Lord, since Thou thus hast broke my bands, I would devote my tongue, my hands, But, however religious he became, John Newton went on with the slave-trade. He returned to Guinea as mate of a ship, and his business there was to sail in the long-boat from place to place and buy slaves. When he came home, he married, in February, 1750, the fair maid in Kent, and sailed again in 1750, commander of a slave-ship, on board which he studied Latin, and established public worship, on this as on other voyages. So completely did Newton accept the custom of his trade, that he writes, "I never knew sweeter or more frequent hours of Divine communion than in my two last voyages to Guinea, when I was either almost secluded from society on shipboard, or when on shore among the natives." In 1754, when about to sail on another voyage, John Newton had an apoplectic fit. He remained at home, and obtained, after a short time, the post of tide-surveyor in Liverpool. At last John Newton resolved to give himself entirely to religion, and enter the Church. He was refused ordination until 1764, when the curacy of Olney was offered to him, and he was examined and ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln. The Rev. Moses Brown, vicar of Olney, had a large family, and was in money dif ulties; he, therefore, held the living, and let thev.carage, while he lived at Blackheath to earn a little more as Chaplain of Morden College. Thus it happened that the Rev. John Newton, as curate of Olney, had sole charge of the parish, and had been there about three years when, in the month of September, 1767, Mrs. Unwin and Cowper became resident in the place. Cowper was much with Newton, assisted at his prayer-meetings, and assisted also in the charitable outlay of £200 a year given by a generous Russian merchant, Mr. John Thornton. But Cowper gradually fell again into religious melancholy. The death of his brother, in March, 1770, affected him deeply. He spoke of him afterwards in that book of "The Task" called "The Timepiece:" 'I had a brother once- Was sacred; and was honoured, loved, and wept In 1771, the Rev. John Newton proposed to William Cowper that they should share in the composition of a book of hymns "for the promotion of the faith, and comforting sincere Christians." But they were not published until 1779, and before they appeared Cowper had once more suffered for a time the extinction of his reason. The loss was gradual, but in 1773 Cowper again attempted his life. A marriage with Mrs. Unwin had been agreed upon but a few months before. The return of insanity, with the deep religious gloom that was in his case its accompaniment, a gloom unnatural to him when in health, put aside every possibility of marrying. It was not until 1776 that Cowper again used his pen. At the end of 1779 Mr. Newton left Olney for London to take the City living of St. Mary Woolnoth, and it was in the earlier part of the same year that the "Olney Hymns" appeared. Those contributed by Cowper (marked with a C) are full of touching reference to the condition from which he had escaped when he was writing them. This for example : LIGHT SHINING OUT OF DARKNESS. God moves in a mysterious way Deep in unfathomable mines Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take, Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, His purposes will ripen fast, Unfolding every hour; The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flower. Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan His work in vain: God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain. In another hymn he repudiates the dread of Divine wrath that had been a part of his disease: — PEACE AFTER A STORM. When darkness long has veiled my mind, And smiling day once more appears, Then, my Redeemer, then I find The folly of my doubts and fears. Straight I upbraid my wandering heart, Oh! let me then at length be taught What I am still so slow to learn; That God is Love, and changes not, Nor knows the shadow of a turn. 66 By thee my prayers acceptance gain, Although with sin defiled; Satan accuses me in vain, And I am owned a child. Jesus! my Shepherd, Husband, Friend, Weak is the effort of my heart, And cold my warmest thought; But when I see Thee as Thou art, I'll praise Thee as ought. Till then I would Thy love proclaim In December, 1780, Cowper, at the suggestion of Mrs. Unwin, who sought healthy occupation for his mind, began to write poems for publication in a book. "The Progress of Error," "Truth," "Table Talk," Expostulation," were soon written. When the publisher the Rev. John Newton's publisher, to whom Newton had recommended Cowper-asked for more verses to bring the volume to a proper size, because "The Progress of Error" concerned Faith, Cowper promptly added "Hope" and "Charity," both written in a fortnight. The book was finished in July, 1781. "Conversation" and "Retirement