lives, in mind and character they differed very materially from each other; and, to this difference, it is difficult to say, whether original constitution or the influence of party associations was the largest contributor. The piety of Taylor, always ardent and sincere, had its root, unquestionably, in a rational and unwaver ing faith. But, at the same time it was sadly darkened and disfigured, in its manifestations, by the influence of the cloister and the schools. Mortifications, penance, and idle ceremonies enter largely into his devotions; mechanical rules and formulas, rather than living principles, seem often to direct his course; and it is evident that the facts of Christianity, especially those which figure most in the painted windows of cathedrals, have a much stronger hold than its doctrines on his mind. His religion indeed is too often that of Laud, or of a monk, who, though he may have severed himself from Rome, still drags behind him many a heavy link of the broken chain, and derives, through morbid feeling, a ghostly pleasure from the rattle which it makes. Hence, though not absolutely necessary, he thinks that 'hair cloth upon our naked bodies', 'journies on foot,' 'laborious postures in prayer,' 'saying many prayers with our arms extended in the fashion of Christ hanging upon the cross,' or 'rolling naked upon nettles or thorns,' &c. &c., may occasionally be very edifying, and ought, when enjoined by an ecclesiastical superior, to be attended to.

On the other hand the piety of Howe, equally ardent and sincere, was not only free from these drivellings, but infinitely above them; the living practical exhibition of a Divine philosophy, of which the grand and immovable centre was the cross of Christ, not so much historically as doctrinally considered. Evangelical truth, apart from forms and ceremonies, and philosophically viewed in all its vast relations to God and man, is the element in which he lives, and moves, and has his being. His piety, however, though of a profoundly contemplative cast, is at the utmost remove from that which is merely theoretical. His profoundest speculations are as full of life, as of light; he never muses but the fire burns; he always glows and kindles as he shines. His faith was not the formal reception of a creed, but the substance of things hoped for, the realising conviction of things unseen, the humble yet joyous confidence of one who had fled for refuge, and laid hold of the hope set before him. His devotion, wholly untrammelled by fanaticism or slavish forms and full of reverence, hope, and love, is the free, spontaneous breathing of a soul thirsting after God; the natural longing of a filial spirit for communion with the Father of Spirits, and humbly hoping for access through the mediation of the cross. Taylor belonged to a community

which, like the Jewish Christians of old, is still to a great extent in bondage with her children. Howe, in the conscious freedom of the evangelical spirit, had cast out the bond-woman and her son; rejoicing in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

Taylor, though equally conversant with the letter of the Word of God, was far less deeply imbued than Howe with the spirit of the gospel; and, consequently, never equals him in the statement or enforcement of evangelical truth. To say nothing of his dismal notions respecting original sin and the intermediate state of existence, Taylor's references to the atonement are not only less numerous than they should be, but sadly vague, defective, and erroneous; discovering not unfrequently more of the crucifix than the cross: while Howe expatiates on the mighty theme with the clearness, fulness, and frequency of one, who not only understood it, but constantly felt and gloried in its saving power; rising in some of his loftiest flights, like the angel of old, amidst the odours of the sacrifice and the flames of the altar. Taylor speaks of the heavenly world like one who had heard of it with the hearing of the ear, believed the report, and devoutly longed for its joys. But his conceptions of heaven are often more earthly than heavenly. Ringing changes on the senses, and running out into childish fancies and details, he often throws a dubious, or ludicrous, air over some of his noblest exhibitions; while, generally, he may be said to utter what he fancies, or simply believes, rather than what he feels and enjoys. It is rarely, on the contrary, that Howe discourses of heaven but like a man inspired. His ideas of the heavenly state are the 'full-orbed visions' of a soul that in God's light has seen light; and has not only looked into eternity, but risen with Christ and sat down with Him in the heavenly places. What foretastes of bliss, what premonitory glimpses of the beatific vision, what deep and habitual communion with the high, the heavenly, the unseen, and eternal, must that mind have enjoyed, from which such works as 'The Blessedness of the Righteous,' or 'Delighting in God,' could proceed! In speaking of the satisfaction which the saints enjoy in heaven:

This,' says he, is as far as love can go. It is love to the uttermost ; it doth not satisfy itself, till it satisfy them. Divine love is now at rest. It was travailing big with gracious designs before; it hath now delivered itself. It would rather create new heavens every moment than not satisfy; but it hath now done it to the full; the utmost capacity of the soul is filled up; it can be no happier than it is.

Now

is the eternal sabbath of love. Now it enters into rest, having finished all its works, it views them all over with delight, for lo! they are all

good; the works of pardon, of justification, and adoption; its works of regeneration, of conversion, and sanctification; its establishing, quickening, comforting works; they are all good, good in themselves, and in their end, the satisfaction and repose of blessed souls. Now divine love puts on the crown, ascends the throne, and the many myriads of glori fied spirits fall down about it and adore. Now they are permitted to feed their eyes with divine glory, to view the face of God. He sets them before his face for ever. And that eternal vision begets an eternal likeness; they behold and partake glory at once. Love cannot permit that heaven should be their affliction: that they should have cause to loathe and be weary of themselves in that presence. It satisfies them, by clothing and filling them with glory; by making them partake of the divine likeness as well as behold it. What amazing love is this, of the great God to a worm! not to give over till he hath assimilated it to his own glory; till it appear as a ray of light begotten of the Father of lights!'-New Edition, vol. ii. pp. 144-146.

How justly might Watts, who was acquainted with Howe in his old age, describe him as standing alone,' amidst the crowd,' ' with his starry pinions on,' 'dressed' and 'ready for his flight' to the realms which he has thrown open in such an apocalypse of glory to the soul!

