the coronation of the Christian, any more than that of the Isthmian victor, be without the applauses of illustrious beholders. "A cloud of witnesses" hovers around and over the amphitheatre of life, who, now spectators of the agony, shall be hereafter of the recompense, when he who has "denied himself and taken up his cross, and followed Christ," shall be confessed and crowned by the illustrious Captain of salvation, before his Father, and before his holy angels; yea, before the assembled and admiring universe. Oh, what compared with the approbation then to be expressed of those who have "fought the good fight, and finished their course, and kept the faith" -by God and by his holy ones-the sages, the dignitaries, the heroes of creation-were the acclamations that at Corinth or elsewhere were thundered from assembled Greece, though all her children, of all ages, renowned for wisdom and for valour, had been gathered into one, and swelled with their voices the general shout; or what were the melody to the conqueror's ear of the triumphal clarion, or Pindar's burning lyre hymning his praise to generations, compared with that enrapturing voice which is heard proceeding from the throne, and saying, "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!" And then, what a crowning blessedness to think that all this glorious triumph is not the triumph of a single day, but the commencement of one which stretches throughout eternity-never decaying for ever brightening; that the diadem of the Christian conqueror is "the wreath that fadeth not away!" Throughout the lapse of ages, the revolution of cycles, the history of worlds, the endlessness of eternity, upon his head the crown shall flourish, its amaranths perpetually fresh, its jewels perpetually blazing, “even as the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for ever and ever."

Now let us mark the end for which this magnificent prospect is held out to Christians. Plainly to stimulate them to vigour and to energy in the pursuit of things eternal. There is obviously implied in the apostle's remark the exhortation which, in another place, he has subjoined to his description of "the glory that is to be revealed:" "Wherefore, beloved brethren, be sted fast and unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for as much as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord." In the passage now before us, however, the sentiment, although the same in substance, has a peculiar force and point imparted to it by the striking reference which it contains to the proved efficiency of a similar motive, in stimulating worldly men to worldly effort. If the hope of winning a meed of fame so brief, so worthless, call forth in the breasts of men such energy of passion, such energy of action, such energy of endurance, capable, if rightly directed, of "taking the kingdom of heaven by storm;' what, oh what, might be expected to be the amount of force imparted to the Christian's character for discharging duty, and enduring trial, by the believing and habitual contemplation of " the joy set before him"-"the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give

him at that day!"—Alas! how utterly inadequate to what might reasonably be expected, is the effect which, in point of fact, we feel thus produced upon ourselves, we see produced on others, though they and we are professing to "look for such things." How far inferior the energy with which we pursue eternal objects, in comparison of that with which worldly men seek "the things that perish in the using." Perhaps, after all the explanations we have given, the instance hitherto referred to may be to most minds too remote and unfamiliar to be anything like so impressive an example of energy directed by earthly men to earthly objects, as it undoubtedly was to the Corinthians at first, accustomed as they had been from infancy to the spectacle to which St Paul so learnedly and happily appeals. But if we do not feel very strongly the force of this particular example, we have only to look round us, and we shall find others, by hundreds, in forms which will come more directly home to our business and bosoms, in the town and in the country, in the fields and the shops, in the houses and the streets. We may fix almost at random on any one of our acquaintance distinctly embarked in any worldly enterprise, which is, or which he imagines of importance to his worldly welfare and enjoyment,-pursuing a definite object of ambition and desire; and if we will but calculate the quantity of thought, and feeling, and care, and trouble, and self-denial, and general exertion of body and of mind which he expends, it may be, upon some very common-place end and aim connected with this brief existence; and then compare it with the amount of corporeal and mental action which we-professing Christians-devote to those grand eternal realities, in comparison of which we profess to believe that all the world inherits is but as the small dust of the balance-alas ! with what regret and confusion of face shall we discover how disproportionate, in respect of power, to the motive which the follower of the world derives from the corruptible, is that which the so called follower of Jesus draws from the incorruptible. From the man who earns by the labour of to-day to-morrow's meal, up to him whose ambition grasps at sceptres, almost every living man is, in respect of the comparative steadiness, and vigour, and decision of his aims and endeavours, a living reprover of the feeble, interrupted, indecisive character of much modern Christianity. It will be well if we often make this comparison, humbling and mortifying as it is, that the rebuke so administered to our deficiencies may have the effect of more strongly stirring up our energies; that we may labour to adjust the intensity of our regards, and the vigour of our pursuits, more truly to the comparative value and duration of those things which are seen and temporal," and those which are "not seen and eternal;" that we may be excited more deeply to feel the spirit, and to imitate the conduct of the great apostle, when he said, "Every one who striveth for the mastery governeth himself in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight

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I, not as one that beateth the air; but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, after having been a herald unto others, I myself should be a rejected candidate." There was a man who exhibited something like the character of a candidate for heaven; of one who lived and breathed, and moved under "the powers of the world to come;" who, from the moment of his first devotion to the Christian course and conflict, habitually made success in that arduous but noble achievement the great end and object of his being; reckoned no sacrifice too costly to be made, no labour too difficult to be undergone, no suffering too painful to be endured, which should promote his fitness for fulfilling the enterprise, his meetness for enjoying the reward; "yea, counted not his own life dear unto him, if so he might finish his course with joy, and the ministry which he bad received of the Lord." Be it henceforward the care of all who profess to be candidates for heaven, to be followers of him as he was a follower of Christ. So shall we enjoy a better hope of joining at last in the exulting song, which, when there lay before him but one struggle more, the bitterest but the last, ere he should " lay hold upon eternal life," and have his victor forehead garlanded with immortality, the champion apostle poured forth in clear and solemn melody from under death's impending shadow; while the block, the dark altar of demon idolatry, was already prepared to drink his blood, and the axe of Nero's lictors gleamed with a ghastly glitter on his eye; when, in one word, he saw frowning before him a martyr's death, and sparkling above him a martyr's crown;-" I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day; and not unto me only, but to all those who love his appearing."

The views of the Christian life which we have thus stated and illus. trated are those which beyond all others are the favourites of Jeremy Taylor. No one can read his writings without being struck with the passion, so to speak, for holiness which breathes and glows through almost every page; and that a holiness not such as is too often dignified with the name, indolent, passive, negative, a course of easy self-indulgent piety that exacts no sacrifice, and demands no effort worthy to be so denominated, but a holiness of strenuous exertion and difficult endurance, a race, a warfare, an agony. Meanwhile the grand ruling motive to which, in enforcing the practice of this self-denied and hard-wrought holiness he is accustomed to appeal, is that which the prospect of the incorruptible crown supplies, that which the apostle calls "having respect unto the recompense of the reward." We have already endeavoured to show that, in so far, our author's conception of what Christian holiness really is, and his use of the motive derived from the prospect of future reward, are both of them in themselves legitimate and scriptural. But it cannot be denied, and it

ought not to be concealed, that he is accustomed in the general tenor of his works to dwell upon these views much too exclusively, and to express them on particular occasions much too unguardedly. We miss in his writings that vast and beautiful variety of impulse and inducement which the Word of God presents: and feel the perpetual illustration and enforcement of the one favourite motive, notwithstanding the endless diversity of forms and hues in which it is arranged by his exhaustless fancy, at length become monotonous and heavy; not to speak of the startling and offensive audacities of expression which too often totter on the very verge, and occasionally rush headlong over the precipice, of sheer legality. In undertaking the duty, when proposed to him, of selecting a volume of extracts from the voluminous works of this extraordinary man, the Editor had hopes at first of being able to compile a volume more free from such incautious statements than in the progress of the work he found to be possible; and he has now therefore to entreat of his readers that they will be cautious in the perusal of the following extracts to separate between the mass of precious ore and the admixtures occasionally occurring of baser materials; that they will be upon their guard against every statement and every expression which shall seem to represent human works as in any degree the meritorious cause of human salvation; and that they will trust our author's sagacity in laying down in detail the practical rules, much more than his orthodoxy in explaining at large the theoretical principles, of Christian holiness.

