nary life (Carlyle's "shams") are sure on these occasions to swim with the stream and take part with the evil, make me strongly feel exemplified what the Scripture says about the strait gate and the wide one,-a view of human nature which, when looking on human life in its full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, I imagine, to find it hard to realize; but here, in the nakedness of boy-nature, one is quite able to understand how there could not be found even ten righteous in a whole city. And how to meet this evil I really do not know; but to find it thus rife after I have been years fighting against it, is so sickening that it is very hard not to throw up the cards in despair, and upset the table. But then the stars of nobleness which I see amid the darkness are so cheering, that one is inclined to stick to the ship again, and have another good try at getting her about. TRUE PREACHING OF THE GOSPEL. To his sister Susannah-1830. No one seems to me to understand our dangers, or at least to speak them out manfully. One good man, who sent a letter to the Times the other day, recommends that the clergy should preach subordination and obedience. I seriously say, God forbid they should; for, if any earthly thing could ruin Christianity in England, it would be this. If they read Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Habakkuk, they will find that the prophets, in a similar state of society in Judea, did not preach subordination only or chiefly, but they denounced Oppression, and amassing overgrown properties, and grinding the laborers to the smallest possible pittance; and they denounced the Jewish high-church party for countenancing all these iniquities and prophesying smooth things to please the aristocracy. If the clergy would come forward as one man, from Cumberland to Cornwall, exhorting peaceableness on the one side, and justice on the other, denouncing the high rents and the game laws, and the carelessness which keeps the poor ignorant and then wonders that they are brutal, I verily believe they might yet save themselves and the state. INTERCOURSE WITH THE POOR. To J. C. Vaughan, Esq.-1835. I am glad that you have made acquaintance with some of the good poor. I quite agree with you that it is most instructive to visit them, and I think that you are right in what you say of their more lively faith. We hold to earth and earthly things by so many more links of thought, if not of affection, that it is far harder to keep our view of heaven clear and strong. When this life is so busy, and therefore so full of reality to us, another life seems by comparison unreal. This is our condition, and its peculiar temptations; but we must endure it, and strive to overcome them, for I think we may not try to flee from it. POPISH AND OXFORD VIEW OF CHRISTIANITY! To T. S. Pasley, Bart.—1836. The Popish and Oxford view of Christianity is that the church is the mediator between God and the individual; that the church (i. e. in their sense, the clergy) is a sort of chartered corporation, and that by belonging to this corporation, or by being attached to it, any given individual acquires such and such privileges. This is a priestcraft, because it lays the stress, not on the relations of a man's heart toward God and Christ, as the gospel does, but on something wholly artificial and formal,-his belonging to a certain so-called society: and thus,-whether the society be alive or dead,-whether it really help the man in goodness or not,still it claims to step in and interpose itself as the channel of grace and salvation, when it certainly is not the channel of salvation, because it is visibly and notoriously no sure channel of grace. Whereas, all who go straight to Christ, without thinking of the church, do manifestly and visibly receive grace, and have the seal of His Spirit, and therefore are certainly heirs of salvation. This, I think, applies to any and every church, it being always true that the salvation of a man's soul is effected by the change in his heart and life, wrought by Christ's Spirit; and that his relation to any church is quite a thing subordinate and secondary: although, where the church is what it should be, it is so great a means of grace that its benefits are of the highest value. But the heraldic or succession view of the question I can hardly treat gravely: there is something so monstrously profane in making our heavenly inheritance like an earthly estate, to which our pedigree is our title. And, really, what is called succession is exactly a pedigree, and nothing better; like natural descent, it conveys no moral nobleness,-nay, far less than natural descent: for I am a believer in some transmitted virtue in a good breed, but the succession notoriously conveys none. So that to lay stress upon it, is to make the Christian church worse, I think, than the Jewish; but the sons of God are not to be born of bloods (i. e. of particular races), nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man (i. e. after any human desire to make out an outward and formal title of inheritance), but of God (i. e. of Him who can alone give the only true title to His inheritance, the being conformed unto the image of his Son). I have written all this I could not fairly and honestly represent | extract like this from such of his writings as this great and good man without giving an constituted a large portion of his life-work. in haste as to the expression, but not at all in haste as to the matter of it. But the simple point is this: does our Lord, or do his apostles, encourage the notion of salvation through the church? or would any human being ever collect such a notion from the Scriptures? Once begin with tradition and the so-called Fathers, and you get, no doubt, a very different view. This the Romanists and the Oxfordists say is a view required to modify and add to that of the Scripture. I believe that, because it does modify, add to, and wholly alter the view of the Scripture, it is therefore altogether false and anti-christian. LIVELINESS ESSENTIAL FOR A SCHOOLMASTER. To H. Balston, Esq.