CHAPTER XII.

WEEK EVENING LECTURES ON THE EVIDENCES OF RELIGION-SERMON ON THE DEATH OF THE REV. J. BARBER-SERMON ON THE APOSTOLIC MINISTRY-ILLNESS OF HIS FATHER-LETTER TO HIS MOTHER-LAST LETTER TO HIS FATHER-LETTER TO HIS WIDOWED MOTHER-OLD GRAVEL-PIT MEETING HOUSE-SECURED FOR HIS CONGREGATIONARRANGEMENTS FOR PUBLIC WORSHIP-COURSE OF SERMONS-SERMON ON THE "ADORATION OF CHRIST "-ANTI-PÆDOBAPTIST MEMBERS -ECLECTIC REVIEW: HALES'S ANALYSIS OF CHRONOLOGY-LETTER TO REV. WM. WALFORD-ON THE INTERMEDIATE STATE-COLLEGE INQUIRY"VINDICIÆ ACADEMICE"-LETTER OF REV. ROBERT HALL-BENEFICIAL RESULTS-SERMON ON THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST-REV. WM. WALFORD BECOMES CLASSICAL TUTOR AT HOMERTON.

DIFFICULTIES-EXCULPATORY

LETTER- COMMITTEE OF

FROM the beginning of February to the end of April, 1810, Dr. PYE SMITH was engaged in delivering a "Course of Lectures on the Evidences of Revealed Religion." This was an extra service, a labour of love, intended for the benefit of the congregation under his pastoral care, to which the Monday evening in every week was devoted.

Two of his published sermons were preached in the early part of this year. One in February on the death of the Rev. Joseph Barber: the other in April on The Apostolic Ministry, Compared with the Pretensions of Spurious Religion and False Philosophy. The latter, extending to sixty pages, is replete with the fruits of his learning, piety, and zeal. A single passage, in which he graphically depicts the false philosophy of Greece, will repay attention as illustrating the Author's full command of the subject:-the text of the discourse is 1 Cor. ii. 6, 7, 8.

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"The Greeks, especially in those states in which literature flourished most, were an ingenious, inquisitive, penetrating and volatile people. Philosophical studies had been with them a favourite object of attention from an early period of their history. From Egypt and the East they had imported many truths and many errors, variously blended and disguised. These, with their characteristic liveliness of fancy and passion for subtile disquisition, they had augmented, transposed, and modified; till their speculations assumed the form of defined systems, whose respective adherents following some distinguished, leader formed the great philosophic sects. Besides the accurate and physical sciences, which some of them deemed too humble pursuits, they disserted on the deity and all inferior beings, on the origin and essences of mundane things, on substances and forms, on matter and intelligence, on primary atoms and eternal ideas, on life, death, immortality, and mutations of existence, on the virtues and vices, on the chief good and deceptive appearances of it; and on an endless variety of the most intricate questions in ontology and ethics. In the better days of Greece, illustrious men were not wanting who brought philosophy from the clouds to dwell with mortals, and to assist them in the useful practice of life. But those days were past. The prevalent taste was now for a vain and deceitful kind of philosophy, ostentatious in profession, destitute of practical utility, and set off with the paint and tinsel of a fallacious rhetoric. The avowed objects of its professors were, not so much truth and goodness, as victory and fame: and there are instances of their pretending to prove unanswerably either side of any argument, or both in succession. This misnamed wisdom was so much in vogue at Corinth, that it became proverbial to call pompous and inane discourses, Corinthian words. This is the sophistry which the apostle denounces as a foe to the simplicity and purity of the Gospel, and which in the text and its connection, he solemnly abjures."

Domestic circumstances made it necessary for Dr. Smith to remain at home during at least the early part of the College vacation in 1810; it is not however known whether it was his intention to do so for the whole of it, as he had done the year before. This deprivation of his company for a few weeks at Sheffield occurring a second year, was a source of great regret to his parents; more especially as his father wished him to see the state of the property which he had purchased in that neighbourhood in 1807. To lessen the disappointment of Mr. Smith, senior, and to gratify the fond feelings of Grandparents, it was resolved that Dr. Smith's daughter should pay them a visit. In a Letter of June 20, he wrote thus:-"We send our dear little girl in answer to your kind invitation, committing her to the protection of the Most High, and the assured care of our dear parents. Please to write to say that she is arrived, how she has borne the journey, &c., by Saturday's post. May

our Heavenly Father preserve and bless her, and bring her back to us in the enjoyment of every mercy! I hope she will be dutiful and well-behaved, so that her Grandparents may have pleasure in her." Owing to some mistake in the arrangements, the daughter could not go by the coach that day; and as the Letter had not been previously despatched, an account of the disappointment was added, and it was sent on by post the next. The Grandfather thus replied:-" Some might be ready to suggest that our dear child's not coming last night was a matter of little consequence; but we did not find it so. Whatever may be thought of what many would call our weakness, the truth is we found it a very great trial. We have no doubt but it was ordered by Infinite Wisdom, and we hope to get good by the dispensation."

