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Christ," his is the latest name you will desire to utter; his is the latest thought you will desire to form; upon Him you will fix your last look on earth, upon him your first in heaven. When memory is oblivious of all other objects-when all that attracted the natural eye is wrapped in the mists of death-when the tongue is cleaving to the roof of our mouth, and speech is gone, and sight is gone, and hearing gone, and the right hand, lying powerless by our side, has lost its cunning, Jesus! then may we remember Thee! If the shadows of death are to be thrown in deepest darkness on the valley, when we are passing along it to glory, may it be ours to die like that saint, beside whose bed wife and children once stood, weeping over the wreck of faded faculties, and a blank, departed memory. One had asked him, "Father, do you remember me?" and received no answer; and another and another, but still no answer. And then, all making way for the venerable companion of a long and loving pilgrimage-the tender partner of many a past joy and sorrow-his wife draws near. She bends over him, and as her tears fall thick upon his face, she cries, "Do you not remember me ?" A stare-but it is vacant. There is no soul in that filmy eye; and the seal of death lies upon those lips. The sun is down, and life's brief twilight is darkening fast into a starless night. At this moment, one calm enough to remember how the love of Christ's spouse is "strong as death"--a love that many "waters cannot quench"-stooped to his ear, and said, "Do you remember Jesus Christ ?" The word was no sooner uttered than it seemed to recall the spirit, hovering for a moment, ere it took wing to heaven. Touched as by an electric influence, the heart beats once more to the name of Jesus; the features fixed in death, relax; the countenance, dark in death, flashes up like the last gleam of day; and with a smile in which the soul passed away to glory, he replied, "Remember Jesus Christ! dear Jesus Christ! he is all my salvation, and all my desire."-Dr. Guthrie,

GEORGE FOX, THE FIRST QUAKER.

While London was agitated by the news that a plot had been discovered, George Fox, the founder of the sect of Quakers, died.

More than forty years had elapsed since Fox had begun to see visions and cast out devils. He was then a youth of pure morals and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, with the education of a labouring man, and with an intellect in the most unhappy of all states, that is to say, too much disordered for liberty, and sufficiently disordered for Bedlam. The circumstances in which he was placed were such as could scarcely fail to bring out in the strongest form the constitutional diseases of his mind. At the time when his faculties were ripening, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, were striving for mastery, and were, in every corner of the realm, refuting and reviling each other. He wandered from congregation to congregation. He heard priests harangue against Puritans, Puritans harangue against priests, and he in vain applied for spiritual direction and consolation to doctors of both parties. One jolly old clergyman of the Anglican communion told him to smoke tobacco and sing psalms; another advised him to go and lose some blood. The young inquirer turned in disgust from the advisers to the Dissenters, and found them also blind guides. After some time, he came to the conclusion that no human being was competent to instruct him in Divine things, and that the truth had been communicated to him by direct inspiration from Heaven. He argued, that, as the division of language began at Babel, and as the persecutors of Christ put on the cross an inscription in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the knowledge of languages, and more especially of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, must be useless to a Christian minister. Indeed, he was so far from knowing many languages, that he knew none; nor can

the most corrupt passage in Hebrew be more unintelligible to the unlearned, than his English often is to the most acute and attentive reader. One of the precious truths which were divinely revealed to this new apostle was, that it was falsehood and adulation to use the second person plural instead of the second person singular. Another was, that to talk of the month of March was to worship the bloodthirsty god Mars, and that to talk of Monday was to pay idolatrous homage to the moon. To say good morning or good evening was highly reprehensible, for those phrases evidently imported that God had made bad days and bad nights. A Christian was bound to face death itself rather than touch his hat to the greatest of mankind. When Fox was challenged to produce any Scriptural authority for his dogma, he cited the passage in which it is written that Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace with their hats on; and, if his own narrative may be trusted, the Chief Justice of England was altogether unable to answer this argument, except by crying out, "Take him away, gaoler." Fox insisted much on the not less weighty argument that the Turks never show their bare heads to their superiors; and he asked, with great animation, whether those who bore the noble name of Christians ought not to surpass Turks in virtue. Bowing he strictly prohibited, and, indeed, seemed to consider it as the effect of Satanical influence; for, as he observed, the woman in the Gospel, while she had a spirit of infirmity, was bowed together, and ceased to bow as soon as Divine Power had liberated her from the tyranny of the Evil One. His expositions of the sacred writings were of a very peculiar kind. Passages, which had been in the apprehension of all the readers of the Gospels during sixteen centuries, figurative, he construed literally. Passages, which no human being before him had ever understood in any other than a literal sense, he construed figuratively. Thus, from those rhetorical expressions in which the duty of patience under injuries is enjoined, he deduced the doctrine that selfdefence against pirates and assassins is unlawful. On the other hand, the plain commands to baptize with water, and to partake of bread and wine in commemoration of the redemption of mankind, he pronounced to be allegorical. He long wandered from place to place, teaching this strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches, which he nicknamed steeple-houses, interrupting prayers and sermons with clamour and scurrility, and pestering rectors and justices with epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and Tyre. He soon acquired great notoriety by these feats. His strange face, his strange chants, his immovable hat, and his leather breeches, were known all over the country; and he boasts that, as soon ar the rumour was heard, "The man in leather breeches is coming," terror seized hypocritical professors, and hireling priests made haste to get out of his way. He was repeatedly imprisoned and set in the stocks, sometimes justly, for disturbing the public worship of congregations, and sometimes unjustly, for merely talking nonsense. He soon gathered round him a body of disciples, some of whom went beyond himself in absurdity. He has told us one of his friends walked naked through Skipton declaring the truth, and another was divinely moved to go naked during several years to market-places, and to the houses of gentlemen and clergymen. Fox complains bitterly that these pious acts, prompted by the Holy Spirit, were requited by an untoward generation with hooting, pelting, coach whipping, and horsewhipping. But though he applauded the zeal of the sufferers, he did not go quite to their lengths. He sometimes, indeed, was impelled to strip himself partially. Thus he pulled off his shoes and walked barefoot through Lichfield, crying, "Woe to the bloody city." But it does not

