land might safely say "Amen." "Amen." So lofty was his nature, that he could not stoop to selfish ambition, nor counsel any thing that would tamper with the public good, or did not point directly to his country's benefit. If such a spirit is the soul of greatness in whatever sphere, we may see also the breadth of the nature in which that spirit lived, when we consider how naturally we think of Washington, as a public man. There are many very good men, reliable men-men as pure in the spirit of their greatness as Washington, whom we should instinctively consider out of place in any large public capacity. And many who are called to the national councils seem too small for the work allotted to them, not less by the feebleness of their powers, than by the selfishness of their spirit. The ample expanse and dignified associations of the Senate Chamber dwarf them; the Capitol does not seem to enclose its masters when they are in it; an empire is too broad a back-ground for their height and bulk. "Pigmies are pigmies still, though perched on Alps." But Washington was emphatically a States-man. The home and the farm could not keep him, although his heart was there. He was made for the broad sphere of public action. The swing of his arm had momentum enough to move a nation; his presence was for the head-quarters of an army, or for the palace of a people; his pen was made to transcribe treaties, and his voice to be heard at the limits of a State. His writings have the solemnity and majesty appropriate to the deliberations and decisions of a congress, and nothing but a nation, and a serious revolution for the maintenance of right, could be competent to relieve the plain but colossal proportions of his judgement, prudence, integrity and love of freedom.

We

And now, bring into the presence of such a characterthus seated upon the throne of justice and a people's veneration, such men as Cæsar and Bonaparte. ought to bring them there; it will do us good to see how they look, and we ought to know how they look, in the light which that brow and that face shed upon them. Do they not look smaller? What right have we to judge any man, however great, by any other standard than that of the good? If a man is a Colossus in genius, but is a colossal criminal, why not always use the noun to de

scribe him, rather than the adjective. Is it not time to see that the standard of the just and good, flames over statesmen, as well as over humble men, and that if a man who cheats and conspires against his neighbor's right in a small sphere is called a knave, the man who cheats and robs and fetters his country, by whatever brilliancy of achievement he effects it, should be branded as a royal villain. Let not the purity of Washington's character be considered, as it too often is, an almost supernatural exception to what can be expected of mortals, but let it be looked up to as the pattern of what humanity may attain, and let it shine upon the reputation of these men that are accounted great, that the splendor of their battles may pale in the solemn brightness of his integrity, and that the complexity of their genius, which only offers so many channels for the selfishness of our nature, may dwindle in its charm before the great simplicity of his soul, that was translucent with the immortal brightness of virtue and fidelity.

It is well for us to look up to the height and mass and complexion of such a virtue. The anniversary of his birth-day does not come round too often for us to devote some hour of it, whenever it returns, to meditation upon him and to gratitude for his spirit and his work. The Almighty has put him into history, as he put the soul of Samuel into the history of Palestine, to show men the majesty of virtue its public relations, and to speak to the human sensibilities and conscience through the incarnate eloquence of a life.

The character of Washington is a buttress to every pulpit of America; for it is a character that is baseless, if religion be not true. If men are mere animals, if there is no law of God, no holy duty, no eternal life, his life is a sublime inconsistency. There is a firmer fulcrum for the lever of the Gospel against the passions and the worldliness of men, there is greater vigor in the eloquence that denounces self-worship and enthrones loyalty to truth, there is more intensity in every appeal that calls men not to be "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God," because such a man has woven the tissue of his fidelity into the half century of his earthly stewardship. Such a life makes the greatness which the precepts of Christianity

present abstractly, a reality; it strengthens the laws and adorns the landscape of the kingdom of Heaven.

The

The Saviour said that his apostles after their death should "sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." And every great character which, out of the materials of human discipline, builds up a shining greatness, rises after its death to a throne, and by its eminence judges the world. And so our subject mounts to a climax of moral authority, impressiveness and appeal. The character of Washington hangs in the moral atmosphere, for instruction and for judgement, over the statesmen of our land. How can there be a time-server, a demagogue, a trifler with right and the true interests of his country, a brutal scorner of the laws of virtue and honor, in that Capitol founded by Washington, and in which his marble counterfeit still strives to shed dignity and truth? people of this land have before them the incarnate ideal of what a statesman should be, and they ought to hold. the statesmen who have read his life, and who meet in the city that bears his name, to the duty of laboring in a spirit like his for the business and the interests of the great estates they guard. It is our fault if his name shall die away into a mere ornament of congressional and caucus rhetoric, and if it is suffered that business shall be postponed, and the courtesies of life trampled upon, and the supreme law of God made a bye-word and mockery, by puny men who sit in the high places of an empire which his fidelity and religion saved. If any man smiles at the idea of great virtue being possible amid the temptations of public life, and thinks that the standard of the pulpit is not for the conflicts and rivalries and diplomacies of the political arena, and feels that the religion of Christ is good enough outside the storms and stress of the world, let him be pointed to Washington, who went clean and victorious through all, and who, "though dead, yet speaks" to us, that the trouble in gaining a great virtue is not in the strength of the world, but in the feebleness of the soul.

