Memoirs of the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D.D. (Kirwan.)

hood and Youth.—Comes to this Country.—Enters the Harpers' Printing Establishment.--Religious Awakening.--What he saw of Popery when a Boy.--How he was disgusted with the System.

Coming to America.

The future,

THE ship Martha, from Dublin, about forty-five years ago, brought a crowd of Irish emigrants to our shores. Among them was a lad seventeen years old, who had come alone to seek his fortune in the western world. In the month of July, 1818, he set his foot in the streets of New York, with little money in his pocket, and no place to call his home. It would have been presumption to predict that this friendless, wandering Roman Catholic boy would become a distinguished Protestant divine, a champion of the faith, and win a name to go back on the wings of fame to the green isle he had left.

Such a lad was Nicholas Murray; such was his introduction to this country, and such was his future career.

His parents.

Clerk in a store.

He was born in Ballynaskea, in the County of Westmeath, Ireland, December 25, 1802. He was the son of Nicholas and Judith Mangum Murray, both of them being Irish Roman Catholics, though their Christian names are indicative of a different parentage. His father was a farmer of some property, and exerted considerable influence in the civil affairs of the neighborhood in which he lived. He died when his son Nicholas was only three years old.

The son remained at home under the care of his mother 'till he was about nine years old, when he went to live with an aunt, the sister of his mother, some ten or twelve miles distant, where he went to school till he reached the age of twelve. Now he was old enough to begin to earn something, and he was apprenticed as a merchant's clerk in a store in Grannard, near Edgeworthtown, where he remained three years. These were eventful years in his mental and

. moral history, as we shall see when he comes to speak of the first influences that the practices of the Roman Catholic Church made upon his mind.

He was sadly and badly used by his employer, but he bore it as well as he could for three long dreadful years, and then fled from the oppression to his mother's house. But his mother disapproved of this step, and entreated him to return to the service from which he had escaped. He steadily refused, and chose to embark on the wide world, and seek his fortune beyond the seas, in the land of the West. He told his brother that he would relinquish all right to any property that might hereafter be his from the estate of his

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