having lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces. The same is the portion of every man and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonour, and our beauty so changed, that our acquaintance quickly knew us not; and that change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak discoursings, that they who, six hours ago, tended upon us either with charitable or ambitious services, cannot, without some regret, stay in the room alone where the body lies stripped of its life and honour. I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends' desire by giving way, that after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does the fairest beauty change; and it will be as bad with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? what friends to visit us? what officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funeral?

The Day of Judgment.

Even you and I, and all the world, kings and priests, nobles and learned, the crafty and the easy, the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, the prevailing tyrant and the oppressed party, shall all appear to receive their symbol; and this is so far from abating anything of its terror and our dear concernment, that it much increases it. For although concerning precepts and discourses we are apt to neglect in particular what is recommended in general, and in incidences of mortality and sad events, the singularity of the chance heightens the apprehension of the evil; yet it is so by accident, and only in regard of our imperfection; it being an effect of self-love, or some little creeping envy, which adheres too often to the unfortunate and miserable; or being apprehended to be in a rare case, and a singular unworthiness in him who is afflicted otherwise than is common to the sons of men, companions of his sin, and brethren of his nature, and partners of his usual accidents; yet in final and extreme events, the multitude of sufferers does not lessen, but increase the sufferings; and when the first day of judgment happened-that, I mean, of the universal deluge of waters upon the old world-the calamity swelled like the flood, and every man saw his friend perish, and the neighbours of his dwelling, and the relatives of his house, and the sharers of his joys, and yesterday's bride, and the new-born heir, the priest of the family, and the honour of the kindred, all dying or dead, drenched in water and the divine vengeance; and then they had no place to flee unto, no man cared for their souls; they had none to go unto for counsel, no sanctuary high enough to keep them from the vengeance that rained down from heaven; and so it shall be at the day of judgment, when that world and this, and all that shall be born hereafter, shall pass through the same Red Sea, and be all baptised with the same fire, and be involved in the same cloud, in which shall be thunderings and terrors infinite. Every man's fear shall be increased by his neighbour's shrieks, and the amazement that all the world shall be in, shall unite as the sparks of a raging furnace into a globe of fire, and roll upon its own principle, and increase by direct appearances and intolerable reflections. He that stands in a churchyard in the time of a great plague, and hears the passing-bell perpetually telling the sad stories of death, and sees crowds of infected bodies pressing to their graves, and others sick and tremulous, and death dressed up in all the images of sorrow round about him, is not supported in his spirit by the variety

of his sorrow; and at doomsday, when the terrors are universal, besides that it is in itself so much greater, because it can affright the whole world, it is also made greater by communication and a sorrowful influence; grief being then strongly infectious, when there is no variety of state, but an entire kingdom of fear; and amazement is the king of all our passions, and all the world its subjects. And that shriek must needs be terrible, when millions of men and women, at the same instant, shall fearfully cry out, and the noise shall mingle with the trumpet of the archangel, with the thunders of the dying and groaning heavens, and the crack of the dissolving world, when the whole fabric of nature shall shake into dissolution and eternal ashes! Consider what an infinite multitude of angels, and men, and women, shall then appear! It is a huge assembly when the men of one kingdom, the men of one age in a single province are gathered together into heaps and confusion of disorder; but then, all kingdoms of all ages, all the armies that ever mustered, all that world that Augustus Cæsar taxed, all those hundreds of millions that were slain in all the Roman wars, from Numa's time till Italy was broken into principalities and small exarchates: all these, and all that can come into numbers, and that did descend from the loins of Adam, shall at once be represented; to which account, if we add the armies of heaven, the nine orders of blessed spirits, and the infinite numbers in every order, we may suppose the numbers fit to express the majesty of that God, and the terror of that Judge, who is the Lord and Father of all that unimaginable multitude!... The majesty of the Judge, and the terrors of the judgment, shall be spoken aloud by the immediate forerunning accidents, which shall be so great violences to the old constitutions of nature, that it shall break her very bones, and disorder her till she be destroyed. St Jerome relates out of the Jews' books, that their doctors · used to account fifteen days of prodigy immediately before Christ's coming, and to every day assign a wonder; any one of which, if we should chance to see in the days of our flesh, it would affright us into the like thoughts which the old world had, when they saw the countries round about them covered with water and the divine vengeance; or as these poor people near Adria and the Mediterranean Sea, when their houses and cities were entering into graves, and the bowels of the earth rent with convulsions and horrid tremblings. The sea, they say, shall rise fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, and thence descend into hollowness and a prodigious drought; and when they are reduced again to their usual proportions, then all the beasts and creeping things, the monsters and the usual inhabitants of the sea, shall be gathered together, and make fearful noises to distract mankind: the birds shall mourn and change their song into threnes and sad accents; rivers of fire shall rise from east to west, and the stars shall be rent into threads of light, and scatter like the beards of comets; then shall be fearful earthquakes, and the rocks shall rend in pieces, the trees shall distil blood, and the mountains and fairest structures shall return into their primitive dust; the wild beasts shall leave their dens, and shall come into the companies of men, so that you shall hardly tell how to call them, herds of men or congregations of beasts; then shall the graves open and give up their dead, and those which are alive in nature and dead in fear shall be forced from the rocks whither they went to hide them, and from caverns of the earth where they would fain have been concealed; because their retirements are dismantled, and their rocks are broken into wider ruptures, and admit a strange light into their secret bowels; and the men being forced abroad into the theatre of mighty horrors, shall run up and down distracted, and at their wits' end; and then some shall die, and some shall be changed; and by this time the elect shall be gathered together from the four quarters of the world, and Christ shall come along with them to judgment.

ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.

ROBERT LEIGHTON (1611-1684) was the son of a Scottish physician, Dr Alexander Leighton, whose tyrannical and barbarous treatment by the Starchamber of Charles I. forms a foul blot on the government of that monarch. Robert Leighton was educated at the university of Edinburgh, and afterwards resided for some time at Douay, in France, where the acquaintance of some accomplished French students polished and liberalised his mind. In December 1641, he was ordained minister of Newbattle, near Edinburgh, and there he delivered the sermons composing his celebrated Commentary on the First Epistle of St Peter. His incumbency extended to February 1653, when he resigned his parish of Newbattle, and became Principal of the university of Edinburgh, which office he held till March 1662, when he was induced to separate himself from the Presbyterian Church, and accept preferment in the Church of England. He did this with reluctance, and chose at first the small and obscure diocese of Dunblane, where he officiated for about eight years. At Dunblane, Leighton's favourite walk is still pointed out, and it has been made the subject of an interesting little poetical work (The Bishop's Walk, by ORWELL, or the Rev. Walter C. Smith, Glasgow). Leighton left his library to Dunblane, and the greater part of it is still preserved. In 1670, he was made Archbishop of Glasgow, having accepted that appointment on condition that he should be assisted in his efforts to carry out such conciliatory measures as might include the Presbyterians. The selfishness and brutality of Sharp and Lauderdale, and the resolute determination of the Presbyterians to consent to no compromise, frustrated the pious wishes and designs of the archbishop, and he tendered his resignation, which the king, after some delay, accepted. He afterwards lived in retirement with a sister at Broadhurst, in Sussex, but being suddenly summoned to London, he died there, after a few days' illness, June 25, 1684. None of Archbishop Leighton's writings were published during his lifetime. They consist of the Commentary on St Peter; Sermons, preached at Newbattle; Lectures and Addresses, delivered in Latin before the university of Edinburgh; and Spiritual Exercises, Letters, &c. Various editions of the collected works have been published in England and America, the most complete being that edited by the Rev. W. West, Nairn (1869-70). Burnet has eulogised Leighton (to whom he was tenderly attached) as possessing 'the greatest elevation of soul, the largest compass of knowledge, the most mortified and most heavenly disposition that he ever saw in mortal.' Other eminent divines are no less laudatory; and Coleridge regarded Leighton as best deserving, among all our learned theologians, 'the title of a spiritual divine.'

The elder Leighton wrote an intemperate polemical work, an Appeal to the Parliament; or Sion's Plea against the Prelacie (1628), for which he was, two years afterwards, sentenced to be publicly whipped at Westminster and set in the pillory, to have one side of his nose slit, one ear cut off, and one side of his cheek branded with a hot iron; to have the whole of this repeated the next week at Cheapside, with the addition of 'S. S.' (sower of sedition) branded on his cheek, a fine of £10,000 to be paid, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment in the Fleet! The fine probably could not be paid, but the rest of the sentence was put in force. After eleven years' confinement, the sufferer was liberated by the Long Parliament.

In the first chapter of his Commentary, Leighton says:

'As in religion, so in the course and practice of men's lives, the stream of sin runs from one age into another, and every age makes it greater, adding somewhat to what it receives, as rivers grow in their course by the accession of brooks that fall into them; and every man when he is born, falls like a drop into the main current of corruption, and so is carried down with it, and this by reason of its strength and his own nature, which willingly dissolves unto it, and runs along with it.' In this single period, Coleridge says, we have 'religion, the spirit: the philosophy, the soul; and poetry, the body and drapery, united; Plato glorified by St Paul!'

