which Mr. Hayley wrote this sentence, viz. that religion had something to do in producing the disorder with which Cowper was afflicted, has been already shewn from his own testimony to have been erroneous.

The irreligious world, in general, are ready enough to suppose that religion has a tendency to derange the mental faculties: and, perhaps, religious people may, on the other hand, refuse to admit that religion ever can contribute to such derangement in any way or degree; and maintain that, on the contrary, it would always prevent such effects. Doubtless, in very many cases, derangement of the intellect, and the dreadful consequences which attend it, would never have taken place if true piety had been seated in the heart; for it is evident, that these melancholy cases frequently arise from too great an attachment to the present world and its concerns, which raises objects of inferior moment into the highest rank of importance, and exposes they miscalculating victims of their own error to such disappointments as involve the complete ruin of every hope they had cherished, and leave them destitute of present alleviation and future resources.

At the same time we can conceive it to be possible, that in some, though very rare, instances, the awful concerns of eternity may press so powerfully upon a soul possessing a morbid sensibility, or connected with a disordered body, as to obstruct, for a season, the free exercise of the reasoning faculties. Moreover, nothing is more easy to be imagined than that a person afflicted with a constitutional tendency to mental derangement, should, in his wanderings, incline to those subjects which had before exercised his judgment or gratified his taste; and that what had taken most possession of the heart, in the happier hours of intellectual sanity, should most employ the tongue in the sad season of depression or distraction. So widely different, however, was the case of Cowper, that for many of the last years of his life he scarcely adverted, either in his letters or conversation, to the subject of religion, which had in the season of health almost entirely engrossed his mind; and the great difficulty which occurs in contemplating his life is to account for the uninterrupted silence which

he maintained, for so long a time, on this once interesting topic.

We have dwelt the longer upon this subject, because an erroneous apprehension of it is injurious, both in a general view, and also with reference to the subject of the memoirs which we are considering.

The following passage, in the 54th page of the first volume, is worth noticing. Speaking of amusements, Cowper says "This place swarms with them, and cards and dancing are the professed business of almost all the genthe inhabitants of Huntingdon. We'refuse to take part in them, or to be accessaries to this way of murthering our time, and by so doing have acquired the name of Methodists." Again, in the same letter, describing his daily mode of life, he says-" At eleven we attend divine service, which is performed here twice every day." Cowper, then, was denominat ed a Methodist, because he would not kill time at the card-table or in a ballroom; and notwithstanding he was so regular a Churchman, that he attended the Church prayers every day! Such things, we see, have been; and such things, we know, still are: and many a faithful member of the establishment is stigmatized as a Methodist, by the weak and dissipated, merely because, like Cowper, he is more sober, moral, or religious than his malicious accusers. Probably the inhabitants of Huntingdon, if required by Cowper to justify the appellation they bestowed upon him, would have experienced some little embarrassment and difficulty; almost as much as we expect the Anti-jacobin Reviewers would experience, if desired to shew cause why they give the name of Semi-methodists to the conductors of the Christian Observer.

But it is time for us to speak of Mr. Cowper's Letters, which compose the greater part of the contents of the two volumes before us. Mr. Hayley justly considers them as "rivals to his poems, in the rare excellence of representing life and nature with graceful and endearing fidelity;" and it is with equal justice that he characterises them as "exquisite examples of epistolary elegance." On this subject, it would not have been easy for Mr. Hayley to have spoken in too warm terms of panegyric. Among these letters we must distinguish, with

of the majestic grandeur of the Old Testament, we have the winning graces of the New; instead of those thunders, by which angels were discomfited, we have, as it were, "the still small voice" of him, who was meek and lowly of heart.

expression, in this instance, claim our commendation, and prove him worthy to be the panegyrist of the bard, whose merits he so well knows how to relish and describe.

Having enumerated the requisites for producing the noblest benefits and delights of poetry, he says,

"I believe it will be readily granted, that all these qualities were never more perfectly combined than in the poetry of Milton: and I think too there will be little doubt, that the next to him in every one of these instances beyond all comparison is Cowper. The genius of the latter did certainly not lead him to emulate the songs of the seraphim: but though he pursues a lower walk of poetry than his great master, he appears no less the inraptured votary of pure unmixed goodness. Nay, perhaps, he may, in this respect possess some peculiar excellencies, which may make him seem more the bard of Christianity. That divine religion infinitely exalts, but it also deeply humbles the mind it inspires. It gives majesty to the thoughts, but it impresses meekness on the manners, and diffuses tenderness through the feelings. It combines sensibility with fortitude, the lowliness of the chill with the magnanimity of the hero.

