and enjoy, as we might and ought to do, that civil and religious liberty of which we are so boastful?

These are a few of the many questions, which should be pressed upon the serious consideration of every one. Our limits forbid us to mention several others, which have been suggested to our minds by the return of this season. We wish to see the anniversary of our Independence devoted to higher purposes, than it has usually been. There has been enough, and more than enough, of self-gratulation. We have taken too much credit to ourselves for the deeds of our fathers. Let us do them and ourselves a higher honor. Let us emulate their excellences and shun their errors. Indeed let us not be satisfied, until we surpass them in knowledge and in virtue; as the superior advantages they procured for us should enable us to do. Let us make a wider and a higher application, than they did, of the great principles for which they so nobly contended. Let us not rest satisfied with our liberty, while aught of slavery abides in our land. S. J. M.

UNWARRANTABLE

PERVERSION OF THE

WORDS

OF

CHRIST. DR. TENNEY'S SERMON AT THE FUNERAL
OF DR. AUSTIN.

Messrs Editors: In a sermon preached a few months since, by Rev Dr Tenney of Weathersfield, Conn., at the funeral of the late Dr Austin formerly of Worcester, I find the following extraordinary passage. It has seldom been equalled for its strange and revolting misapplication of a part of the history of our Lord.

In delineating the character of Dr Austin, the preach-er had before remarked, that the theological sentiments. of the deceased are clearly evinced, by his writings, &c., to have been strictly Calvinistic, and in agreement with those of Edwards, Bellamy, and Hopkins;' and having added, that these sentiments contributed to give refinement to his feelings, elevation to his joys, &c., he thus proceeds:

"But for the last three or four years, a thick and dark cloud has hung over the course and enveloped in dismay the mind of our revered friend. He lost nearly all hope of his own reconciliation to God and interest in the Redeemer. He sunk into a settled deep religious melancholy, which occasionally appeared in paroxisms of despair and horror. His bitter moarings were, at times, sufficient to wring with sympathetic anguish the most unfeeling heart. On this account, however, who, even in the secresy of thought, can doubt, that he was, in truth, a man of God? Doubt, in view of such a life for almost fifty years, the very highest possible evidence of sound piety!. Doubt, in view of the fact, that he exhibited, most clearly, the Christian graces, except hope, and that he continued and abounded in prayer, and showed the burden of his desires to be, what he uttered, and which were his last words of prayer; 'Blessed Jesus! Blessed Jesus! Sanctify me wholly.' Who can doubt! The eminent Bellamy was once in despair; Cowper, and others like him, have closed this probationary life in despair; nay, Jesus Christ, the dearly beloved Son of God, died in darkness, crying, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!'

I confess I have been perfectly shocked by this odious abuse of scripture; involving at once the most mistaken interpretation of the passage, and the worst possible comparison of the state of our Saviour's mind in his expiring moments, with that of one of his melancholy or deranged and despairing followers. Here Jesus Christ, the well-beloved Son of God, who had just before been interceding with his Father for the forgiveness of his enemies, and was just commending his de

parting spirit to the God who breathed it, in the confidence that he should be heard, is represented as 'dying in darkness!' And, as if this were not enough, his feelings and sufferings are represented as of the same class with those, which only false notions of God and his truth, or the workings of a disordered temperament can engender ;-with the despair of Bellamy, whose enthusiastic frame and diseased sensibility exposed him to the most opposite extremes of rapture and distress, of joy and anguish; of Cowper, whose reason for seven years together was eclipsed, and who under the workings of an appalling faith and loss of all hope in the mercy of God, more than once attempted to put an end to his own existence;* and of Dr Austin, the subject of this discourse, who, if we have not been misinformed, was for a long time before his death in a state little short of madness; in a degree too, which,— considering the various causes from which it might have proceeded and to which it has been ascribed, the agitations of a disappointed and mortified spirit, perplexity in the management of some temporal affairs of which he had a guardianship, besides what undeniably might have proceeded from despair of soul,— we count it little less than blasphemy to bring into comparison with the agony of Christ.

And what is the ground of this perverse comparison, —of this miserable interpretation of St Matthew's history ? This, forsooth, that our Lord in his last devotions thought proper to repeat a portion of the 22d Psalm, the beginning of which is in the words, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Let the reverend au

* See 'Private Correspondence with his most intimate friends, edited after the life by Hayley, by his relative, Johnson.'

thor of this discourse, doctor in divinity though he be, turn to the best commentators of this passage, to Le Clerc and others, and he may be instructed, that the words quoted by St Matthew only describe the Psalm, which our Saviour used; that in applying them to himself, as he was accustomed to do the words of David and the Prophets, he intended to apply the whole Psalm, commencing with the exclamation My God, my God ;' that the Psalin itself, in giving utterance to suffering is also throughout an expression of strong confidence in God; that if it begins in fear and despondence, even these are mingled with a filial trust; and that, let it be noted, it concludes with transports of gratitude and joy, such as these 'I will proclaim thy name to my brethren. In the midst of the congregation will I praise thee. For he hath not despised the affliction of the afflicted, neither hath he hid his face from him. But when he cried unto him, he heard. My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation. I will pay my vows before them, that fear him.'-And the same thankful and exulting strain is continued to the end of the Psalm.

Besides this, it is a most material objection to the interpretation which the preacher seems to adopt, that it takes from us the perfection, and with it much of the benefit, of the example of Christ; who, it is declared by his apostle, was 'tempted like as we are, yet without sin.' But if Christ died in darkness,' where, we must ask, was his filial trust, under all trials, in God his Father? where that cheerfulness of submission to the divine pleasure, which said, 'The cup, which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?' where that consciousness of his Father's approbation, which ena

bled him to declare, The Father himself loveth me," and to ask, Thinkest thou not, that I could pray to my Father, and he would give me a legion of angels? But how else would the scriptures be fulfilled?'

We confess, we have no patience with that miserable system, which admits the belief, that the Son of God's love died under the inflictions of his Father's wrath. How injurious are such misrepresentations of that sublime and most touching history of his cross and passion! How much to be deprecated, too, are those views of religion, which authorize them!

Dr Tenney, as we notice in the conclusion of his discourse, takes pains to caution his hearers against imagining, that it was the tendency of the doctrines, which Dr Austin believed, to produce such mental distress. We shall not here attempt to oppose this statement. For we look with unfeigned sympathy upon that greatest of all calamities-a disordered mind; we know by what inexplicable diversity of operation,' totally independent of man's control, it may be produced; and we believe there is no object more worthy of the tenderest compassion, or on which the Father of mercies. himself looks with a more pitying eye, than on him, whose soul is darkened and overwhelmed by a sense of sin, or by the terrors of a mistaken, a withering faith. But that such a state may not be produced by such a faith, that precisely the views which Dr Austin professed and zealously preached, might not unsettle the reason, no one acquainted with the history of religions and their actual effects among men, will, we believe, venture to deny.