stranger may be safely confided to an Aeneze; and however importunate the guides may be for presents, they are most punctiliously faithful to their employers. Yet, such is their inordinate love of gain, that no dependance is to be placed on their veracity in matters of merchandise; and they cheat each other at every opportunity. They are not chargeable, as a nation, with any excess of sensuality; being rather abstemious than otherwise. In his tent, the Arab is lazy and indolent, leaving his wife and daughters to perform the drudgery of the domestic concerns: but seated on his mare, no toil is too great for him. A striking characteristic of the Bedouin is his patience under poverty and suffering. He is too proud to show discontentment or to utter complaint: never begs for assistance, but strives with his utmost labour to retrieve his losses. Their belief in fate and a controlling Providence, enables them to meet every adversity, with a stoical endurance. But this resignation does not lead the Arab, as it does the Turk, to apathy; they are incited to stronger exertion by calamity, and reproach the Turks with the proverb, 'He bared his back to the musquitoes, and then exclaimed, God has decreed that I should be stung.'

We do not find many new illustrations of the natural history of the Bible in this volume. The female camel is the most valuable possession of the Arab, and next to it in estimation, is a fleet mare. With respect to the capability of camels to endure the want of water, it is said, that this faculty varies according to their different races: those from cold climates requiring drink every second day; but that all over Arabia four whole days in summer, or possibly, in some cases, five, constitute the utmost extent of time that they can endure the privation. In the winter they seldom drink, excepting when on journeys; the early succulent herbs supplying them with sufficient moist

There is no territory, however, according to this traveller, in any route through Arabia, where wells are farther distant from each other than three and a half days journey. He never knew of water being found in the stomach of a slaughtered camel. He heard an incredible tradition of a camel travelling two hundred and fifty miles in a day, but had every reason to trust another account of a camel, which, for a wager, went a hundred and twenty-five miles in eleven hours. He says, that the natural gaits of a camel are not so swift as those of the horse: that its natural pace is an easy, gentle amble of about five miles an hour, at which rate it will continue, for many

days and nights. Messengers have thus reached Aleppo from Bagdad, a journey of twenty-five days for caravans, in seven days; and from Cairo to Mecca, a usual journey of forty-five days, in eighteen days, without changing their animals.

Locusts abound in the desert; sometimes ravaging all the vegetation, and even penetrating the dwellings, and devouring the leathern vessels. As they come invariably from the East, the Arabs suppose they are produced by the waters of the Persian Gulf. They are still used for food when boiled, salted, and dried. Mr. Madden says, they are often ground and made into bread. Burckhardt mentions, that the general impression of the abundance of horses in Arabia, is very erroneous. The breed is limited to the fertile pasture grounds, such as those in Mesopotamia, on the banks of the Euphrates, and the Syrian plains. He supposes, that the aggregate number in all Arabia, as bounded by Syria and the Euphrates, does not exceed fifty

thousand.

We cannot go farther into the details furnished in the notes before us. The outlines we have given are sufficient to show, that the character of this people has not been changed in the thirtyseven centuries, which have elapsed since the angel of the Lord proclaimed to the exile-mother of their ancestor' Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael, because the Lord hath heard thy affliction: and he shall be a wild man, his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him: and he shall dwell in the presence of his brethren. The tribes of the desert are the living proofs of the faithfulness of Him who heard Abraham's prayer, and announced, Behold, I have blessed Ishmael, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly: twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.'

225

ARTICLE V.-MEMOIR AND SERMONS OF THE REV. EDWARD PAYSON, D. D.

A Memoir of the Rev. Edward Payson, D. D., late Pastor of the Second Church in Portland. By Asa Cummings, Editor of the Christian Mirror. Second Edition, Boston, Crocker & Brewster. New York, J. Leavitt, 1830, 8vo. 12mo. pp. 400.

Sermons by the late Edward Payson, D. D., Portland. Shirley and Hyde, 1828, 8vo. pp. 503.

WE think that no man can rise from the perusal of the works which we have placed at the head of this article, but with deep, and in some respects, melancholy emotions. It will not be so much, that he has been conversing with a man naturally of melancholy temperament, though it will not be strange if he rises with some of the shades hovering over him, which occasionally darkened Payson's path. It may not be, that he is looking upon the only memorials that remain of a personal friend. But it will be, that this shining light, so far as the earth is concerned, is extinguished; that this burning, rapid, etherial heaven-born spirit, that so well knew the way to the human heart, and so faithfully rebuked crime, and so victoriously raised the standard of the Messiah whenever he went forth to spiritual battles, has gone where the din of conflict is unheard. That warrior sleeps in death. He left the scene at an early age, and left it too, we fear, because he did not hear the cautious voice of prudence, till it was too late. The tongue sleeps in death, unable to speak for its master; and the eye is closed unfeared by the sinner, made speechless and dim to all human appearance, by a zeal too ardent for the frail body, and by disregarding the lessons of colder, but more useful wisdom.

