One main feature in the character of our departed friend, was a repugnance to outward show and glitter. He may be said to have been a "true-born Englishman," considered in the healthiest periods of our history—a man of simplicity, earnestness, and energy, as well in his -actions as in his writings. We are not the panegyrists of the late Mr. Aspland, for we are aware that he was not without his defects; but we have an opinion with 'regard to his literary labours in particular, which we shall fearlessly state. These consisted principally in sermons and theological disquisitions, and other papers of a miscellaneously literary character inserted in the two periodicals above referred to. These evince the qualities of his mind, as that of a cautious but ardent inquirer after Christian truth, a fearless assertor of his opinion, yet open to conviction-in thought, sober and circumspect; in reasoning, accurate and logical. His writings are distinguished by clearness and vigour of conception and perspicuity of style. He was not, apparently, ambitious of ornament in his compositions, but there are passages in his pulpit discourses which may be cited as examples of peculiar felicity of diction, and of a chaste but fervid imagination. In general, his sermons appear to have been constructed according to the legitimate rules laid down by Dr. Blair, and similar classical writers on the belles lettres; for this we do not blame, but rather admire, them; and though it could hardly be expected but that the great number that have been published should vary in their respective degrees of force, clearness, and logical argumentation, there are some, like the one preached on the occasion of the death of the late Mrs. Rowe, of Bristol, containing passages, we will venture to say, not surpassed, in stirring pulpit eloquence, by Massillon or Bossuet. Take, for example, the following extract from the discourse just mentioned, on Heaven and its joys :

"The descriptions of the world to come by the sacred writers are altogether general, and consist of the images of those things that are here most intimately associated with joy and glory. Heaven is a festival, in which good men will sit down with the most illustrious of their kind, and enjoy communion with their Saviour, and, through him, with the Father of all. It is a kingdom in which

they will reign for ever, on thrones that cannot be shaken, and with crowns that shall not fade away. It is a state of light, of safety, purity, activity, and joy-in which they shall shine as the sun. It is a condition of perfect life, unalloyed satisfaction and pleasure. It is a temple not made with hands, and eternal, the gates of which are never shut, and in which all the righteous minister as priests before God, singing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and of the Lamb, and uniting in their hallelujahs with all the wise and good from every climate and every age, and every dispensation of faith and knowledge. It is a holy city, whose foundations are the rock of ages, whose builder and maker is God. It is a paradise, a garden of peace and pleasure, where grows the tree of life, bearing ever-varied fruit, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, and where flows the river of the waters of life, fresh from the everlasting fountain. It is a day without night, created by that Sun which never goes down, nor is obscured by clouds, even the glory of Him who dwelleth from eternity in his own inconceivable splendours."-pp. 10, 11.

And again, in the same discourse :—

"Our highest interests (I speak to Christians, but let men of the world hear!) are in that country, whither we are travelling to spend nearly the whole of our existence. As our treasures are there, thither let our hearts ascend. Let us rise above the world that is perishing. For what is the world? It is not merely this material globe. There would be no beauty or grandeur here but for our associations of ideas, and these are all formed upon the model of human society. To behold the face of man no more upon the earth, is to take away from the earth all that is of value, or that can minister delight. Suppose this the last generation of the human race, and one of us to be the single survivor of all his species: would not this be the most unhappy of beings? Would not the world lose its wonted charms, and, instead of beauty, present deformity -instead of sublimity, dreariness and horror? world, then, is formed by human beings: but not by the generations gone by; for, to the eye of sense, what are they but dust and ashes? The present living inhabitants of the globe are the world; but they die daily, and presently will all have been gathered to their fathers. What,

The

therefore, of certainty and satisfaction is there in the world? None; but as we carry ourselves forward to that state where alone life, and where alone society can be truly enjoyed; that state where hunger and thirst shall be no more known, where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, where God shall wipe away all tears from all eyes, and where the unclouded light of the Divine love shall create the joy, and call forth the praises of the multitude that no man can number, through ages that shall revolve their never-ending round."-pp. 18, 19.

For ourselves, we hesitate not to say, that for their vigorous simplicity, their plain evangelical tone, their practical good sense, the sermons of Mr. Aspland will I continue to be read when not a few of those of his contemporaries (his Unitarian brethren not excepted) of more ambitious pretensions, which aim at a more profound and recondite Christian philosophy, or a more imaginative brilliancy, may be disregarded or forgotten.

