His promise is health, And joy out of measure; His Spirit my guide; Whatever betide." O blessed Lord, lead us to build our hopes of happiness both here and hereafter on thee the Rock of ages! Lord, increase our faith and help our unbelief; and grant that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, may be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Blessed be God, that he hath given unto us such a sure foundamercy and goodness, that we are permitted and invited to build upon it. Lord, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou so regardest him? Surely his days are crowned with mercy and loving kindness. O that we may learn so to distrust ourselves, and cease from our own wisdom, that our only hope may be fixed upon the unerring guidance of our heavenly Father, through faith in Christ as the Lord our righteousness. May divine grace teach us the necessity of building upon him, and resting upon him the whole stress of our eternal hopes; then shall they not sink into disappointment and ruin; then shall we not flee away ashamed in that awful day when the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the déluge of divine wrath shall overflow every hiding-place, but that which God has prepared for us, in his Son." There is no system secure, no foundation safe, on which a sinner can rest his hopes, but on the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us rejoice to think how firm that foundation stands. Let us for a moment meditate on the truly blessed state of those persons that build their hopes on Christ. Hap tion! Adored be his is piness we can never enjoy, until -- his grace and spirit, so that we "Father, fix our souls on thee; O that all may seek and find PRAYER. O blessed Lord! who art the fountain of life and the foundation of true and lasting happiness, shed abroad the light of thy countenance upon us; that we may seek thee whilst thou art to be found, and call upon thee whilst thou art near. May we be led by thy Spirit to love and fear thee; and do thou, O Lord, renew a right spirit within us, that we may build on Christ as on a sure foundation, and rest our hopes on him as the sinner's only friend. Be thou our leader and our guide, and enable us to flee to thine almighty power; and do thou in mercy look upon us, and surround us with the arm of thine omnipotence; for thou savest by thy right hand those that put their trust in thee. O that we may, therefore, trust in thee and believe in thee to the saving of our souls! Make us sensible, O Lord, of our own weakness, and grant that our strength may be derived from thee; that under the shadow of thy wings may be our refuge from the temptation of sin, the world, and the devil; and that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance to do always that is righteous in thy sight; that we surely trusting in thy defence may not fear the power of any adversaries, through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen. MENTOR. BIBLE ANECDOTE. To the Editor of the Christian Guardian. SIR, THE Bible Anecdote, inserted in page 22 of your Number for January, reminded me of one of a similar nature concerning Tyndall's translation of the New Testament, which, though frequently published, may prove interesting to some of your readers. I extract it from the Life of the Rev. William Tyndall, as published by the Bristol Tract Society. "The Bishop Bishop of London thought the best way to prevent the book getting into circulation, would be to buy up all the copies that could be met with, and burn them at Paul's Cross. He therefore employed a person at Antwerp to procure them from Tyndall, who sold them to him, and immediately set about publishing a new and more correct edition. The Bishop was afterwards exceedingly mortified at having done this; for one Constantine being apprehended by Sir Thomas More, and questioned how Tyndall and others subsisted abroad, replied, That the Bishop of London had been their chief supporter, by buying up the first edition of the New Testament to burn it; and they lived upon this money until they received the amount of the sale of the second edition. In this circumstance we may admire the over-ruling providence of God, which makes the wrath of man to turn to his praise. turn to his praise. The Bishop little thought that he was really furthering the cause which he was attempting to destroy." REVIEW OF BOOKS. The Martyr of Antioch, a dramatic Poem. By the Rev. H. H. Milman. Murray.-Pp. 168. Irad and Adah, a Tale of the Flood; with other Poems. By Thomas Dale, of Bene't College, Cambridge. Richardson.-Pp. 188. POETIC talent is a gift which, rarely as it is bestowed, is yet far more rarely well employed. In so many instances, indeed, is it prostituted to the vilest of purposes, and in so many others used only in the praise of what is worthless and deceiving, that its possessors appear placed in a state of high responsibility and peculiar temptation. With a sense of this responsibility the writers before us have, we trust, been duly impressed. To say the least, they have selected subjects of the deepest interest, and have treated them in a manner well calculated to excite Christian feelings. Mr. Milman, the author of the Martyr of Antioch, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, is well known as having given to the public, about two years since, a poem of considerable merit and popularity, or the fall of Jerusalem. His present work is of a similar nature, and in a similar form. By some, indeed, it is considered inferior to his former publication; but we have not been able to discover in what its