DIVINITY.

From the Christian Library.

BY MR. JOHN SMITH.

(Concluded from page 126.)

AND yet I grant there are some principles of knowledge that are so deeply sunk into the souls of men, that the impression cannot easily be obliterated. Sensual baseness doth not so grossly sully and bemire the souls of all wicked men at first, as to make them deny the Deity, or question the immortality of souls. Neither are the common principles of virtue pulled up by the roots in all. The common notions of God and virtue impressed upon the souls of men, are more clear than any else; and if they have not more certainty, yet they have more evidence than any geometrical demonstrations. And these are both available to prescribe virtue to men's own souls, and to force an acknowledgment of truth from those that oppose, when they are well guided by a skilful hand. Truth needs not at any time fly from reason, there being an eternal amity between them. Besides, in wicked men there are sometimes distastes of vice, and flashes of love to virtue; which are the faint strugglings of a higher life within them, which they crucify again by their wicked sensuality. As truth doth not always act in good men, so neither doth sense always act in wicked men. They may sometimes have their sober fits; and a divine spirit breathing upon them may then blow up some sparks of true understanding within them; though they may soon quench them again, and rake them up in the ashes of their own earthly thoughts.

All this, and more that might be said, may serve to point out the way of virtue. We want not so much means of knowing what we ought to do, as wills to do that which we know. But yet all that knowledge which is separated from an inward acquaintance with virtue and goodness, is of a far different nature from that which ariseth out of a true living sense of them, which is the best discerner thereof, and by which alone we know the true perfection, sweetness, energy, and loveliness of them, and all that which can no more be known by a naked demonstration, than colours can be perceived of a blind man by any definition which he can hear of them.

And further, the clearest notions of truth that shine in the souls of the common sort of men, are extremely clouded if they be not accompanied with that answerable practice that might VOL. VIII. May, 1825.

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preserve their integrity. These tender plants may soon be spoiled by the continual droppings of our corrupt affections upon them; they are but of a weak and feminine nature, and so may be sooner deceived by that wily serpent of sensuality that harbours within us.

While the soul is full of the body, while we suffer those principles of religion to lie asleep within us; the power of an animal life will be apt to incorporate and mingle itself with them: and that reason that is within us becomes more and more infected with those evil opinions that arise from our corporeal life. The more deeply our souls dive into our bodies, the more will reason and sensuality run one into another, and make up a most unsavoury and muddy kind of knowledge. We must therefore endeavour more and more to withdraw ourselves from these bodily things, to set our souls as free as may be from its miserable slavery to this base flesh. We must shut the eyes of sense, and open that brighter eye of our understandings, and that other eye of the soul, which indeed all have in some degree, but few make use of it. This is the way to see clearly; the light of the divine word will then begin to fall upon us, and those pure corFuscations of immortal and ever living truth will shine out into us, and in God's own light shall we behold him. The fruit of this knowledge will be sweet to our taste and pleasant to our palates, sweeter than the honey or the honey-comb. The priests of Mercury, as Plutarch tells us, in the eating of their holy things, were wont to cry out, "Sweet is truth." But how sweet and delicious that truth is, which holy and heaven-born souls feed upon in their mysterious converses with the Deity, who can tell but they that taste it? When reason is raised by the mighty force of the divine Spirit into a converse with God, it is turned into sense. We shall then converse with God, not with a struggling and contentious reason, hotly combating with difficulties and divers opinions, and labouring in itself in its deductions of one thing from another; but we shall fasten our minds upon him with such a serene understanding, such an intellectual calmness and serenity, as will present us with a blissful, steady, and invariable sight of him.

And now, setting aside the epicurean herd of brutish men, who have drowned all their sober reason in sensuality, we shall divide the rest of men into these four ranks, with respect to a fourfold kind of knowledge.

The first whereof is that complex and multifarious man that is made up of soul and body, as it were by a just equality of parts and powers in each of them. The knowledge of these men is a knowledge wherein sense and reason are so twisted together, that they cannot easily be unravelled. Their highest reason is complying with their senses, and both conspire together in vul

gar opinion: their life being steered by nothing but opinion and imagination. Their notions of God and religion are so entangled with the birdlime of fleshly passions and worldly vanity, that they cannot rise up above the surface of this dark earth, or entertain any but earthly conceptions of heavenly things. Such souls as Plato speaks of, heavy behind, are continually pressing down to this world's centre. And though, like the spider, they may appear sometimes moving up and down in the air, yet they do but sit in the loom, and move in that web of their own gross fancies, which they fasten to some earthly thing or other.

The second is, the man that thinks not fit to view his own face in any other glass but that of reason and understanding; that reckons upon his soul as that which was made to rule, his body as that which was born to obey, and like a handmaid perpetually to wait upon his higher and nobler part. And in such a one the common principles of virtue and goodness are more clear and steady. To such a one we may allow more clear and distinct opinions, as being already in a method or course of purgation, or at least fit to be initiated into the lesser mysteries of religion. Though they may not be so well prepared for divine virtue, (which is a higher emanation,) yet they are not immature for human, as having the seeds of it already within themselves, which being watered by answerable practice, may sprout up within them.

