which they were administered." To the above judicious observations, may be added some fur. ther remarks on the same sub. ject, by the Rev. Mr. Cecil, in his Memoirs of the late Rev. John Newton.-Having occasion to advert to the mental indisposition of Cowper, the poet, he states the following :

"The malady, which seemed to be subdued by the strong consolations of the gospel, was still latent; and only required some occasion of irritation to break out again, and overwhelm the patient. Any object of constant attention that shall occupy a mind previously disordered, whether fear, or love, or science, or religion, will not be so much the cause of the disease as the accidental occasion of exciting it. Cowper's Letters will shew how much his mind was occupied at one time with the truths of the Bible; and at another time by the fictions of Homer; but his melancholy, originally a constitutional disease,-a physical disorder, which, indeed, could be affected either by the Bible or Homer; but was utterly distinct in its nature from the mere matter of either. And here, I can. not but mark this necessary distinction; having been often wit. ness to cases where religion has been assigned as the proper cause of insanity, when it has been only an accidental occasion in the case of one already affected.

"I have been an eye-witness of several instances of this kind of misrepresentation; but will detain the reader with mention. ing only one. I was called to visit a woman whose mind was disordered; and, on my observ.

ing that it was a case which required the assistance of a physi. cian rather than that of a clergyman, her husband replied,'Sir we sent to you, because it is a religious case: her mind has been injured by constantly read. ing the Bible.'-I have known many instances, said 1, of persons brought to their senses by reading the Bible; but, it is pos. sible that too intense an application to that, as well as to any other subject, may have disordered your wife. There is ev.

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ery proof of it,' said he; and was proceeding to multiply his proofs, till his brother interrupt. ed him by thus addressing me; Sir, I have no longer patience to stand by and see you so im. posed on. The truth of the matter is this: My brother has forsaken his wife, and been long connected with a loose woman. He had the best of wives in her, and one who was strongly attached to him: but she has seen his heart and property given to another, and, in her solitude and distress, went to the Bible, as the only consolation left her. Her health and spirits at last sunk under her troubles, and there she lies distracted, not from read. ing her Bible, but from the infi. delity and cruelty of her hus band.'

Does the reader wish to know what reply the husband made to this?-He made no reply at all, but left the room with confus ion of face!"

The opponents of Evangelic. al religion will do well to remem. ber, that the agonies of mind under which some persons have labored, who were unjustly called Fanatically Insane or Melancholy Mad, were occa.

sioned by their sense of moral turpitude, independently of any peculiar religious tenets newly embraced; and they should also recollect, that our public hospitals and mad-houses are filled with patients of every class and character, with but comparatively few individuals oppressed by hypochondriacal delusions.

Evan. Mag.

DEATH OF HUME.

THE following admirable remarks on the death of the cele brated infidel, David Hume, are extracted from a critique on Ritchie's Life of Hume in the Eclectic Review. "His death,' as the Reviewer observes, will probably be admitted, and even cited, by infidels, as an example of the noblest and most magnan. imous deportment in the prospect of death, that it is possible for any of their class to maintain an example, indeed, which very few of them ever, in their serious moments, dare promise themselves to equal, though they may deem it in the highest degree enviable. It may be taken as quite their apostolic specimen, standing parallel in their history to the instance of St. Paul in the records of the Christians, I have fought a good fight,' &c.

For a short time previous to his death, he amused himself with playing at cards, making whim. sical legacies, and other trifling occupations. As an instance of his sportive disposition,' not. withstanding the prospect of speedy dissolution,' his biographer relates, that, when reading

Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, he diverted himself with invent ing several jocular excuses which he supposed he might make to Charon, and in imagining the very surly answers which it might suit the character of Charon to return to them :-" Upon fur. ther consideration," said he, "I thought I might say to him, 'Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edi tion. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the public receive the alterations? But Charon would answer, "When you see the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so honest friend, please to step into the boat." But I might still urge, 'Have a little patience, good Charon: I have been endeavoring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfal of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.' But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. "You loiter. ing rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy, loitering rogue.'

This anecdote is accompanied with the following just and strik ing reflections on the part of the Reviewer: 1st. Supposing a certainty of the final cessation of conscious existence at death, this indifference to life, if it was not affected (which indeed we suspect it to have been in part) was an absurd undervaluation of a possession which almost all rational creatures, that have not been extremely miserable, have

its own nature, most precious. To be a conscious agent, exert ing a rich combination of wouderful faculties,-to feel an infinite variety of pleasurable sensa. tions and emotions, to contemplate all nature,-to extend an intellectual presence to indefi. nite ages of the past and future, to possess a perennial spring of ideas,-to run infinite lengths of inquiry, with the delight of exercise and fleetness, even when not with the satisfaction of full attainment, and to be a lord over inanimate matter, compelling it to an action and an use altogether foreign to its nature,to be all this, is a state so stupendously different from that of being simply a piece of clay, that to be quite easy and complacent in the immediate prospect of passing from the one to the other, is a total inversion of all reasonable estimates of things; it is a renunciation, we do not say of sound philosophy, but of sense. The certainty that the loss will not be felt after it has taken place, will but little sooth a man of unperverted mind, in considering what it is that he is going to lose.