Arise, Shine (Isaiah lx. 1).

The day of the Gospel is too precious that any of it should be spent in sleep, or idleness, or worthless business. Worthless business detains many of us. Arise, immortal souls, from moiling in the dust, and working in the clay like Egyptian captives! Address yourselves to more noble work. There is a Redeemer come, who will pay your ransom, and rescue you from such vile service, souls of Christians can so much forget their first original for more excellent employment. It is strange how the from Heaven, and their new hopes of returning thither, and the rich price of their redemption, and forgetting all these, dwell so low, and dote so much upon trifles. How is it that they hear not their well-beloved's voice crying, Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away? Though the eyes of true believers are so enlightened that they shall not sleep unto death, yet their spirits are often seized with a kind of drowsiness and slumber, and sometimes even when they should be of most activity. The time of Christ's check to his three disciples made it very sharp, with me one hour? Shake off, believing souls, that heavy though the words are mild: What! could you not watch humour. Arise, and satiate the eye of faith with the contemplation of Christ's beauty, and follow after him till you attain the place of full enjoyment. And you others, who never yet saw him, arise and admire his matchless excellency. The things you esteem great appear so but through ignorance of his greatness. His brightness, if you saw it, would obscure to you the greatest splendour of the world, as all those stars that never go down upon us, yet are swallowed up in the surpassing light of the sun when it arises. Arise from the dead, and he shall give you light. Arise and work while it is day, for the night cometh wherein no man can work, says our Saviour himself. Happy are they who rise early in the morning of their youth; for the day of life is very short, and the art of Christianity long and difficult. Is it not a grievous thing that men never consider why they came into the world till they be upon the point of going out again, nor think how to live till they be summoned to die? But most of all unhappy he who never wakens out of that pleasing dream of false happiness till he fall into eternal misery. Arise, then, betimes, and prevent that sad awakening!

Idle Curiosity and Useless Contention.

Wise men observe that there is an inbred curiosity in men to know things to come rather than things present, and the affairs of others rather than their own. Yea, we spend much of our time and discourse inquiring what of this man? and what of the other? inquiring of matters private or public, of church or of state; as if, forsooth, all were equally capable to consider of all things; this were to level all men's understandings, which is as absurd and unreasonable as to level all men's estates. Much time is spent in doing evil, much in doing nothing, and almost all in doing nothing to the purpose. Some call this diversion, but we may truly call it distraction; for,

certainly, when men are thus employed, they are not at home with themselves, but are like the fool whose eyes are in the corners of the earth.

It is true, a man may live in silence and solitude to little purpose, as Domitian, who shut himself up in his closet, and there caught flies. One may there be haunted with many noisome thoughts, and such had need to take the advice which was given to one of the ancients, who, being asked what he was doing, answered: 'I am conversing with myself,' it was replied to him: 'Vide sit cum bono viro' (See it be with a good man). Such a man may be conversing with worse company than all the world, except he draw in what is better than himself and all the world, even God and his Spirit to converse with. Some will say that although we be not concerned in the private affairs of others, or in matters of state, yet the affairs of the church are such as we ought not a little to concern ourselves in them. I shall only say that all truths are not alike clear, nor all duties alike weighty to all, and do not equally concern all persons. Christians may very well keep themselves within the compass of their own sphere. Many things about which men dispute very warmly are of remote relation and affinity to the great things of Christianity. Some truths are of so little evidence and importance, that he who errs in them charitably, meekly, and calmly, may be both a wiser man and a better Christian than he who is furiously, stormily, and uncharitably orthodox. If it be the mind of God that that order which from the primitive times has been in constant succession in this and other churches, do yet continue, what is that to thee or to me? If I had one of the loudest, as I have one of the lowest voices, yea, were it as loud as a trumpet, I would employ it to sound a retreat to all our unnatural and irreligious debates about religion, and to persuade men to follow the meek and lowly Jesus. There is great abatement of the inwards of religion when the debates about it pass to a scurf outside, and nothing is to be found within but a consuming fever of contention, which tendeth to utter ruin. If we have not charity towards our brethren, yet let us have some compassion towards our mother. But if this cannot be attained, I know nothing rather to be wished for, next to the silent shades of the grave, than a cottage in the wilderness. Ah, my beloved, the body of religion is torn, and the soul of it expires, while we are striving about the hem of its garment !