appear that he ever thought it his duty to appear before the public without that decent garment from which his popular appellation was derived.

Thus

If we form our judgment of George Fox simply by looking at his own actions and writings, we shall see no reason for placing him, morally and intellectually, above Ludowick Muggleton or Joanna Southcote. But it would be most unjust to rank the sect which regards him as its founder with the Muggletonians or the Southcotians. It chanced that among the thousands whom his enthusiasm infected were a few persons whose abilities and attainments were of a very different order from his own. Robert Barclay was a man of considerable parts and learning. William Penn, though inferior to Barclay in both natural and acquired abilities, was a gentleman and a scholar. That such men should have become the followers of George Fox ought not to astonish any person who remembers what quick, vigorous, and highly-cultivated intellects were in our own time duped by the unknown tongues. The truth is, that no powers of mind constitute a security against errors of this description. Touching God and his ways with man, the highest human faculties can discover little more than the meanest. In theology, the interval is small indeed between Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage. It is not strange, therefore, that wise men, weary of investigation, tormented by uncertainty, longing to believe something, and yet seeing objections to everything, should submit themselves absolutely to teachers who, with firm and undoubting faith, lay claim to a supernatural commission. we frequently see inquisitive and restless spirits take refuge from their own scepticism in the bosom of a church which pretends to infallibility, and, after questioning the existence of a Deity, bring themselves to worship a wafer. And thus it was that Fox made some converts to whom he was immeasurably inferior in everything except the energy of his convictions. By these converts his rude doctrines were polished into a form less shocking to good sense and good taste. No proposition which he had laid down was retracted-no indecent or ridiculous act which he had done or approved was condemned; but what was most grossly absurd in his theories and practice was softened down, or at least not obtruded on the public; whatever could be made to appear specious was set in the fairest light: his gibberish was translated into English, meanings which he would have been quite unable to comprehend were put upon his phrases, and his system so much improved that he would not have known it again, was defended by numerous citations from Pagan philosophers and Christian fathers whose names he had never heard. Still, however, those who had remodelled his theology, continued to profess, and doubtless to feel, profound reverence for him; and his crazy Epistles were to the last received and read with respect in Quaker meetings all over the country. His death produced a sensation which was not confined to his own disciples. On the morning of the funeral a great multitude assembled round the meetinghouse in Gracechurch-street. Thence the corpse was born to the burial ground of the sect near Bunhill-fields. Several orators addressed the

crowd which filled the cemetery.

DEATH OF QUEEN MARY.

William had but too good reason to be uneasy. His wife had, during two or three days, been poorly; and, on the preceding evening, grave symptoms had appeared. Sir Thomas Millington, who was physician in ordinary to the king, thought that she had the measles, but Radcliffe, who, with coarse manners and little book learning, had raised himself to the first practic in London, chiefly by his rare skill in diagnostics, uttered the

more alarming words, "small pox." That disease, over which science has achieved a succession of glorious and beneficent victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid, but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory, and the small-pox was always present, filling the churchyard with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken; leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power; turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden, objects of horror to the lover. Towards the end of 1694, this pestilence was more than usually severe. At length the infection spread to the palace, and reached the young and blooming queen. She received the intimation of her danger with true greatness of soul. She gave orders that every lady of her bedchamber, every maid of honour, nay, even every menial servant, who had not had the small-pox, should instantly leave Kensington House. She locked herself up during a short time in her closet, burned some papers, arranged others, and then calmly awaited her fate.

During two or three days there were many alternations of hope and fear. The physicians contradicted each other and themselves in a way which sufficiently indicates the state of medical science in that age. The disease was measles, it was scarlet fever, it was spotted fever, it was erysipelas. At one moment some symptoms, which, in truth, showed that the case was almost hopeless, were hailed as indications of returning health. At length all doubt was over; Radcliffe's opinion proved to be right; it was plain that the queen was sinking under small-pox of the most malignant type.

