have with difficulty gathered in their harvest, the labourers having been almost every day carried out of the field incapable of work; and many die.

The French poetess is certainly chargeable with the fault you mention, though I thought it not very glaring in the piece I sent you. I have endeavoured indeed, in all the translations I have made, to cure her of that evil, either by the suppression of passages exceptionable upon that account, or by a more sober and respectful manner of expression. Still however she will be found to have conversed familiarly with God, but I hope not fulsomely, nor so as to give reasonable disgust to a religious reader. That God should deal familiarly with man, or, which is the same thing, that he should permit man to deal familiarly with him, seems not very difficult to conceive, or presumptuous to suppose, when some things are taken into consideration. Woe to the sinner that shall dare to take a liberty with Him that is not warranted by his word, or to which He himself has not encouraged him! Till the incarnation of the Godhead is verily believed, He is unapproachable by man upon any terms; and in that case to accost him as if we had a right of relationship, when in reality we have none, would be to affront Him to his face. But an Incarnate God is as much human as divine. When He assumed man's nature, he revealed himself as the friend of man, as the brother of every soul that loves him. He conversed freely with man while he was upon earth, and as freely with him after his resurrection. I doubt not therefore that it is possible to enjoy an access to Him even now unincumbered with ceremonious awe, easy, delightful, and

without constraint. This however can only be the lot of those who make it the business of their lives to please him, and to cultivate communion with him. And then I presume there can be no danger of offence, because such a habit of the soul is of his own creation, and near as we come, we come no nearer to him than He is pleased to draw us. If we address him as children, it is because he tells us he is our father. If we unbosom ourselves to him as to a friend, it is because he calls us friends; and if we speak to him in the language of love, it is because he first used it, thereby teaching us that it is the language he delights to hear from his people. But I confess that through the weakness, the folly, and corruption of human nature, this privilege, like all other Christian privileges, is liable to abuse. There is a mixture of evil in every thing we do; indulgence encourages us to encroach, and while we exercise the rights of children, we become childish. Here I think is the point in which my authoress failed; and here it is that I have particularly guarded my translation, not afraid of representing her as dealing with God familiarly, but foolishly, irreverently, and without due attention to his majesty, of which she is sometimes guilty. A wonderful fault for such a woman to fall into, who spent her life in the contemplation of his glory, who seems to have been always impressed with a sense of it, and sometimes quite absorbed in the views she had of it.

W. C.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Sept. 8, 1783. MRS. UNWIN would have answered your kind note from Bedford, had not a pain in her side prevented her. It still continues, but is less violent than it was. I, who am her secretary upon such occasions, should certainly have answered it for her, but was hindered by illness, having been myself seized with a fever immediately after your departure. The account of your recovery gave us great pleasure, and I am persuaded that you will feel yourself repaid by the information that I give you of mine. The reveries your head was filled with, while your disorder was most prevalent, though they were but reveries, and the offspring of a heated imagination, afforded you yet a comfortable evidence of the predominant bias of your heart and mind to the best subjects. I had none such; it would have been wonderful if I had: indeed I was in no degree delirious, nor has any thing less than a fever really dangerous ever made me so. In this respect, if in no other, I may be said to have a strong head; and perhaps for the same reason that wine would never make me drunk, an ordinary degree of fever has no effect upon my understanding.

The epidemic begins to be more mortal as the autumn comes on. Two men of drunken memory, Bob Freeman and Bob Kitchener, have died of it since you went. In Bedfordshire it is reported, how truly however I cannot say, to be nearly as fatal as the plague. It is well for those about me, that I am neither very subject to fevers, nor apt to lose my

senses when I have one. My ravings would be those of a man more conversant with things beneath than with things above, and if they bore any resemblance to my habitual musings, would serve only to shock bystanders. I heard lately of a clerk in a public office, whose chief employment it was for many years to administer oaths, who being light-headed in a fever, of which he died, spent the last week of his life in crying day and night-" So help you God-kiss the book-give me a shilling." What a wretch in comparison with you, and how happy in comparison with me!

I have indeed been lately more dejected and more distressed than usual; more harassed by dreams in the night, and more deeply poisoned by them in the following day. I know not what is portended by an alteration for the worse after eleven years of misery, but firmly believe that it is not designed as the introduction of a change for the better. You know not what I suffered while you were here, nor was there any need you should. Your friendship for me would have made you in some degree a partaker of my woes, and your share in them would have been increased by your inability to help me. Perhaps indeed they took a keener edge from the consideration

of your presence; the friend of my heart, the person with whom I had formerly taken sweet counsel, no longer useful to me as a minister, no longer pleasant to me as a Christian, was a spectacle that must necessarily add the bitterness of mortification to the sadness of despair. I now see a long winter before me, and am to get through it as I can. I know the ground

before I tread upon it; it is hollow, it is agitated, it suffers shocks in every direction; it is like the soil of Calabria, all whirlpool and undulation: but I must reel through it,—at least if I be not swallowed up by the way.

Mr. Scott has been ill almost ever since you left us. This light atmosphere, and these unremitting storms, are very unfriendly to an asthmatic habit. He suffers accordingly; and last Saturday, as on many foregoing Saturdays, was obliged to clap on a blister by way of preparation for his Sunday labours. He cannot draw breath upon any other terms. If holy orders were always conferred upon such conditions, I question but even bishopricks themselves would want an occupant. But he is easy and cheerful, and likes his wages well.

I beg you will mention me kindly to Mr. Bacon, and make him sensible that if I did not write the paragraph he wished for, it was not owing to any want of respect for the desire he expressed, but to mere inability. If in a state of mind that almost disqualifies me for society, I could possibly wish to form a 'new connexion, I should wish to know him; but I never shall, and things being as they are, I do not regret it. You are my old friend, therefore I do not spare you; having known you in better days, I make you pay for any pleasure I might then afford you, by a communication of my present pains. But I have no claims of this sort upon Mr. Bacon.

Be pleased to remember us both, with much affection, to Mrs. Newton, and to her and your Eliza; to Miss Catlett likewise, if she is with you. Poor Eliza droops and languishes, but in the land to which she is