shunned. Let us consider that life at best is short, and its blessings transitory, that its great end is to train us to virtue and to prepare us for heaven, and that we had far better resign it at once than protract it by baseness or unmanly fear. Death awaits us all, and happy he who meets it in the discharge of duty. Most happy and most honored of men is the martyr to religion, who seals with his blood those truths, on which human virtue, consolation and hope, depend; and next to him, happy is the martyr to the cause of his country, who, in obedience to God, opposes his breast to the sword of her invaders, and repays with life the protection she has afforded.

5. I have thus, my friends, set before you your duties to God and your country in this period of danger. Let me close with offering a few remarks on your duties to your enemies. You will remember that we profess a religion, which enjoins benevolence towards all mankind, even towards our personal and national foes. Let not our patriotism be sullied with malignant passions. Whilst we defend our shores with courage, let us not cherish hatred towards our invaders. We should not open our ear to every idle tale of their outrages, nor heap calumnies on their heads because they are enemies. The brave are generous. True courage needs not malignity to feed and inflame it. Especially when our foe is an illustrious nation, which for ages has defended and nurtured the interests of religion, science, and humanity; a nation to which grateful Europe is now offering acknowledgements for the protection which she has extended over the oppressed, and for the vigor with which she has cooperated in prostrating the bloody and appalling power of the usurper; when such a nation is our foe, we should feel it unworthy and debasing to encourage a rancorous and vindictive spirit. True, she is sending her armies to our shores; but let us not forget, that our own government first sent slaughter and conflagration into her unoffending provinces. Let not approaching danger disturb our recollections, or unsettle our principles. If we are to meet her armies in battle, which God in his mercy forbid, let us meet them with that magnanimity, which is candid and just even to its foes. Let us fight, not, like beasts of prey, to glut revenge, but to maintain our rights, to obtain an honorable peace, and to obtain a victory which shall be signalized by clemency as well as by valor. God forbid, that our conflicts should add fury to those bad passions and national antipathies, which have helped to bring this country to its present degraded and endangered condition.

I have placed before you your duties. God give you grace to perform them. In this day of danger, we know not what is before us; but this we know, that the path of piety, of virtue, of patriotism, and manly courage, leads to glory and to immortality. No enemy can finally injure us, if we are true to God, to our country, to mankind. In such a cause as ours, I trust, prosperity and victory will be granted us by the almighty Disposer. But whether success or disaster await us, we know that the world is passing away, and that all of us will soon be placed beyond the reach of its changes. Let us not then be elated or depressed; but, with a firm and equal mind, let us acquit ourselves as men and Christians in our several spheres, looking upward to heaven as our rest and reward.

NOTICE OF THE REV. S. C. THACHER.

[The Rev. S. C. THACHER, late Minister of the New South Church in Boston, died at Moulines, in France, Jan. 2, 1818, Ætat. 32. He had long been absent from this country, and had visited the Cape of Good Hope, for the recovery of his health. The following sketch of his character is taken from a discourse delivered in the church, where he had been accusto.ned to officiate, the Sunday after the accounts of his death were received.]

THE news of Mr. Thacher's death, although not unexpected, spread an unusual gloom through the large circle in which he moved and was known. When we thought of his youth and virtues, of the place which he had filled and of the confidence he had inspired, of his sickness and sufferings, of his death in a distant land, and of the hopes which died with him, we could not but speak of his removal as mysterious, dark, untimely. My own mind participated at first in the general depression; but in proportion as I have reflected on the circumstances of this event, I have seen in them a kindness, which I overlooked in the first moments of sorrow; and though in many respects inscrutable, this dispensation now wears a more consoling aspect.

I now see in our friend a young man, uncommonly ripe in understanding and virtue, for whom God appointed an early immortality. His lot on earth was singularly happy; for I have never known a minister more deeply fixed in the hearts of his people. But this condition had its perils. With a paternal concern for his character God sent adversity, and conducted him to the end of his

being by a rougher but surer way, a way trodden and consecrated by the steps of the best men before him. He was smitten by sudden sickness; but even here the hand of God was gentle upon him. His sickness, whilst it wasted the body, had no power over the spirit. His understanding retained its vigor; and his heart, as I often observed, gained new sensibility. His sufferings, by calling forth an almost unprecedented kindness in his parishioners, furnished him with new and constant occasions of pious gratitude, and perhaps he was never so thankful to the Author of his being, as during his sickness.

