able father; who had followed him to England, and died there; and whose grave his son never passed by without taking off his hat and walking bareheaded the whole length of the church-yard. So affectionate and dutiful a son deserved to find happiness in his family, and no man found it more sentiently. At the very time we are speaking of, when he so much needed relaxation and solace, we are presented with the following domestic portrait, which may serve by contrast to bring out in bolder relief the more public features of his character. "He ever had a firm reliance on the care of Divine Providence, watching its openings, and working with it for the benefit of others, and the upright maintenance of his rapidly increasing family, which he ever gloried in, as the highest honour God could confer upon him: indeed, after the labours of the study were over, he used to amuse himself with his little ones, who quickly assembled to his well-known call of 'Come all about me-Come all about me.' Then was to be heard the joyous shout, and the rush of the youngsters to claim the first kiss, or obtain the best seat upon his knee often would he dispose of them on his person: one round his neck was his collar; one hanging on each shoulder were his shoulder-knots; one round his waist was called his girdle; and one seated on each foot, clinging their little arms round his knee, formed his clogs; and with an infant in his arms would he, thus equipt, walk about the room, the happiest of the group. The sports of the evening finished, each alternately kneeled at the mother's knee to say its prayers; and when quite prepared for bed, Mr. Clarke, when not out preaching, invariably carried them himself up to bed, put, or playfully threw them in, and tucked them up for the night; but before retiring himself, he always visited each bed to see if all was right; and to his well-known voice, pretty early in the morning, the little urchins would start up, unpin each its own bundle of clothes (which from almost infancy it had been taught to fold up), and dress with all possible expedition; for, from mere childhood, he would never permit waste of time by dilatory habits, any more than slovenly neglect through affected attempts at expedition." Vol. ii. pp. 38, 39. We need scarcely add, that such a son and such a father was an affectionate husband. Of this these volumes record many interesting traces, and among them the fragment of a painfully affecting letter, written to his wife when separated from her, and in alarm lest she and their children had been lost in a voyage from Dublin to Liverpool. But we will quote a more lively document, partly because it is short, and partly because it happens to follow in the same page from which our last extract was taken, and will save our searching out for another. It is not customary with biographers to narrate all the unbendings of their hero; but no man can, or ought to be, always stately and in full dress; and we are not therefore absolutely shocked at learning that Adam Clarke, who appears in public bristled with Arabic, Coptic, and all the terrors and sublimities of "LL.D., F.A.S., &c. &c. &c." sometimes " played at marbles with his children," and penned such courtly trifles as the following to his wife : "My very dear Mary,-This gold watch, the beautiful dial of which is an emblem of thy face; the delicate pointers, of thy hands; the scapement, of thy temples; the balance, of thy conduct in thy family; the gold case, of thy body; and the cap, of thy prudence; thy affectionate husband presenteth unto thee, on this eleventh anniversary of our wedding-day. Bristol, April 17, 1799.-Adam Clarke." Vol. ii. p. 39. In 1801 we find him removed to the Liverpool circuit; full, as usual, of business-chiefly indeed his direct business as a Methodist preacher, but varied with such little episodes as compiling and publishing elaborate works, which would have furnished occupation for half the life of a less systematic and laborious man. It is not necessary to the purpose of the present review to notice in detail his various publications, several of which, and particulary his Bibliographical Dictionary, his Succession of Sacred Literature (so admirably continued and concluded by his son, the editor of the present memoir), and most of all his Commentary on the Sacred Scriptures, display unwearied diligence, varied and extensive learning, and an ardent desire to promote Biblical and Theological studies, as an important part of the tools, so to speak, of the well-furnished Christian minister. These labours of this excellent man being well-known and highly appreciated. we confine our attention chiefly to the more personal portions and newer matter of the present memoir. While on the Liverpool circuit, Dr. Clarke was so ill as to be obliged to go to London to consult the late Mr. Pearson, who told him that he was in a state of mortal disease, and would die suddenly and speedily, if he did not at once and totally abstain from reading, writing, and preaching, and every other exertion both of body and mind. Dr. Clarke received the announcement with great composure, only adding, with his wonted resolution and disinterestedness of character: "If I find I cannot do my work, I will give it up; I will not feed myself to starve the church of God; I will seek out some other way of maintaining my wife and children." His valuable life was, however, spared for more than thirty years after this ominous announcement; doubtless because, as his daughter says, "God had yet work for him to do, both in his church and in the world." We have been struck, in reading these volumes, with the extensive range of Dr. Clarke's information and usefulness. His exertions, though