were written and added while it was being printed. A preface was written by Mr. Newton, but this was so alarmingly serious that, at the request of the publisher, it was withdrawn, and first appeared before the fifth edition. A lively human interest in all that concerned the true welfare of humanity fills Cowper's verse with references to topics of the time. His love of freedom was intense, and when not under the cloud of disease no man could feel more keenly the liberty wherewith Christ had made him free. In the dialogue of "Table Talk" Cowper wrote— B. Vigilant over all that He has made, A. Freeman and slave then, if the case be such, Stand on a level,-and you prove too much. If all men indiscriminately share His fostering power and tutelary care, As well be yoked by Despotism's hand, As dwell at large in Britain's chartered land. B. No. Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves, howe'er contented, never know. The mind attains beneath her happy reign Religion, richest favour of the skies, Stands most revealed before the freeman's eyes; Free to prove all things, and hold fast the best, A blessing, freedom is the pledge of all. In the poem on "Truth" Cowper thus asserts the sense that was always strong in him when relieved of physical depression, the sense of the cheerfulness of true religion: Artist, attend!-your brushes and your paint- Will weep indeed, and heave a pitying groan No fear attends to quench his glowing fires, Ten thousand thousand strings at once go loose, Can call up life into his faded eye That passes all he sees unheeded by. No wounds like those a wounded spirit feels; No cure for such, till God, who makes them, heals. A Father's frown, and kiss His chastening hand. Then Heaven, eclipsed so long, and this dull Earth, While busy upon this book, Cowper made Lady Austen's acquaintance, of which came "John Gilpin, and his chief poem, "The Task," produced in 1785— four years before the fall of the Bastille." "The Task" caused Cowper's cousin, Lady Hesketh, sister of his early love, to break a silence of nineteen years. Her husband, Sir Thomas Hesketh, had died in 1782, and in 1786 Lady Hesketh went to Olney. She persuaded Cowper and Mrs. Unwin to find Olney dull, and in November they moved to a more cheerful house at Weston Underwood, where they had a friend for landlord. An addition of £50 a year to his income came also from an unknown friend, who seems to have been Theodora, But in 1787 Cowper was ill again, from January to June, and then again attempted suicide. In 1788, Lady Hesketh again visited him; he was busy upon a translation of Homer into blank verse, which was published in 1791, and for which he was paid a thousand pounds. In the December of that year, Mrs. Unwin had an attack of paralysis. Cowper had been invited to work on an edition of Milton. William Hayley had been asked to write a "Life of Milton" for another edition of his works. Hayley and Cowper being, therefore, spoken of as rivals, 2 See the volume in this Library containing "Shorter English Poems," pp. 399-401, of Hayley wrote to Cowper, whom until then he had not known, and there was established friendly fellowship between them. Visits were exchanged, and Cowper spent six weeks with Hayley at Eartham. The best English translations of the Latin poems Milton were the produce of this fellowship. But Mrs. Unwin became worse. Cowper sank again into insanity. The king granted him a pension of £300, when the sufferer hardly knew what it meant. October, 1796, they removed to East Dereham, where Mrs. Unwin died. For the rest of his life Cowper's only chance of health was in the sustained care of his friends to support his mind by occupation of it. In March, 1799, he finished the revision of his Homer, and he died on the 25th of April, 1800. CHAPTER XIII. In FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA.-PRIESTLEY, PALEY, HEBER, CHALMERS, WORDSWORTH, KEBLE, AND OTHERS. -A.D. 1789 TO A.D. 1837. JOSEPH, the son of Jonas Priestley, who was a clothdresser at Birstal Fieldhead, near Leeds, was born in 1733. His mother died when he was six years old, and he was adopted by Mrs. Keighley, a sister of his father's. He learnt Latin and Greek at the local grammar-school, and Hebrew in the holidays. He worked also at Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic, besides French, German, and Italian. His health was delicate; while he was a schoolboy his lungs were not sound. When nineteen he joined the academy at Daventry, now incorporated with New College, London. He was to enter the ministry, and had been trained in Calvinistic opinions, but as a youth inclined rather to the different opinions of Harmensen (Arminius). The minister of the congregation in which he attended with his aunt had refused young Priestley the communion, because he had doubts on the subject of original sin and on eternity of punishment. At the