hopes, and souls departing been enabled to go down to the grave as men go up to a throne, and living men in their every-day dress been enabled to rise above their every-day sins, and to become messengers of grace and wisdom to their comrades? Have these things come to pass? And that over a wide extent of country? And that in my day?

Then let me bless my Maker that I live in such a day, and let me go to His throne of grace, and with importunate prayer “give Him no rest," till upon me and my neighbours the same spirit is poured out from on high, and the same wonders wrought. Even the Westminster Review lays down earnest and united prayer for the salvation of souls, as one of the conditions necessary to obtain a Revival. Among the unfair things it says, one is perfectly fairthat if Christians really believed, instead of believing that they believe, Revivals would not be an occasional phenomenon in the Christian church, but its normal condition.

V.

In Memoriam.

JOHN ANGELL JAMES.

DR. CAMPBELL'S "Review," which has just come into our hands, "will be found," as he says, " to trench in no degree on the forth

1. "John Angell James; A Review of his History, Character, Eloquence, and Literary Labours, with Dissertations on the Pulpit and the Press, Academic Preaching, College Reform," &c. By JOHN CAMPBELL, D.D. London: J. Snow. 1860.

2. "The Funeral Services occasioned by the Death of the late Rev. John Angell James, of Carr's Lane Chapel, Birmingham: including the Funeral Sermon delivered in Carr's Lane Chapel on Sunday Morning, October 9th, 1859, and the Oration at the Interment, October 7th, 1859." By the Rev. R. W. DALE, M.A., his Colleague and Successor. Birmingham: Hudson. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co. 1859.

3. "Dying Pastors and the Undying Priest; a Sermon Preached in St. Martin's Church, Birmingham, on Sunday Evening, October 9th, 1859, being the Sunday after the Funeral of the Rev. J. A. James." By the Rev. J. C. MILLER, D.D., Honorary Canon of Worcester, Rector of St. Martin's, Chaplain to Lord Calthorpe. Birmingham: Willey. London: Stevenson. 1859.

4. "A Tribute of Grateful Love to the Memory of the late Rev J. A. James, with an Estimate of his Character and Influence." By the Rev. W. GUEST, of Leeds. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co. Leeds: Slade. 1859.

5. "The Faithful Servant: his Life and his Lessons. A Tribute to the Memory of John Angell James." By WILLIAM LANDELS, Minister of Regent's Park Chapel. London: Nisbet and Co. 1859.

6. "The Chariots of Israel and the Horsemen Thereof. A Sermon by the Rev. ALEX. RALEIGH, Preached in Hare Court Chapel, Canonbury, on Sunday Evening, October 9th, 1859, on the Occasion of the Death of the Rev. J. A. James." London: Snow. 1859.

coming Life of Angell James, from the pen of his gifted successor;" and he modestly asks no more than "to be allowed to claim for it the honour of an humble harbinger." As a whet, it will be welcome to many, including some who will not perhaps quite sympathise with all the writer's views on Academic Reform and other high matters, of which possibly they will think he treats in too off-hand, not to say flippant, a style. For ourselves, we deem an all-sided discussion of such questions highly desirable; and we are not sorry to see him coming forward as the mouth-piece of opinions very widely entertained as to the shortcomings of our Collegiate system in relation to what ought to be its grand aim, viz., a thorough Theological training, practical as well as scientific. We would not have less Humanity provided; but we quite agree with him that Divinity should be studied more, and should be fully re-instated in her royal rights as Queen of the Sacred Grove. We must not, however, suffer ourselves to be allured from our present purpose into a criticism on the volume. We simply take occasion, from its appearance, to indulge in an act of piety, not insincere if too long delayed, to the memory of the "Prince and great man in Israel" who is its subject. Worthily have hundreds of pulpits, belonging to all bodies of Evangelical Christians, already echoed with his praise since those early October days when the electric wires conveyed the shock which announced his death. Some of these obituary tributes have been rendered permanent by the help of the press. Of the printed Funeral Discourses which have come under our notice, we may particularly specify those of Canon Miller and Mr. Landels as marked by other excellencies of head and heart besides the catholic spirit which elevates, and the glow of personal affection which intensifies their tone. In the latter respect they are hardly surpassed by Mr. Guest's, or even by Mr. Dale's, with his unique sorrow, as smarting under the loss of such an elder colleague in the Gospel. None, too, but careless readers can help seeing the tears of individual friendship glistening behind the glorious rainbow which, in Mr. Raleigh's magnificent sermon, spans the fresh grave of the fallen spiritual hero. Even those who are not aware with what genial delight Mr. James, some years ago, looked forward to the prospect of welcoming Mr. Raleigh as pastor of a sister church in Birmingham, may here trace in the undertone of chastened private grief the influence of the fellowship then cemented between two kindred souls. Hope, however, is the predominant feeling in this masterly public improvement of the bereavement, as it should be in every Christian requiem. Mr. Raleigh rejects the broken column as a monument unsuitable to the dead in Christ, and deems child-like trust in the boundless love and infinite resources of the Great Head of the Church a better way of glorifying the grace of God in illustrious departed saints than any despondent limiting of the Holy One of Israel, such as is implied in the too common question, Quando ullum inveniemus parem? We cannot resist the temptation to transcribe from this eminently Christian discourse the following fine passage,

