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THINKINGS, FROM DR. JOHNSON.

MARRIAGES.-When we see the avaricious and crafty taking companions to their tables and their beds, without any inquiry but after farms and money; or the giddy and thoughtless uniting themselves for life to those whom they have only seen by the light of tapers; when parents make articles for children without inquiring after their consent; when some marry for heirs to disappoint their brothers; and others throw themselves into the arms of those whom they do not love, because they found themselves rejected where they were more solicitous to please: when some marry because their servants cheat them; some because they squander their own money; some because their houses are pestered with company; some because they will live like other people; and some because they are sick of themselves; we are not so much inclined to wonder that marriage is sometimes unhappy, as that it appears so little loaded with calamity; and cannot but conclude, that society hath something in itself eminently agreeable to human nature, when we find its pleasures so great, that even the ill choice of a companion can hardly overbalance them.-These therefore, of the above description, that should rail against matrimony, should be informed, that they are neither to wonder, or repine, that a contract begun on such principles has ended in disappointment.

ANGER. It is told by Prior, in a panegyric on the Earl of Dorset, that his servants used to put themselves in his way when he was angry, because he was sure to recompense them for any indignities he made them suffer. This is the round of a passionate man's life; he contracts debts when he is furious, which his virtue, if he has virtue, obliges him to discharge at the return of reason. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation. Or, if there be any who hardens himself in oppression, and justifies the wrong because he has done it, his insensibility can make small part of his praise or his happiness: he only adds deliberate to hasty folly, aggravates petulance by contumacy, and destroys the only plea that he can offer for the tenderness and patience of mankind.

Yet, even this degree of depravity we may be content to pity, because it seldom wants a punishment equal to its guilt. Nothing is more despicable or more miserable than the old age of a passionate man. When the vigour of youth fails him, and his amusements pall with frequent repetition, his occasional rage sinks by decay of strength into peevishness; that peevishness, for want of novelty and variety, becomes habitual; the world falls off from around him and he is left, as Homer expresses it, to devour his own heart in solitude and contempt.

THE VALUE OF TIME.-The proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together. Of the same kind is prodigality of life; he that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.

An Italian philosopher expressed in his motto, that time was his estate: an estate indeed, that will produce nothing without cultivation, but will always abundantly repay the labours of industry, and satisfy the most extensive desires, if no part of it be suffered to lie waste by negligence, to be over-run by noxious plants, or laid out for show rather than for use.

ON THE FORMATION OF CHARACTER.-Whosoever shall review his life, will generally find that the whole tenor of his conduct has been terminated by some accident of no apparent moment, or by a combination of inconsiderable circumstances, acting when his imagination was unoccupied, and his judgment unsettled; and that his principles and actions have taken their colour from some secret infusion, mingled without design in the current of his ideas. The desires that predominate in our hearts are instilled by imperceptible communications, at the same time we look upon the various scenes of the world, and the different employments of men, with the neutrality of inexperience; and we come forth from the nursery of the school, invariably destined to the pursuit of great acquisitions or petty accomplishments.

TO MAZZINI AND KOSSUTH.
"Twas the old story! Liberty uprose
And gloriously her world-wide march begun—
But to be crushed again by banded foes.
Yet though now baffled, seemingly undone,
Ye have, transcendant heroes, our age won
From tame degeneracy; your life-deeds give
Assurance that the hopes of ages gone,-
Rienzi's, Koscuisko's souls,-yet live;

And with them are your names, though now maligned,
In man's deep heart of hearts, Fame's noblest temple, shrined!

Ay, and your cause its failure shall retrieve!

Kossuth, droop not, the Magyar's strength matures :
Mazzini, to thy life's Idea still cleave!

Triumph for Right the coming time assures;

The patriot flame, ye kindled, yet endures;
And though awhile it smoulder, soon elate,-

Consuming all Time's rubbish, pomps, throned powers,
Corruptions,-'twill the nations renovate.

The phoenix, Freedom, aye will spring replete
With fresh life-vigour from the ashes of defeat !
Leicester.
WILLIAM WHITMORE.

TO LITTLE LELIA E....

My pretty, tiny maid, with wondering eyes-
Glancing around their questionings eloquent-
Superbly as the stars, thy gaze is bent

On me, on all, in pleasantest surprise :
Is it that thou, fresh comer from the skies,
Dost not remember how of yore we went
Plucking immortal wreaths in deep content,

And singing richly-blended harmonies

In Heaven? Alas, how few months on this earth

Have chased all ancient memories from thy brain!
What! laughing? Well, thy chirping, dimpling mirth
Is still a trace which Heaven hath left behind;
And we must thankful be that thy sweet eyes
Retain the limpid lustre of the skies.

EUGENE.

A CALL TO THE PEOPLE.

SONS of old England, from the sod
Uplift each noble brow!

