and king, we find him, in 1646, among those who then affirmed that the Church was the source of all the misery and war by which the country was distracted, and that from her

cause.

"at first the firebrands came, That set this empire in a flame." +

He was the first in Surrey to take up arms for the Parliament, and his pen was soon engaged in the same He lived to write an ode of congratulation on the accession of Charles the Second; and after experiencing many reverses of fortune, marched off" the stage of this vain world" on the 2d of May, 1667.

Few men have witnessed such eventful changes in public affairs as Wither. He lived, as he tells us, under eleven different governments; viz. Elizabeth, James, Charles the First, the King and Parliament together, the Parliament alone, the Army, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, a Council of State, the Parliament again, and Charles the Second.

Wither was an honest and fearless advocate of those principles which he "opined to be right;" and the fact that he indignantly returned to Cromwell, when in the zenith of his power, the keys of his private closet at Whitehall, which had been given him as a mark of special grace, testifies strongly in his favour. His political follies proceeded from errors of the head rather than of the heart; and the ingenuous repentant spirit which appears in some of the last lines penned by his hand, evidences that fervent piety which breathed through the poems of his earlier and happier days. Garsden, 1839.

ON READING LESSONS FROM THE

SCRIPTURES.

As to the original of our Church's practice in appointing of lessons to be part of her public service, we might go back as far as the original of the sacred canon of Scripture; for if the book of Job was the first extant, and published (as some think) by Moses for the use and benefit of the Church, it was doubtless a most proper lesson for the then state and condition of the Israelites under their sufferings and afflictions in Egypt, and afterwards in the wilderness. When, after this, the same inspired author had written his five books, which we call the Pentateuch, what was the book of Deuteronomy but a kind of prelude to the Gospel, and an apposite emblem of our second lesson; not only as it is, for the most part, an exposition of the moral law contained in the ten commandments, but chiefly as it gives us the spiritual and evangelical interpretation of the mysteries veiled in the ceremonial part of the Levitical law; and therefore was as necessary for all the people of the Jewish Church to hear or read, as it is for us Christians to have lessons set us out of the New Testament, after we have heard one out of the Old.

Thus stood the canon for many years, except we add the book of Joshua, and perhaps Judges and Ruth. And this was all the Scripture which David so often celebrated in his Psalms as his daily study and delight.

After the return of the Jews from their captivity, God was pleased to stir up the spirit of Esdras, to collect and revise the sacred canon (which by that time had been completed by the addition of the Psalms and the Prophets); and probably in his time, or soon after, was introduced the custom of reading them at their public meetings. That the Scriptures were divided into lessons, and that the custom was on the Sabbathdays to read a select portion of the Law (or books of Moses), and another out of the Prophets, appears from sundry passages in the New Testament. The reading out of Moses, or the Law, was their first lesson; and the voices of the prophets (which were also read every Sabbath-day) was their second.

This method, then, was the established practice of the Jewish Church in our Saviour's time, and in the time of the apostles; a practice our Lord often honoured with his presence, and always joined in; a practice to which the usage of our own Church is exactly conformable. And indeed if we compare the whole synagogue-service with ours in the Church of England, we shall find the frame and model of both to be perfectly alike;-the synagogue-service consisting, as ours doth, of forms of prayer and two lessons; and afterwards a discourse or sermon, when any that was a rabbi or teacher was present, and had any word of exhortation for the people.

Thus we see, the use of reading the Scriptures, and that too by way of lessons, in the public service, grew up by degrees from small beginnings till it became the constant and standing order of the Jewish Church. Thus it certainly was in our Saviour's time; and his presence and practice sufficiently evinced his approbation. No wonder, then, the Christian Church borrowed this, with many other liturgical rites and customs, from the Jewish, and adopted the use of reading the Scriptures by way of lessons into her public service; with this variation only, that she takes her first lesson out of the Old Testament, and her second out of the New.

That this became the early usage of the Christian Church, and probably as soon as the canon of the New Testament was settled, appears from many of the ancient fathers, namely, Justin Martyr, Cassian, Chrysostom, St. Augustin, &c., as cited by Sparrow, Comber, Nicholls, and others. And as this observation cannot but give great satisfaction to the members of our Church, so ought it to undeceive the prejudice of her opposers, when they observe her treading in the steps of God's people in all ages, and conforming herself to the very example of Christ while he was upon earth, and that of his Church in the first and purest times. Nay, we may add, that by her reformation from the Church of Rome she has not only restored the primitive custom, which the Romish Church had vitiated, but in some degree has improved the method used by the primitive Church in the choice of her lessons; as every candid observer who shall examine the rule she has prescribed by her tables and calendar must readily acknowledge.

