and edify it. Much of the barreness of the pastoral office, so universally lamented in these times, may surely be attributed to that cold and desponding sensation which is one of the forms of unbelief. We preach, and we hear also, with a certain incredulity, as though we expected no fruit. We become heartless and insensible; as we might be, if we had been certainly warned that the influences of the Spirit had been like household words. Another thing 'Tis pitiful withdrawn. And thence may further To court a grin where you should woo a come such speeches as have occasioned these remarks. But the powers of darkness have nothing to do with faithful preaching. Excellent sermons, preached by holy men, are essentially gifts of the Comforter. "I laboured more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.' "They glorified God in me." " To me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I might preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ." Can we suppose that the Apostle who thus ascribed what he did to Divine powercan we suppose him saying to a Gentile convert, "The devil told me what excellent epistles I have written to the Romans and Corinthians!" If the reader is offended by this abrupt attempt to draw a parallel, let him define the inherent difference between the two cases. It is, indeed, very probable that St. Paul would have rebuked a flatterer who tried to ingratiate himself by a foolish compliment; but he would have done this without levity, and without the affectation, real or imputed, of humility. I am the more anxious to settle the point on its right foundation, because glittering anecdotes have done much evil to the Christian cause. The inexperience of young men converts smart sayings into arguments: and, sometimes, that which does well when spoken by their seniors, and under circumstances which apparently authorize deviations from a regular course, is perfectly unjustifiable and untimely, when bandied about, at second hand, " soul: : nay, it is far worse than pitiful; it is quite opposed to the admonition, 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." And it is remarkable, that the very next words, "for it is God that worketh in you,' refer to the operations of the Holy Spirit, and might teach us the connection between salvation, and seriouness of mind in attending to the concerns of salvation. If ministers, and especially young ministers, inquire how they are to receive religious compliments, they may perhaps find safety in silence; for silence is, frequently, a most impressive form of eloquence. To answer nothing, when flattery expects to hear its own echoes, is reproof. There was once a minister who, at the close of a sermon, being addressed by one of his auditors with, "I shall not tell you, sir, what I think of the excellent exhortation we have just heard," was repulsed by, "You may safely speak, sir, for I have no opinion of your judgment; "--which was about as bad, in its way, as the one which heads this communication; and, if spoken in the lobby of the House of Commons, might have ended in a meeting on Putney Heath. And thus res humanæ sunt flebile ludibrium, both in church and state. Let us try to be serious in the right place; for our spiritual enemies are mighty; and they shew their success, if they can make us laugh when we ought to be too soberminded to yield to the influences of levity. We may undervalue the gifts of the Spirit, when we think we are shewing our humility; and call men to be diverted by the spectacle. SCRUTINEER. persons on spiritual matters either sooner or further than as the Spirit of God (which bloweth when and where it lists) would be resisted in me if I held my tongue. Secondly, because it is but deluding the persons I ORIGINAL LETTER ON THE DIVINE speak to, and helping them to be LIFE, BY THE REV. WILLIAM LAW. To the Editor of the Christian Observer. THE following is a copy of an unpublished autograph letter from the author of the " Serious Call" to the Rev. John Ryland of Northampton, father of the late Dr. Ryland of Bristol. In this day of garrulous religious profession it may furnish some useful considerations; though, perhaps, your readers may also think it open to some exception. There is a time to be silent; but there is also a time to speak; and there is occasionally danger of mistaking the one for the other. 66 J. E. R. Sir,-Your packet I received, and the letters I delivered as directed; but I am sorry you sent so many of your Plans, because neither the ladies nor myself know how to dispose of any for your advantage. "I am glad you have so worthy a gentleman for your boarder; and if any thing I have wrote has helped to beget, or increase, the desire of his heart towards God, I shall be as thankful to God for it as he can be. As to your intention of a visit here, I can say nothing to encourage it: and though my countenance would have no forbidding airs put on by myself, yet, as old age has given me her own countenance, I might perhaps bear the blame of it. "But my chief objection against a visit of this kind is the reason which you give for it—namely, for my instructive conversation on spiritual An appointment for religious conversation has a taking sound, and passes for a sign of great progress in goodness. But with regard to myself, such a meeting would rather make me silent, than a speaker in it. First, because I hurt myself, and am only acting a part, if I speak to CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 356. content with an imaginary falsehood, should I, as a spiritual assistant, speak to them of any thing but that which is their own evil and their own good. For true edification arises only from such knowledge, and not from devout harangues on the spiritual life in general, though set forth in the most enlivened words. The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us; and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it: and much speaking, or a delight in it, will be often no small hindrance of that good, which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us. This