they wished him a good night, and were leaving the room. He desired them to stay, spoke to each of them separately. He exhorted them all to continue to love each other. "And you, little thing," speaking to Eliza, "remember the hymn you learned, 'Birds in their little nests agree.' I am going to sleep as well as you; for death is only a good, long, sound sleep in the grave, and we shall meet again." John Wesley himself did not insist more than Joseph Priestley upon love as the vital air without which Christianity could not exist. The best answer to scepticism was the endeavour really to set up the Christian life within the Christian Church. The young men at Oxford who were influenced like the Wesleys by William Law's "Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life," and endeavoured against all ridicule of the world to carry it out to the full extent of Law's interpretation of a Christian's duty, placed love in the centre of their system. "If religion," said William Law, "teaches us anything concerning eating and drinking, or spending our time and money; if it teaches us how we are to use and contemn the world; if it tells us what tempers we are to have in common life, how we are to be disposed towards all people, how we are to behave towards the sick, the poor, the old, and destitute; if it tells us whom we are to treat with a particular love, whom we are to regard with a particular esteem; if it tells us how we are to treat our enemies, and how we are to mortify and deny ourselves; he must be very weak that can think these parts of religion are not to be observed with as much exactness as any doctrines that relate to prayers. It is very observable that there is not one command in the Gospel for public worship; and perhaps it is a duty that is least insisted on in Scripture of any other. The frequent attendance at it is never so much as mentioned in all the New Testament; whereas that religion or devotion which is to govern the ordinary actions of our life is to be found in almost every verse of Scripture." Law suggested three daily periods of private prayer besides the first morning and last evening devotions, and a theme for each. At nine o'clock the prayer should seek to quicken the spirit of humility. At noon the duty dwelt on should be universal love; and at three it❘ should be resignation to the will of God. When dwelling upon this duty of love, Law wrote, "You will perhaps say, How is it possible to love a good and a bad man in the same degree? Just as it's possible to be as just and faithful to a good man as to an evil man. Now are you in any difficulty about performing justice and faithfulness to a bad man? Are you in any doubts whether you need be so just and faithful to him as you need be to a good man? Now why is it that you are in no doubt about it? "Tis because you know that justice and faithfulness are founded upon reasons that never vary or change, that have no dependence upon the merits of men, but are founded in the nature of things, in the laws of God, and therefore are to be observed with an equal exactness towards good and bad men. Now do but think thus justly of charity, or love to your neighbour, that it is founded upon reasons that vary not, that have no dependence upon the merits of men, and then you will find it as possible to perform the same exact charity as the same exact justice to all men, whether good or bad." This note had been taken up by the Wesleys and Whitefield, and its music was felt by Cowper and by many an earnest soul within and without the churches. Thousands whose forefathers had been Puritans of the Old Testament were now Puritans of the New. We have seen how John Wesley was influenced early in his career as a reformer, by the New Testament Puritanism of the Moravian Brethren. John Cennick, a fellow-worker with Wesley and Whitefield in the Methodist school among the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol, joined the Moravians and went to Ireland in 1746, where he founded a settlement of Moravian Brethren, called Grace Hill, at Ballymena, in the county of Antrim. Here he kindled a like zeal in the heart of a young man of the village, John Montgomery, who in 1757, at the age of twenty-three, was received into communion by the Moravians at Grace Hill, and became a preacher among them. He married, in 1768, Mary Blackley, daughter of another member of the same community, and the eldest son of this marriage, born in November, 1771, three months after the death of the first child, a daughter, was James Montgomery, the poet. When he was born, his father had just settled at Irvine, in Ayrshire, as pastor of a small Moravian congregation there, the first that had been formed in Scotland. When James Montgomery was little more than four years old, his parents returned with him and their newly-born second son Robert to the