Biography.

CLEMENT OF ROME.*

THE threshold of ecclesiastical biography is a situation of moving interest to the mind, which will pause awhile to survey the scene presented to it, and converse with the persons that immediately encounter it. These latter are the disciples and companions of the apostles, who now stand alone, without the aid and countenance of superiors, in the high places of the Church to which they had been ordained. Theirs • Abridged from "Evans's Biography of the Early Church," by the editor of " The (Coburg) Church."

was no common charge, they were no common men, nor could they have earned their honourable commission by common services of wisdom and piety. As referred to their predecessors, they appear to us like younger brothers, who, being destitute of the privileges and wealth entailed upon the elder, are left to make their way in the world as well as they can. As referred to their contemporaries, they are the flower of their generation, exceeding all in their beauty of holiness and odour of sanctity. As compared to their successors, they come before us with all the majestic attributes of founders of families; and more especially excite our imagination and feelings where the Churches, at whose foundations they laboured, are still seen towering with their walls and pinnacles. Ephesus has long ago vanished, and carried away with it much matter for reflection, which we might have pleasingly associated with our thoughts on Timothy. But Rome still survives, and her long series of eventful history leads up to Clement in a frame of mind so affected as to regard him with looks of much greater interest than the few recorded facts of his life are capable of supplying.

Clement was a fellow-worker with St. Paul in the Gospel of Christ; and the Church of Philippi, among others, was the scene of those services which were ultimately to be transferred with such benefit of experience to Rome.

But the thick veil which obscures the history of the early Church, and particularly envelopes that of the origin of the Church of Rome in uncertainty, hides from our sight all the facts which intervene between his sojourn in Philippi and his episcopate at Rome. We can only infer the course of unblemished life and unwearied exertion by which he won the suffrages of the brethren, who deemed him not unworthy of presiding in a Church where the words and works of two apostles were still fresh in memory. About three-and-twenty years had elapsed since their martyrdom; and two bishops, Linus and Anencletus, had successively discharged the pastoral office when Clement was summoned to its ministrations.

He thus succeeded (A.D. 92) to a charge of which we can but faintly estimate the exceeding weight; but, in despite of all difficulties, the views presented to this father must have been full of brightness. The kingdom of his Master had given unequivocal signs that it could not be shaken by any powers of earth; and many were the signs of decline which the king of this world was exhibiting to his sight. He went, therefore, on the way of his ministry rejoicing.

He had, however, proceeded but a few steps upon his course before the severity of the times called upon him distinctly as shepherd to be ready to lay down his life for the flock. Such a call would be readily heard and cheerfully obeyed by one who had ministered to Paul, and had probably been an eye-witness when he received, together with Peter, the crown of martyrdom in the last persecution. Domitian, a close and worthy imitator of Nero, now imitated him in stretching forth his hands to vex the Church. The same peculiar situation, which, in later days, proved so favourable to the acquisition and exertion of power, was, in earlier times, one of superior danger and suffering to the Church of Rome. In the capital of the Roman world, ⚫ Philip. iv. 3.

under the immediate eye of Caesar and his government, she received the first and heaviest strokes of his scourge; and her bishops won by suffering that reverence which their successors exacted by threats. The false and horrible charges, which had been invented against the Christians in the former persecutions, were now revived; and as Domitian never forgot his interests in his cruelties, and made his revenge minister to his rapacity, the Christian name became doubly odious at Rome, by supplying a convenient subject for capital charge against any one whose person was obnoxious or property desirable. At the head of so calumniated a body, Clement must have been severely tried. To confirm the wavering; to cheer the despondent; to prepare the martyr for his suffering; to administer comfort to his bereaved friends; to combat the expostulations of those who wished to drop some badge of their profession, the importance of which they thought light compared with the danger to which it exposed them, or to adopt the screen of some observance which they were unwilling to consider sinful under such pressing necessity; to calm the terrors of the weaker brethren; and, amid this distraction of the crew, to direct, like a good helmsman, a steady look-out upon the course of the labouring vessel,-these were the cares of Clement during this perilous storm. He brought the Church safe through it, himself unhurt, and with not many of his companions, perhaps, lost either to this world or the next.