which soars so buoyantly on the wings of faith that it may possibly startle some of our readers ::

"We are deeply sensible of the loss; we mourn over so much departed worth; we feel the vacancy caused by the retirement, and, conscious of our personal insufficiencies, we pray for a double portion of the spirit of our glorified friend. May we not venture humbly to regard such feelings as tokens for good and beginnings of new strength? And if any in despondency should say, 'Where is the Lord God of Elijah ?' May we not answer, 'He is here, speaking in the prayers of survivors, working their sorrows to an aftercourse of joy, and girding them with secret strength for the toils and conflicts of the coming days.'

"None among them will be exactly like the venerated dead, nor is it necessary that they should be. That wonder-working Being who makes not any two blades of grass in the field, nor any two leaves in the forest, exactly alike, never mechanically repeats a human life. Every plant of His right hand of planting' has liberty to grow. From the influence of His resources He works new wonders in every age. In the womb of the future there lie types of character and forms of strength probably altogether different from any which have yet had the embodiment of life. Let not any, then, among the sons of the prophets mimic the thunder of Elijah, nor attempt to speak to the priests of Baal with his taunting voice of scorn, nor gird up their loins for a race with Ahab's chariot from Carmel to Jezreel. Let each speak in his own voice, use his own gifts, and, in the strength of grace, achieve and realise the Divine possibilities of his own life, and then we shall have ample and blessed compensation for what we have lost-compensation in which none will rejoice on earthı half so much as they who have just been parted from us, and carried up into heaven. They had from their seats to watch the effects of their removal. Angel-like, now they desire to look into these things; and even their perfect joy will receive new thrills of rapture as they see multitudes pressing forward to seize the falling standards, and to occupy and enlarge the fields of glorious toil and strife where they fought and fell. On the life of each one of His faithful servants the Saviour writes, 'It is finished.' The inscription is clearest on the noblest and best. There was no rehearsal, and there can be no repetition. Failure and disappointment must attend every attempt to recast the broken mould, or to relieve those grand forms of usefulness through which the spirits of our fathers lightened and spoke. We say it with reverence, but we are not called to a mere imitation of even the life of Christ. With deep significance the Apostle says, 'Let the same mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.' The great Builder has His plastic hand now on the mould of your individual life. If you feel the touch, and yield to the creative freshening influence, He will make the mould both fair and firm, and will endow it with organs and forms exactly suited to your individual need. He will give you a tongue to the time, an eye to the new scenes that are arising, and a firm

