GEORGE W. BETHUNE.

THIS distinguished author as well as eloquent divine was born in New York, on the 18th of March, 1805. He is the only son of Mr. Divie Bethune, a native of Ross-shire, Scotland; who, for many years, was an eminent merchant in New York-eminent not only for business qualifications, but for an intelligent, ever-active piety, that made him the first, or among the first, in every religious charitable movement.1

He prepared for college under private tutorship, and in 1819 entered Columbia College. After being here three years, he entered the senior class of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Penna., where his brother-in-law, the Rev. George Duffield, had been for some years settled as the Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in that place. During that year (1822), a remarkable revival of religion took place in Dickinson College, of which he was a subject, and he, therefore, resolved to devote his life to the Christian ministry. After graduating, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary, and, in 1827, was ordained by the Second Presbytery of New York, and settled over the Reformed Dutch Church, Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, New York. In 1830, he was settled at Utica, over the new Reformed Dutch Church, which he gathered and built up; and in 1834, he was called to the First Reformed Dutch Church, Philadelphia. After laboring in this field two years, a number of his friends and admirers in that city determined to build a new house of worship for him; and, accordingly, in 1837, he was settled over the Third Reformed Dutch Church, worshipping

1 Dr. Bethune's mother, Mrs. Joanna Bethune, was the daughter of the celebrated Isabella Graham, and inherited much of her mother's earnest philanthropy. She was very active in founding the Widow's Society and Orphans' Asylum in New York, and was among the first in laying the foundation of many benevolent institutions, such as the Sunday School, the Society for the Promotion of Industry, &c. &c.

2

Another subject of that revival was the late distinguished Erskine Mason, D.D., for twenty-one years pastor of the Bleeker Street Church, who died May 14, 1851. His sermons were distinguished for great compactness of thought, and severe logical arrangement, united to a fervid and often impassioned eloquence, that made him one of the first, if not the first preacher in New York. An octavo volume of his sermons, entitled The Pastor's Legacy," has been published since his death, prefixed to which is an excellent memoir, by Rev. Wm. Adams, D.D. Read also a very discriminating and beautifully written article on his character, by the late Rev. R. S. Storrs Dickinson, for two years Assistant Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, whose early death was a great loss to the Christian church.

at the corner of Tenth and Filbert Streets. Here he remained twelve years, when he left to take charge of the Reformed Dutch Church on Brooklyn Heights, New York, where he now resides.

From his varied learning, as well as for his power as a writer and an orator, Dr. Bethune has received many invitations to posts of high honor and trust. The chair of Moral Philosophy at West Point was offered to him by President Polk; he was elected Chancellor of the University of New York, to succeed Mr. Frelinghuysen; and he was invited by a unanimous vote of the General Synod of the Reformed Dutch Church, to the Professorship of Ecclesiastical History and Pastoral Theology in their Theological Seminary at New Brunswick, New Jersey; but he declined all these honors, feeling it to be his duty to remain in the pulpit as the pastor of a people who are devotedly attached to him.

The following are Dr. Bethune's chief publications: "The Fruits of the Spirit," a volume of Christian ethical essays, published in 1839; "Early Lost Early Saved," on the death and salvation of infants, 1846; a volume of "Sermons," 1847; "History of a Penitent, or Guide to an Enquirer," 1847; an edition of “ Walton's Angler," with copious literary and bibliographical notes, 1848; "Lays of Love and Faith, with other Fugitive Poems," 1848; "The British Female Poets," with biographical and critical notices, 1848.

For twenty years Dr. Bethune has been continually invited to deliver orations and lectures at various colleges, and before societies in different parts of the Union. A few of these he has accepted, and the following orations and lectures have been published: 1837, "On Genius," delivered at Union College; 1839, "Leisure, its Uses and Abuses," a lecture before the Mercantile Library, Philadelphia; and "The Age of Pericles," before the Athenian Institute, Philadelphia; 1840, an oration before the literary societies of the University of Pennsylvania; and the "Prospects of Art in the United States," before the Artists' Fund Society, Philadelphia; 1842, "The Eloquence of the Pulpit," at Andover Theological Seminary; and "The Duties of Educated Men," at Dickinson College; 1845, "Discourse on the Death of Andrew Jackson," Philadelphia; and "A Plea for Study," at Yale College; 1849, "The Claims of our Country on its Literary Men," before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College.

The writings of this eloquent Christian scholar are all so rich and instructive, that it is difficult to make selections; but the following, I believe, will give some idea of his power, eloquence, and classic grace of style.

THE NEW ENGLANDER.