-1839. Another point to which I attach much importance is liveliness. This seems to me an essential condition of sympathy with creatures so lively as boys are naturally, and it is a great matter to make them understand that liveliness is not folly or thoughtlessness. Now, I think the prevailing manner among many valuable men at Oxford is the very opposite to liveliness; and I think that this is the case partly with yourself; not at all from affectation, but from natural temper, encouraged, perhaps, rather than checked, by a belief that it is right and becoming. But this appears to me to be in point of manner the great difference between a clergyman with a parish and a schoolmaster. It is an illustration of St. Paul's rule, "Rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep." A clergyman's intercourse is very much with the sick and the poor, where liveliness would be greatly misplaced; but a schoolmaster's is with the young, the strong, and the happy, and he cannot get on with them unless in, animal spirits he can sympathize with them, and show them that his thoughtfulness is not connected with selfishness and weakness. OLD ENGLISH DIVINES-BUNYAN, MILTON. To Mr. Justice Coleridge-1836. I have left off reading our divines, because, as Pascal said of the Jesuits, if I had spent my time in reading them fully, I should have read a great many very indifferent books. I never yet found one of them who was above mediocrity. But if I could find a great man among them, I would read him thankfully and earnestly. As it is, I hold John Bunyan to have been a man of 1 His admiration of the Pilgrim's Progress was very great:-"I cannot trust myself," he used to say," to read the account of Christian going up to the Celestial gate, after his passage through the river of Death." And when, in one of the foreign tours of his later years, he had read it through again, after a long interval, "I have always," he said, "been struck by its piety; I am now struck equally, or even more, by its profound wisdom." incomparably greater genius than any of them, and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity. His Pilgrim's Progress seems to be a complete reflection of Scripture, with none of the rubbish of the theologians mixed up with it. I think that Milton-in his "Reformation in England," or in one of his "Tracts," I forget which-treats the church writers of his time, and their show of learning, utterly uncritical as it was, with the feeling which they deserved. ALLAN CUNNINGHAM, 1784-1842. ALLAN CUNNINGHAM, a happy imitator of the old Scottish ballads, and a man of various talents, was the son of humble parents, and was born at Blackwood, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, December 7, 1784. After having received an ordinary school-education, he was apprenticed to a stone-mason, and for some years followed that business. But, growing weary of this, in 1810 he removed to London, and connected himself with the newspaper press. In 1814 he was selected by Sir Francis Chantry as a superintendent and assistant in his studio; and it is thought that that eminent sculptor is indebted to Cunningham for the marks of imagination and fancy that appear in his works. He continued in the establishment of Chantry, at the same time constantly employing his indefatigable pen, till his death, which took place on the 29th of October, 1842. Allan Cunningham was a most industrious writer,1 and all his works, whether of prose or poetry, are instructive and pleasing in an unusual degree. He evidently puts his soul in all that he writes, and makes us feel because he feels first himself. Some of his smaller poems are perfect gems, and his dissertation upon the history and peculiarities of Scottish song exhibits a prose style of great clearness, eloquence, and power. From this I select the following. After dwelling with amiable partiality on the greater love of music and song which the Scotch possess, as compared with the English, he thus speaks of THE INFLUENCE OF SCOTLAND AND HER SONGS. Song followed the bride to the bridal chamber, and the corpse when folded in its winding-sheet,-the hag as she gratified her own malicious nature with an imaginary spell for her neighbor's harm, and her neighbor who sought to counteract it. Even the enemy of salvation solaced, according to a reverend authority, his conclave of witches with music and with verse. The soldier went to battle with songs and with shouts; the sailor, as he lifted his anchor for a foreign land, had his song also, and with song 1 The following works are from the prolific | pen of Cunningham:-Gallery of Pictures, 2 vols.; Lives of Painters, Sculptors, &c., 6 vols.; Lord Roldan, a Romance, 3 vols.; Maid of Elvar, a Poem; Paul Jones, a Romance, 3 vols.; Songs of Scotland, 4 vols.; Traditionary Tales * * * * he welcomed again the reappearance of his native hills. Song seems to have been the regular accompaniment of labor: the mariner dipped his oar to its melody; the fisherman dropped his net into the water while chanting a rude lyric or rhyming invocation; the farmer sang while he consigned his grain to the ground; the maiden, when the corn fell as she moved her sickle; and the miller had also his welcoming song when the meal gushed warm from the mill. In the south, I am not sure that song is much the companion of labor; but in the north there is no trade, however toilsome, which has banished this charming associate. It is heard among the rich in the parlor, and among the menials in the hall: the shepherd sings on his hill, the maiden as she milks her ewes, the smith as he prepares his welding heat, the weaver as he moves his shuttle from side to side, and the mason, as he squares or sets the palace-stone, sings to make labor feel lightsome and the long day seem short. The current of song has not always been poured forth in an unceasing and continued stream. Like the rivulets of the north, which gush out into rivers during the season of rain and subside and dry up to a few reluctant drops in the parching heat of summer, it has had its seasons of overflow and its periods of decrease. Yet there have been invisible spirits at work, scattering over the land a regular succession of lyrics, more or less impressed with the original character of the people, the productions of random inspiration, expressing the feelings and the story of some wounded heart, or laughing out in the fullest enjoyment of the follies of man and the pleasant vanities of woman. From them, and from poets to whose voice the country has listened in joy, and whose names are consecrated by the approbation of generations, many exquisite lyrics have been produced which find an echo in every heart, and are scattered wherever a British voice is heard, or a British foot imprinted. Wherever our sailors have borne our thunder, our soldiers our strength, and our merchants our enterprise, Scottish song has followed, and awakened a memory of the northern land amid the hot sands of Egypt and the frozen snows of Siberia. The lyric voice of Caledonia has penetrated from side to side of the eastern regions of spice, and has gratified some of the simple hordes of roving Indians with a melody equalling or surpassing their own. Amid the boundless forests and mighty lakes and rivers of the western world, the songs which gladdened the hills and vales of Scotland have been awakened again by a kindred people; and the hunter, as he dives into the wilderness, or sails down the Ohio, recalls his native hills in his retrospective strain. These are no idle suppositions which enthusiasm creates for national vanity to repeat. For the banks of the Ganges, the Ohio, and the Amazon, for the forests of America, the plains of India, and the mountains of Peru or Mexico, for the remotest |