The same one-sided and exclusive mode of viewing Christianity as if it consisted mainly and well-nigh wholly in the enforcement of the principle that "without holiness no man shall see the Lord," which leads our author occasionally to speak of holiness as if it were truly meritorious of salvation, seems to have misled him into the adoption of some other peculiarities of opinion, which, though not very prominent upon the face of the following extracts, were yet esteemed by him points of so great importance as to exert a pervading influence over all his habits of religious conception and religious admonition. We allude more especially to the doctrine which he held respecting the extent to which human nature was deteriorated by the fall of Adam; a doctrine the exposition of which forms the object of a great part of his controversial works, and drew upon him very general expressions of dissatisfaction, not only from the Presbyterian divines, to whom exclusively he at first ascribed the doctrine which he opposed, but from some of the most eminent and most personally attached to Taylor among the dignitaries of his own church. The doctrine which he himself had adopted on the subject is little less than pure Pelagianism, maintaining as he does not merely that no man, for original sin alone, will be punished with everlasting destruction,-a conclusion in which, as Bishop Heber remarks, not merely all the Arminians, but some among the Calvinists will agree with him;-but besides this, that by the first sin of the first man

human nature at large lost nothing of the moral power which originally belonged to it on the fact of its creation, but only certain superadded advantages bestowed upon Adam by a special act of Providence; that there is no such thing as a natural predisposition and proneness to evil in human beings as they are now born into the world, and that the causes of the universal wickedness of mankind are to be found in a vast variety of circumstances, altogether independent of an innate corruption of our moral being, the obscurity of the original revelation, "the restraint imposed by God's laws in many instances upon the indifferent, and in other cases lawful inclinations of nature, evil examples, the similitude of Adam's transgression, vices of princes, wars, impunity, ignorance, error, false principles, flatteries, interest, fear, partiality, authority, evil laws, heresy, schism, spite, ambition, natural inclinations, and other inauspicious causes which, proceeding from the natural weakness of the human constitution, are the fountain and proper causes of many consequent evils."

When our author thus unduly exalted the powers of man's unrenewed nature, it is the less wonderful that he seems often to speak too highly of the degree of purity and perfection to which the regenerate attain, even in the present rudimentary condition of their being-the world of commencements and of elements. Of course he rejects the ordinary Calvinistic interpretation of Rom. vii. 14-25, as describing the experience of the regenerate, referring it to the case of a "natural man under the law, better instructed and soundly threatened, and set forward in some instances by the spirit of fear." His notion is that a man is not regenerate till the period when the contest between the flesh and the spirit has been so conclusively settled in favour of the latter, that what remains of human infirmity expresses itself rather in the imperfection of our duty, than in the commission of criminal actions, or at least in such actions only where the will is surprised, and where the matter is small." In every instance in which a really regenerate man, as David for example, commits a gross or a deliberate sin, Taylor's opinion seems to be that he falls from a state of grace, and is not restored to it except by his subsequent repentance and pardon.

The only other instance to which we shall refer of his absorbing passion for the interests of holy living inducing him to shut his eyes to a plain doctrine of Scripture on account of its apprehended consequences, is the view which he held, and has again and again most elaborately defended, respecting the invalidity of a death-bed repentance; thus, in order that he may excite the living to timely concern, consigning many of the dying to flat despair. It is well for poor humanity that "the foolishness of God is wiser than man,”—that the Bible has shown how to supply the living with abundant excitement to a speedy repentance, without closing the gates of mercy and of hope on the expiring penitent,-and that in the instance of our Lord's two companions in death, he himself has taught us so affectingly that while no one should presume, no one need despair.