same sense in which it is proper there should be punitive circumstances, privations, and inflictions, in this our sinful state? For one knows not how to believe that some revelation of that next stage of our existence would not be more influential to a right procedure in this first, than such an absolute unknown. It is true that a profound darkness, which we know we are destined ere long to enter, and soon to find ourselves in an amazing light, is a striking object of contemplation. But the mind still, again and again falls back from it disappointed and uninstructed, for want of some defined forms of reality to seize, retain, and permanently occupy it. In default of revelation, we have to frame our conjectures on some principle of analogy, which is itself arbitrary, and without any means of bringing it to the test of reason."

Now one is tempted to exclaim, in perusing such a passage, Can the man who writes this have ever seriously read the Scrip tures? It may be said that Foster was not here speaking of the general doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments, but of the default of any definite knowledge of our state immediately after death. But even thus, such language is absolutely unjustifiable on the ground of the information contained in the Word of God, and would seem totally inconsistent with a firm faith in the truth, or a serious examination of the meaning, of our blessed Lord's own declarations as to what takes place after death. There is no such thing as this absolute unknown, of which Foster speaks; on the contrary, the blank is so definitely filled up, the mystery is so much cleared away, that our Lord solemnly declares to us that if men will not believe for what is already written, neither would they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. A sentence which stands in singular and palpable contradiction against what Mr. Foster remarks about some revelation being more influential. He has introduced a similar train of reflections in one of his Essays, but with a very different impression. But he seems to have been constantly wishing for something more clear and convincing than we have in the Word of God, in regard to the realities of the Eternal World, and constantly underrating the degree and decisiveness of that information; or what is worse, shrinking back from its admission, and dreading its plain and direct interpretation. Nothing can be more unfortunate than such a state of mind in regard to the Scriptures, especially for a preacher of the Gospel; and few things would render a teacher more unfitted for the instruction of others, in regard to some of the most essential points in the system of revealed truth.

His state of mind was somewhat like that of a disastrous eclipse, and all things looked in it as the vegetation and forms of the world look in an eclipse of the sun at noonday. It seemed as if, while he was advancing forward to the knowledge of Divine things, the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and to

the possession of convictions and expanded views and a celestial
experience, which would have armed him, as with the sword of
Michael against the powers of darkness, there had been a strange
permission given to those powers to stop him. And they said,
We cannot take from him what he has gained, but we will fasten
him there; he shall henceforward view all things only from his
present limited point of view, and here we will bring to bear upon
him all our suggestions of mysteries and difficulty, and if we can-
not turn him from his integrity, we will make the very anguish and
utterance of his uncertainties the means of shaking others. And
he shall, at the least, never make any onset upon our kingdom,
notwithstanding the towering pride of his intellect, and the grace
of God in him. And in effect, Foster did for a season stop. He
seems for a long time to have made little advance in religious
knowledge, and little in religious zeal. His life was always pure,
his nature noble, and his spirit was always hovering over the
awful gulf of futurity, and you might see a gloomy and terrible light
reflected from the wings of the soul, as you followed its excursions;
but you
could seldom see it in the clear serene of heaven. You
saw not the shining light shining more and more, unto the
perfect day, but a path of involutions and anxieties, sometimes
indeed running in that shining light, but sometimes crossing it at
right angles and plunging into the darkness. His feelings were of
an exquisite kindness and tenderness; his sympathies were strong
and deep, notwithstanding his apparently misanthropic aloofness
from society. His humility was genuine, his personal reliance
upon Christ, towards the close of life, delightfully entire and satis-
factory; and yet for a long period there was doubt and gloom.

The position of his mind seemed like that of a man in the dark, confident that he is near some vast, solid obstacle, but not daring to advance. He had a spiritual sense or instinct of the realities of the future world, like the feeling which makes a blind man know that things are near him, even without touching them. And he trembled at times, as a bewildered traveller might stand and tremble in the darkness, when convinced by the deep roar of falling waters, near and below him, that he is on the brink of some tremendous verge, where he dare not stir one step without a guide. What avail would it be for him in such a case, to shout to others, who might be in the same position, There is nothing to fear, the gulf is not bottomless, and if you fall, you will come up unhurt! Why fear for thyself, O man, if thou art so sure of the divine benevolence at the bottom of this fall to others? This fear is the sacred instinct of the soul in the near presence of the reality. Though the soul does not see, or will not see, the form of the reality in the definite light of the Divine Word, yet it feels the reality, almost as if it touched it.

It was under the power of this feeling that Foster lived and

wrote. His very letters issue from the pressure of it; every coinage of his mind bears its stamp. He could not help it, any more than he could the sense of his immortality. There was always in his soul a sense of vast, dread, illimitable retribution in Eternity, to which all sinful beings are advancing, and from which the only escape is in the mercy of God in Christ Jesus to those only who in this world avail themselves of it. He felt this; he could not, did not, reason about it; he felt it. He questioned it, and yet he felt it. He shrunk back from it, and yet he felt it. It was with him by day and by night, an ever-brooding power and presence from the Eternal World, a truth that woke to perish never," a Master o'er a slave; a presence that was not to be put by." Beneath the pressure of questioned realities in the invisible world he wrote all his works, and they have, consequently, some of them, an overpowering solemnity. For he could not put off his heritage; his soul would be weighed down beneath it, notwithstanding all evasive doubts, and shrinkings from its dread solemnity. There was within him

"That eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal mind."

