Many were attracted to Rowland Hill's ministry by his eccentricities. To many of the present generation, who know him only as belonging to the past, the bare mention of his name is suggestive of a pulpit joke. Many are the singular stories concerning him which have found their way into the jest books and newspapers, some of them gross exaggerations of facts, and others having no foundation whatever in truth. In his latter days, when the mellowness of advancing years had somewhat chastened his native humor, Mr. Hill was very much annoyed by these spurious anecdotes. One in particular gave him extreme pain, since it represented him as wanting in proper respect for his wife, by administering to her a public reproof on occasion of her appearing in Surrey Chapel with a new bonnet. When he saw this story in print he was greatly grieved. "Sir," said he to a friend, "I hope that the Christian minister, if not the gentleman, always prevented me from making my wife a laughing-stock for the amusement of the vulgar." Doubtless many of the facetious stories of eminent men which serve to fill the columns of magazines and newspapers have as little basis in truth as this. But if men will be odd, as well as eminent, they must not wonder if some unscrupulous story-maker should use their names to give point and interest to his false narratives.

Rowland Hill never affected eccentricity as many do, seeking to cater to a vitiated taste, and making the house of God a place for Sunday amusements. Whatever oddities he had were natural. We do not make this a plea for justifying all his whimsicalities, since it is not always safe or right to indulge our natural propensities: they should rather be chastened and subdued. We simply state the fact. He was cheerful and witty from a boy, and always had a taste for the ludicrous. One who knew him intimately asserts, "Had not God changed his heart, he would probably have made one of the first comedians of his day." This natural proclivity to mirthfulness was indulged rather than restrained. It is not improbable that his intercourse and intimacy with Berridge exercised an unconscious influence over him in this respect. Berridge was himself noted for oddity, and Hill became acquainted with him at a time when his own habits were forming, and when, perhaps, a friend and adviser of another stamp would have led him to modify and

temper his mirthful propensity instead of indulging it. But the two were drawn together by a common feeling of zeal and earnestness in the cause of God, and this gave Berridge a strong influence over the young student. Hill, however, would undoubtedly have been odd had he never seen the eccentric old vicar of Everton; and the blessing which the good old man was made to the persecuted student more than counterbalanced any additional singularities of which his example may have been the innocent cause.

Mr. Hill's eccentricities were in manner only, and not in matter. He made no effort to dazzle his hearers with brilliant theories, and had no desire to mystify them with metaphysical speculations. He never cared to wander comet-like from the great central sun of truth into the dark and unknown regions of error, but steadily kept in his orbit, pursuing faithfully the path of duty from year to year. He was conscientious also, as well as natural, in the means he used to attract and interest the people. He wished to arrest the attention of the lower orders, who he felt were too much neglected by the clergy of his time. That in endeavoring to accomplish this desirable result he sometimes overstepped the bounds of propriety, and seemed to trifle with serious things, there can be no doubt. Yet Rowland Hill cannot justly be called a trifler. He felt that he had a serious duty to discharge in calling sinners to repentance, and whatever was eccentric in his manner he endeavored to make subordinate to this one great end. Nor did he indulge in witticisms in every sermon. There were times when he held his audience spellbound and in tears from the commencement of the discourse to its close.

But while Mr. Hill honestly thought that he might make use of his humorous power to attract the careless hearer to God's house, he was also keenly alive to the fact that he sometimes went too far in this direction. This excess of drollery in the pulpit was then followed by tears and lamentations in private. According to his own confession, many of the bitterest moments of his life were thus occasioned. At one time he preached a sermon at Brighton, a portion of which produced much laughter among the congregation, though he closed his discourse with an awful appeal to their consciences, which brought tears to all eyes. After he had retired for the night,

at the house where he was visiting, a friend hearing a noise in the passage way stepped out to inquire the cause, and found Mr. Hill pacing the hall in the deepest agony of mind, mourning over the ill-timed mirthfulness in which he had indulged while preaching.

Mr. Hill seems to have succeeded better as a preacher than as a controversialist. He carly became a famous pamphleteer, but he so often indulged in vituperative language and in gross personalities that he alienated from himself some of his best friends. Notwithstanding the so-called irregularity of his course as a minister, he enjoyed the favor and friendship of many of the clergymen of the Church of England until the appearance of his "Spiritual Characteristics." This work contained many severe and caustic remarks against irreligious and inconsistent ministers, and excited strong prejudices against him by its extreme harshness. His friends were grieved by the style of the book, and his enemies were exasperated and made worse. After this publication he only received occasional invitations to preach in the churches of the Establishment, and then chiefly in country places. His controversy with the Scotch divines on occasion of the "Pastoral Admonition" of the General Assembly, already referred to, was conducted in a similar style of bitterness.