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hand that will not drop the sword in conflict, nor loose itself from the plough in toil. Are you willing? Are you ready? Breathe you forth this day, through the cloud of sorrow and bereavement that has gathered over us, the prayer of Elisha for a double portion of the spirit of our ascended friend to rest on pastors and people who mourn his loss? If so, then 'the God of all comfort' is making us rich amends, and proving to us that we are not straitened in Him."" Happy shall we deem ourselves if, in placing upon record our high estimate of the private and public worth of John Angell James, we can but catch something of the high-souled Christianity which breathes in these eloquent and suggestive words. They lift us at once to the right stand-point. To refer Christian excellence to its root in God, is to be put upon our guard against confounding the weed with the flower, at the same time that we are solemnly warned against enviously depreciating the Divine husbandry. It invests character with a halo of sacredness very different from that thrown around it by a purblind admiration. It reminds us that the image and superscription may be as mischievously shattered by the attempt to substitute gold for the clay on which they are impressed, as by defacing the lineaments and legend of the king. The Spirit working from without by Providence, and from within upon the heart, has fashioned a wondrous whole, upon which at death He seis His inviolable seal. The works of the Heavenly Artist we have simply to study, not to mend, any more than we may mar them For to mend is to mar them. Flattery and detraction are al ke rebuked as sacrilegious tampering with the true features of the "human face divine," portrayed by no mortal pencil. Indiscrimi nate eulogy by elevating blemishes to the level of the graces, no less effectually dims the lustre of these latter, than the slime voided by moroseness and malignity. The crowds of thoughtless adulators, no less surely than the stealthy assassins of honourable reputations, incur by their profane intermeddling His displeasure who says, "Touch not Mine anointed, and do My prophets no harm."

JOHN ANGELL JAMES was a native of the West country, having been born on the 6th of June, 1785, at Blandford-Forum, in Dorsetshire -the birthplace of several eminent persons. Amongst them we find a Primate of England and a Primate of Ireland, both born there within three years of each other --about the middle of the seventeenth century. The one was Archbishop Wake, of Canter, bury, the well-known translator of the writings of the Apostolical Fathers. At his death, he bequeathed £1,000 to the town for the erection of a charity school, and for other benevolent purposes The other, Dr. Thomas Lindsay, was some time chaplain to Henry Lord Capel, one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, and died Archbishop of Armagh, aged seventy, in the year 1724, eight years after his fellow-townsman had been raised to the highest dignity in that English Establishment, and thirteen before his death at the age of eighty. If wisdom in winning souls, and world-wide usefulness in turning many to righteousness, shine more brightly in the new

heavens than learning and ecclesiastical rank, the unadorned pastor of Carr's Lane Independent Chapel, Birmingham, may very well count in that firmament as a star of greater magnitude than either of the two contemporary primates, or than both of them together. The old Dorsetshire market-town, in which henceforward Nonconformity will feel as deep an interest as Anglicanism, has a history, had we time to go into it. The half-Roman, half-Saxon name points to an antiquity far beyond Doomsday Book. It must have been already hoary with years when the famous Damory oak hard by-which, before it was sold for firewood in the latter half of the last century, had a hollow seventeen feet high, twenty-three wide at the base, and twelve at the crown, so that it was large enough to hold twenty full-grown men-was but an acorn. From the Conquest down through the wars of the Great Charter, and the times of Archbishop Chicheley and his uncle Cardinal Beaufort, both of whom, like Simon de Montfort and Saier de Quincy in King John's reign, enjoyed manorial rights in the place, the stream of local tradition runs tolerably clear. The population-some three or four thousand-has had to do without manufactures, since they contrived to lose the market for their lace-superior to that of Brussels, and sold at £30 a yard or let slip from their fingers the cunning by which it was formerly twisted. Not for a long time back, if ever, a stirring, wide-awake town, one would say, like our Lancashire and Yorkshire hives of industry. Somewhat sleepy and dead-alive we might rather be inclined to fancy, and not without its share in the partial paralysis with which so many of the Western shires have been some time since afflicted, and which has entailed the gradual decay of their once flourishing clothing trade, and other like disasters. The impression is confirmed by the fact that the Blandford folks needed to be burnt out thrice within little more than half-a-century-not to speak of a like catastrophe in Camden's time before they would be scourged by this fiery discipline into the adoption of a less perishable and inflammable style of architecture. The last of these great fires happened in 1731. It broke out at a tallow-chandler's shop, situated at the junction of the four streets which make up the town, and reduced the Church, Townhall, schools, and all but forty of the houses, to ashes in an incredibly short space of time. The damage was computed at upwards of £100,000. This terrible rebuke proved effectual; and, though stunned for a while, Blandford afterwards rose, like a phoenix, from the conflagration, in repristinated youth and beauty. With its new Doric Town-hall and Grecian church, both of Portland stone, and its regular streets of handsome houses, rebuilt in brick and solid masonry, it became one of the finest little towns in the West of England.

It was not until his father's time that Mr. James's family settled in Blandford. The little village of Ower-Moigne, in the same county, about half-way between Dorchester and Wareham, was its seat in former generations, and the churchyard there abounds in tombstones