mainly directed into the usual channel of his duties as a Methodist preacher, yet branched out into a variety of incidental services to mankind. Medicine, chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, all furnished their aid to his varied labours. He was a promoter by anticipation of Temperance Societies forty years ago; and he kept up with, and often preceded, the advancement of the age, in every effort of enlightened philanthropy, both for the bodies and the souls of his fellow-creatures. Still his paramount object was "to save himself and those that heard him ;" and thousands were benefited by his faithful, unwearied, pastoral labours, who never heard of, or could not appreciate, his claims to public celebrity. These volumes contain many incidental illustrations of his daily private habits of ministerial occupation; among which we quote the following incident, because it is somewhat remarkable, and happens to occur at the portion of the history at which we have arrived. But it is rather by things not remarkable, at least not so accounted, that the value of such a life as that of Dr. Clarke ought to be judged of. The remarkable incidents of a long life are but episodes; its real character must be estimated by its daily tenor. The following is the singular incident above alluded to. "A gentleman in attended Mr. Clarke's preaching, and shortly afterwards was deeply convinced of sin, of his fallen nature, and of his actual transgression. He became diligent in his attendance on the public ministry; deeply deplored his sins; and with strong prayer and tears sought pardon of God for his transgressions, through the blood of Jesus: he sought, but found not: he mourned, but was not comforted. Shortly afterwards he was confined by sickness, and sent for Mr. Clarke to pray with him, and for him: he did so; and when he learned how long he had thus mourned, and saw its apparent sincerity and earnestness, he secretly wondered at God's so long withholding a manifestation of pardon from such bitter, such deep repentance: but he charged not God foolishly; but rather, on finding after such oft-repeated visits that the lamp of life was burning low, and that the mental agony of the penitent was even hurrying on its extinction; with tender but firm language he said, It is not often, Mr. , that God thus deals with a soul deeply humbled as yours is; and so earnestly, in His own appointed way, seeking redemption through the blood of His Son: Sir, there must be a cause for this; and you have yet left something undone, which it was and is your interest and duty to have done: God judge between you and it.' "The gentleman fixed his eyes intently on the face of Mr. Clarke, raised himself up in bed, and gave the following narration : "In the year I was at —, and took my passage in the ship for England: before we sailed, some merchants of that place came to the vessel, and put on board a small bag of dollars, which they gave into the charge of the captain to carry to such and such parties. I saw this transaction and marked the captain's carelessness; for, instead of putting the bag of dollars in a place of safety, he left it carelessly day after day rolling on the locker. For the simple purpose of frightening him, I hid it: he made no enquiries; and we arrived at, and I still detained it till it should be at : missed month after month passed away, and still no inquiry was made for the lost property. The parties to whom it was consigned, and who had notice of its being sent, came to the captain for it: he remembered its having been given into his charge but nothing more: it might have been left behind. Letters to that effect were written to the correspondents, and a search was made, but nothing could be learned; no trace of the lost treasure could be discovered. All this necessarily occupied many months: I had now become alarmed, and was ashamed to confess, lest it should implicate my character. I then purposely secreted the property. The captain was sued for the amount; and having nothing to pay, he was thrown into prison, firmly maintaining his innocency of the theft, but pleading guilty to the charge of carelessness respecting his trust. He languished in prison for two years, and then died. Guilt had by this time hardened my mind; I strove to be happy, by stifling my conscience with the cares and amusements of the world: but all in vain. I at last heard you preach; and then it was that the voice of God broke in upon my conscience, and reasoned with me of righteousness, and of judgment to come. Hell gat hold upon my spirit: I have prayed; I have deplored; I have agonized at the throne of mercy, for the sake of Christ, for pardon: but God is deaf to my prayer; Christ casts out my petition there is no mercy for me; I must go down into the grave unpardoned, unsaved!' "O what a tale was this! how fine a scheme of Satanic device did it reveal! The captain was, however, dead; and that too without learning that his name was rescued from infamy: but his widow and fatherless children still lived; and Mr. Clarke suggested to the dying penitent, that God claimed from him not only repentance, but restitution. To this the gentleman willingly consented. The sum, with its interest, and compound interest, was made up; the circumstances of the case, without the name, were declared to the widow, and the parties concerned, through the medium of Mr. Clarke, who obtained an acknowledgment for the sum (which he kept to his death, and which still remains among his papers): shortly afterwards the troubled mind of Mr. was calmed; and in firm assurance of the mercy of God, through the merits of Christ, this penitent soul exchanged worlds; a warning to all the workers of