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His name was Corbett. He had been a curate six and forty years. He sought not to be any thing else. The religion he professed had taught him, 'having food and raiment, to be therewith content,' and the same influence extending to his habits, had enabled him by temperance and prudence, to obtain all he thought necessary in life... ..He never read prayers; he prayed-and with such deep and fervent feeling, with emphasis so obviously suggested, not by the art, but by the nature of supplication; with pauses so strongly marked by solemnity of recollection, and a suspension of the act, without a suspension of the feeling, that his congregation almost unconsciously joined in the responses which were originally intended for their utterance, and felt the force of habit and of indolence yield to the holy energy with which he poured out his petitions. I never heard man preach as he did. He was a scholar to whom few I have ever met were superior. He was a man delighting in conversation, in which, if light, he would amuse, and if argumentative, he could instruct, more than any other man I ever listened to. But in the pulpit, he laid aside the wisdom of words, and the weapons of fleshly warfare altogether. That he was a scholar you felt not; that he was a man of rich imagination, or of strong reasoning powers; you felt not that he or his discourse could be referred to any class of mind or composition that could assist you to judge of them in a temporal sense. But you felt irresistibly that he was a believer, pleading with the power of cone viction; that he was a religionist, speaking from experience, commending a life he lived, and a felicity he felt; that he spoke and acted on principles which, though beyond the range of existence, were not beyond the range of reality; principles which he made present and vivid and substantial, alike by the force of eloquence and the force of example. He was a speaker who, of all others I ever heard, succeeded most in averting your attention from himself to his subject. It was long after his sermon had concluded that you could think of the preacher-like the priest in the Jewish hierarchy, he disappeared in the cloud of incense himself sent up........Though his positions were strong and important, they were clothed in a language whose peculiar and providential felicity is, that it is the universal language, the first language that religion talks to the ear of infancy, the language that genius reverences, and ignorance understands, the language of the poet and of the saint, the language of divinity and of the heart, the language of the Scriptures. He spoke as a father pleading with a wayward child; he spoke as a judge with a criminal, to confess and be forgiven; as a guide with a wanderer, to return and to rest. When he finished his sermon, it was not with Cowper's wellbred whisper. He appeared for some time engaged in prayer........ When he came down and walked among us, though the thunder of his eloquence was hushed, his countenance spoke still. He had descended from the mount, but his visage retained the brightness of that high place. If I write of this man, I shall write volumes."

In the volume before us, there is so much of what is excellent, as to give us additional cause for lamenting that the fine faculties of its Author should be degraded to any labour inferior to VOL. XIV. N.S.

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the high pursuits of his profession. As a whole, these sermons are written in a purer taste than any other of his productions; and they contain passages of great richness, beauty, and vigour. As a theologian, indeed, Mr. Maturin has much to acquire. His views seem to be sufficiently clear and correct as far as they extend, but their range is limited; they fall short of that ampler sphere where the mind taught from above, and deeply imbued with the glory and blessedness of Divine truth, delights to expatiate. Mr. M. is strangely fearful of committing himself: he frequently exhibits the doctrines of the Gospel with fidelity and feeling, but he seems restlessly anxious to satisfy his hearers that he is guiltless of Puritanism.' He occasionally indulges himself in a dignified sneer at enthusiasm, and ventures on a little commonplace slang about the lungs of the preachers of the conventicle.' All this is excessively weak: a good cause rejects it, and it will utterly fail of assisting a bad one. Among the Puritans of the conventicle, there are not a few who are somewhat more than a match for Mr. M. in the fair field of polemics. But we suspect that he is fully aware of this, and that he well knows what weapons are best suited to the infirmity of his cause, and to the measure of his own controversial skill. We can scarcely recollect elsewhere a piece of argument so signal in debility as the sermon professing to offer reasons for preferring the communion of the Church of England.' It opens in a very interesting manner.