These works are all that remain as memorials of this faithful and successful minister of the Gospel. To us he was personally a stranger. Yet we had heard of his name; and as a most successful and pungent preacher, his fame was known extensively in the churches of this country. As a tribute to his well earned reputation, he was invited to two of the most important stations in our land. And we doubt not, that it will be conceded that he was one of the most successful preachers that have adorned the American pulpit. We know the disadvantages under which VOL. III. No. II.-2 F

we attempt to form an estimate of character, when we have only the embodied form of thought; when we sit down as critics to review, with hearts cold and barren, the doings of a man of singular piety; when we have not seen the man, nor been admitted to the confidence of private friendship, nor heard his voice in the thronged assembly, nor beheld the kindling of his eye, the fervor of action, the power of the persuasion that bears men onward to the point at which it aims.

Yet we sat down not so much to look at the man, as to search for the elements of success in the gospel ministry. With that view, we have turned over the pages of these works with singular interest, and we propose to lay the results of our reflections before our readers. We wish to concentrate on our pages the rays of light, whether they glow in the North, or burn in the South, or strike upon us aslant from the regions of the setting sun, that we may hold up before the ministry now in the field, and those who are soon to enter the field, every great and illustrious example of men, who, in the religious cause have nobly toiled and died. We see already in action, many who are called to the grand work of proclaiming, like Payson, saving truth to mankind; and, an unusual portion of them men in comparatively early life; and it is with no invidious intention, that we say, we desire to see burning in their bosoms, more of the godlike spirit which animated the heart of this successful man of God. We see rising around us, many, who will soon stand as he did, the ambassadors of peace to a dying world; and we desire as much as may lie in us, by the example of such men, to impress upon them the truth, that the ministry is the grandest of all human employments; but grand only, when it concentrates to the single purpose of saving souls, every original faculty of thought, and every energy which the utmost stretch of all the powers may impart; and most grand when it weeps, like Payson, over dying men, and finds out the secret place of tears, and bears upon the conscience all of tenderness and awe furnished by the condition here, and the impending doom hereafter; and when, by the grace of God, it draws hosts of weeping sinners to the altars and the cross.

Of Payson as a man, we propose to say little. They who wish to know what he was, will find a most interesting portraiture in the little volume which sketches his life. We wish that our humble recommendation, would avail enough to put this biography into the hands of every minister in the land.

We do not speak of Dr. Payson as a man of splendid original endowments. Aside from what may be considered as the

moral part of his character, we do not know that he would have been particularly eminent. He possessed a sound understanding; a masculine, thorough, and what Locke calls, "large roundabout sense," a lively imagination, a memory remarkably tenacious, and a power of employing full and flowing imagery to illustrate and adorn, what he wished vividly to present. This last trait, in a special manner, we think, was much increased by his religious feelings. He was one of the instances, where the heart prompted the man to look at all things as fresh from the hand of God. Creation was seen to be spread out before him, to win him to ardent devotion; and as his eye rested on those works, he drew from them arguments and illustrations, to bear upon the consciences of men, and win the wandering world to God and heaven.

That Payson might not have risen to eminence in other professions, we do not deny. But we think, that neither at the bar, nor in the senate, would he ever stood as high as in the sacred ministry. It was not that his talents were, by nature, peculiarly fitted for the desk; it was, that they were devoted without reserve to the honour of God; that every attainment was consecrated; that every power of thought was directed to the great purpose of saving men from death. Religion, in his case, as it might do in every case, called up energies that would otherwise have been dormant: gave vigour to what at the bar, or in the political assembly, might have been no more than ordinary pleading, and no singularly eminent powers of debate; and urged the mind onward to new tracks of thought, and led him to task all the powers of invention to find access to the heart of man. There is, we think, no fact better established, than that piety may thus of itself urge the mind onward into otherwise unknown fields of thought; and give resurrection to powers of mind that might have otherwise slept for ever. It is to the human faculties, what the rays of a vernal sun are to the material creation. It scatters the chills of the long dreary frosts; quickens into motion the juices long congealed; dissolves the far-spreading snows; carpets the earth with living green; fills the air with perfumes, and the groves with melody; and excites into rapid and lovely being far spread wastes and solitudes that slept in the chills of death. The love of God res

tores the vital functions to the heart dead in sin; opens the blind eyes on the beauty of new worlds; unstops the ear to the harmony of the skies, and spreads out fields of thought, where the mind may for ever range, and the fancy expatiate in bound