iniquity; a lesson to all the ministers of Christ, not to charge God foolishly, when any such cases come before their spiritual cognizance; an exhortation to such as have received the wages of unrighteousness, not only to confess, but to restore to the full all ill-gotten gain; and a loud call upon all who think, like this gentleman, that they stand, to take heed lest, like him, they fall." Vol. ii. pp. 61-64. During his residence in this circuit Dr. Clarke lost his brother. We notice the circumstance for the purpose of quoting the following statement, and adding to it one or two remarks, which it appears to us to require. "Mr. Tracy Clarke died at Maghull, near Liverpool, in the forty-fifth year of his age; but his memory still lives in the respect and esteem alike of the rich and the poor throughout the neighbourhood. "A curious circumstance occurred some little time previously to the death of Mr. Tracy Clarke, which deserves notice, both as being singular in itself, and as resting on more indubitable evidence than most recorded facts of the kind. Mr. Tracy Clarke was accustomed to visit the Isle of Man occasionally for the recovery of his declining health; the last time that he was there, he took his third son, Thrasycles, with him, leaving his fifth son, about seven years old, with his mother. After staying some days in the island, he proposed to return to Maghull, and while his son and he were walking to the packet, he said, Thrasycles, I have been last night to see your mother; she was sleeping in the best bed-room, which she is not accustomed to sleep in, and looked very well.' By the time that he had finished the account, they came to the packet, set sail, and arrived safely in Liverpool. Mr. Tracy Clarke and his son went at once to his brother's house in Leeds Street; and in the course of conversation, without thinking particularly of the matter, he told his dream about having gone to Maghull. But the singular part of the story is this. Early in the morning of the same day in which Mr. T. Clarke left the Isle of Man, Mrs. Clarke, at Maghull, woke her young son, and said, 'I am very much distressed; I fear some evil has happened to your father; for last night, while lying in bed, I heard him come in; he rode up to the stable, put his horse into it, brought his saddle and bridle into the house, and hung them up as usual. I then heard his footsteps ascending the stairs, enter the room, and walk round the bed; all this I heard distinctly, though I saw nothing; and that it was your father's footstep I am certain, as I should know it from any other in the world; and I am sadly afraid that some misfortune bas befallen him.' "The day on which Mr. T. Clarke and his son arrived in Liverpool, his brother persuaded him to spend at his house, and to sleep there that night, sending his son Thrasycles forward to Maghull, to inform his mother of their safe arrival. When Mrs. Clarke saw Thrasycles coming without his father, she broke into the most passionate exclamations of grief, and it was a long time before her son could persuade her that his father was safe in Liverpool, so alarmed was she at seeing him alone, and so convinced did she feel that this visit of her husband's spirit, for such she always believed it to be, boded to him no good. A very short time after this, Mr. T. Clarke's illness increased so rapidly as speedily to terminate his life. "The above appears to be a most singular fact:-one person dreams, if such it were, in the Isle of Man, and tells the dream next morning to his son:-his wife, eight miles from Liverpool, hears on the same night, and tells it next morning, that she had heard him do what he himself dreamed he had performed. The circumstance was told to others before the parties met; by the husband in the course of casual conversation, and by the wife as a subject of alarm: he supposes it to be a dream, and she an omen and when her son appeared without the father, she thought that her forebodings were accomplished. There had been neither time nor possibility for intercourse between the parties: he had dreamed that he saw what was the fact, her sleeping in a room where she was not accustomed to sleep, and she actually believed she had heard him in that very room. However it may be accounted for, it is a most singular coincidence, and were we inclined to speculate, it might afford room for the supposition of mental sympathy and knowledge between persons far separated, or of the communion of spirits, when individuals could not personally have intercourse." Vol. ii. pp. 69–71. The remark which it chiefly occurred to us to make upon this passage was, that this doctrine of "mental sympathy and knowledge between persons far separated," is utter nonsense; and when urged by such a man as Dr. Clarke, especially in connexion with a tale of ominous dreams and presentiments, is calculated to enervate the minds of young and superstitious persons, and to cause much moral injury. We have already observed that Dr. Clarke seems never to have wholly vanquished some of his early prejudices, of which the love of the marvellous was one. In the alchemy which he studied in his childhood this doctrine of sympathy was a prominent article of belief, and many a notable device was set forth for killing or curing by "a communion of spirits," where the parties concerned had no knowledge of the process to which they were being subjected. Dr. Clarke's notion of mental sympathy is not one whit more rational than Sir Walter Raleigh's receipt for curing wounds by a sympathetic powder, which was to be applied to the weapon and not to the wound, the patient meanwhile being unconscious of the application. Besides, what was there so very extraordinary as to