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The strongest characteristic of man is his mutability-it is marked in every action of life, whether public or domestic it affects him in every pursuit, whether of business or of pleasure; all that he does has the love of change inscribed on it; it is the only epitaph that all his buried pursuits, and all their buried pursuers may bear, from him who exchanged Paradise for a desert world, to the babe of yesterday who weeps for a toy, and the moment he has obtained, resigns it for another. In pleasure, the taste for variety is but too natural, for the very effect of pleasure is to satiate, and nothing but novelty can stimulate the palled appetite, whose artificial orgasm, wearied with indulgence, demands excitement; but our rage for variety extends to other objects to every object to all that occupies-to all that interests. The beggar feels it when he wanders from hovel to hovel, as much as the conqueror when he traverses from region to region; yet both find only weariness in the change, for both find only a repetition of circumstances without a renewal of excitement from them. Singular contrast between internal restlessness and external uniformity! The fire burns within us, but life refuses fresh fuel. This passion, so universally acknowledged and felt, would be comparatively harmless, if we indulged it only in our pleasures; but it becomes perilous and mischievous in the extreme, when we permit it to extend its range, and operate on the institutions of society and the forms of government. It is still worse when we suffer it to rage among

the principles of religion, and try its insane strength against the powers of the world to come.'

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But what bearing have these observations, in the general accuracy of which every body will acquiesce, on the main ques tion? Why, says Mr. Maturin, the rage for novelty alone has filled a hundred conventicles!' This is a pure gratis dictum, and is just as fairly urged by the Romanists against the English Hierarchy, as by the latter against the Dissenters. He then proceeds to propose two short tests:'-' If any religion is exclusive, that religion must be unscriptural? and The religion that is opposite to intellectual cultivation, must be false.' To the first of these points, let Mr. Maturin himself look: it is neither more nor less than the foundationstone of all establishments. To the second it is enough to reply, that the great body of English Dissenters utterly reject the imputation. After a most illiberally expressed regret that nonconformists have been entrusted with what he is pleased to term power,' he proceeds, under an empty disclaimer of 'profes'sional pedantry,' to laud and magnify the venerable fabric' and admirable constitution' of the Established Church. He starts at score.

The great obvious advantage that the Church of England possesses is, that she has in her homilies, her liturgy, and her articles, a standard that can neither be removed nor shaken, an unalterable test of the soundness of her doctrines. This is an advantage inestimable! If her children wander, to this they can be recalled-if they murmur against her, by this let her be tried, and she shall be justified. Is this an advantage to be claimed by the rambling followers of an unorganized meeting, where the creed of the day depends on the preacher, where contradiction, error, and absurdity, may succeed each other without detection or rebuke, because they have no standard for their opinions. The Scriptures they have, doubtless-but of the Scripture every stubborn fanatic will deem himself as good a judge, and as sound an interpreter, as his brother or his pastor; ay, and his confidence and obstinacy will be in the direct proportion of his ignorance. Such is the invaluable distinction of having a standard for doctrines and opinions.'

We defy Mr. Maturin himself to read this passage deliberately, without a feeling of shame that such a wretched scrap of self-contradictory absurdity should be on record against him. The Homilies and Articles a criterion of opinion, and the Scriptures either no standard at all, or an unsafe and uncertain one! But to what must the Articles themselves be referred for trial, but to the Scriptures? Is Mr. M. prepared, then, to affirm, that a secondary can supersede a primary authority? But he seems to think that the doctrinal documents of his Church are more intelligible and less evasible than the declarations and definitions of the inspired writings. We will not

answer this but by a plain appeal to fact. Is Bishop Marsh, with his new set of articles, to expound the system of the Church or are we to give our credence to the respectable men who stigmatize his measures as enormous impositions? Which side does Mr. Maturin take in the Regeneration controversy ? Did he never happen to hear of a Calvinistic liturgy and an Arminian clergy? We might ask him a bundred such questions, but we have neither space nor leisure to waste in refuting a mere array of pompous words and empty pretensions. Of the Liturgy, he observes with matchless simplicity, that its opponents complain that it must want the force, fervency, and apparent 'sincerity of extempore prayer; I admit that it must, and 'perhaps so much the better'!! Mr. Maturin expresses himself more accurately than he would have his readers think, when he speaks of having given his feeble testimony' to the praise and glory of his Church. But we will not part thus with him: we have spoken highly of his ability in a former page, and we give the following extract as a justification of our eulogy.