settlement at Grace Hill; and there was another infant brother, named Ignatius, when James, not seven years old, was taken to Yorkshire and put to school in the Moravian settlement, called, after a town in Moravia, Fulneck, about six miles from Leeds. Six years afterwards, in 1783, the younger boys, Robert and Ignatius, were also left at Fulneck, because John Montgomery was going with his wife as missionary to the slave-drivers and slaves of Barbadoes. Moravians are remarkable for the pure devotion of their missionaries, who have gone out alone and unpaid to Greenland, to the huts of the American Indians, or of the negro slave, and to the far wilds of Tartary. The James Montgomery, who was destined by his parents for his father's calling, received his first impulse towards poetry when he was with some of the boys at Fulneck, who sat under a hedge and heard one of the Brothers read Blair's "Grave." Devotion to poetry grew in him with little to feed it, because works of imagination are seldom admitted into a Moravian school. He began, indeed, by imitating hymns of the Moravian collection. Montgomery became occupied with his own thoughts, seemed indolent, and was at last held to be probably unfit for the ministry. For a time, at least, he should be put to a business, and in 1787, at the age of sixteen, he was placed with a Moravian who kept a small retail shop as a fine bread baker, at Mirfield, near Fulneck. Here James Montgomery wrote verse for a year and a half, having plenty of leisure, and from this place he departed with all his MSS. and a single change of linen. New clothes had been given to him, but as he did not think he had fairly earned them, he went away in his old clothes, and had three shillings and sixpence in his pocket. When he had got as far as Wentworth, he found service again in a general store at Wath, with the consent of the kind-hearted Moravian he had left, who gave him a good character, supplied him with some money, and sent him the clothes he had left behind. James Montgomery was then a grave youth of eighteen, never absent from his duty in the shop, but filling up all leisure time with the production of MSS. His chief friend was a neighbouring stationer who had book parcels sometimes from Paternoster Row. He represented literature, approved of Montgomery's poems, and sent a parcel of them to "the Row" with recommendations of their author, who was following to find a publisher. Montgomery left Wath in 1790 for Paternoster Row, where Mr. Harrison, to whom he had been introduced, declined to publish his poems, but kindly offered him a situation in his shop. The poet still wrote. Advised to try prose, he tried a novel, tried an Eastern tale, failed, parted from the shelter he had found in Paternoster Row, and went back to the general store at Wath. His parents meanwhile were suffering hard fortunes at Barbadoes and Tobago. At Tobago there was, in the summer of 1790, a mutiny of soldiers, who set the town on fire, and in the following August a great hurricane. In October, the poor missionary's wife died of fever, after seven days' illness. In the following June, John Montgomery followed her, and the young poet in England became fatherless and motherless. Of the last days of the missionary in Tobago a comrade of the mission wrote home: "You may easily believe that our late brother's illness, which lasted sixteen weeks, put us to no small inconvenience. The room in which the negroes meet was the only place in which we could lodge him, and we have no other dining-room." In March, 1792, Montgomery, who was twenty-one years old, read in the Sheffield Register an advertisement for a clerk in a counting-house. He answered it, and went in April to Sheffield as a clerk in the employment of Joseph Gales, publisher of the Sheffield Register, who was an enterprising printer, bookseller, and auctioneer. Montgomery was soon an active writer in the Sheffield Register, and shared the best hopes of young and ardent minds that saw in the French Revolution a great means for the regeneration of society. At a meeting of the "Friends of Peace and Reform" gathered in Sheffield on the Fast Day, in February, 1794, this hymn, written for the occasion by young James Montgomery, was distributed, and sung by the assembled thousands : Her rivers bleed like mighty veins, O Thou, whose awful word can bind The roaring waves, the raging wind, Mad tyrants tame, break down the high Whose haughty foreheads beat the sky, Make bare Thine arm, great King of Kings: Burst every dungeon, every chain! Speak and the world shall smile in peace! In July, 1794, Joseph Gales left Sheffield to escape James prosecution for a letter in the Register. Montgomery, with help of money from a gentleman whom he had not before known, and who became a sleeping partner, bought the presses, types, and goodwill of the