Daventry Academy, where he was trained for the ministry under the successor of Dr. Doddridge, young men were required to study both sides of each argument; on many subjects there was division of opinion, and the side usually taken by Priestley was not the orthodox. As a student he began to write his "Institutes of Natural and Re 1 66 years at Needham Market, Priestley moved in 1758 to Nantwich, where he had another congregation, and succeeded better in obtaining pupils. At Nantwich his interest in scientific inquiry deepened, and he saved money enough to buy an air-pump and an electrical machine. In 1761, Priestley, aged twentyeight, left Nantwich to become teacher of languages and belles lettres in the academy at Warrington. At Warrington he married Miss Wilkinson, the daughter of a Welsh ironmaster. In 1767, Priestley, who had for his interest in science just been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, visited London, and was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, who aided him with books for his History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments," which appeared before the close of the same year. He obtained also at this time the degree of LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh. It was in the same year 1767 that Priestley left Warrington, and was engaged for Mill-hill Chapel, Leeds. At Leeds, in the next year, he began the course of investigations that led to his discovery, in 1774, of oxygen gas, which he called dephlogisticated air. Other important discoveries followed. In 1773 Dr. Priestley had become librarian and literary companion to the Earl of Shelburne, with £250 a year and a house. He travelled with Lord Shelburne, and at Paris was introduced to the chief men of science, who told him he was the only sensible man they knew who believed in Christianity. In 1780 Lord Shelburne parted from Priestley, giving him an annuity of £150 a year, and Priestley then became minister to the chief Dissenting congregation at Birmingham. He was still publishing from time to time the results of his scientific inquiries, and in 1780 there appeared an answer to such arguments against religion as he had heard at Paris, in his "Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, containing an Examination of the Principal Objections to the Doctrines of Natural Religion, and especially those contained in the writings of Mr. Hume." In 1787, Priestley added a treatise on the "State of the Evidence of Revealed Religion, with Animadversions on the two last chapters of the first volume of Mr. Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Fifty-six years old, and the author of many scientific and religious books, this was Priestley's position at Birmingham at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. William Paley was ten years younger than Joseph Priestley. He was born in July, 1743, at Peter borough, where his father was a minor canon. William Paley the elder presently resigned his minor canonry to become head-master of the school of vealed Religion," of which the four parts were published in 1772-3-4, seventeen or eighteen years after he had left the Training College. Priestley began the ministry at Needham Market, in Suffolk, with a stipend of £30 a year, and sought pupils at half-a-Giggleswick, in Yorkshire. There William, his eldest guinea a quarter, who might be boarded for £12 a year. He was not orthodox enough for his congregation, and was the less successful as a preacher, because he had an impediment of speech. After three 1 Dr. Philip Doddridge, who died at the age of forty-nine, in 1751, was a close friend of Dr. Samuel Clarke. "The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul," was the most popular of his works, and some of the Hymns written by him are very good. His influence was great as a trainer of young men for the dissenting ministry, and several of his pupils abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity. son, was taught until November, 1758, when, at the age of fifteen, he was admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge, as a sizar. He did not go into residence at once, but studied mathematics under a private tutor, and joined his college in October, 1759. In the following December he was appointed to a scholarship from Giggleswick school, and was also elected scholar on the college foundation, and appointed to the exhibition founded by Sir Walter Mildmay. In May, 1761, he was also elected to the Buntry Scholarship. For two years he was a somewhat idle student; then I spent the first two years of my undergraduateship happily, but unprofitably. I was constantly in society, where we were not immoral, but idle and rather expensive. At the commencement of my third year, however, after having left the usual party at rather a late hour in the evening, I was awakened at five in the morning by one