He was indeed removed at length from the kind offices of his friends. But this event was fitted, and, may I not say, designed, to strengthen his connexion with God, and to prepare him for the approaching dissolution of all earthly ties. I now see him tossed on the ocean; but his heart is fixed on the rock of ages. He is borne to another hemisphere, but everywhere he sees the footsteps and feels the presence of God. New constellations roll over his head, but they guide his mind to the same Heaven, which was his hope at home. I see him at the extremity of Africa, adoring God in the new creation which spreads around him, and thanking him with emotion for the new strength, which that mild atmosphere communicated. I see him too in the trying scene which followed, when he withered and shrunk like a frail plant under the equinoctial sun, still building piety on suffering, and growing in submission, as hope declined. He does not indeed look without an occasional sinking of the heart, without some shudderings of nature, to a foreign soil as his appointed grave. But he remembers, that from every region there is a path to immortality, and that the spirit, which religion has refined, wherever freed from the body, will find its native country. He does not indeed think without emotion of home, a thought, how trying to a sick and dying man, in a land of strangers! But God, whom he adores as everywhere present, seems to him a bond of union to distant friends, and he finds relief in committing them to his care and mercy.-At length I see him expire; but not until suffering has done its work of discipline and purification. His end is tranquil, like his own mild spirit; and I follow him not to the tomb, for that lifeless body is not he—but to the society of the just made perfect. His pains are now past. He has found a better home, than this place of his nativity and earthly residence. Without the tossings of another voyage, he has entered a secure haven. The fever no longer burns in his veins; the hollow and deep voice no longer sends forth ominous sounds

Disease and death, having accomplished their purpose, have lost their power, and he remembers, with gratitude, the kind severity with which they conducted him to a nobler life, than that which they took away. Such is the aspect which this dispensation now wears; how different from that which it first presented to sense and imagination!

Let me pay a short tribute to his memory. It is a duty, which I perform with a melancholy pleasure. His character was one, which it is soothing to remember. It comes over the mind, like the tranquillizing breath of spring. It asks no embellishment. It would be injured by a strained and labored eulogy.

The character of our friend was distinguished by blandness, mildness, equableness and harmony. All the elements were tempered in him kindly and happily. He passed through the storms, tumults and collisions of human life, with a benignity akin to that which marked our perfect guide and example. This mild and bland temper spread itself over the whole man. His manners, his understanding, his piety, all received a hue from it, just as a soft atmosphere communicates its own tender and tranquil character to every object and scene viewed through it.

With this peculiar mildness he united firmness. His purposes, whilst maintained without violence, were never surrendered but to conviction. His opinions, though defended with singular candor, he would have sealed with his blood. He possessed the only true dignity, that which results from proposing habitually a lofty standard of feeling and action; and accordingly the love, which he called forth, was always tempered with respect. He was one of the last men to be approached with a rude familiarity.

His piety was a deep sentiment. It had struck through and entwined itself with his whole soul. In the freedom of conversation

I have seen how intimately God was present to him. But his piety partook of the general temperament of his mind. It was warm, but not heated; earnest, but tranquil; a habit, not an impulse; the air which he breathed, not a tempestuous wind, giving occasional violence to his emotions. A constant dew seemed to distil on him from heaven, giving freshness to his devout sensibilities; but it was a gentle influence, seen not in its falling, but in its fruits. His piety appeared chiefly in gratitude and submission, sentiments peculiarly suited to such a mind as his. He felt strongly, that God had crowned his life with peculiar goodness, and yet, when his blessings were withdrawn, his acquiescence was as deep and sincere as his thankfulness. His devotional exercises in public were

particularly striking. He came to the mercy-seat, as one, who was not a stranger there. He seemed to inherit from his venerable father the gift of prayer. His acts of adoration discovered a mind penetrated by the majesty and purity of God; but his sublime conceptions of these attributes were always tempered and softened by a sense of the divine benignity. The Paternal character of God was not only his belief, but had become a part of his mind. He never forgot, that he worshipped the Father.' His firm conviction of the strict and proper unity of the divine nature taught him to unite and concentrate in his conception of the Father, all that is lovely and attractive, as well as all that is solemn and venerable; and the general effect of his prayers was to diffuse a devout calmness, a filial confidence, over the minds of his pious hearers.

His understanding was of a high order; active, vigorous and patient; capable of exerting itself with success on every subject; collecting materials and illustrations from every scene; and stored with a rich and various knowledge, which few have accumulated at so early an age. His understanding, however, was in harmony with his whole character. It was not so much distinguished by boldness, rapidity and ardor, as by composed energy, judiciousness, and expansiveness. His views were often original and often profound, but were especially marked by justness, clearness and compass of thought. I have never known a man, so young, of riper judgment, of more deliberate investigation, and of more comprehensive views of all the bearings and connexions of a subject, on which he was called to decide. He was singularly free from the error into which young preachers most readily fall, of overstating arguments, and exaggerating and straining the particular topics which they wish to enforce. But in avoiding extravagance, he did not fall into tameness. There was a force and freshness in his conceptions; and even when he communicated the thoughts of others, he first grafted them on his own mind, so that they had the raciness of a native growth. His opinions were the results of much mental action, of many comparisons, of large and liberal thinking, of looking at a subject on every side; and they were expressed with those limitations, which long experience suggests to others. He read with pleasure the bold and brilliant speculations of more adventurous minds; but he reserved his belief for evidence, for truth; and if the most valuable gift of the understanding be an enlarged, discriminating judgment, then his was a most highly gifted mind.