printing business, which was continued by the firm of James Montgomery and Co. On the 4th of July the Sheffield Register was born again, with an emblem of the world's hope in its new title, the Sheffield Iris. In January, 1795, Montgomery was tried at Doncaster, charged with printing, for a street-hawker, "A Patriotic Song, by a Clergyman of Belfast," which contained the stanza HYMN. O God of Hosts, Thine ear incline, Regard our prayers, our cause be Thine: When orphans cry, when babes complain, When widows weep, canst Thou refrain? Now red and terrible, Thine hand Scourges with war our guilty land; Europe Thy flaming vengeance feels, And from her deep foundations reels. JAMES MONTGOMERY. (From a Portrait taken in 1806.) Montgomery was sentenced for this to three months' imprisonment in York Castle, and a fine of £20. In York Castle he wrote the verses published in 1797 as "Prison Amusements;" and making Sheffield his home, as his judgment and power ripened, Montgomery not only made the Sheffield Iris one of the best journals in the provinces, but won more and more attention as a poet. After he had published other poems, "The Ocean" in 1805, and "The Wanderer in Switzerland" in 1806, the abolition of the African slave-trade in 1807 caused James Montgomery to write a poem in four parts on the "West Indies." The graves were there of his father and mother, who had died in the service of God; and while he painted in the first three books of this poem with generous sympathy the wrongs suffered by the negro in the rise and progress of the traffic that his country had put out her hand to stay, he opened the fourth book with lines that must come to the heart of those who remember what he knew of the devoted lives of the Moravian missionaries, to whom he thus paid honour: MORAVIAN MISSIONS. Was there no mercy, mother of the slave, When Europe languish'd in barbarian gloom, A Christian Israel in the desert fed, While ravening wolves, that scorned the shepherd's hand, Ages rolled by, the turf perennial bloomed O'er the lorn relics of those saints entombed; 1 The Moravian Brethren trace their descent from the Bohemian reformers of the time of Huss. They had since that time endured in their own country many persecutions before they were organised in 1722 by Count Zinzendorf at a settlement which they called Herrnhut (the Lord's Shelter), in Upper Lusatia. Since that date they have been re-organised as a society of Brethren who hold property in common, and seek to live only as servants of God. The charm of their religious peace and their unselfish energy is felt by all who come much into contact with them No miracle proclaimed their power divine, "Go forth, my sons, through heathen realms proclaim Mercy to sinners in a Saviour's name:" Thus spake the Lord; they heard and they obeyed;- Where roll Ohio's streams, Missouri's floods, Beneath the umbrage of eternal woods, The Red Man roamed, a hunter-warrior wild; On him the everlasting Gospel smiled; His heart was awed, confounded, pierced, subdued, Divinely melted, moulded, and renewed; The bold base savage, nature's harshest clod, Rose from the dust the image of his God. And thou, poor Negro! scorned of all mankind; Thou dumb and impotent, and deaf and blind; Thou dead in spirit! toil-degraded slave, Crushed by the curse on Adam to the grave; The messengers of peace, o'er land and sea, That sought the sons of sorrow, stooped to thee. The captive raised his slow and sullen eye; He knew no friend, nor deemed a friend was nigh, Till the sweet tones of Pity touched his ears, And Mercy bathed his bosom with her tears; Strange were those tones, to him those tears were strange, He wept and wondered at the mighty change, Felt the quick pang of keen compunction dart, And heard a small still whisper in his heart, A voice from heaven, that bade the outcast rise From shame on earth to glory in the skies. From isle to isle the welcome tidings ran; The slave that heard them started into man: Like Peter, sleeping in his chains, he lay, The angel came, his night was turned to day : "Arise!" his fetters fall, his slumbers flee; He wakes to life, he springs to liberty. A little later in the poem, after celebration of the men who had battled for the ending of this wrongGranville Sharp (who established against opposition the law of the Constitution that there are no slaves in England, and a negro found in England must, therefore, be free), Clarkson, Wilberforce, Pitt, and FoxMontgomery remembers the pure love of liberty in Cowper, and exclaims Lamented Cowper! in thy path I tread; Reginald Heber, who died in 1826, aged fortythree, is remembered among writers of a generation earlier than that with which some of the most vigorous of his contemporaries are associated. He was really three years younger than Dr. Chalmers, who lived more than twenty years longer, and