The third is, he whose soul is already purged by this lower sort of virtue, and so is continually flying off from the body, and returning into himself. Such, in St. Peter's language, are those "who have escaped the pollutions which are in the world through lust." To these we may attribute a lower degree of science, their inward sense of virtue and moral goodness being far transcendent to all mere speculative opinions of it. But if this knowledge settle here, it may be quickly liable to corrupt. Their souls may too much heave and swell with a sense of their own virtue and knowledge: there may be an ill ferment of selflove lying at the bottom, which may puff it up with pride and self-conceit. If this knowledge be not attended with humility and a deep sense of penury and emptiness, we may easily fall short of that true knowledge of God which we seem to aspire after. We may carry such an image of ourselves constantly before us, as will make us lose the clear sight of the divinity, and be too apt to rest in a mere rational life, without any true participation of the divine life, if we do not slide back by vain glory, popularity, or such like vices, into worldly and external vanity.

The fourth is, the true contemplative man, who shooting up above his own rational life, pierceth into the highest life, into the faith which worketh by love: who, by universal love and holy affection, abstracting himself from himself, endeavours the

nearest union with the divine essence; knitting his own centre, if he have any, unto the centre of the divine Being. To such a one we may attribute a true divine wisdom, powerfully displaying itself in an intellectual life. Such a knowledge is always pregnant with divine virtue, which ariseth out of a happy union of souls with God, and is nothing else but a living imitation of a God-like perfection drawn out by a strong fervent love of it. This divine knowledge makes us athirst after divine beauty, beautiful and lovely; and this divine love and purity reciprocally exalts divine knowledge; both of them growing up together. Such a life and knowledge as this peculiarly belongs to the true and sober Christian, who lives in him who is life itself, and is enlightened by him who is the truth itself, and is made partaker of the divine unction, and knoweth all things, as St. John speaks. This life is nothing else but God's own breath within him, and an infant-Christ (if I may use the expression) formed in his soul, who is in a sense, axavyatua ns dogns, the shining forth of the Father's glory. But yet we must not mistake; this knowledge is here in its infancy: there is a higher knowledge, or a higher degree of this knowledge that doth not, that cannot descend upon us in these earthly habitations. Here we can see but in a glass, and that darkly too. Our own imaginative powers, which perpetually attend the highest acts of our souls, will be breathing a gross dew upon the pure glass of our understandings, and so sully and besmear it that we cannot see the image of the divinity sincerely in it. But yet this knowledge being a true heavenly fire kindled from God's own altar, begets an undaunted courage in the souls of good men, and enables them to cast a holy scorn upon the poor petty trash of this life, in comparison with divine things, and to pity those poor, brutish epicureans that have nothing but the mere husks of fleshly pleasure to feed themselves with. This sight of God makes pious souls breathe after that blessed time, when "mortality shall be swallowed up of life," when they shall no more behold the divinity through those dark mediums that eclipse the blessed sight of it.

BIOGRAPHY.

MEMOIR OF THE REV. WILLIAM ROSS.

(Concluded from page 133.)

THE closing scene of a good man's life is always interesting as well as instructing to the living. It is more particularly so when that man has been the public expounder and advocate of those truths which are justly considered as the support and consolation of the soul in this trying hour. It is now that the virtues of the Christian, the graces of the Christian minister, and

the experimental effect of gospel truth, are all seen in the expiring agonies of the holy servant of Christ, displaying all their brilliancy and loveliness; and their voice is heard echoing from the bed of death the triumph of the believer, "Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." The sensualist may revel in mirth, and the voluptuous hypocrite, who adds to his other vices an effort to deceive, may make an empty show of virtues he does not possess, while each riots in luxury and sports at the arrows of death while flying over their heads, or whistling by their sides; but when these arrows fasten upon their own vitals, and the pampered appetites and passions no longer sustain their wonted vigour, but begin to feel the weakness of disease, while the paleness of death sit on their cheeks; the disguise is stript off, and the "gaping tomb" reminds them of their hollow professions, and of the reality of that world to which they are going, and of that religion which they either despised or treated with neglect, and of the just vengeance of that God whose authority they contemptuously braved.

The truth of these observations has often been strikingly illustrated on the deathbed of carnal and unregenerate men, who have "spent their strength for nought, and their money for that which profiteth not." And they have been yet the more strikingly illustrated by contrasting the deathbed scene of the voluptuary with that "chamber where the good man meets his fate," and which "is favoured above the common walks of life." Here the glory of God illumines the path to the other world, and presents on the other side of Jordan, those extended fields of immortality which invite the passage of the righteous, and promise them a rich reward for all their labours and sufferings in this ever-changing life.

With these preliminary observations we shall introduce to the reader's notice, the winding up the thread of the life of the Rev. WILLIAM ROSS. From the preceding narrative it will appear manifest that though he persevered in his master's work, it was often through much bodily weakness. While encountering the inclement and varying seasons of Vermont, his constitution received a shock from which it never fully recovered; and in that "feverish body, oppression and tightness in the chest, and painful cough," of which he speaks, we may perceive early symptoms of the fatal disease, which gradually undermined his health and finally terminated his life. In addition to the typhus fever, of which we have already spoken, with which he was afflicted in Troy, and which, no doubt, added fresh fuel to the slow fire which had begun to prey upon his vitals, by taking a severe cold after preaching of an evening in the mission-house in NewYork, he was confined to his room for several weeks; and many of his friends even then thought, by perceiving symptoms of the