How strange and mortifying that progress in personal religion is so difficult! that it should not be the natural, earnest, and even impetuous tendency of an immortal spirit, summoned to the prosecution of immortal interesta!

It often occurs to meditative thought, what an instant cure it will be for all the disorders at once, when the frame itself is laid down, and the immortal inhabitant, abandoning it, will care no more about it; will seem to say, "Take all thy diseases with thee now into the dust; they and thou

How very conditionally it is that firm, uninterrupted health is really a blessing. And what a testimony it is against our miserably perverted nature, that a real and eminently great good is so much in danger of proving an evil.

It continually surprises me to think, how little that is remarkable occurs (so as to be known) where a hundred thousand human beings, all busily intent on their purposes, are existing within the circuit of a very few miles. How monotonous is the human condition! In fancy, we night have supposed that among such a multitude of living, thinking, acting creatures there should be a continual succession of something to excite surprise, instead of an endless common-place of existence. But we see business just going on the usual way; sin of all sorts, constant to its customs; religion but little changing its aspects and ope

rations.

As to religion in this country, and the world at large, how passionately one could long to see some great movement, some striking and prodigious changes, some events answering to the figure of "a nation born in a day." It is disconsolate to see, in this respect, the year end nearly as it began a progress almost imperceptibly slow; such a dead weight on millions of souls; such a vast measure of means consumed in producing so little effect toward the one great end. One envies the people of those future times when a new order of powers and progress will be unfolded on the earth.

:

Have you any notion that the world is just on the point of prodigiously mending, or that there is any glimmer of the millennium on the horizon? There is truly little enough of any thing of the kind to be seen; but old as I am, and misanthropic, and sceptically given, and all that, I am really willing to hope that some considerable good may not be far off, though it is likely to come by a very rugged and costly process.

CLVII. TO THE REV. JOHN FAWCETT.

Stapleton, near Bristol, April 24, 1830. I was hesitating whether to look at the date of your letter; I usually avoid, if I can, in self-defence, seeing that part of a letter which I am beginning to answer, because it is almost sure to meet me in the character of a reproach. I have not, however, been lucky enough to escape catching sight of the date of yours, and it is just four months since. It gratified me much, both as a proof that friendships of youth may continue alive to far advanced age, and as conveying many interesting particulars of information from the scene of my early life and interests. But how few, how very few, of the persons of my acquaintance in that scene could be found in it if I revisited it now; I should have to read the names on tombstones of most of those with whom I familiarly conversed forty years since. My memory is bad to the most wretched degree; and no small sign of its being so is, that I have much less power of recollecting circumstances in early life than I have observed to be quite usual of persons of my age. As to things comparatively recent, I experience even more than the usual treacherousness of the memory of a person in age, particularly in respect to names. In meeting persons with whom I have been, or even am at present, familiarly acquainted, I am frequently at a loss for the name; so that, unwittingly asking a husband,-" How is Mrs. —?” or a wife,—“ How is Mr. -?" I am baffled, stop short, and am driven at last to say--" your wife,' or the "good man," or "good lady, at home." This has happened to me many a time with

persons whom I knew as well as my own door or my old Lat.

The worst of it is, that it makes reading very nearly useless to me; I retain but a very dim trace of any thing I read, even striking matters of fact; and as to matters of thought, sometime lately I read on perhaps 100 pages of some book or other (I forget what) without becoming aware, till I came to some remarkable name, or some such thing, that I had read all those pages but a few weeks before. Have you had any taste or fancy for graphical works, such as splendidly illustrated and picturesque books of travels, antiquity, and the like? This has been my taste quite to a fault; a fault I mean in reference to pecuniary means.

Pray, do you often preach? I have suffered an almost entire deposition from that office,-by physical organic debility as the primary cause, and, as an accessional one, by choice, from having felt the great inconvenience and laboriousness of doing occasionally what I have been so long out of the practice of; so that for a long time past I have declined wholly our city pulpits, and never go higher than an easy unstudied discourse now and then in one or two of the neighbouring country villages, where there is no stated ministry. Mr. Hall is in high physical vigour (for the age of 66), while often suffering severely the inexplicable pain in his back, of which he has been the subject from his childhood. His imagination (and therefore the splendour of his eloquence) has considerably abated, as compared with his earlier and his meridian pitch; but his intellect is in the highest vigour; and the character of his preaching is that of the most emphatically evangelical piety. His friends have now surrendered all hope of his doing any thing more in the way of authorship; they have ceased to remonstrate with him on the subject, but most deeply deplore this lack of service to the Christian cause, when they consider that he might have produced half a dozen, or half a score (the more the better) of volumes of sermons which would have filled a lamentable chasm in that province of our literature, and would have been decidedly, considered in their combination of high qualities, the foremost set of sermons in our language.