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Here, my brethren, let me pause, and direct your attention for a moment to the characters of those extraordinary men, the Jewish prophets. Their history, told simply as it is by themselves, appears to me enough to convert infidelity. They seem solely to have lived to God, to have passed through mortal existence in a sacred abstraction from its seductions, its infirmities, and its passions. When we read of Elijah defying the rage of the king and the madness of the people, and trusting himself fearlessly to the desert and to famine, for the sake of God and of his truth;-of Isaiah, the uncle of a monarch, disregarding the splendour and power of a court, and bearing awful and single testimony against its depravity and danger;-of Jeremiah, who, whether brought before the presence of his king, and beholding his countenance in complacency, or plunged by his wrath into a dungeon,...... alike in palace and in dungeon testifying the truth of God, and calling on the infatuated people (while his voice could yet be heard) to witness the fulfilment of that truth;-of Daniel, who even in the court of the king of Babylon dared to announce to him the destruction of his kingdom; and braved the anger that might have crushed the " prophet of ills" to dust before his unwelcome message was said: while we read of such men and such things, we are struck with the sublime and unearthly superiority of those beings, not only to their cotemporaries, but to all mankind.—I know that history abounds in instances of self-denial as severe, and of voluntary suffering as terrible, but what those who form the heroes of historic narrative underwent, was for themselves, their own pride— passions-interest-self in some way is apparent through all their heroism. But what these men did and suffered, they did and suffered for God; 66 they endured as seeing him who is invisible." Their superiority was owing to no external cause; they were slaves, prisoners, victims," destitute, afflicted, tormented:" their superiority was owing to that communication with God, and with the powers of the invisible

world, which makes the present, with all its seductive and dangerous ncarness, all its tangible claims, appear in comparison as the drop of the bucket, or the dust of the balance--a thing to be glanced at, weighed, found wanting, and disregarded. Their history leaves on the mind this indelible impression: "If these men were not of God they could do nothing"-they could not at least have been the men they were.'

There are not a few passages, perhaps, superior to this; we had also marked a few instances of bad taste, of which we shall only mention the irreverent and offensive vulgarism God 'knows.'

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As this article was about to be forwarded to the press, we met, half-accidentally, with a new tale,' in four volumes, by the Author of the Sermons to which we have just adverted in terms of eulogy. With our views and feelings, we cannot have much disposition to employ ourselves in this kind of reading: to say nothing of eternity, we have lived long enough to learn that the realities of life have in them an absorbing interest, compared with which the exaggerations of romance are tame. But in the present instance, the curiosity, mixed with something of a higher feeling, excited by the Writer's name, and the strange contrast between the subjects of the volume we had but a few hours previously been reviewing, and the baser matter on which Mr. Maturin has employed his noble faculties, have so far tempted us out of our usual course, as not only to carry us, somewhat hastily we confess, through the wild fictions of "Melmoth the Wanderer," but to induce us to give some intimation of their nature and contents, as an appendix, not without its meaning and its moral, to the original article.

We are not quite sure that we have an accurate notion of the precise character of the hero of this strongly conceived, and powerfully (though unequally) written romance. As we understand it, however, he is a man of wild and desperate curiosity, who, having sought initiation into the fearful secrets of the invisible world, has been induced to avail himself of infernal agency, and to form a dreadful compact with the prince of darkness. The terms of this covenant with hell, may be stated by Melmoth himself.

I obtained from the enemy of souls a range of existence beyond the period allotted to mortality-a power to pass over space without disturbance or delay, and visit remote regions with the swiftness of thought to encounter tempests without the hope of their blasting me, and penetrate into dungeons, whose bolts were as flax and tow at my touch. It has been said that this power was accorded to me, that I might be enabled to tempt wretches in their fearful hour of extremity,

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