is not enough known by religious persons: they rejoice in kindling a fire of their own, and delight too much in hearing their own voices, and so lose that inward unction from above which alone can new-create their hearts. "To speak with the tongues of men or angels on religious matters, is a much less thing than to know how to stay the mind upon God, and abide with him in the closet of our hearts, observing, loving, adoring, and obeying his holy power within us. Rhetoric and fine language about the things of the Spirit, is a vainer babble than in other matters. And he that thinks to grow in true goodness by hearing or speaking flaming words or striking expressions (as is now much the way of the world), may have a great deal of talk, but will have little of his conversation in heaven. "I have wrote very largely on the spiritual life; and he that has read, and likes it, has of all men the least reason to ask me any questions about, or visit me on that occasion. He understands not my writings or the end of them, who does not see 3 N ON THE APOCALYPTIC TRUMPETS. (Concluded from p. 400.) To the Editor of the Christian Observer. By the three causes mentioned at the conclusion of my last paper the career of the Turks was arrested for two centuries; and by the last mentioned cause in particular, the four angels might be said to be bound upon the great river Euphrates, if we refer this last expression to the seat of the power by which they were coerced and restrained, which was the Tartar dynasty in Persia. " The fragments of the Seljukian monarchy (observes the historian) were disputed by the Emirs who had occupied the cities or the mountains; but they all confessed the supremacy of the Khans of Persia; and he often interposed his authority, and sometimes his arms, to check their depredations, and to preserve the peace and balance of his Turkish frontier." But this coercion on the part of the Khans was but of short duration, and the Turkish power revived under a new head. "The death of Cazan, one of the greatest and most accomplished princes of the house of Zingis, removed this salutary controul; and the decline of the Moguls gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman empire;" the origin of which Gibbon thus describes, after the vain struggle of Gelaleddin against the overwhelming hordes of the Moguls: no His death dissolved a veteran and adventurous army, which included, under the name of Carizmians, or Corasmins, many Turkman hordes, that had attached themselves to that Sultan's fortune.... Part of these engaged in the service of Aladin, sultan of Iconium; and among them were the obscure fathers of the Ottoman line....Orthogrul became the soldier and subject of Aladin, and established at Surgut, on the banks of the Sangar, a camp of four hundred families, or tents, whom he governed fifty-two years, both in peace and war: he was the father of Othman, who possessed, and perhaps surpassed, the ordinary virtues of a soldier; and the circumstances of time and place were propitious to his independence and success. The Seljukian dynasty was more, and the distance and decline of the Mogul Khans soon enfranchised him from the controul of a superior. He was situate on the verge of the Greek empire; the Koran sanctified his gaze, or holy war, against the infidels; and their political errors unlocked the passes of Mount Olympus....It was on the twenty-seventh of July, in the year twelve hundred and ninety-nine of the Christian era, that Othman first invaded the territory of Nicomedia ; and the singular accuracy of the date seems to disclose some foresight of the rapid and destructive growth of the monster"....(Gibbon, chap. lxiv.) From this point of time, so emphatically marked by the historian, the Ottoman arms progressively encroached upon the Greek empire, both in Asia and Europe, till the dominions of the Sultan not only comprised the whole of the territory then remaining to the Greek empire, but the whole of what had ever belonged to that empire. In the course of a few years, "the maritime country, from the Propontis to the Mæander, and the Isle of Rhodes, so long threatened and so often pillaged, were finally lost to the Roman empire;" and from the year 1312 may be dated the fall of the seven churches of Asia. "In the loss of Ephesus" (says Gibbon), "the Christians deplored the fall of the first angel, the extinction of the first candlestick of the Revelations. The desolation is complete; and the temple of Diana, or the church of Mary, will equally elude the search of the curious traveller. The circus and three stately theatres of Laodicea are now peopled with wolves and foxes; Sardis is reduced to a miserable village; the God of Mohammed, without a rival or a son, is invoked in the moschs of Thyatira and Pergamos; and the populousness of Smyrna is supported by the foreign trade of the Franks and Armenians. Philadelphia alone has been saved, by prophecy or courage;....she is still erect; a column in a scene of ruins; a pleasing example that the paths of honour and safety may sometimes be the same." In the last year of Othman's reign his son Orchan took Prusa, and from its conquest (the historian observes) we may date the true era of the Ottoman empire....and the city, by the labours of Orchan, assumed the aspect of a Mohammedan capital." In 1353 the Turks were first impolitically introduced into Europe as allies of the Empire, and effected a settlement there. 