In describing the condition of the lost, Taylor's representations are often terrifically sublime: but they are too minutely, dubiously, and unwarrantably physical; far too demon-like, and, sometimes, even ludicrously vulgar and brutal, to create a proper impression. Sadly wanting in the sublime reserve of scripture, and full, to overflowing, with the horrors of the inqui sition and purgatorial romance, it is impossible, in some of his grim descriptions, to recognize the necessary consequences of sin, or the inevitable inflictions of a righteous God. Unalarmed because unconvinced, the sinner shields himself under what is fabulous, from the impression of what is true; if he is not prompted to the sallies of a profane wit against religion, by the quaint absurdities of the preacher. What effect, for instance, would it produce upon our readers, were a preacher now to tell them, literally, that each body of the damned is more loathsome and unsavoury than a million of dead dogs, and all those pressed and crowded together;' and that the devils, though spirits, send forth no better smell!' Yet the reader of his Contemplations of the State of Man,' will meet with notions, equally gross and unscriptural, in almost every page, in which he treats of the torments of the lost.

But what a contrast to all this do we find in Howe. Faithful to his mission, he preaches the threatenings as well as the promises of God: but the terrors with which he endeavours to persuade men, are invariably the terrors of the Lord. These,

moreover, he presents, not in formal descriptions, but in awful suggestions and appeals to the heart and conscience of the sinner respecting the nature of sin; the righteous claims of an infinitely holy God; the inveterate depravity of the impenitent unbelieving heart; the stupendous efforts of Divine mercy to save a ruined race; the blood which the Saviour shed and the tears which he wept for the lost. It is by representations like these, as well as his own entreaties, arguments, expostulations, and yearnings over the impenitent, that he arouses them to terror or remorse. It is a truly grand and surpassing excellence in Howe, that he is as deeply and tenderly evangelical when discoursing on the threatenings as on the promises of God; so that while he thrills the soul with a terrific dread of the Divine wrath, he leaves the sinner no escape from the conclusion that, if he repents not, he must and ought to be for ever lost. We know of nothing, in Howe or any other uninspired writer, more worthy of the profoundest study of the Christian ministry, than the manner in which this melancholy duty of the sacred office is discharged.

On the important subject of Christian morals, Taylor has left behind him several invaluable treatises; in which the beauty, force, and subtlety of his genius, as well as the purity of his heart, are strikingly displayed. Mentally or morally considered, they are most extraordinary productions, and entitle him to our lasting gratitude and praise. Here, however, we discover the same want of evangelical power as in his doctrinal disquisitions; together with such a minute and wearisome love of detail, as utterly defies the grasp of the reader's memory, if it does not very soon exhaust his patience. The spirit with which he handles such subjects is generally that of a casuist or a lawyer, rather than a preacher of the cross; nor is the vain conversation, which he received in tradition from the fathers, or the prerogative-loving school of Laud, forgotten or laid aside. Howe, on the contrary, though he has written nothing which can be regarded, or was intended to be regarded, as a complete treatise on Christian morals, ever shows, in his discourses upon individual duties, the profoundest acquaintance with the principles and motives of evangelical obedience, or, in other words, with the law written in the renewed heart by the Spirit of God. Not contented, as is too frequently the case with Taylor, with inferior motives, he shows, in the very spirit of the gospel, the obligations under which we are laid by the cross of Christ; the great centre from which they all radiate and in which they all meet; as if his whole soul were pervaded with the sentiment, so finely expressed by Young,

'Speak they of morals! O thou bleeding love!
Thou maker of new morals to mankind!
The grand morality is love of Thee!'

In pointing out, however, the comparative excellence of these eminent men, we by no means wish to convey the impression, that some of the qualities ascribed to the one were never exemplified by the other; but simply that they predominate in their works and lives, in the way described. Taylor sometimes rises to the evangelical, heavenly, and ethereal tone of Howe; while Howe occasionally descends to the casuistical, or, rather, scholastic, turn of Taylor. But the latter is seldom deeply evange lical, nor is there in the former a particle of what is monkish, servile, or traditional.

If, indeed, from the loftier we carry on the comparison into some of the minor shades of character, we shall find, along with many points of resemblance, the same kind of difference. Both of them were men of high polish; born, as well as educated, to adorn a palace or a court. But Taylor, with all his great virtues and engaging manners, was vain and ambitious. At the commencement of his career he eagerly sought and courted promotion, even at the hands of Laud; and at the close of life, we find him prostrate, in fulsome adulation, at the feet of the second Charles; though he must have known that lies and perjury were the steps by which the royal profligate had mounted the throne. The well-known frequency with which he exhibited his own likeness to the world, as an embellishment to his works, shows that his self-admiration descended even to personal appearance. In most of his productions, he writes like a person who has not wholly lost sight of himself; often bespangling his pages with little fancies and conceits, that exhibit the author rather than the subject, or with such admiring allusions to the mere outward distinctions of life, 'the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,' as serve to show that one of the 'three things' which his godfather and godmother had 'promised and vowed in his name,' had been but very imperfectly remembered.

Howe, though equally acquainted with thrones and palaces, had a soul into whose composition not a grain of vanity or ambition ever seems to have entered; combining, with uncommon greatness and dignity, a modesty and lowliness of mind, which recoiled from promotion and shuddered at the sound of praise. Nothing but the resolute kindness of Cromwell could have dragged him at first from obscurity; nor is there, throughout his writings or his subsequent history, the. slightest trace of an improper consciousness of worth; and,