The Difficult Passages of Scripture. Observe in general, how plain and easy, and how few are those things that are the rule of our life; no dark sentences to puzzle the understanding, nor large discourses and long periods to burden the memory. They are all plain: There is nothing wreathed nor distorted in them,' as Wisdom speaks of her instructions, Prov. viii. 8. And this gives check to a double folly amongst men, contrary the one to the other, but both agreeing in mistaking and wronging the word of God; the one is of those that despise the word, and that doctrine and preaching that is conformable to it, for its plainness and simplicity; the other of those that complain of its difficulty and darkness. As for the first, they certainly do not take the true end for which the word is designed, that it is the law of our life-and it is mainly requisite in laws, that they be both brief and clear-that it is our guide and light to happiness; and if that which ought to be our light, be darkness, how great will that

darkness be!'

It is true, but I am not now to insist on this point, that there are dark and deep passages in Scripture, for the exercise, yea, for the humbling, yea, for the amazing and astonishing of the sharpest-sighted readers. But this argues much the pride and vanity of men's minds, when they busy themselves only in those, and throw aside altogether the most necessary, which are therefore the easiest and plainest truths in it. As in nature, the commodities that are of greatest necessity, God hath made most

common and easiest to be had; so, in religion, such instructions as these now in our hands are given us to live and walk by: and in the search of things that are more obscure, and less useful, men evidence that they had rather be learned than holy, and have still more mind to the tree of knowledge' than the 'tree of life.' And in hearing of the word, are not they who are any whit more knowing than ordinary, still gaping after new notions, after something to add to the stock of their speculative and discoursing knowledge, loathing this daily manna, these profitable exhortations, and requiring meat for their lust?' There is an intemperance of the mind as well as of the mouth. You would think it, and, may be, not spare to call it a poor cold sermon that was made up of such plain precepts as these: 'Honour all men ; love the brotherhood; fear God; honour the king:' and yet, this is the language of God; it is his way, this foolish, despicable way by which he guides, and brings to heaven them that believe!

Again, we have others that are still complaining of the difficulty and darkness of the word of God and Divine truths; to say nothing of Rome's doctrine, who talks thus, in order to excuse her sacrilege of stealing away the word from the people of God (a senseless pretext though it were true; because the word is dark of itself, should it therefore be made darker, by locking it up in an unknown tongue ?); but we speak of the common vulgar excuse, which the gross, ignorant profaneness of many seek to shroud under, that they are not learned, and cannot reach the doctrine of the Scriptures. There are deep mysteries there indeed: but what say you to these things, such rules as these: 'Honour all men?' &c. Are such as these riddles, that you cannot know their meaning? Rather, do not all understand them, and all neglect them? Why set you not on to do these? and then you should understand more. 'A good understanding have all they that do his commandments,' says the Psalmist, Psa. cxi. 10. As one said well: The best way to understand the mysteries and high discourse in the beginning of St Paul's epistles, is, to begin at the practice of those rules and precepts that are in the latter end of them.' The way to attain to know more is to receive the truth in the love of it,' and to obey what you know. The truth is, such truths as these will leave you inexcusable, even the most ignorant of you. You cannot but know, you hear often, that you ought 'to love one another,' and 'to fear God,' &c. and yet you never apply yourselves in earnest to the practice of these things, as will appear to your own consciences, if they deal honestly with you in the particulars.

We subjoin a few more beautiful passages from Leighton's works:

The

the Redeemer to come, and in the belief of the things The prophets had joy and comfort in the very hopes of which any others had spoken, and which themselves spake concerning Him. And thus the true preachers of of others, yet that salvation which they preach they lay the gospel, though their ministerial gifts are for the use hold on and partake of themselves; as your boxes wherein perfumes are kept for garments and other uses sweet stream of their doctrine did, as a river, make its are themselves perfumed by keeping them. still forward to after-ages, and by the confluence of more own banks fertile and pleasant as it ran by, and flowed such prophecies, grew greater as it went, till it fell in with the main current of the gospel in the New Testahimself whom they foretold to come, and recorded by ment, both acted and preached by the Great Prophet his apostles and evangelists, and thus united into one river, clear as crystal. the Scriptures hath still refreshed the city of God, his church under the gospel, and still shall do so, till it empty itself into the ocean of eternity.

This doctrine of salvation in

* Cardinal Pole, as pointed out by Mr West (Leighton's Works, vol. iii. 298). The saying is also quoted by Fuller.