inferiority consists. Priority of publication, however, may in this, as in some other instances, assign the palm of excellence to that poem which first occupies the public mind, though not in itself possessing any claim to such a distinction. "The narrative is founded," says the author, 66 on a part of the history of St. Margaret. She was the daughter of a heathen priest, and beloved by Olybius the prefect of the East, who wished to marry APRIL 1822. her." He has endeavoured to depict, in the person of a young and beautiful female martyr," the surrender of life when it appeared most highly gifted with the blessings of Providence; the literal abandonment of this world when all its pleasures, its riches, and its glories were in her power; the violent severing of those ties which the gentle spirit of Christianity had the more endeared; the self-denial, not of the ungodly lusts but of the most innocent affections; that last and most awful conflict, when brother delivered brother unto death, and the father the child, and when a man's foes were those of his own household." The poem opens at a temple near Antioch, where a chorus of youths and maidens sing the praises of Apollo. The worshippers await the appearance of the priestess Margarita, who, to their disappointment and the grief of her father, is absent. Meanwhile Olybius is induced by the emperor's mandate, communicated by Vopiscus, to denounce death to the Christians on the following day. Margarita, who had arrived in time to hear the sentence, hastens to warn the Christians of their danger, and on the following morning reveals to her father the fatal secret of her religion. In the course of the day, while the other Christians are brought before the prefect Olybius, she is discovered by some shepherds, engaged in Christian worship, and dragged to the judgment-hall, and from thence to prison. Here a most affecting scene takes place between Margarita and her father Callias, who endeavours to move her to deny her God. Olybius also exerts all his influence, but in vain. On the following morning he pronounces sentence, under the hope, that at the immediate view of death she might retract; but, to his bitter U agony and despair, she seals her testimony with her blood; and while he is overwhelmed with grief, her body, and those of other sufferers, are borne to the grave by her fellow Christians, who unite in singing a triumphant hymn, with which the poem closes. The volume abounds with beautiful passages: we were particularly struck with the earnest entreaties of Callias to his daughter; with the melancholy description he gives of the desolate state to which he should be reduced by her death; with the contrast, drawn by Olybius, of the black amphitheatre preparing for the morrow's sacri Where the proud judge in purple splendour sate; fice, if she adheres to her faith, and Thou stoodst a meek and patient criminal, the splendid scenes which awaited her as his bride, if only she would return to the faith of her ancestors; Thy doom of death from human lips to wait; Whose throne shall be the world fate. Thou wert alone in that fierce multi and with the account of her closing With all mankind to hear their everlasting scene, and the effect it produced both on the mind of her father Callias and of the assembled multitudes; but we pass over all these beautiful and impressive descriptions to insert the following hymn, No hand to guard thee 'mid those insults both as being more strictly suited -Thou knowest, gracious Lord tude, When "Crucify him!" yell'd the general shout; rude, We are aware that some of our readers will object to that intermixture of Christian and Heathen hymns and sentiments, which is found in this volume. Such an intermixture, however, is almost a necessary consequence of a dramatic, nay even of a historical poem of those times. We have, indeed, sometimes lamented that our Chris-, tian poets have succeeded better in their profane than in their sacred hymns, a defect which we are disposed to attribute to the almost exclusive attention which is paid in early life to Heathen rather than Christian writers. Mr. Milman, however, is not justly chargeable with this defect. Of Mr. Dale's volume we have not room to say much. His talents are not, perhaps, inferior to Mr. Milman's, but the work he has produced will certainly not be read with equal interest. This may be attributed partly to his subject and partly to the mode of arrangement which he has adopted. The subject itself is of a sombre and dreary nature. The awful visitation of the flood is deeply impressed with the characteristic features of immensity, terror, and desolation; ideas on which the mind is not, generally speaking, disposed to dwell; add to which, all the characters are so necessarily and entirely fictitious as to cast an air of improbability over the whole. The connexion between the parts, into which this subject is divided, is so slight as scarcely to be remembered, or at least not remembered with any very deep interest. Mr. D. however, evidently possesses great powers of language; and though we do not anticipate for the present volume any very extended circulation, yet we cannot but hope that he will favour us ere long with some performance, which will both extensively benefit the present, and survive for the advantage of future generations. We have found some difficulty in selecting a suitable passage from the larger poem of Irad and Adah, and we therefore present our readers with one of Mr. Dale's specimens of a projected new version of the Psalms, which we hope he may be induced and encouraged to complete. |