All this time William remained night and day near her bed-side. The little couch on which he slept when in camp was spread for him in the ante-chamber, but he scarcely lay down on it. "The sight of his misery," the Dutch envoy wrote, "was enough to melt the hardest heart." Nothing seemed to be left to the man whose serene fortitude had been the wonder of old soldiers on the disastrous day of Landen, and of old sailors on that fearful night, among the sheets of ice and banks of sand on the coast of Goree. The very domestics saw the tears running unchecked down that face, of which the stern_composure had seldom been disturbed by any triumph or any defeat. Several of the prelates were in attendance. The king drew Burnet aside, and gave way to an agony of grief. "There is no hope,” he cried. "I was the happiest man on earth, and I am the most miserable. She had no fault-none; you knew her well, but you could not know, nobody but myself could know, her goodness." Tenison undertook to tell her that she was dying. He was afraid that such a communication, abruptly made, might agitate her violently, and began with much management; but she soon caught his meaning, and with that gentle, womanly courage, which so often puts our bravery to shame, submitted herself to the will of God. She called for a small cabinet, in which her most important papers were locked up, gave orders that, as soon as she was no more, it should be delivered to the king, and then dismissed worldly cares from her mind. She received the Eucharist, and repeated her part of the office with unimpaired memory and intelligence, though in a feeble voice. She observed that Tenison had been long standing at her bedside, and with that sweet courtesy which was habitual to her, faltered out her commands that he would sit down, and repeated them till he obeyed. After she had received the Sacrament, she sunk rapidly, and uttered only a few broken words. Twice she tried to take a last farewell of him whom she had loved so truly and entirely, but she was unable to speak. He had a succession of fits so alarming, that his

privy councillors, who were asembled in a neighbouring room, were appre hensive for his reason and his life. The Duke of Leeds, at the request of his colleagues, ventured to assume the friendly guardianship of which minds deranged by sorrow stand in need. A few minutes before the queen expired, William was removed, almost insensible, from the sick room.

FRUITS OF THE REVOLUTION OF 1688.

England has passed through severe trials, and had come forth renewed in health and vigour. Ten years before it had seemed that both her liberty and her independence were no more. Her liberty she had vindicated by a just and necessary revolution. Her independence she had reconquered by a not less just and necessary war. She had successfully defended the order of things established by the Bill of Rights against the mighty monarch of France, against the aboriginal population of Ireland, against the avowed hostility of the nonjurors, against the more dangerous hostility of traitors who were ready to take any oath, and whom no oath could bind. Her open enemies had been victorious on many fields of battle. Her secret enemies had commanded her fleets and armies, had been in charge of her arsenals, had administered at her altars, and taught at her universities, had swarmed in her public offices, had sat in her parliament, had bowed and fawned in the bedchamber of her king. More than once it had seemed impossible that anything could avert a restoration which would inevitably have been followed, first, by proscriptions and confiscations, by the violation of fundamental laws, and the persecution of the established religion, and then by a third rising up of the nation against that house which two depositions and two banishments had only made more obstinate in evil. To the dangers of war and the dangers of treason had recently been added the dangers of a terrible financial and commercial crisis. But all those dangers were over. There was peace abroad and at home. The kingdom, after many years of ignominious vassalage, had resumed its ancient place in the first rank of European powers. Many signs justified the hope that the revolution of 1688 would be our last revolution. The ancient constitution was adapting itself, by a natural, a gradual, a peaceful development, to the wants of a modern society. Already freedom of conscience and freedom of discussion existed to an extent unknown in any preceding age. The currency had been restored, public credit had been re-established, trade had revived, the exchequer was overflowing; there was a sense of relief everywhere, from the Royal Exchange to the most secluded hamlets among the mountains of Wales and the fens of Lincolnshine. The ploughmen, the shepherds, the miners of the Northumbrian coal-pits, the artisans who toiled at the looms of Norwich and the anvils at Birmingham, felt the change without understanding it; and the cheerful bustle in every seaport and every market town indicated, not obscurely, the commencement of a happier age.

THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE.

During near half an hour the battle continued to rage along the southern shore of the river. All was smoke, dust, and din. Old soldiers were heard to say, that they had seldom seen sharper work in the low countries. But, just at this conjuncture, William came up with the left wing. He had found much difficulty in crossing. The tide was running fast. His charger had been forced to swim, and had been almost lost in the mud. As soon as the king was on firm ground he took his sword in his left hand, for his right arm was stiff with his wound and his bandage, and led his men to the place where the fight was the hottest. His arrival decided the fate of the day; yet the Irish horse retired fighting obstinately. It was long remembered among the Protestants of Ulster, that, in the midst of the tumult, William rode to the head of the Enniskilleners. "What will you

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