And that character shines down upon all of us, and searches the depths of our hearts to prove our fidelity to truth and Heaven. The greatest goodness is imitable and encourages aspiration. What is there in the greatness of Washington that cannot in spirit be revealed in us, and

that is not applicable to our circumstances and needed in our breast? If Washington had failed in fidelity to his call; if he had said "my circumstances are easy enough here amid my parks, and forests, and farms, and I will not hazard my happiness upon the issue of a conflict between my feeble country and the most powerful empire of the world;" or if, having taken the responsibility, he had used its means and power for himself more than for the great duties to which it called, we should mourn when we read it, and view it as another dark page in the history of the frailty of human genius. And yet, in the sight of God, what would it be but a record in larger type of the practical infidelity and failure which so many men are printing in smaller type upon their allowance of time? Every private soldier is required to be faithful, as much as every officer who has charge of the campaign. Every man is required to rule his passions and to discipline his powers as the great founder of our freedom did; and although every man is not required to save a country, yet there is no one that does not have a soul to save from darkness, depravity, the feebleness of sloth and luxury, and the powers of hell. Some men say that the divine character of Christ is too high for them, but what man has done surely men may do; and the affectionate reverence which we feel and pay towards the Father of his country, and the gratitude we confess to Providence for placing his name foremost and lustrous on the roll of our country's annals, call on us, in the name of consistency and our own moral aspirations, to examine ourselves and see if there is in us, as there was in him, a love of the truth that makes all falsehood infamous; a devotion to the right that keeps the ear away from the seductions of the flesh and the world; and that upward look to what is best, which fosters in us the desire. at all times to be the servants of that and that only which is supreme and everlasting.

T. S. K.

ART. XV.

Literary Notices.

1. Wesley, and Methodism. By Isaac Taylor. New York: Harper & Brothers, &c. 1852. 12mo. pp. 328.

A NEW work from Isaac Taylor is always a rich and profound mine of thought newly opened. Of all living writers, in England or America, he stands perhaps first as the expounder of those moral and religious forces which make up human character, and which operate in practical life. Or, if we were to assign him an equal, in this province, we should at once name that mighty but eccentric spirit, Thomas Carlyle; though the differences, between the two, are such that it is difficult to compare them with each other. The latter wants the Christian element which distinguishes the former in so great a degree. Besides this, Carlyle delights to study human nature in remarkable individuals rather than in the mass; he has quite a taste for "hero-worship," rather than for the patient and systematic illustration of our active forces, as they belong to all men. Even when he turns to these, it is generally to disclose their relations with the infinite depths that encompass our being, instead of tracing out their workings in every-day life. Taylor has none of his dramatic power, little of his gift at drawing or creating personal characters; and though endowed with a strong imagination, he possesses but a moderate share of his humor, and less of his poetic genius. His style of writing is, in most of his works, about half as crabbed as that of the arch-humorist himself; his sentences being long, contorted, sometimes dislocated, and usually awkward, though his words at least are generally English. But his thoughts make ample amends for the roughness of their clothing. They are distinguished for their vigor, and for the rare combination of breadth, depth, and completeness; and they abound in pregnant suggestions, every where throwing out new views of facts and relations. He not only clears the path before him, but fills the horizon around with light. This is the case, at least, when he treats of principles as they actually work in the human heart, and as they come out in human character. When he ventures to calculate the course which communities, or institutions, will hold in the future, we have not much faith in his prognostications,—he then gives too free a play to his imagination, and is too confident that the plan, on which the Almighty Ruler governs the Universe, is "the Thirty-Nine Articles." He is a better philosopher than prophet.

In the work before us, he maintains that the Methodism of Whitefield and Wesley, though quite faulty as a system, was nevertheless