The relaxation of the violence of this persecution recalled the attention of Clement and his Church to an application which it had compelled them for a time to neglect; and low as the Church of Rome now seemed to the eyes of the world, never since, perhaps, has she stood so high in the eyes of her divine Head, nor has she ever since been regarded with greater deference and respect by her sisters. At the very moment that her bishop was glad to pass unknown and unobserved through the streets of that city, of which his successors are sovereigns, she was extending her hand in aid of a great but distressed Church, and exercising the charitable office of mediation in her distracted body. The Church of Corinth had invoked her assistance to quell those divisions, which, however allayed for the time by Paul, had now been renewed after an interval of about forty years, and with more miserable laceration than ever. There were peculiar circumstances, besides the general one of the high character and influence of the Church in the capital, which directed her appeal in this quarter. An intimacy had existed from the first between the two sisters. They had been nursed by the same apostles Peter and Paul; and some of the first preachers at Corinth, as Aquila with his wife Priscilla, had come from Rome. Clement himself, too, had been among Paul's fellow-workers in Greece; and even if he had never accompanied him to Corinth, yet as he was now probably one among few survivors of the companions of him who had composed their former difference, this would naturally furnish an additional reason for their directing their appeal hither. One of the deputies was Fortunatus, who had been employed formerly, when they gave the account of the distracted state of their Church to the

series of vexations, if not of dangers; and was a period of at least petty persecution.

The peaceful administration of Nerva was followed by the accession of Trajan; but before the treatment of the Christians had undergone any change in the counsels of this emperor, Clement had breathed his last, in the third year of his reign. Thus his death appropriately marked the close of the first century of Christian suffering and of Christian glory.

GOD IS LOVE:

A Sermon,

BY THE REV. RICHARD MORICE, M. A. Curate of Cheshunt, Herts.

1 JOHN, iv. 16.

"God is love."

THIS concise but emphatic sentence conveys to us a truth which the greatest exercise of human intellect, unenlightened by Divine revelation, never has, nor ever could have discovered the admixture of evil with goodof suffering with happiness-in the affairs of this life, has thrown over the subject an obscurity and perplexity which the mind of fallen man never could penetrate or unfold; "having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them." Even the Athenians, who spent their time "in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing," proclaimed their ignorance by erecting an altar "to the unknown God;" and St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, a people almost equal to the Athenians in civilisation and intellectual attainments, asks, "Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching" (as the worldlywise thought it) "to save them that believe." And, my brethren, even among us, in this Christian land, who have the advantage of so clear and simple a revelation as the words of my text, how unworthy are the opinions entertained by some of the infinite and eternal Creator! Some, like the fool, are saying in their hearts, "There is no God;" living practically without God in the world, neglecting his word and worship, slighting his present mercy, despising his future judgments, and forgetting that "the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good" others, degrading the purity and dignity of his holy law, are supposing, by the merit of their own works, to atone for their conscious deficiencies; while others, through want or weakness of faith, are attributing to the Giver of all good the origin of their sufferings. To all these I would ad

dress the words of my text, "God is love :" not merely that he possesses the quality of love and benevolence towards his creatures, but that he is essentially love itself. It is not possible for us, my brethren, fully to comprehend the infinite attributes of God, or

to understand the extent of that love "which

passeth knowledge;" but we may, by the light of God's word, discover various ways in which God has been pleased to manifest himself as a God of love.

And, first, let us contemplate the exercise of his love as exhibited in paradise before the fall-the earth spontaneously producing every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, watered with fruitful streams, and abounding in every thing that could tend to promote the happiness of his creatures. Then behold man, made after the image of God in holiness, and happiness, and heavenly affections and desires, placed in the midst of this scene of bounty and of beauty, with no restriction but such as was necessary to preserve him in this state of happiness-the abstaining from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; blessed with the frequent presence of the Author of all his happiness, and enjoying a hallowed day of rest, a holy Sabbath, in which he would rejoice to pour forth the praises of a full and grateful heart, and delight in more immediate communion with the Author of his happy being. Endeavour to realise this scene to your minds, my brethren, in which every thing was proclaimed by the unerring voice of the great and wise Creator very good, and therefore eminently productive of pure and unmixed happiness, and say, does it not prove that "God is love?" Then the pure image of a God of love was reflected from the heart of man, without a cloud of sin to obscure its brightness: but, alas, such is no longer our state; sin has brought a curse upon the earth, and extended its withering and blighting influence over the mind and heart of man (the seat of his understanding and affections), as well as over the visible works of the creation. But even yet, how many proofs do we see around us in the earth of the mercy and love of God! "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork."

But again; if we have sufficient evidence that God is love from contemplating the condition of man before the fall, how much more cause have we to acknowledge it from contemplating his condition since! If Almighty love shine forth conspicuously in the work of creation, how much more bright and especially interesting does it appear in the work of redemption! Had God left us to the consequences of sin, it would have been no more than the exercise of infinite justice, and quite