Gold apes a mightier power than God,
And fiends are worshipped, now!
In all these toil-ennobled lands

Ye have no heritage :

They snatch the fruits of youthful hands,
The staff from weary age!

Oh, tell them in their palaces-

These Lords of Land and Money-
They shall not kill the poor like bees,
To rob them of life's honey?

Through long dark years of blood and tears,
We've toiled, like branded slaves,
Till Power's red hand hath made a land
Of paupers-prisons-graves!
But our meck sufferance endeth now!
Within the souls of men

The bursting buds of promise blow,
And Freedom lives again!
Oh, listen in your palaces,

Proud Lords of Land and Money-
Ye shall not kill the poor like becs,
To rob them of Life's honey?
Too long have Labour's nobles knelt
Before exalted "rank":

Within our souls the iron's felt-
We hear our fetters clank!
A glorious voice goes throbbing forth,
From millions stirring now,
Who, yet, before these gods of earth

Shall stand with unblenched brow.
Your day-OUR day of reck'ning comes,
Proud Lords of Land and Money-
Ye shall no longer wreck our homes,
Nor rob us of Life's honey!

GERALD MASSEY.

THE RED INDIAN.

HARK! our war-chief calls-' Away, away,'
Now the battle has begun :

Great Spirit, to the Red-man give the fray,
Ere the deep surge hides the sun!

Why here doth the stranger White-man come?
With bloody intent to chase

The wild Red-skin from his golden home;
Or, to cancel the untamed race?

Ah! White-man, you smoked the pipe of peace,
And pressed the Indian's hand;

And proferred a brother's dear caress,

And settled on our land.

And now with the sword and gun, you try

Our wigwams to remove

From the graves of our fathers; we vainly cry-
'Is this the White-man's love?'

Back, back, to your wigwam, proud White-man-
Our mighty warriors dread!

For the Great Spirit shields our hallowed clan,
And the earth of our kindred dead.

Our blood on their sacred dust shall fall,

All fondness shall flee away;

Ere basely the Red-skin bends to thrall,
His bosom shall press the clay!

Back, or my war-axe shall deal the blow!

So did the warrior rave,

When a murderous ball laid the Red-skin low;
And he rests with the band of the brave!
EDWARD SMITH.

CRITICAL EXEGESIS OF GOSPEL HISTORY,

ON THE BASIS OF STRAUSS'S LEBEN JESU.'

SERIES OF EIGHT DISCOURSES; DELIVERED AT THE LITERARY INSTITUTION, JOHN STREET, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD, AND AT THE HALL OF SCIENCE, CITY ROAD, ON SUNDAY EVENINGS, DURING THE WINTERS OF 1848-9, AND 1849-50.

BY THOMAS cooper,

Author of 'The Purgatory of Suicides.'

II. THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

WHY would you disturb the faith of any in those points of belief which it has been so long customary to regard as sacred in the land of our birth? What good can you expect to do by your attempts,-and what good have any done who have made the same attempts before you? Are you not afraid you will rather do harm than good? Do you not perceive it to be dangerous to shake people's belief in established principles? Are you not likely to shake their attachment to morality while doing that, and so effect an injury which can never be repaired?

These are serious questions which I can readily suppose to be in the minds of thinking, earnest, and conscientious hearers; and I am not disposed to treat them lightly. I think that such objections deserve the most serious consideration; and from me they shall have it.

What good has been done, and what good can be done by disturbing the faith of any one in points of belief, which it has long been customary to hold sacred? I answer-if the good is not immediately seen, it is always most surely done, by separating Truth from fable; and by shewing that the Truth is not dependent on the fable, but is infinitely more glorious and worshipful when divested of it. If the legends of the Four

Gospels, (such as the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary, and the annunciation of the Birth of Christ by the choral assembly of the angels, or by the star that guided the Wise Men from the East and went and 'stood over where the young child was ') be of a character equally fanciful and foreign to fact with the legends of old Egypt, India, and Greece-what strength can the understanding receive by prostrating itself to the imagination in the one case, any more than in the other? The lessons of every truly great philosopher in the past, as well as of our Bacon and Locke and Reid and Brown and Dugald Stewart, in modern times, are thrown away, if we do not learn by their teachings to subject the imagination to the reason, and to cast off resolutely, though with deep consideration, a slavish belief in what is clearly imaginary-when we have clearly discerned to be so.