be preternatural, in a sick husband, absent from home, dreaming that he went to see his wife; or in his anxious wife's dreaming the same night, or every night, or even fancying as she dozed, that she saw her husband return? Such dreams and somnolescent surmises have doubtless occurred millions of times, for persons naturally dream of what most impresses their spirit. And what possible connexion has such a dream with the circumstance of the husband dying not long after, as was naturally enough to be expected from his state of health? knowing which, his anxious partner might easily persuade herself-for grief is keenly alive to morbid sensations-that her dream or impression was ominous. The only remaining circumstance is the change of room; but, curiously enough, that is not mentioned in the narrative; much less is it stated-which is essential to the story-that the husband was not aware of this arrangement. It might have been previously agreed upon by the parties, to take the opportunity of his absence for managing various domestic performances it might be the usual practice to make this change when he was from home; or it might that very day have been announced to him by his solitary partner. Why then convert such familiar stories into prodigies; and dress them up with sage remarks about "mental sympathies," and we know not what? We never cease recording our protest on all such occasions, because these superstitious notions, we are persuaded, tend only to evil. They mix what is awfully and infinitely great, with what is puerile and little; what is true, with what is false; the sublime and con : soling doctrine of a Divine Providence, with the superstitious forebodings of a diseased imagination: and they prepare the way for those out-bursts of fanaticism which are generated by a latent unsoundness of mind. No man more deprecated and deplored the extravagancies of the school of Mr. Irving, than the venerable subject of this memoir; and yet what is there more incredible in a modern preternatural tongue, than in a modern preternatural omen, both being an exception to the usual course of God's providence, which, in the present era of the Christian dispensation, no longer acts by visible signs and miracles? As for the doctrine of "sympathy" -in the sense, not of what is really sympathy, that sympathy by which absent friends naturally conjecture and take an interest in each others feelings, but of a sixth sense or faculty, as it were, by which they secretly divine what is befalling each other, without any accountable means of information, and in matters not in any way connected with their ordinary circumstances or habits-it is a supposition so unphilosophical and so irrational, that it is not worth a serious argument. We need not add that it derives no countenance from Scripture, as no person, we presume, ever ventured to trace it to that infallible source of truth. (To be continued in the Appendix.) RELIGIOUS INTELLIGENCE. CHRISTIAN EFFORTS IN GENEVA. We have so often adverted to the cir- ers; CHRISTIAN EFFORTS IN GENEVA. State of Religion in Geneva. At the epoch of the Reformation, Geneva was one of those centres from which God was pleased to illuminate his church. It stood in the same relation to the churches usually styled Reformed, as did Wittemberg to those of the Confession of Augsburg. The Presbyterians of France, Switzerland, Holland, and Scotland, regarded Geneva as their mother church. Calvin, Beza, and other distinguished divines, here shone as stars; and many were the individuals in many countries who were turned to righteousness by their influence, direct or indirect. Even now, churches, both in the old and new world, are indebted to their labours for the inestimable system of doctrine with which they are instructed. But the church of Geneva, which has diffused its wealth so widely, is itself reduced to the most lamentable indigence. This church, Reformed in doctrine, and Presbyterian in discipline, has seen its doctrine become adulterated since the beginning of the ighteenth century; and practical Chris tianity lost its strength, as was natural, at the same time that doctrine became corrupt. In 1724, the pious Benedict Pictet died. From that moment the Company or Assembly of Pastors, by successive alterations in the editions of the Liturgy and Catechism, commenced this unhappy degradation of the faith. The decline from truth continued to increase during this century of false philosophy, till at last, on the 14th of September 1818, the Assembly of Pastors declared, in an official letter, that for a long period four important doctrines had not existed in the Catechism. These were, the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the original corruption of human nature, salvation by grace, and regeneration by the Holy Spirit. Nor was there merely a prohibition to inculcate these doctrines on the minds of young persons, but Arianism was publicly taught to young children, and preached to adults. At the close of the last century, and at the commencement of the present, the Professor of Divinity lectured on nothing more than natural theology; the essential doctrines of Christianity were no longer subjects of teaching or inquiry. About the time of the fall of Napoleon, the first shock was given to this ignorance and error. Many young men, students or ministers, having commenced with zeal the study of the Sacred Writings, their eyes were opened. They recovered the knowledge of that truth which the Reformers had proclaimed, and their heart burnt within them. Many persons experienced at that time real conversion. One of the most important results of this revival was the formation of two dissenting congregations, which still exist |