Again, writing of the value of time, he says:

It is a precious talent, and our Christian profession opens a wide field for the due improvement of it. Much of it has been already lost, and therefore we are exhorted to redeem it. I think many things that custom pleads for will be excluded from a suitableness to a Christian, for this one reason, that they are not consistent with the simple notion of the redemption of time. Here is a truth of which we all, in every age, need continual reminder :

The first lesson in the school of Christ is to become a little child, sitting simply at His feet.

This is his attitude towards the chance of unexpected death :—

We are always equally in danger in ourselves, and always equally safe under the shadow of His wings. No storms, assaults, sieges, or pestilences can hurt us, till we have filled up His appointed measure of service; and when our work is done, and He has ripened us for glory, it is no great matter by what means He is pleased to call us home to Himself.

Many more such pages of such wisdom might be quoted, but the reader may find these wise sayings in abundance for himself in the pages of Cardiphonia.

Whatever the laymen may find in the book, certainly a small devotional and practical manual for clergy might be compiled from the Cardiphonia.

Here, for instance, are Newton's comments upon certain sermons which had been forwarded for his criticism :

I am

They will not answer your desired end. persuaded that you wish to be useful to reclaim

sinners from their evil ways, to inspire them with a love to God, and a sincere aim to walk in obedience to His will. May I not venture to appeal to yourself, that you meet with little success; that the people to whom you preach, though they, perhaps, give you a patient hearing, yet remain as they were, unchanged and unholy? It must be so; there is but one sort of preaching which God blesses to these purposes-that which makes all the world guilty before God, and sets forth Jesus Christ (as the brazen serpent was proposed by Moses), that guilty and condemned sinners, by looking to Him and believing on His Name, may be healed and saved. The most pressing exhortations to repentance and amendment of life, unless they are enforced in a certain way, which only God can teach, will leave our hearers much as they find them.

To a curate he writes :

Preferment is not necessary, either to our peace or our usefulness.

In a similar strain he writes to one newly preferred to a living :

I congratulate you, likewise, upon your accession to -, not because it is a good living, in a genteel neighbourhood, and a fine country; but because I believe the Lord sends you there for fulfilling the desires He has given you, of being useful to souls. Church preferment, in any other view, is dreadful; and I would as soon congratulate a man upon seeing a millstone tied about his neck to sink him into the depths of the sea, as upon his obtaining what is called a good living, except I thought him determined to spend and be spent in the cause of the Gospel.

A parish is an awful millstone, indeed, to those who see nothing valuable in the flock but the fleece; but the Lord has impressed your heart with a sense of the glory and importance of His truth, and the worth of souls, and animated your zeal by the most powerful motive-the knowledge of His constraining love.

To a fellow-clergyman whose wife is dangerously ill, he sends a letter which ends as follows:

Many a time the desire of my eyes has been threatened, many a time my heart has been brought low; but, from what I have known at such seasons, I have reason to hope that had it been His pleasure to bring upon me the thing that I feared, His everlasting arm would have upheld me from sinking under the stroke. As ministers, we are called to comfort the Lord's afflicted people, and to tell them the knowledge of His love is a cordial able to keep the soul alive under the sharpest trials. We must not wonder that He sometimes puts us in a way of showing that we do not deal in unfelt truths, but that we find ourselves that solid consolation in the Gospel which we encourage others to expect from it. You have now such an occasion of glorifying the Lord; I pray He may enable you to improve it, and that all around you may see that He is with you, and that His good word is the support and anchor of your soul. And English literature can show few lines more inspiring to the "fisher of men " than this exhortation:

Remember your high calling-you are a minister and ambassador of Christ: you are entrusted with the most honourable and important employment than can engage and animate the heart of man.

Filled and fired with a constraining sense of the love of Jesus, and the worth of souls; impressed with an ardour to carry war into Satan's kingdom, to storm his strongholds, and rescue his captives— you will have little leisure to think of anything else. How does the love of glory stimulate the soldier, make him forget and forego a thousand personal tendernesses, and prompt him to cross oceans, to traverse deserts, to scale mountains, and plunge into the greatest hardships and the thickest dangers ? They do it for a corruptible crown, a puff of smoke, an empty fame; their highest prospect is the applause and favour of their prince. We, likewise, are soldiers; we have a Captain and a Prince Who deserves our all. They who know Him, and have hearts to conceive of His excellence and to feel their obligations to Him, cannot indeed seek their own glory, but His glory is dearer to them than a thousand lives. They owe Him their souls, for He redeemed them with blood, His own blood and by His grace, He subdued and pardoned them when they were rebels, and in arms against Him. Therefore they are not their own, they would not be their own. When His standard is raised, when His enemies are in motion, when His people are to be rescued, they go forth clothed with His panoply, they fight under His eye, they are sure of His support, and He shows them the conqueror's crown. O when they think of that eu, doule agathe with which He has promised to welcome them home when the campaign is over, hard things seem easy, and bitter things sweet; they count nothing, not even their own lives, dear, so that they may finish their course with joy.

WILLIAM COWPER

I

The charm of the eighteenth century-Cowper's early days, insanity, conversion and recovery-Olney, Mrs. Unwin and Newton-His writings and growing fame-His later days-Cowper as Churchman-His daily life and Puritan spirit-Criticism of clergy and Church services-The influence and naturalness of his poetryHis charm as a letter-writer-Three specimens.

It would be hard to say exactly what constitutes the unfailing charm of the English literature and history of the eighteenth century.

But one reason for that charm is undoubtedly this, that the century was a transition period. The student of the times stands upon ground midway between the days of the Stuarts and Hanoverians (days which for us belong irretrievably to the Past) and the Victorian era, which is so very near to our Present. The first year of the century was barely fifty years after Charles had laid his royal head upon the block at Whitehall; whilst its last year brings us within measurable distance of railways and electric telegraphy.

The eighteenth century, thus merged at its beginning and its end into these two epochs, presents many features of both of them; so much so that in its literature at one moment we experience the charm of finding ourselves in surroundings wholly strange and of a bygone age, whilst at the next we find the outlook strangely identical with our own. As there is abundant contemporary material from which to study the phases