Did a reverence for the fables of the past guide the founders of any great system of Truth discovered in modern times? Did Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of blood, take for his guides the blundering fables of the old physicians? Was he not on the contrary, assailed with malevolence and persecution as a rash innovator and a dangerous disturber of the system of medicine established by the practice of physicians through hundreds of years? And yet who doubts the circulation of the blood now? and who doubts that the first necessary step of a physician in a serious disorder is to feel the pulse and ascertain the state of the circulation of the vital fluid? Laissez-faire !'-the indolent, and the fearful, and the interested, cried then, as they cry now with regard to the fables in the Gospels-Let it alone!-people have been cured according to the old system of medicine, although many have been killed: let it alone! what good do your new-fangled discoveries do? We have the same chance to be killed or cured as our forefathers had!' 'Laissez-faire!' cry the people who are fearful of thinking about legends in religion-fearful of suspecting that there can be any. 'Let it alone!'-Our forefathers believed in the miraculous conception, and in the miraculous star, and all that; and, so far as we can find, they were many of them better and nobler men than the majority of men now-a-days. Just so: but the question is whether their belief in the miraculous conception and the miraculous star, and the stories of angels and devils in the four Gospels, had any influence in making them good and noble men, or whether they would not have been much better and nobler men without such a belief.

This brings us to the more important question we supposed to be hinted in the minds of some hearers, at the outset: 'Is it not dangerous to shake people's belief in established principles? Are you not likely to shake their attachment to morality while doing that, and to effect an injury which can never be repaired ?'

I shall not answer here as some may suppose I should. I tell you, with the deepest sense of my own responsibility-that I do see danger, and that I am fearful of shaking the attachment of any young mind, especially, to morality. And under a deep impression of this responsibility, I am sure you will bear me witness, I have always spoken in this place and elsewhere. There is no thinking man who has mixed with the mass of the people but knows how closely many of them,-more especially those who have been all their lives under the guidance of priests of one sect or other,connect morality with a belief in the whole Bible, ay, every line of it, as divinely and unerringly inspired. Their simple and earnest hearts ask, at once, when you throw doubt upon any part of it-'Where is our rule of life, then ?-what have we to depend upon as an unerring guide, if we give

up the full and entire faith in this, that we have been taught to be necessary to our salvation? If this book be not entirely true, what certainty have we for the foundations" of morality,-and why should we care how we live ?'"Let us eat and drink," as the book says, "for to-morrow we die." It is true that these are the questions chiefly of the peasantry in the agricultural districts, and of the uneducated or sectarianly-educated in towns-while in the manufacturing districts thousands of men whose haggard frames and pale and thoughtful faces tell you that starvation has coerced them into self-education, assert the dignity of reason and tell you that they no longer look for the sanctions of morality in the legends of an old book; but in the utility of acts-and in the influence which every thought they cherish, and every word they speak, and every deed they perform, has upon the happiness of themselves and upon the rest of mankind.

It is this great doctrine of utility as the grand sanction of morality which I have ever sought to set before you. I am not speaking, now, to uneducated persons. Hundreds of you have long used your reason too well, to dread the destruction of morality by the annihilation of a belief in legends. But for the welfare of those who have been less sternly disciplined, the utmost caution ought to be used. Our duty to each other demands that Truth be so advocated as to prevent the Liberty of the Mind from degenerating into licentiousness. Once let the love and worship of moral beauty be lost in the Mind, and all is lost the character of a man will be worthless then: his own selfish gratification will be his rule; and he will care neither who starves, who weeps, who cries out in agony, nor who sinks in shame, so long as that vile gratification can be had.

But come, now, tell me, while you think, and think deeply, what principle of morality have we shaken in presenting to you the fact of the contradiction between the genealogies of Matthew and Luke?-or, to begin earlier, by unfolding the fact that we know not, for a certainty, whether Matthew or Luke wrote these gospels? What intelligent and sincere man can possibly become less moral, by discovering the legendary nature of the stories concerning the birth and childhood of the great and good Jesus of Nazareth, related in the gospels which bear the names of Matthew and Luke? If you feel, with me, that truth and uprightness, goodness and kindness, are still deeply attractive to your heart and mind, notwithstanding your conviction of the mythical nature and origin of these earlier parts of the Gospel records, let us pursue our enquiry-with the same spirit of earnest and candid investigation, that, I hope, has hitherto characterised our review. Premising that we are again to be aided by the great German analyst, I enter on the next stage of our enquiry.-Whether, and how far, the Gospel accounts of the Baptism and Temptation of Jesus are to be regarded as true or legendary?

We are thrown into the mythical element again when we open the story of the birth of John the Baptist, as given by Luke. The barrenness of Elizabeth, the apparition and prediction of the angel Gabriel, the sudden dumbness and as sudden recovery of Zacharias, the naming of the child, the journey of Mary to the house of her cousin Elizabeth, the leaping of the babe in Elizabeth's womb, with the songs' of Mary and Zacharias, -all bear such evident marks of legend, that we need not stay to distinguish them more minutely. Parts of the histories of the birth of Ishmael, Isaac, Samuel and Samson, are here remodelled, and woven into one marvellous narrative; and the hymn of Mary is but a partial copy of Hannah's song of praise. (Compare Luke, i. ch. 47 v. with 1 Samuel, ii. ch. 1 v. Luke

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