seems, therefore, to us the younger man. Reginald Heber was born in April, 1783, at Malpas, in Cheshire. He was made familiar with the Bible from his earliest years, and it is said that he could, when five years old, generally tell where any passage quoted from it would be found. He was also from early years inquisitive for knowledge of all kinds, and was never seen in a passion. As a schoolboy, he found his chief recreation in books; but his liveliness and kindliness, and readiness as a teller of good stories, kept him always on the best terms with his schoolfellows. He was still studying the Bible daily, and at sixteen or seventeen considered Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" his favourite book. As a schoolboy, he was distinguished for his skill in composition. In 1800 he went to Oxford, and joined Brasenose College, where an elder brother was, as his father had been, a Fellow. In his first year he won the University prize for Latin verse with a "Carmen Seculare" upon the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Palestine was given as the subject for an extra prize in English verse. Heber worked so hard at it that he brought on an attack of illness, and was confined to his bed for a few days when the poem was only half done; but he finished it, and won the prize with one of the very best poems ever written by a young man upon such an inducement. Its quality, and the profound earnestness with which it was read by the young student in 1803-his age then being twenty-raised the audience to enthusiasm at the public recitation. This is the poem: PALESTINE. Reft of thy sons, amid thy foes forlorn, Mourn, widow'd Queen, forgotten Sion, mourn! Ye guardian saints! ye warrior sons of heaven, 10 20 20 30 If e'er your song on Salem's glories dwell, Fierce, hardy, proud, in conscious freedom bold, 50 60 70 " 1 Ardeni's rill. In the days of poetic "diction," few geographica! names escaped the disguise of false finery. If a man meant "Jordan" it did not follow that he would say "Jordan." The Hebrew letters "Yarden" would flow smoothly as Ardeni. Notes were in those days an essential part of the equipment of a published poem. The poet had, therefore, a place in which he informed the reader what he meant by "Almotana's tide" and "Ardeni's rill." Young Heber was only doing what the taste of the time required, and he could have quoted Aristotle on the elevating character of a few strange words in a composition. The old woman was of one mind with fine critics of her day when she found benefit to her soul from the mere hearing of "that blessed word 'Mesopotamia,'" which it was her good fortune not to understand. No robber rage the ripening harvest knows; 80 As the poor outcast on the cheerless wild, Arabia's parent, clasped her fainting child, And wandered near the roof, no more her home, Forbid to linger, yet afraid to roam : 90 My sorrowing Fancy quits the happier height, 100 Such now the clans, whose fiery coursers feed O Thou, their Guide, their Father, and their Lord, And refluent Jordan sought his trembling source; 120 O feeble boast of transitory power! Vain, fruitless trust of Judah's happier hour! Not such their hope, when through the parted main The cloudy wonder led the warrior train: 130 Nor, when five monarchs led to Gibeon's fight, 150 In heaven's own strength, high towering o'er her foes, Victorious Salem's lion banner rose: Before her footstool prostrate nations lay, And vassal tyrants crouch'd beneath her sway. 170 Yet e'en the works of toiling Genii fall, And vain was Estakhar's enchanted wall. In frantic converse with the mournful wind, There oft the houseless Santon rests reclin'd; Strange shapes he views, and drinks with wond'ring ears The voices of the dead, and songs of other years. Such, the faint echo of departed praise, Still sound Arabia's legendary lays; And thus their fabling bards delight to tell How lovely were thy tents, O Israel! For thee his iv'ry load Behemoth bore, And far Sofala teem'd with golden ore; Thine all the arts that wait on wealth's increase, Or bask and wanton in the beam of peace. When Tyber slept beneath the cypress gloom, And silence held the lonely woods of Rome; Or ere to Greece the builder's skill was known, Or the light chisel brush'd the Parian stone; Yet here fair Science nurs'd her infant fire, Fann'd by the artist aid of friendly Tyre. Then tower'd the palace, then in awful state The Temple rear'd its everlasting gate.1 180 190 1 Walter Scott, after the poem was finished, heard Heber read it, and enjoyed it greatly, but called attention to the omission of a point in the original narrative of the building of the Temple that was strikingly poetical: "There was neither hammer, nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building" (1 Kings vi. 7). Heber at once added the next reference to "majestic silence." |