66 Soliman, the son of Orchan, at the head of ten thousand horse, was transported in the vessels and entertained as the friend of the Greek Emperor. In the civil wars of Romania he performed some service, and perpetrated more mischief; but the Chersonesus was insensibly filled with a Turkish colony, and the Byzantine court solicited in vain the restitution of the fortresses of Thrace." After this, we see the Turks advancing rapidly in the conquest of the European provinces of the empire. "By the pale and fainting light of the Byzantine annals" (says Gibbon)," we can discern that Amurath I., the brother of Soliman, subdued without resistance the whole province of Romania, or Thrace, from the Hellespont to Mount Hamus, and the verge of the Capitol, and that Adrianople was chosen for the royal seat of his government and religion in Europe.... Never till this fatal hour had the Greeks been surrounded, both in Asia and Europe, by the arms of the same hostile monarchy." Nor did Constantinople alone feel the power of Amurath; "he marched against the Sclavonian nations between the Danube and the Adriatic, the Bulgarians, Servians, Bosnians, and Albanians; and these warlike tribes, who had so often insulted the majesty of the empire, were repeatedly broken by his destructive inroads, A.D. 1360-89....The character of Bajazet I., the son and successor of Amurath, is strongly expressed in his surname of Ilderim, or the lightning; and he might glory in an epithet which was drawn from the fiery energy of his soul, and the rapidity of his destructive march. In the fourteen years of his reign, a.d. 1389-1403, he incessantly moved at the head of his armies, from Prusa to Adrianople, from the Danube to the Euphrates....From Angora to Amasia and Erzeroam, the northern regions of Anatolia were reduced to his obedience; he stripped of their hereditary possessions his brother Emirs, of Ghermian and Caramania, of Aidin and Sarukhan; and after the conquest of Iconium, the ancient kingdom of the Seljukians again revived in the Ottoman dynasty. Nor were the conquests of Bajazet less rapid or important in Europe. No sooner had he imposed a regular form of servitude on the Servians and Bulgarians, than he passed the Danube, to seek new enemies and new subjects in the heart of Moldavia. Whatever yet adhered to the Greek empire in Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, acknowledged a Turkish master....He next turned his arms against the kingdom of Hungary, the perpetual theatre of the Turkish victories and defeats....In the battle of Nicopolis, A.D. 1396, Bajazet defeated a confederate army of an hundred thousand Christians, who had proudly boasted, that if the sky. should fall they could uphold it on their lances....In the pride of victory, Bajazet threatened that he would besiege Buda; that he would subdue the adjacent countries of Germany and Italy; and that he would feed his horse with a bushel of oats on the altar of St. Peter at Rome." (Ģib, chap. lxiv.) This proud career was, indeed, arrested, and the fate of Constantinople for a while suspended, by the advance of a still more powerful conqueror. Tamerlane, after overrunning Turkistan, Persia, Russia, and Hindostan, turned his irresistible arms against the western provinces of Asia; and in the battle of Angora, in which Bajazet brought into the field four hundred thousand men, to oppose seven hundred thousand, the former underwent a total defeat, the whole of Anatolia was overwhelmed by the Tartar hordes, and the narrow strait which divides Asia from Europe alone prevented the total overthrow of the Turkish empire. But this mighty conqueror, like Zingis Khan about two centuries before, resembled a portentous meteor, which after a transient blaze totally disappears. Tamerlane withdrew with his myriads of horse from the western to the eastern extremity of Asia, to avenge in China the expulsion of the Tartar dynasty *; and the Turkish empire rose again from its ruins" the massy trunk" (says Gibbon) "was bent to the ground; but no sooner was the hurricane passed away, than it again rose with fresh vigour and more lively vegetation." After a period of civil wars, the Turkish dominions in Europe and Asia were again united, A.D. 1421, under Amurath II., a wise and valiant prince; than whom no It may seem extraordinary that these tremendous conquerors should not have been noticed by the Spirit of prophecy; but it is to be remembered, that the Roman empire, or Christendom, is the peculiar subject of the Apocalyptic visions, and that the conquests of Zingis Khan and Tamerlane but little affected that empire, and, in effect, that they rather protracted the existence of the Eastern empire, than hastened its downfal. man, says Cantemir, obtained more or greater victories; Belgrade and Constantinople alone withstood his arms. The capture of the latter was, however, only reserved to grace the arms of his son Mahommed II. styled by Gibbon the great destroyer." "The conquest of two empires, twelve kingdoms, and two hundred cities, is ascribed to his invincible sword." This Gibbon styles "a vain and flattering account;" remarking, that " under his command the Ottoman forces were always more numerous than their enemies; that their progress was bounded by the Euphrates and the Adriatic; and his arms were checked by Huniades and Scanderbeg, by the Rhodian knights and by the Persian king." This very remark, however, sufficiently discloses the actual extent of his dominion; and the reduction of Constantinople, as the historian himself observes, has sealed his glory." This was the great object of his ambition, and, after mighty preparations, was at length achieved by him, A. D. 1453; and it is to be particularly observed, in reference to the prophecy, this his success is in a great measure to be ascribed to the use of artillery. "Among the implements of destruction," (I still cite Gibbon), "he studied with peculiar care the recent and tremendous discovery of the Latins, and his artillery surpassed whatever had yet appeared in the world." (Gib. chap. lxviii.) By it he was enabled to batter down those walls which had defied all former attacks; and, after a valiant but ineffectual resistance on the part of the emperor, the city fell a prey to the sword of the conqueror. "It was thus, after a siege of fifty-three days, that Constantinople, which had defied the power of Chosroes, the Chagan, and the Caliphs, was irretrievably subdued by the arms of Mohammed II. Her empire only had been subverted by the Latins; her religion was trampled in the dust by the Moslem conquerors." -The foregoing sketch of the origin and progress of the Ottoman power, |