of my companions, who stood at my bedside and said, "Paley, I have been thinking what a d-d fool you are. I could do nothing, probably, were I to try, and can afford the life I lead; you could do everything, and cannot afford it. I have had no sleep during the whole night on account of these reflections, and am now come solemnly to inform you, that if you persist in your indolence, I must renounce your society." I was so struck with the visit and the visitor, that I lay in bed great part of the day, and formed my plan. I ordered my bed-maker to prepare my fire every evening, in order that it might be lighted by myself. I arose at five, read during the whole of the day, except such hours as chapel and hall required, allotting to cach portion of time its peculiar branch of study; and just before the closing of the gates (nine o'clock) I went to a neighbouring coffeehouse, where I constantly regaled upon a mutton chop and a dose of milk-punch. And thus, on taking my bachelor's degree, I became senior wrangler. This was in 1763, when Paley's age was twenty. As he was too young to take orders, he became assistant at Greenwich in a school which prepared pupils for the army and navy. He practised very strict economy to enable himself to pay some college debts that he brought with him. After three years of work in the academy, he left it and took deacon's orders; but he remained in Greenwich as private tutor to a widow's son, and became assistant-curate to the vicar. In 1766, Paley obtained a fellowship on the foundation of his college, and completed the degree of M.A., his age then being twenty-three. In October, 1767, when his pupil at Greenwich went to Cambridge, Paley returned to his college, took private pupils in Cambridge, was ordained priest, and in 1768 was made one of the two assistant-tutors of his college (the other being John, son of Edmund Law, the Bishop of Carlisle), under the sole tutor, Dr. Shepherd. In 1771 he was appointed one of the Whitehall preachers. In 1775 Paley was presented by his friend, Dr. Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle, to the rectory of Musgrave, in Westmoreland, a living of £80 a year. In 1776 he vacated his fellowship by marrying Miss Jane Hewitt, of Carlisle, and was presented in December to the vicarage of Dalston, in Cumberland, worth £90 a year, holding Musgrave still. In 1777 he resigned Musgrave on being presented by the Dean and Chapter of Carlisle to the vicarage of Appleby, in Westmoreland, worth about £300 a year. He then resided for six months of the year at Appleby, and six at Dalston. In 1780 there was an addition of £400 a year to his income by his collation to the fourth prebendal stall in the church of Carlisle. His old fellow-tutor, John Law, had been presented by his father to the vicarage of Warkworth and to a prebendal stall at Carlisle, and in 1777 had been made Archdeacon of Carlisle. In 1782 Archdeacon Law became an Irish bishop, and Paley, succeeding to the office Law vacated, became archdeacon at the age of thirty-nine. His time was now spent partly at Dalston, and partly at Carlisle, where, in 1785, the office of chancellor of the diocese was added to his preferments. It was in this year, 1785, that Paley published his "Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy," a book formed by the recasting of lectures that he had formerly given at Christ's College. It provoked much controversy. One of its lines of thought was developed in 1788, when Archdeacon Paley wrote a letter advocating abolition of the slave-trade; and in 1789 he addressed to the committee formed to secure its abolition, "Arguments against the unjust pretensions of slave-dealers and holders to be indemnified by pecuniary allowances at the public expense in case the slave-trade should be abolished." This was not published. In 1790 William Paley published his argument for the authenticity of the Scriptures, entitled, "Horæ Paulina; or, the Truth of the Scripture History of St. Paul evinced by a Comparison of the Epistles which bear his Name with the Acts of the Apostles, and with one another." In 1792 he was instituted to the vicarage of Addingham, near Great Salkeld, worth about £140. He had at this time eight children, and had lost his wife in the preceding year. The stir caused in England by the French Revolution led Paley to publish as a separate pamphlet the chapter on the British Constitution from his "Moral and Political Philosophy." Although it had been written ten years before the fall of the Bastille, and only set forth the doctrines illustrated by the English Constitution, there were many who regarded this reprint as a sign of sympathy with disorder. Paley was not an enthusiast. He was an amiable, clear-headed Englishman, who had made the Church his profession, and was glad to rise in it; whose bent of mind was opposed to an undue exercise of authority But |