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want his advice before I go abroad in many things. But I question whether I shal be permitted to see him or anybody, but such as are absolutety necessary towards the dispatch of my private affairs. If so, God bless you both! and may no part of the ill-fortune that attends me ever pursue either of you. I know not but I may call upon you at my hearing, to say somewhat about my way of spending my time at the deanery, which did not seem calculated towards managing plots and conspiracies. But of that I shall consider. You and I have spent many hours together upon much pleasanter subjects; and, that I may preserve the old custom, I shall not part with you now till I have closed this letter with three lines of Milton. which you will, I know, readily, and not without some degree of concern, apply to your ever-affectionate, &c. Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before him where to chose His place of rest, and Providence his guide.' Atterbury, however, was clearly guilty. He afterwards became, like Bolingbroke, the chief counsellor and director of the exiled court, and strove in vain to infuse some of his own turbulent energy into the feeble mind of the Chevalier. He organised a plan for raising the Highland clans, and a special envoy was despatched from Rome, but the scheme miscarried. Though ready to plunge his country into civil war, Atterbury regarded it with tenderness:

Thus on the banks of Seine,

Far from my native home, I pass my hours,'
Broken with years and pain; yet my firm heart
Regards my friends and country e'en in death.

Usefulness of Church-Music.

The use of vocal and instrumental harmony in divine worship I shall recommend and justify from this consideration; that they do, when wisely employed and managed, contribute extremely to awaken the attention and enliven the devotion of all serious and sincere Christians; and their usefulness to this end will appear on a double account, as they remove the ordinary hinderances of devotion, and as they supply us further with special helps and advantages towards quickening and improving it.

By the melodious harmony of the church, the ordinary hinderances of devotion are removed, particularly these three; that engagement of thought which we often bring with us into the church from what we last converse with; those accidental distractions that may happen to us during the course of divine service; and that weariness and flatness of inind which some weak tempers may labor under, by reason even of the length of it.

When we come into the sanctuary immediately from any worldly affair, as our very condition of life does, alas! force many of us to do, we come usually with divided and alienated minds. The business, the pleasure, or the amusement we left, sticks fast to us, and perhaps engrosses that heart for a time, which should then be taken up altogether in spiritual addresses. But as soon as the sound of the sacred hymus strikes us, all that busy swarm of thoughts presently disperses: by a grateful violence we are forced into the duty that is going forward, and, as indevout and backward as we were before, find ourselves on the sudden seized with a sacred warmth, ready to cry out, with holy David: My heart is fixed. O God, my heart is fixed; I will sing and give praise.' Our misapplication of mind at such times is often so great. and we so deeply immersed in it, that there needs some very strong and powerful charm to rouse us from it; and perhaps nothing is of greater force to this purpose than the solemn and awakening airs of church-music.

For the same reason, those accidental distractions that may happen to us are also best cured by it. The strongest minds, and best practised in holy duties, may sometimes be surprised into a forgetfulness of what they are about by some violent outward impressions; and every slight occasion will serve to call off the thoughts of no less willing though much weaker worshippers. Those that come to see and to be

Been here, will often gain their point; will draw and detain for a while the eyes of the curious and unwary. A passage in the sacred story read, an expression used in the common forms of devotion, shall raise a foreign reflection, perhaps, in musing and speculative minds, and lead them on from thought to thought, and point to point, till they are bewildered in their own imaginations. These, and a hundred other avocations, will arise and prevail; but when the instruments of praise begin to sound, our scattered thoughts presently take the alarm, return to their post and to their duty, preparing and arming themselves against their spiritual assailants.

Lastly, even the length of the service itself becomes a hinderance sometimes to the devotion which it was meant to feed and raise; for, alas! we quickly tire in the performance of holy duties; and as eager and unwearied as we are in attending upon secular business and trifling concerns, yet in divine offices, I fear, the expostulation of our Saviour is applicable to most of us: What can ye not watch with me one hour?' This infirmity is relieved, this hinderance prevented or removed, by the sweet harmony that accompanies several parts of the service, and returning upon us at fit intervals, keeps our attention up to the duties when we begin to flag, and inakes us insensible of the length of it. Happily, therefore, and wisely is it so ordered, that the morning devotions of the church, which are much the longest, should share also a greater proportion of the harmony which is useful to enliven them.

But its use stops not here, at a bare removal of the ordinary impediments to devotion; it supplies us also with special helps and advantages towards furthering and improving it. For it adds dignity and solemnity to public worship; it sweetly influences and raises our passions whilst we assist at it, and makes us do our duty with the greatest pleasure and cheerfulness; all which are very proper and powerful means towards creating in us that holy attention and erection of mind, the most reasonable part of this our reasonable service.

