kind should utterly go, or that the memories of those who have resolutely died for the good of their country, should be in danger of poor pitiful extinction. The consequence of this, our regret, has been, that we have lapsed into an exciting course of reading; first, sipping at police reports; then, tippling at the huge tap of the State Trials; and fairly coming, at last, to dramming ourselves with the Newgate Calendar and Remarkable Trials, to the deep forgetfulness of all" honest men and true." Reading the Newgate Calendar is perhaps the opium-eating of books; but as it is well known, that such habit of reading or eating is more easily fallen into than discontinued, and as it is also pleasure to a sufferer to talk of his infirmities, we cannot refuse ourselves the melancholy satisfaction of telling over our whole course of reading, as much in the hope of rescuing |