We all claim a common history, and, whatever be our immediate parentage, are proud to own ourselves the grateful children of the mighty men who declared our country's independence, framed the bond of our Union, and bought with their sacred blood the liberties we enjoy. Nor is it an insincere compliment to assert, that, go where you will, New England is represented by the shrewdest, the most enlightened, the most successful, and the most religious of our young population. Nearly all our teachers, with the authors of our schoolbooks, and a very large proportion of our preachers, as well as of our editors (the classes which have the greatest control over the growing character of our youth), come from, or receive their education in New England. Wherever the New Englander goes, he carries New England with him. New England is his boast, his standard of perfection, and "So they do in New England!" his confident answer to all objectors. Great as is our reverence for those venerable men, he rather wearies us with his inexhaustible eulogy on the Pilgrim Fathers, who, he seems to think, have begotten the whole United States. Nay, enlarging upon the somewhat complacent notion of his ancestors, that God designed for them, "his chosen people," this Canaan of the aboriginal heathen, he looks upon the continent as his rightful heritage, and upon the rest of us as Hittites, Jebusites, or people of a like termination, whom he is commissioned to root out, acquiring our money, squatting on our wild lands, monopolizing our votes, and marrying our heiresses. Whence, or how justly, he derived his popular sobriquet, passes the guess of an antiquary; but certain it is, that, if he meets with a David, the son of Jesse has often to take up the lament in a different sense from the original—“I am distressed for thee, my Brother Jonathan !" Better still, his sisters, nieces, female cousins, flock on various honorable pretexts to visit him amidst his new possessions, where they own with no Sabine reluctance the constraining ardor of our unsophisticated chivalry; and happy is the household over which a New England wife presides! blessed the child whose cradle is rocked by the hand, whose slumber is hallowed by the prayers of a New England mother! The order of the Roman policy is reversed. He conquered, and then inhabited; the New Englander inhabits, then gains the mastery, not by force

of arms, but by mother-wit, steadiness, and thrift. That there should be, among us of the other races, a little occasional petulance, is not to be wondered at; but it is only superficial. The New Englander goes forth not as a spy or an enemy, and the gifts which he carries excite gratitude, not fear. He soon becomes identified with his neighbors, their interests are soon his, and the benefits of his enterprising cleverness swell the advantage of the community where he has planted himself, thus tending to produce a moral homogeneousness throughout the confederacy. Yet let it be remembered that this New England influence, diffusing itself, like noiseless but transforming leaven, through the recent and future States, while it makes them precious as allies, would also make them formidable as rivals, terrible as enemies. The New Englander loses little of his main characteristics by migration. He is as shrewd, though not necessarily as economical a calculator in the valley of the Mississippi, as his brethren in the East, and as brave as his fathers were at Lexington or Charlestown. It were the height of suicidal folly for the people of the maritime States to attempt holding as subjects or tributaries, directly or indirectly, the people between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains; but those who have not travelled among our prairie and forest settlements can have only a faint idea of the filial reverence, the deferential respect, the yearning love, with which they turn to the land where their fathers sleep, and to you who guard their sepulchres. The soul knows nothing of distance; and, in their twilight musings, they can scarcely tell which is dearer to their hearts-the home of the kindred they have left behind them, or the home they have won for their offspring.

OUR COUNTRY.

Phi Beta Kappa Oration.

What has God done, what is He doing, what is He about to do, in this land? He has set it far away to the west, and made it so circumstantially independent, that, if all the rest of the habitable earth were sunk, we should feel no serious curtailment of our comforts. The products of the whole world are, or may soon be, found within our confederate limits. He brought here first the sternest, most religious, most determined representatives of Europe's best blood, best faith, best intellect; men, ay, and women (it is the mother makes the child), who, because they feared God, feared no created power-who,

bowing before His absolute sovereignty, would kneel to no lord spiritual or temporal on earth-and who, believing the Bible true, demanded its sanction for all law. To your Pilgrim Fathers, the highest place may well be accorded; but forget not that, about the time of their landing on the Rock, there came to the mouth of the Hudson men of kindred faith and descent-men equally loving freedom-men from the seawashed cradle of modern constitutional freedom, whose union of free burgher-cities taught us the lesson of confederate independent sovereignties, whose sires were as free, long centuries before Magna Charta, as the English are now, and from whose line of republican princes Britain received the boon of religious toleration, a privilege the States-General had recognized as a primary article of their government when first established; men of that stock, which, when offered their choice of favors from a grateful monarch, asked a University;1 men whose martyrsires had baptized their land with their blood; men who had flooded it with ocean-waves rather than yield it to a bigottyrant; men, whose virtues were sober as prose, but sublime as poetry; the men of Holland! Mingled with these, and still farther on, were heroic Huguenots, their fortunes broken, but their spirit unbending to prelate or prelate-ridden king. There were others (and a dash of cavalier blood told well in battle-field and council);-but those were the spirits whom God made the moral substratum of our national character. Here, like Israel in the wilderness, and thousands of miles off from the land of bondage, they were educated for their high calling, until, in the fulness of times, our confederacy with its Constitution was founded. Already there had been a salutary mixture of blood, but not enough to impair the Anglo-Saxon ascendency. The nation grew morally strong from its original elements. The great work was delayed only by a just preparation. Now God is bringing hither the most vigorous scions from all the European stocks, to "make of them all one new MAN;" not the Saxon, not the German, not the Gaul, not the Helvetian, but the AMERICAN. Here they will unite as one brotherhood, will have one law, will share one interest. Spread over the vast region from the frigid to the torrid, from Eastern

1 After the eventful issue of the siege of Leyden, the Prince of Orange and the States-General, grateful to the heroic defenders of that city, offered them their choice of an Annual Fair or a University. They chose the University; but, struck with the nobleness of the choice, the high authorities granted them both. The University was established in 1575, and became the Alma Mater of Grotius, Scaliger, Boerhaave, and many other renowned men.