Such is our nature, that even the best things, and most worthy of our esteem, do not always employ and detain our thoughts in proportion to their real value, unless they be set off and greatened by some outward circumstances, which are fitted to raise admiration and surprise in the breasts of those who hear or behold them. Aud this good effect is wrought in us by the power of sacred music. To it we, in good measure, owe the dignity and solemnity of our public worship.

Further, the availableness of harmony to promote a pious disposition of mind will appear from the great influence it naturally has on the passions, which, when well directed, are the wings and sails of the mind, that speeds its passage to perfection, and are of particular and remarkable use in the offices of devotion; for devotion consists in an ascent of the mind towards God, attended with holy breathings of soul, and a divine exercise of all the passions and powers of the mind. These passions the melody of sounds serves only to guide and elevate towards their proper object; these it first calls forth and encourages, and then gradually raises and inflames. This it does to all of them, as the matter of the hymns sung gives an occasion for the employment of them; but the power of it is chiefly seen in advancing that most heavenly passion of love, which reigns always in pious breasts, and is the surest and most inseparable mark of true devotion; which recommends what we do in virtue of it to God, and makes it relishing to ourselves; and without which all our spiritual offerings, our prayers, and our praises, are both insipid and unacceptable. At this our religion begins, and at this it ends; it is the sweetest companion and improvement of it here upon earth, and the very earnest and foretaste of heaven; of the pleasures of which nothing further is revealed to us, than that they consist in the practice of holy music and holy love, the joint enjoyment of which, we are told, is to be the happy lot of all pious souls to endless ages.

Now, it naturally follows from hence, which was the last advantage from whence I proposed to recommend church-music, that it makes our duty a pleasure, and enables us, by that means, to perform it with the utmost vigour and cheerfulness. It is certain, that the more pleasing an action is to us, the more keenly and eagerly are we used to employ ourselves in it; the less liable are we, while it is going forward, to tire, and droop. and be dispirited. So that whatever contributes to make our devotion taking, within such a degree as not at the same time to dissipate and distract it, does, for that very reason, contribute to our attention and holy warmth of mind in performing it. What we take delight in, we no longer look upon as a task, but return to always with desire. dwell upon with satisfaction, and quit with uneasiness. And this it was which made holy David express himself in so pathetical a manner cons

cerning the service of the sanctuary: "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so pauteth my soul after thee, O God. When, oh when, shall I come to appear before the presence of God?' The ancients do sometimes use the metaphor of an army when they are speaking of the joint devotions put up to God in the assembly of his saints. They say we there meet together in troops to do violence to heaven: we encompass, we besiege the throne of God, and bring such a united force as is not to be with-tood. And I suppose we may as innocently carry on the metaphor as they have begun it, and say, that church-music, when decently ordered, may have as great uses in this army of supplicants, as the sound of the trumpet has among the host of the mighty men. It equally rouses the courage, equally gives life, and vigour, and resolution, and unanimity to these holy assailants.

DR. SAMUEL CLARKE.

DR. SAMUEL CLARKE, a distinguished divine, scholar, and metaphysician, was born at Norwich--which his father represented in parliament-on the 11th of October 1675. His powers of reflection and abstraction are said to have been developed when a mere boy. His biographer, Whiston, relates that 'one of his parents asked him, when very young, whether God could do everything. He answered, Yes. He was asked again, whether God could tell a lie. He answered No. And he understood the question to suppose that this was the only thing that God could not do; nor durst he say, so young was he then, that he thought there was anything else which God could not do-while yet he well remembered that he had even then a clear conviction in his own mind that there was one thing which God could not do that he could not annihilate that space which was in the rcom where they were.' This opinion concerning the necessary existence of space became a leading feature in the mind of the future philosopher. At Caius' College, Cambridge, Clarke cultivated natural philosophy with such success, that in his twenty-second year he published an excellent translation of Rohault's 'Physics,' with notes, in which he advocated the Newtonian system, although that of Descartes was taught by Rohault, whose work was at that time the textbook in the university. Four editions of Clarke's translation were required before it ceased to be used in the university; but at length it was superseded by treatises in which the Newtonian philosophy was avowedly adopted.

Having entered the church, Clarke found a patron and friend in Dr. Moore, bishop of Norwich, and was appointed his chaplain. Between the years 1699 and 1702, he published several theological essays on baptism, repentance, &c., and executed paraphrases of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These tracts were afterwards published in two volumes. The bishop next gave him a living at Norwich; and his reputation stood so high, that in 1704 he was appointed to preach the Boyle lecture. His boyish musings on eternity and space were now revived. He selected as the subject of his first course of lectures, the 'Being and Attributes of God;' and the second year he chose the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion.' The lectures were published in two volumes, and attracted notice and controversy from their containing Clarke's celebrated ar

gument a priori for the existence of God, the germ of which is comprised in a Scholium' annexed to Newton's Principia.' According to Sir Isaac and his scholar, as immensity and eternity are not substances, but attributes, the immense and eternal Being, whose attributes they are, must exist of necessity also. The existence of God, therefore, is a truth that follows with demonstrative evidence from those conceptions of space and time which are inseparable from the human mind.