Intimations had reached the family at Homerton, that at that time Sheffield had lost many of its inhabitants, especially among the young, by an epidemic fever. But the vagueness of these reports, added to the great care which they well knew their daughter would receive from all her relations in that town, induced the parents to keep to their original purpose. Accordingly on the 29th of June, Dr. Smith wrote to say, that they had some hope of sending her the next week. The next day, however, Mr. Robert Leader, Dr. Smith's brother-in-law, wrote to apprise him that Mr. Smith, senior, had been seized on the Thursday with fever of so alarming a kind as to excite much apprehension for his safety. Thus that singular delay of the daughter's visit, which nobody could account for at the moment, which was felt most keenly by the grandfather, and in her child's measure by the granddaughter also may be said to have been fully explained when this Letter came to hand. The house at Sheffield could not now welcome, nor with safety receive the little stranger; and in the town itself, the prevailing malady might have taken hold upon the new comer with a severity which many of the residents escaped. Even the loving grandfather was quite beyond the reach of any real joy from such a source. His greetings would have been marked, at one instant perhaps with the distressing excitement of a feverish brain, at the next with the listless apathy of a state of collapse; both equally mournful to witness, and for a wonder or a fear to the child. Here, then, by a signal interposition of the Divine Goodness, not by a happy conjuncture

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of accidents, a great mercy really lay wrapped up in circumstances which were at the time trying to all concerned and this mercy came so closely in connection with what was very soon to follow, as to prove a source of relief and thankfulness amidst bereavement and tears.

Dr. Smith wrote at once in reply to Mr. Leader's Letter:"My very dear and honoured Mother,-We do indeed truly and deeply sympathise with you and my beloved relatives in this unexpected and heavy affliction. If I could view MY DUTY as coinciding with my EARNEST DESIRE and inclination, I should set out by this evening's mail: but my situation is really that of extreme and painful difficulty."-In fact, owing to Mrs. Pye Smith's expected confinement, it was quite impracticable for her husband to leave home for the length of time which a journey to Sheffield and back would have taken in that day of slow travelling. He could only express his deep sympathy by Letter and offer fervent prayer. July 5th he wrote again to his mother, and also to his father thus :—

"My very dear and honoured Father,

"In the hope that this may find you in the earthly house of our dying tabernacle, I am anxious to have the painful pleasure of holding this imperfect intercourse with one whom I so dearly love. None can fully enter into my feelings. How dark and heart-rending the providence which forbids, -insuperably forbids-my flying to you! But the Lord, I doubt not, is with my dear Father; and better than a thousand sons, and all the tenderness of human affections. Accept the most tender and affectionate love of your distressed and I may truly say overwhelmed children. O that you may be most graciously and divinely supported by the God of all grace! O that the joy of His presence may be your perpetual consolation! And, if it be His most condescending and merciful good pleasure, O that he may restore you to us, that we may again praise Him in the land of the living! But if he reject our earnest prayer in this respect-for you, my dear Father, it is FAR BETTER. We constantly endeavour to meet you at the throne of grace:-hereafter we trust to meet before the throne of holiness and glory! Amen, amen. Ever yours."

The tidings from Sheffield, after fluctuating a little, grew all at once most sad, so that without his being aware of it at the time, the next Letter was written on the day when his father died :

"Homerton, July 9, 1810.

"My very dear and honoured Mother,

"Unsearchable as are the ways of the Lord, they are assuredly all right and holy. The short-sighted and imperfect views of flesh and sense might lead us to repine under the most cutting and heart-rending reverse which our hopes have this day experienced. But we are believers in the LORD JESUS. HE LIVES: and the immortal life of His people is laid up with His. Blessed be His name, we are not left to sorrow as those who have no hope. If by this time, my Beloved Father has passed the important hour-we have reason to mourn on our own account, NOT ON HIS. Heavy indeed is the loss and grief, and to me it is heavy beyond all that I can express. I not only participate in the feelings of filial love and gratitude, but I am sensible that those feelings are exceedingly increased by the circumstance of my being fixed at such a distance from my ever-honoured parents: and now that at this solemn and interesting season, I should be prevented by the indissoluble ties of duty and Divine Providence from attending on my dear Father-0, this distresses me beyond measure. But I also ought not to repine. I am well satisfied that I am obeying the voice of duty. It is the hand of the Lord that hath done this; and under His mighty hand I must humble myself.

"O my much loved Mother, may you experience in the richest manner, the all-powerful, gracious, and consoling presence of Him who is the Father of the fatherless and the Protector of the widow, the Living God who is LIGHT and LOVE. If we are indeed His obedient and submissive children -who can separate us from His love? Can tribulation-or distress or death? Can the sudden and overwhelming disappointment of our fond hopes? Can the weight of sorrow redoubled? No. No. In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that hath loved us! These things, even these, shall work together for our good!

"And if it please the Holy and Righteous Sovereign to bring us into that great trial which now we scarcely dare hope