In his dispute with Mr. Wesley on their doctrinal differences he pursued the same course, notwithstanding Mr. Wesley was forty years his senior. He openly accused him of "forgeries" and of "falsehood," and styled him "an empiric or quack doctor." Mr. Wesley says of him: "For forty or fifty years have I been a little acquainted with controversial writers, some of the Romish persuasion, some of our own Church, some dissenters of various denominations. And I have found many among them as angry as he, but one so bitter I have not found."*. It is due to the memory of Mr. Hill to say that he regretted in later years the spirit he manifested in this controversy.

It was this same spirit which occasioned the alienation of feeling between himself and Lady Huntingdon. At the commencement of his ministry he often preached in her chapel to delighted crowds, and among them some of the noblest families

* "Some Remarks on Mr. Hill's Review."-Works, vol. vi, p. 145, Am. ed.

in the land. But his views of Church polity differed somewhat from hers. In truth he never relished the idea of women ruling in the Church, and he seems to have thought her too fond of authority. This she could have endured; but when he carried his opposition so far as to make her and her followers the subjects of some of his ill-timed pulpit jokes, taking them "all up into the pulpit as his merry-andrews," her womanly spirit was roused. She never fully forgave him this ridicule, though she afterward spoke well of his labors, and contributed to the erection of Surrey Chapel. But she resolutely refused to permit him to preach in any of her chapels, uttering her refusals with an emphasis and an authority which made them irrevocable.

Mr. Hill was to the last devotedly attached to the Church of England, though he deeply deplored her defects. He had no sympathy with the exclusive notions of some churchmen, but opened his pulpit to ministers of all evangelical denominations, and frequently exchanged with them. When some of the rigid ones declared that such union with dissenters was "riding upon the back of order and decorum," his reply was, "Happy should I be to ride upon the back of such order and decorum till I had ridden them to death." In token of his utter contempt for such High Church notions, he actually named one of his carriage horses "Order," and the other "Decorum!"

He loved the liturgy of the Church, and used it every Sabbath in his chapel. But in Church government he was neither Episcopal nor Congregational, but combined the two. Said he, in speaking on this subject, "I am, all things considered, for a reduced episcopacy, a reformed liturgy, and the election of the minister by the suffrages of the people." He thus occupied an independent position, having no formal connection with the establishment, nor with any other ecclesiastical organization. He formed a religious society peculiarly his own, having as its standard of doctrine the Articles of the Church of England.

In spite of his defects, Rowland Hill was a faithful and successful minister of Jesus Christ. He early sacrificed worldly position and ecclesiastical preferment in deference to his own convictions of duty. He chose to share the poverty, contumely,

and labors of a faithful living ministry, rather than bask in the sunshine of paternal favor, or recline at ease upon the fat livings of the Church. His love of souls led him especially among those who, by reason of their poverty or their crimes, were neglected by the fastidious and slothful wearers of the surplice, who sneeringly styled his self-denying labors “irregularities." The busy streets of the metropolis, the quiet retreats of the rural districts, the mountains and the mines, the riverside and the sea-shore, were all the scenes of his toils and his trials, as they were frequently the witnesses of his joys and his triumphs.

His robust English constitution endured these labors far beyond the period at which men ordinarily cease to toil. He continued preaching long after the growing infirmities of age reminded him that the "silver cord" of life was loosening; and when he became too weak to stand in his accustomed place before the people, he addressed them in a sitting posture. His last sermon was preached in Surrey Chapel, from 1 Cor. ii, 7, 8, on the last day of March, 1833. Eleven days afterward his Master called him from labor to reward.

ART. V.-ESCHINES AND ELOQUENCE.

THE question of precedence among the Attic orators was long since decided by the acclamations of the Athenians, and their verdict has been unanimously approved by more than sixty generations of men who have lived since Demosthenes descended from the bema. There were once sturdy contestants who struggled long and bravely for the throne of eloquence on which the Paanian now sits apart from other men, as Jupiter sat on the highest peak of Olympus apart from the other gods. Foremost among those who fought, for that high seat was Eschines, the celebrated champion of the political opposition to Demosthenes. [It is extremely unfortunate for Eschines that his truly great oratorical abilities are never regarded independently in their own light, but are always viewed in the dazzling resplendence of his antagonist. Thus the Grecian