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of a right hand. God's spirit will come less frequently to the heart that is only hardened by his influences, and which at every slighted visit is the more strengthened to resist his future solicitations. Do not expect that amid all these discouraging circumstances, after this protracted career of guilt, a divine hand will be upon you to draw you back to the commencement of your journey; to remove at once the fixedness of your sin. The Spirit of God, when it acts at all, operates in harmony with your own agency. "It doth persuade" you, while you can listen and ponder and understand. It presents truth to the eye, and it fixes the eye upon it. The more dimned has become the vision by sinful indulgence, the more difficult will be the conversion by the truth. Ah! is there not such a thing as a total blindness even in this life, which no divine influence will cure. The spirit is kind and compassionate; it takes a long while to grieve him utterly away; but he will not strive forever. When the soul as it were immures itself in dungeon walls, he will find some crevice to let in the light; but when every aperture is closed, and the doors are barred and bolted with a strength that yields to no knocking, then sadly, indeed, but surely the Spirit takes his eternal flight. "There is a sin unto death." In every man's destination there is a limit beyond which if he go, he is lost forever. Could you visit the abodes of despair, many a wretched one could point you to the moment in his history when for the last time he rejected the proffered aid, and sealed his own doom. Oh! my hearers, who of you has reached this critical period? Mighty in sin, mighty in strength to cope with the Mightiest of all, with eyes that can hardly see; with ears that can hardly hear; with a heart that can hardly feel. Yet to-day, after so long a time, God comes to thee with a gentle voice. Hear you not the tenderness of his invitation as it falls upon your well nigh paralyzed sense? See you not the beauty of his truth, as he holds it up to your almost blinded vision? Do not the repentings well nigh "kindle

together," even in your sluggish, death-stricken spirit? If you would rouse yourself to listen and to gaze, to love and to obey, this last mission might prove your spiritual birth-day. But if you still scorn and reject, you may not see him again till he is "laughing at your calamity," you may not hear him, till the sentence already determined is pronounced in your ear.

Now

I have thus set before you, my friends, the urgent claims of immediate repentance. I see not that as rational beings, you have any way of escape. In the former part of the discourse you saw how promptly you would have acted in worldly concerns which called for your immediate exertion; and now you see that the call of religious duty is infinitely louder and more pressing. Oh! be not inconsistent. Deny not to the famishing soul that sustenance you bestow on the body. Take not from God the moments you give to man. you are able, abuse not the precious talent. Now rich is the prize held out to you, trample not the jewel beneath your feet. Shall I not add, now or never! for who knows but the dark uncertainty of the future to which you leave yourselves may prove certain and eternal darkness to your souls? The considerations here presented apply to the minutest divisions of time. You are not called upon to repent this year, this day, this hour, but this moment. Delay not an instant. Set not up points in the immediate future for action; but now choose, resolve, do. Now say in your heart, I will be the Lord's, and now be the Lord's.

NOTE.

The preceding discourse was the second which Mr. Homer ever wrote, and was preached at Sherburne, Mass. in the afternoon of the first sabbath on which he ever occupied the pulpit. "On that afternoon," as he writes to a friend, "I preached on immediate repentance, my plainest and homeliest sermon." It was afterwards preached at Boston, Salem-street church; at Durham, N. H.; and at South Berwick, May 3, 1840.

ABSTRACTS AND NOTES

31

ON THE

CLASSICS.

PREFATORY NOTE.

The first of the following Articles is an Abstract or a condensed translation of the "Prolegomena in Homerum" by Richard Payne Knight, Esq. The second is an Analysis of "Die Erfindung der Buchstabenschrift,” pp. 85—122; by J. Leonhard Hug, D. D. Prof. of Theol. at Freiburg. The third is an Abstract of a Treatise " Ueber das Zeitalter und Vaterland des Homer," by Dr. Bernhardt Thiersch, Principal of a Gymnasium at Halberstadt. The fourth is a condensed translation of "Demosthenes als Staatsmann und Redner," by Dr. Albert Gerhard Becker, preacher at Quedlinburg. The notes which are added are a small portion of Mr. Homer's extensive criticisms upon the Greek Classics. Both the translations and the notes were prepared merely for Mr. Homer's private use, and are now published with but slight attempts to correct them, and with no important alterations.

ABSTRACTS AND NOTES.

I.

ABSTRACT OF R. P. KNIGHT'S PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS UPON THE POEMS OF HOMER.

1. The Doric invasion of the Peloponnesus occurred eighty years after the destruction of Troy.

2. The Grecian Refugees went first to Boeotia and Attica, and afterwards to Asia. Here cities sprang up, and as the fruit of their rapid refinement, the Homeric Poems appeared.

3. Nothing is known for a certainty concerning the authorship of these poems. In the revival of letters six hundred years subsequent to the Doric invasion, the Greeks could arrive at no definite conclusions.

4. It is now generally believed that Pisistratus first reduced to writing, and arranged the scattered fragments of the Iliad and Odyssey in their present order. But this belief is founded on an uncertain rumor first mentioned by Cicero,* and is rendered highly improbable from the circumstance that Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle make no mention of it.

5. Another circumstance which has given rise to the belief, is the fact mentioned in the Socratic dialogue entitled Hipparchus, that that prince or some of the family of Pisistratus first compelled the Rhapsodists at the Panathenaea to sing the rhapsodies in their regular order, rather than in the confused manner to which they had been accustomed.

6. Besides the Iliad and Odyssey, twenty minor poems were among the ancients attributed to Homer.

7. But eminent among all were the Iliad and Odyssey referred to one distinguished poet of remote antiquity. There were not wanting those who doubted whether one poet was the au

* De Oratore, Lib. III.

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