Professor Dugald Stewart, though considering that Clarke, in pursuing this lofty argument, soared into regions where he was lost in the clouds, admits the grandness of the conception, and its connection with the principles of natural religion. For when once we have established, from the evidences of design every where manifested around us, the existence of an intelligent and powerful cause, we are unavoidably led to apply to this cause our conceptions of immensity and eternity, and to conceive Him as filling the infinite extent of both with his presence and with his power. Hence we associate with the idea of God those awful impressions which are naturally produced by the idea of infinite space, and perhaps still more by the idea of endless duration. Nor is this all. It is from the immensity of space that the notion of infinity is originally derived; and it is hence that we transfer the expression, by a sort of metaphor, to other subjects. When we speak, therefore, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, our notions, if not wholly borrowed from space, are at least greatly aided by this analogy; so that the conceptions of immensity and eternity, if they do not of themselves demonstrate the existence of God, yet necessarily enter into the ideas we form of his nature and attributes.'* How beautifully has Pope clothed this magnificent conception in

verse!

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;

That, changed through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame;

Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,

Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;

Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent.

The followers of Spinoza built their pernicious theory upon the same argument of endless space; but Pope has spiritualised the idea by placing God as the soul of all, and Clarke's express object was to shew that the subtleties they had advanced against religion, might be better employed in its favour. Yet Whitson only repeated a simple and obvious truth when he told Clarke that in the commonest weed in his garden were contained better arguments for the being and attributes of the Deity than in all his metaphysics.

The next subject that engaged the studies of Clarke was a 'Defence of the Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul,' in reply to

* Stewart's Dissertation, Encyclopædia Britannica.

Mr. Henry Dodwell and Collins. He also translated Newton's 'Optics' into Latin, and was rewarded by his guide, philosopher, and friend with a present of £500. In 1709, he obtained the rectory of St. James's, Westminster, took his degree of D.D. and was made chaplain in ordinary to the queen. In 1712, he edited a splendid edition of Cæsar's Commentaries,' with corrections and emendations, and also gave to the world an elaborate treatise on the Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity.' The latter involved him in considerable trouble with the church authorities; for Clarke espoused the Arian doctrine, which he also advocated in a series of sermons. He next appeared as a controversialist with Leibnitz, the German philosopher, who had represented to the Princess of Wales, afterwards the queen-consort of George II. that the Newtonian philosophy was not only physically false, but injurious to religion.

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Sir Isaac Newton, at the request of the princess, entered the list on the mathematical part of the controversy, and left the philosophical part of it to Dr. Clarke. The result was triumphant for the English system; and Clarke, in 1717, collected and published the papers which had passed between him and Leibnitz. In 1724, he put to press a series of sermons, seventeen in number. Many of them are excellent, but others are tinctured with his metaphysical predilections. He aimed at rendering scriptural principle a precept conformable to what he calls eternal reason and the fitness of things, and hence his sermons have failed in becoming popular or useful. He who aspires,' says Robert Hall, to a reputation that shall survive the vicissitudes of opinion and of time, must aim at some other character than that of a metaphysician.' In his practical sermons, however, there is much sound and admirable precept. In 1727, Dr. Clarke was offered, but declined, the appointment of Master of the Mint, vacant by the death of his illustrious friend, Newton. The situation was worth £1500 a year, and the disinterestedness and integ rity of Clarke were strikingly evinced by his declining to accept an office of such honour and emoluments, because he could not reconcile himself to a secular employment. His conduct and character must have excited the admiration of the queen, for we learn from a satirical allusion in Pope's 'Moral Epistle on the Use of Riches '-first published in 1731-that her majesty had placed a bust of Dr. Clarke in her hermitage in the royal grounds. The doctor duly frequented the court,' says Pope in a note; but he should have added,' rejoins Warburton, with the innocence and disinterestedness of a hermit.' In 1729, Clarke published the first twelve books of the 'Iliad,' with a Latin version and copious annotations; and Homer has never had a more judicious or acute commentator. The last literary efforts of this indefatigable scholar were devoted to drawing up an 'Exposition of the Church Catechism,' and preparing several volumes of sermons for the press. These were not published till after his death, which took place on the 17th of May 1729. The various talents and learn

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