Every man walketh in a vain show. His walk is nothing but an on-going in continual vanity and misery, in which man is naturally and industriously involved, adding a new stock of vanity, of his own weaving, to what he has already within, and vexation of spirit woven all along in with it. He 'walks in an image,' as the Hebrew word is; converses with things of no reality, and which have no solidity in them, and he himself has as little. He himself is a walking image in the midst of these images. They who are taken with the conceit of pictures and statues are an emblem of their own life, and of all other men's also. Life is generally nothing else to all men but a doting on images and pictures. Every man's fancy is to himself a gallery of pictures, and there he walks up and down, and considers not how vain these are, and how vain a thing

he himself is.

He that looks on himself as a stranger, and is sensible of the darkness round about him in this wilderness, and also within him, will often put up that request with David, Psal. cxix. 19, I am a stranger on this earth; hide not thy commandments from me '-do not let me lose my way. And as we should use this argument to persuade God to look down upon us, so likewise to persuade ourselves to send up our hearts and desires to Him. What is the joy of our life, but the thoughts of that other life, our home, before us? And certainly he that lives much in these thoughts, set him where you will here, he is not much pleased or displeased; but if his father call him home, that word gives him his heart's

desire.

DR ISAAC BARROW.

ISAAC BARROW (1630-1677) was the son of a linen-draper of London. At school he was more remarkable for a love of athletic exercises than for application to his books. He studied for the Church, and was made a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1649. But perceiving, at the time of the Commonwealth, that the ascendency of theological and political opinions different from his own gave him little chance of preferment, he turned his views to the medical profession, and engaged in the study of anatomy, botany, and chemistry. After some time, however, he resumed his theological pursuits, devoting also much attention to mathematics and astronomy. In 1655, having been disappointed in his hopes of obtaining the Greek professorship at Cambridge, he went abroad for four years, during which he visited France, Italy, Smyrna, Constantinople, Germany, and Holland. At the Turkish capital, where he spent twelve months, he studied with great delight the works of St Chrysostom, which were composed in that city. Barrow returned to England in 1659, and in the following year obtained, without opposition, the professorship for which he had formerly been a candidate; to which appointment was added, in 1662, that of professor of geometry

in Gresham College, London. Both these he resigned in 1663, on becoming Lucasian professor of mathematics in Cambridge University. After filling the last of these offices with great ability for six years, towards the end of which he published a valuable and profound work on Optics, he resolved to devote himself more exclusively to theology, and in 1669 resigned his chair to Newton. He was subsequently appointed one of the royal chaplains; and in 1672 was nominated to the mastership of Trinity College by the king, bestowed it on the best scholar in England.' To who observed on the occasion, that he had complete his honours, he was, in 1675, chosen vice-chancellor of the university; but this final appointment he survived only two years, having been cut off by fever in the forty-seventh year of his age. Barrow was distinguished by scrupulous integrity of character, by great candour, modesty, disinterestedness, and serenity of temper. His manners and external aspect were more those of a student than of a man of the world; and he took no pains to improve his looks by attention to dress. On one occasion, when he preached before a London audience who did not know him, his appearance on mounting the pulpit made so unfavourable an impression, that nearly the whole congregation immediately left the church. He was never married.

tician-in which capacity he is accounted inferior Of his powers and attainments as a mathemato Sir Isaac Newton alone-Barrow has left evidence in a variety of treatises, nearly all of which are in Latin. It is, however, by his theological works that he is more generally known to the public. These, consisting of sermons-expositions of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Decalogue, and the Doctrine of the Sacraments-and treatises on the Pope's Supremacy and the Unity of the Church-were published in three folio volumes a few years after his death. His sermons continue in high estimation for depth and copiousness of thought, and nervous though unpolished eloquence. 'As a writer,' says Dugald Stewart, 'he is equally distinguished by the redundancy of his matter, and by the pregnant brevity of his expression; but what more peculiarly characterises his manner, is a certain air of powerful and of conscious facility in the execution of whatever he undertakes. Whether the subject be mathematical, metaphysical, or theological, he seems always to bring to it a mind which feels itself superior to the occasion; and which, in contending with the greatest difficulties, puts forth but half its strength." He composed with such care, that in general it was not till he had transcribed his sermons three or four times that their language satisfied him. The length of his discourses was excessive, seldom occupying less than an hour and a half in the delivery. It is recorded, that having occasion to preach a charity sermon before the lord mayor and aldermen of London, he spoke for three hours and a half; and that when asked, on coming down from the pulpit, whether he was not tired, he replied: 'Yes, indeed, I began to be weary with standing so long.' An excellent edition of Barrow's Theological Works, in nine volumes, edited by the Rev. A. Napier, with a Memoir by Dr Whewell of Trinity College, proceeded from the Cambridge University press in 1859.

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