Lo you take any more interest in political matters now in

later, than you were inclined to do in earlier life? Very great things have been done in recent times. America set free-Greece-a humiliation of the Mohammedan empire— the Catholic emancipation-and a great part of the world put in a state of mobility, ominous, we may hope, of prodigious and accelerated changes.

How is my old friend Mrs. Fawcett? On meeting her 1 should look, with eager inspection, to recognize a countenance than which no one is more indelibly impressed on my memory. Give my most friendly regards to her, with congratulations that she has fought so gallantly through the toils of life.

CLVIII. TO B. STOKES, ESQ.

Stapleton, June 16, 1830.

One of the constellation which is shedding such lustre on our dark world (Dr. Okely*) has withdrawn, or is

* The Rev. William Okely, M.D., was the third son of the Rev. Francis Okely (formerly of St. John's College, Cambridge), a Moravian minister at Northampton. He was born at Bedford, Jan. 25, 1772, and educated first at Fulnec, and subsequently at Niesky and Barby. On completing his studies, he spent a short time at Christianfield in Denmark, and then returned to Fulnec in the capacity of teacher, but soon resigned, in consequence of holding sentiments which were incompatible with that office. After spending two years with a surgeon at Bedford, he removed to Edinburgh, where he prosecuted the study of medicine and took the degree of M.D. During his stay there, he was highly respected and distinguished for propriety of conduct and character, which he always attributed to his early education among the United Brethren. In 1797 he was chosen Physician of the General Infirmary at Northampton, and while there, published a sceptical work entitled "Pyrology." Shortly after he became a firm believer in Christian truth, and immediately published a recantation of his "Pyrology."

"The author," he says, " was himself an unconverted man, to whom, of course, all that relates to the transcendental part of creation, could not but appear confused and unintelligible, and the conduct and language of such as were real followers of Jesus, weak and enthusiastic. By the merciful preservation of God, however, he had continued an honest man, not pretending to know what he did not know; bold enough to assert what he did know, and vain enough to imagine that what he knew was all that could be known. Suppose such a man tolerably tinctured with the letter of Christianity, but neither understanding it, nor seeing any beauty in it,

withdrawing, his share of the lustre. I saw him lately in Bristol, whither he is come, in a state of extreme physical debility, from which his friends do not anticipate his possible recovery. He is a Moravian of much knowledge and mental sharpness; at the same time a very worthy man. Dr. Chalmers is to preach this evening for the Auxiliary of the British and Foreign School Society, as he did the day before yesterday, at the opening of a capital new meeting-house, built wholly at the expense of Mr. Hare the great floor-cloth manufacturer, and our most munificent promoter of religious especially, but of all, good designs; which he does, apparently, at the expense of far less self-denial than it appears to cost many of our rich professors of religion (especially such as have made their fortunes from nothing by industry) to contribute in a vastly less proportion. C. retains without the smallest diminution, his simple, friendly, unassuming character and manners. He has with him a delightfully pleasing woman, in the character of his

Dr.

except the moral precepts and human character of its Author; at the same time educated in retirement, and ignorant of the world; suppose such a one placed in a sphere calculated for extensive observation of mankind, and resolved to judge of the belief of men from their conduct, and not from their public professions;-the picture such a person would draw of man, would, I believe, be nearly that contained in the Pyrology. It is the picture of a natural man, the slave of Satan, dead in trespasses and sins, without God and Christ in the world, and hastening to endless perdition; it is the picture of a rational brute; it was his own picture.. The immediate sources whence most of the author's mistakes are derived, are first, a presumptuous reliance on the strength of his faculties, and extent of his information; secondly, a want of attention to the detail of the gospel history. The worst consequence of my former doctrine is, that it cuts off the doctrine of the atonement-that main pillar of Christianity."

On renouncing his sceptical views, Dr. O. solicited re-admission to the Brethren's church, and in that communion occupied various stations as minister or director of schools. He was distinguished for logical acuteness, and the fearless investigation of truth. His pulpit discourses were marked by originality, and rendered highly interesting by bringing the results of his study of human nature to bear on the characters and facts recorded in the scriptures. Besides the Pyrology, his only avowed publications were: 1. A Letter to Robert Southey, Esq., &c., on his Life of the late Mr. John Wesley, and especially that part in which he treats of the Moravians. 2. A Sermon on the Incarnation of the Son of God, 1824. He also contributed a valuable article to the Eclectic Review (Jan. and Feb., 1816), on Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works. He died July 9, 1830