His coeval and friend, Mr. Fullagar, informs us,* that the sermon which first brought him into public notice, was entitled, "Divine Judgments on Guilty Nations," delivered on a fast-day, in 1803, a time when the established and dissenting clergy were rivalling each other in offering adulatory incense on the altar of high prerogative. "Mr. Aspland, on the contrary, thought that a fast-day should be a day of national humiliation, and proceeded to state what he deemed our national sins: there were our eagerness for war, the alliance of the Christian religion with the civil power, our treacherous and bloody conquests in the East Indies, our slave ships, the multiplied oaths in our civil and ecclesiastical administration, and our penal laws, like those of Draco, written in blood; the amelioration of some of these evils he lived to see, and to it he contributed his talents and his energies, which were always at the service of any project for the enlargement of the human mind."

Such was the late Rev. Robert Aspland, in the general lineaments of his mind and character. Moreover, it is satisfactory to know, that as he had begun, so he continued to the end of his career. Latterly, indeed, successive attacks of ill-health tended to repress his energies

* See the "Inquirer" for January 17th, 1846.

in the service of the church to which he belonged, and for some years before his death he had been obliged to remain in comparative retirement and inactivity. Consolatory is it, however, to reflect that through all his physical sufferings his mind continued firm and steadfast, fixed on the Rock of Ages. He knew in whom he had believed. To the last he did not neglect in his domestie sphere the requirements of devotional duty. His end was peaceful; and while those who survive have to lament the loss of a Christian minister, whose teachings always ministered to virtue, and to those principles and feelings that make and keep society great and happy, they also derive consolation from the assurance that he descended to the tomb with unswerving confidence in redeeming mercy, and in the joyful hope of a blessed immortality.-ED.

ILLUSTRATION OF DIFFICULT PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE.

It seems to have been an universal custom, derived from the first fathers of mankind, to describe the world by resemblances of the human body. Hence an arm of the sea, the mouth of a river, the foot of a mountain, the brow of a hill, the face of a country.

The Scriptures abound with such similitudes: a plain between two prominent hills, is a dwelling between shoulders; a bay near the mouth of Jordan is a tongue; a mountain is a head, of which trees, bushes, and vegetables are the hair; a cliff is a nose, and the bed of the ocean is the hollow of God's hand. Throughout all the East, a spring or fountain, or well-head, is an eye. In general the springs and brooks in Palestine may be divided into three classes: the first accidental or providential. Of this kind is Ain-bakkora in the rocky mountain Lehi. Nothing could be more natural than an assimilation of 'mountains to animals. The Arabians called a high lofty mountain, with expanded sides, Halica, a bird on the wing, whence came Mount Helicon, with all its poetical appendages. The Phoenicians called a huge mountain Thour, an ox, whence came mount Taurus. The Hebrews called one rocky mountain an ass, and the craggy passage

by which it was ascended Lehi, the jaw. In the top of the rock Etam in Siméon, the hero Samson dwelt, and the road to his habitation went through Judah by Lehi. The Philistines, whom he had exasperated, and who watched an opportunity to take him, lodged themselves in a passage called Lehi, or the jaw, a ledge of rugged rocks in the lower part of the mountain. The lands of Simeon had been taken out of the lot of Judah, whose lands lay betwixt Samson and the Philistines, and which had been damaged by their frequent incursions, covenanted with the Philistines to deliver Samson into their hands. When he appeared, coming down Ramat-lehi, or the upper part of the jaw, the Philistines located in the lower part shouted to attack him. The hero, perceiving a pendant projection of the rock (a tooth of the jaw) moist, and supposing water had loosened it, laid hold, and, shivering it off, set it rolling down the steep, which, dislodging other masses as it fell, overwhelmed and killed a great number of men in the narrow pass at the bottom. Samson, transported with joy, exclaimed, alluding to the name of the mountain and the passage, that he had thrown down heaps of rock and rubbish upon heaps of Philistines, and that with the jaw bone of an ass he had slain a thousand men. By this exertion he had exhausted his spirits and strength, and in an agony of thirst he cried to Heaven for water. He had not been mistaken in the moisture, for, when he rent the rock, there sprang out of the hollow clift a stream of water, and Samson called it Ain-bakkora, an eye, that looked in mercy upon him, when in distress he prayed for water. From this remarkable spot, a socket in the upper jaw, where Samson broke off the rock, a fountain continued to flow in after ages.

An investigation of Jewish topography, and the taste of the Eastern nations in describing places, very likely would elucidate many parts of the Old Testament, much better than the usual touches of types and systems, and render the most edifying books of antiquity, at the same time, the most entertaining.

Probably Behemoth, that "ate up grass like an ox," that lay among reeds and fens and willows of the brooks, that "drank up a river and moved not, that stared upon Jordan with his eyes, and drew it up into its mouth,"