: growing once into choler, passing too far, and losing more than their argument for they lost their reason, and they lost their patience; "and Epiphanius wished that St. Chrysostom might not die a bishop; and he, in a peevish exchange, wished that Epiphanius might never return to his bishopric: when they had forgotten their foolish anger, God remembered it, and said 'Amen' to both their cursed speakings." But we are anon reminded of yet a greater example of human frailty; yet a more signal proof that in this particular even good men are sometimes unprosperous; yet a more stringent monition that, in this particular, we ought at least to endeavour to be more than conquerors over passion, because, on the bishop preacher's showing, "God allows it not, and, by punishing such follies, does manifest that He intends that we should get victory over our sudden passions, as well as our natural lusts.” The greater example in question is from the Acts of the Apostles alas, that it should be one of the acts of the apostles ! "St. Paul and Barnabas were very holy persons; but once, in a heat, they were both to blame; they were peevish and parted company. This was not very much; but God was so displeased, even for this little fly in their box of ointment, that their story says they never saw one another's face again." That they never did may be charitably and hopefully questioned; for the assertion is perhaps as open to doubt as the supposition that they had been acquainted in early youth; by which supposition the very friendly way in which the son of consolation took Saul the convert by the hand, at the first, when all others eyed him askance, has been accounted for. No such hypothesis is required to account for the fact. Barnabas was eminently a "good man, and full of the Holy Ghost, and of faith." He has been pronounced, with justice, one of the most lovable of all the characters set before us in Scripture; distinguished by a self denying liberality which prompted him to give all that he had to the cause of Christianity, by a meek, devout, and earnest spirit which led him to labour assiduously in the evangelist's work, by the "hopeful and charitable views which he seems habitually to have taken of all persons and events," and by the enduring zeal with which he sped his missionary course. While declining to compare Barnabas with his more illustrious companion in point either of ability or usefulness, Dr. Roberts submits that his "placid, considerate, and cautious disposition" may have exercised no small influence for good over "the more impetuous and impulsive spirit of the great apostle." The two friends are accordingly declared to have been admirably fitted for supplying each other's deficiencies. And their friendship lasted through many vicissitudes and trials, until at length it was interrupted by the dispute at Antioch touching the companionship of John, whose surname was Mark, dear to Barnabas as his sister's son, objectionable to Paul as an absentee. The golden-tongued John whom the silver-tongued Jeremy cites as quarrelling with Epiphanius, as did Paul with Barnabas, himself shrewdly and impartially metes out perhaps the due measure of praise and blame when he says that, in respect of the contention at Antioch, Paul aimed at that which was strictly just, Barnabas at that which was kind and friendly. A biographer of St. Paul, already quoted, adverts to the general leaning towards the side of the apostle, and confesses that to him Barnabas appears to have had the best of the argument. Be that as it may, the fact of the disruption in dudgeon remains; a stubborn fact, and an ugly, yet an instructive. Mark in after years was endeared to Paul the aged as profitable to him in the ministry, and warmly recognised as such. But whether Paul and Barnabas ever really became friends again we can hope about, but have no certain knowledge. "Alas!-how light a cause may move And sorrow but more closely tied ; That stood the storm when waves were rough, Yet in a sunny hour fall off, Like ships that have gone down at sea, When heaven was all tranquillity." A something, light as air—a look, a word unkind or wrongly taken--some difference of that dangerous sort, by which, though slight, the links that bind the fondest hearts may soon be riven. A word, or the want of a word, it has been said, is a little thing; but into the momentary wound or chasm, so made or left, throng circumstances; these thrust wider and wider asunder, till the whole round bulk of the world may lie between two lives. Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, murmuring o'er the name again, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine? "Alas! they had been friends in youth; With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain To free the hollow heart from paining- The marks of that which once hath been.' It makes sport for the Philistines when there is a split between the saintly, real or reputed. "Words ran high even among these holy persons," writes the historian of Latin Christianity, respecting the divisions among the clergy upon crusade details. Externally at least matters are mended; at any rate, manners are. After telling how, at the Council of Constance, the Archbishops of Milan and Pisa sprang from their seats in the midst of debate, closed like wild beasts, and nearly throttled each other, Mr. Dallas adds, "No such passion dare show itself in a modern Convocation." Hot blood throbs in some veins nevertheless, even in a modern Convocation ; and the dissentients and disputants differ without by any means agreeing to differ, and without the least relish for Uncle Toby's notion of a theological difference between brother divines. "A great matter if they had differed!" said my uncle Toby, “the best friends in the world may differ sometimes." And, by the way, one of the parties to Captain Shandy's hypothetical difference is St. Paul himself; though the other is not Barnabas. Strange to Milton's Raphael it seemed 66 that angel should with angel war, And in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet Tantæne animis celestibus iræ ?1 Gibbon sneers at the passions to be deemed unworthy of a celestial breast, yet freely attributed to the saints. St. Andrew and St. Patrick are pictured by the latter saint's dean in heated controversy, raging and storming to a degree that warrants the deus intersit: "Now words grew high: we can't suppose Immortals ever come to blows, But lest unruly passions should Degrade them into flesh and blood, An angel quick from heaven descends," etc. And readers of Burns will recal with ease the pungent tale of 1 The tantæne taunt is a kind of cynical commonplace in miscellaneous literature. Boileau uses it in the first canto of Le Lutrin: "Muse, redis-moi donc quelle ardeur de vengeance Mr. Carlyle says of the Voltaire and Maupertuis feud: "And the result is, there is considerable rage in one celestial mind against another male one in red wig and yellow bottom," etc.,—just as in a previous volume he had said of Queen Sophie Dorothee venting her august wrath on the Princess Wilhelmina, "Can there be such wrath in celestial minds, venting itself so unreasonably?" To apply a late poet's epigram— "'T is not Lucilla that you see amid the cloud and storm: 'Tis Anger. What a shame that he assumes Lucilla's form!" how the twa best herds in a' the wast, that e'er ga'e gospel horn a blast, for five-and-twenty sinimers past, O! dool to tell, had had a bitter black out-cast atween themsel'. 66 Mr. Toplady was as remote from the new-light school as from the Kilmarnock pastors whose feud made them merry, but he made all the mirth he could out of the bickerings, tiffs, and downright quarrels of the "perfect" people under Wesley's wing, reminding Wesley, in after days, of his scheme of collecting as many perfect ones as he could to live under one roof; a number of these flowers being transplanted accordingly from some of your nursery beds to the hothouse. And a hothouse it soon proved. For, would you believe it! the sinless people quarrelled in a short time at so violent a rate, that you found yourself forced to disband the whole regiment." Elsewhere the same trenchant assailant of Arminianism in all its ramifications relates the story of a lady of his acquaintance, who, in the early stage of her religious profession, imbibed the notion of sinless perfection, which she at last "concluded herself to have attained" (unlike the apostle's Not as though I had already attained, etc.); professing to have a heart filled with nothing but pure and perfect love, and from which all sin had been eradicated. But being one day provokingly contradicted by her husband,1 the perfect lady was so very near boxing To some feminine temperaments the not being contradicted, but suffered to run on, without curb or check, by a phlegmatic listener, is more exasperating still. Witness Mrs. Proudie at one crisis of her career, when the bishop says nothing, and hears all. "Mrs. Proudie was boiling over with wrath. Alas! alas! could she but have kept her temper as her enemy did, she would have conquered as she had ever conquered. But divine anger got the better of her, as it has done of other heroines, and she fell."-Barchester Towers, chap. xxvi. Noblesse oblige, as well as sanctity; and not only noblesse, but the having merely associated with it. So at least, with some naïveté, opines a common friend of those two wits and notables, Henry Luttrell and Samuel Rogers, who, by his account, were both of them bad tempered, and ever |