And amidst all the uncertainties of his religious experience, and all the vagueness of his views, perhaps there never was a man, who had a fuller, more constant, brooding sense of eternity, as a sense of eternal responsibility, and a danger of eternal ruin. And although custom lies upon our religious sensibilities, if they be not most anxiously cultivated, with a weight, as men advance into

"heavy as frost, and deep almost as life," no religious deadness or insensibility or laxity of view, ever delivered Foster from this powerful haunting sense of Eternal retribution. We think we can detect it even in that late letter on the subject of the Divine penalty, even while summoning all his powers to resist the conviction. A letter, not indeed written in anything like the dotage of the mind in old age, for Foster never lived to that, but bore his faculties with surprising vigor, beyond his three-score years and ten; but still written when the wheel is beginning to cease its revolutions at the cistern, and when they that look out at the windows be darkened. A letter full of the most surprising inconsistencies, of which the impression remaining on the mind is that of a being crushed beneath some heavy load, and writhing in vain to get out from it.

The manner of Mr. Foster's reasoning in that letter, combined with the tenor of his practical appeals to the conscience in his writings, reminds us irresistibly of what he himself has said to the "professed disbelievers in the Christian revelation of an imaginary heaven, and an equally fictitious hell." "You must allow me to doubt, whether you really feel in this matter all the confident as

surance which you pretend. I suspect there are times, when you dare not look out over that field, for fear of seeing the portentous shapes there again; and even that they sometimes come close to present a ghastly visage to you through the very windows of your stronghold. I have observed in men of your class, that they often appear to regard the arrayed evidences of revealed religion, not with the simple aversion which may be felt for error and deception, but with that kind of repugnance which betrays a recognition of adverse power.

Just so the argument of Foster against the Scripture view of the eternity of future punishments, betrays not so much a persuasion, as the existence of agonizing doubt, and the recognition of adverse power.

We question if this will not also strike the mind in reading his letter to Dr. Harris, in which he speaks of the transcendently direful nature of a contemplation of the human race, if he believed the doctrine of the eternity of future misery; and speaks also of the "short term of mortal existence, absurdly sometimes denominated a probation." Mr. Foster, in writing this, must have absolutely forgotten what he himself wrote in his introduction to Doddridge's Rise and Progress, in regard to that very probation, and the shortness of it, and under this very denomination of a probationary state. He tells the careless man, with the most overwhelming pressure of solemnity he can bring to bear upon his spirit, to "think of that existence during endless ages, an existence to commence in a condition determined for happiness or misery by the state of mind which shall have been formed in this introductory period." "The whole term of life, diminutive as it is for a preparatory introduction to that stupendous sequel, is what our Creator has allotted to us, leaving to us no responsibility that it is not longer." And Mr. Foster draws from the actual shortness of the preparatory time at the uttermost, an argument, not against the goodness of God, but for the conscience of the guilty man, to convince him of the infinite madness of making it any shorter, of wasting any portion of it. He tells the man of the world, of the rapidity of the course with which he is passing out of life, rejecting from him all care of life's one grand business, the preparation for an eternal state. He tells him that he is madly living as if this life had no connection with that future life, and as if that future life would. have "no reference or relation to the previous and PROBATIONARY state." He adjures the idea of ETERNITY to overwhelm that spirit, whose whole scheme of existence embraces but a diminutive portion of time. He calls for the scene of the last judgment to present itself in a glare to the being whose conscience is in such awful repose. Let the thought of the Almighty fulminate on the

mind of that mortal!

Here assuredly is that state most distinctly recognized, and the

solemnity of it with great power enforced, as a probationary state, which Mr. Foster, at a later period, declared to be absurdly denominated a probation. But it was "in his haste" that he said it. We pass to a sketch of the succeeding portion of his life, before resuming this subject.

In the year 1800 Mr. Foster removed to Downend, about five miles from Bristol, where he preached regularly at a small chapel erected by Dr. Caleb Evans. Here he resided about four years, and then," in consequence chiefly of the high testimony borne to his character and abilities by Mr. Hall, he was invited to become the minister of a Congregation meeting in Shepard's Barton, Frome." He removed thither in February, 1804, and in 1805 his great work, indeed the work, on which, as a grave profound classic in English Literature, his fame rests, was published. He was now thirty-five years of age. At this time a swelling in the thyroid gland of the neck compelled him for a season to relinquish preaching, and he gave up his charge, and devoted himself with much assiduity to a literary engagement as contributor to the Eclectic Review. "So fully was he occupied in this department of literature, that upwards of thirteen years elapsed, before he again appeared before the public in his own name."

In 1808 he was married to an admirable lady of congenial mind and feeling, to whom he had been engaged for five years. From the period of his marriage he lived a number of years at Bourton, a village in Gloucestershire, with a good deal of work and much serene domestic happiness. Though not settled in the ministry, he was preaching nearly every Sabbath, once or twice, for about seven years. In 1817 he became once more a resident and stated preacher at Downend, though for a few months only. In 1818 he delivered his Discourse on Missions. His sermon in behalf of the British and Foreign School Society, delivered the same year, was afterwards enlarged into the powerful Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance, and published in 1820. In 1821 he removed from Downend to Stapleton, within three miles of Bristol, and in 1822, at the earnest solicitation of his friends in Bristol, commenced a series of fortnight lectures in Broadmead Chapel. His preparations for these lectures have been printed since his death, and contain some of the finest productions of his genius. He continued these lectures somewhat longer than two years, but on the settlement of Robert Hall at Bristol, he relinquished the engagement as, in his own view, "altogether superfluous, and even bordering on impertinent." He observed that he should have very little more preaching, probably, ever, but should apply himself to the mode of intellectual operation, of which the results might extend much further, and last much longer.

In the year 1825 he wrote one of his most important and powerful essays, the Introduction to Doddridge's Rise and Progress of