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the contemplation of such a change. There was, in this instance, the same incongruity which we should impute to a writer who should mingle buffoonery in a solemn crisis of the drama, or with the most momen. tous event of a history. To be in harmony with his situation, in his own view of that situation, the expressions of the dying phi losopher were required to be dignified; and if they were in any degree vivacious, the vivacity ought to have been rendered graceful, by being accompanied with the noblest effort of the intellect, of which the efforts were going to cease for ever. The low vivacity of which we have been reading, seems but like the quickening corruption of a mind whose faculty of perception is putrifying and dissolving, even before the body. It is true, that good men, of a high order, have been known to utter pleas antries in their last hours;—but these have been pleasantries of a fine, ethereal quality,--the scintillations of animated hope,the high pulsations of mental health, the involuntary movements of a spirit feeling itself free even in the grasp of death, the natural springs and boundings of faculties on the point of obtaining a still much greater and a boundless liberty. These had no resemblance to the low and labored jokes of our philosopher, jokes so labored as to give strong cause for suspicion, after all, that they were of the same nature, and for the same purpose, as the expedient of a boy on passing through some gloomy place in the night, who whistles to lessen his fear,

or to persuade his companion that he does not feel it.

3. Such a manner of meeting death was inconsistent with the skepticism to which Hume was always found to avow his adhe. rence; for that skepticism necessarily acknowledged a possibility and a chance that the religion which he had scorned might notwithstanding, be found true, and might, in the moment after his death, glare upon him with all its terrors. But how dread. ful to a reflecting mind would have been the smallest chance of meeting such a vision! Yet the philosopher could be cracking his heavy jokes; and Dr. Smith could be much diverted at the sport!

4. To a man who solemnly believes the truth of revelation, and therefore the threatenings of divine vengeance against the despisers of it, this scene will present as mournful a spectacle as perhaps the sun ever shone upon. We have beheld a man of great talents and invincible perseverance, entering on his career with the profession of an impartial inquiry after truth, met at every stage and step by the evidences and expostulations of religion and the claims of his Creator, but devoting his labors to the pursuit of fame and the promo. tion of impiety, at length acquiring and accomplishing, as he declared himself, all he had intended and desired, and descending toward the close of life amidst tranquillity, widely-extending reputation, and the homage of the great and the learned. We behold him appointed soon to appear before that Judge to whom he had never alluded but

with malice or contempt; yet

preserving to appearance an en. tire self-complacency, idly jest ing about his approaching disso. lution, and mingling with the in. sane sport his references to the fall of superstition :'—a term of which the meaning is hardly ever dubious when expressed by such men. We behold him at last carried off, and we seem to hear, the following moment, from the darkness in which he vanish. es, the shriek of surprise and terror, and the overpowering accents of the messenger of ven. geance! On the whole globe there probably was not acting, at the time, so mournful a trage dy as that of which the friends of Hume were the spectators, without being aware that it was any tragedy at all.'

EXTRACTS FROM BISHOP HORS

LEY'S CHARGE TO THE CLER-
GY OF THE DIOCESE OF ST.
DAVID'S AT HIS PRIMARY
VISITATION IN 1790.

THAT faith and practice are separable things is a gross mis take, or rather a manifest con. tradiction. Practical holiness is the end; faith is the means; and to suppose faith and prac tice separable is to suppose the end attainable without the use of means. The direct contrary the truth. The practice of re ligion will always thrive in pro portion as its doctrines are generally understood and firmly re ceived; and the practice will de generate and decay in propor tion as the doctrine is misunderstood and neglected.

RELIGION and science are very different things, and the objects

the object of natural reason; religious truth of faith. Faith, like the natural faculties, may be improved by exercise; but in its beginning it is unquestion ably a distinct gift of God.

Religion and morality differ not only in the extent of the duty they prescribe, but in the part, in which they are the same in the external work, they differ in the motive. They are just as far asunder as heaven is from the earth. Morality finds all her motives here below; religion fetches all her motives from above. The highest principle in morals is a just regard to the rights of each other in civil society. The first principle in religion is the love of God; or, in other words, a regard to the relation, which we bear to him, as it is made known to us by revelation. Hence, although religion can never be immoral, because moral works are a part of the works of religion, yet morality may be irreligious. For any moral work may proceed from mere moral motives apart from all religious considerations. History records, I think, of SERVETUS, SPINOZA, and HOBBES, that they were men of the strictest morals. The memory of the living witnesses the same of HUME. And history, in some future day, may have to record the same of PRIESTLEY and LINDSAY. But let not the morality of their lives be mistaken for an instance of a righteous practice, resulting from a perverse faith; or admitted as an argument of the indifference of

VOL. II. New Series.

error. Their moral works, if they be not done as God hath willed and commanded such works to be done, have the nature of sin; and their religion, consisting in private opinion and will-worship, is sin, for it is heresy.

It

THAT man is justified by FAITH, without the works of the law, was the uniform doctrine of the first reformers. is a far more ancient doctrine ; it was the doctrine of the whole college of apostles. It is more ancient still; it was the doctrine of the prophets. It is older than the prophets; it was the religion of the patriarchs. And no one, who hath the least acquaintance with the writings of the first reformers, will impute to them more than to the patri. archs, the prophets, or apostles, the absurd opinion, that any man, leading an impenitent, wick. ed life will finally upon the mere pretence of faith (and faith connected with an impenitent life must always be a mere pretence) obtain admission into heaven. It is not by the merit of our faith, more than by the merit of our works, that we are justified.

THE peculiar doctrines of revelation are the trinity of persons in the undivided Godhead, the incarnation of the second person, the expiation of sin by the Redeemer's sufferings and death, the efficacy of his intercession, the mysterious commerce of the believer's soul with the divine Spirit.

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