"The grandest features of the Christian character were never more gloriously exemplified than in that spirit, which animates the whole of Milton's poetry. His own Michael does not impress us with the idea of a purer, or more awful, virtue than that which we feel in every portion of his majestic verse; and he no less happily indicates the source from which his excellence was derived, by the bright beams which he ever and anon reflects upon us from the sacred scriptures: but the milder

ap

graces of the Gospel are certainly less parent. What we behold is so awful, it might almost have inspired a wish, that a spirit, equally pure and heavenly, might be raised to illustrate, with like felicity, the more attractive and gentler influences of our divine religion. In Cowper, above any poet that ever lived, would such a wish seem to be fulfilled. In his charming effusions, we have the same spotless purity, the same elevated devotion, the same vital exercise of every noble and exalted quality of the mind, the same devotedness to the scriptures, and to the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel ; the difference is, that instead of an almost repressive dignity, we have the sweetest familiarity; instead

"May we not then venture to assert,

has rendered both these great men liable to the charge of religious enthusiasm, but which in truth raised the minds of both to a kind of happy residence

، In regions mild, of calm, and serene air, 'Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, Which men call earth.'

A peculiar character has been derived to the poetry of them both, which distinguishes their compositions from those of almost all the world besides. I have already enumerated some of the superior advantages of a truly virtuous poet, and presumed to state, that these are realised in an unexampled degree in Milton and Cowper. That they both owed this moral eminence to their vivid sense of religion will, I conceive, need no demonstration, except what will arise to every reader of taste and feeling on examining their works. It will here, I think, be seen at once, that that sublimity of conception, that delica cy of virtuous feeling, that majestic independence of mind, that quick relish for all the beauties of nature at once so pure, and so exquisite, which we find ever occurring in them both, could not have existed in the same unrivalled degree, if their devotion had been less intense, and of course their minds more dissipated amongst low and distracting objects."

XCVII. Six more Letters to Granville Sharp, Esq. on his Remarks upon the Uses of the Article in the Greek Testament. By GREGORY BLUNT, Esq. 8vo. pp. xxiii, and 195. London, Johnson. 1803.

No

THE most familiar objects of knowledge are replete with mystery: we can penetrate scarcely to any depth beyond their surface: their inmost nature is perfectly unknown. On such high subjects as those which concern the divine nature and operations, it can hardly be expected that we should be better informed. position, therefore, can be more destitute of foundation, than that common and presumptuous one," Where mystery begins, religion ends." We will not, however, undertake to deny, that in particular cases this may be the fact; and that persons of a certain complexion may have renounced their religion, as soon as they disco

vered that there are mysteries in it. How far the fictitious author before us may be concerned in this observation, it is for him to determine; the province of his readers is conjecture, and that unquestionably cannot be denied them. What will be the result of their conjecture is no difficult matter to divine, when the instances are adverted to, which abound in this work, of indecent levity descending even to vulgarity*; of extreme disrespect towards the parties whose sentiments are attacked; of illiberal abuse of the primitive Christian writerst; and, above all, of gross and prurient profaneness §.

Upon a subject of such acknowledged importance as that involved in the present controversy, gravity and temperance might with some reason be expected. But the hostility and violence which have, in general, been discovered by the impugners of that fundamental article of our faith, the divinity of its author, produced some abatement in our expectation; nor did we suffer any considerable disappointment, upon finding the usual embellishments of Socinian productions adorn the homogeneous publication of a man, who screens himself from public knowledge under the cover of an antithetical pun.

The learned and respectable writer, particularly assailed in these letters, had advanced a theory with respect to the uses of the article in the Greek Testament, which he considered as bringing a considerable accession of evidence to the divinity of our blessed Saviour. The theory was approved, and the book re-edited by Mr. now Dr. Burgess. Mr. Wordsworth likewise addressed six letters to the author, in which, by a detail of the historical evidence arising from the writings of the primitive fathers, he greatly corroborated the system of Mr. Sharp. (See our review of these works, Christian Observer, Vol. I. p. 438.)

This theory, more especially the application of it, the author, with whom we have now to deal, has thought it of sufficient importance to

* See pp. 1, 29, 38, 39, 46, 60, 62,

63, 85, 121.

See pp. 22, 29, 35.

See pp. 12, 50, 62, 63, 92, &c. See pp. xi. 26, 29, 46, 62, 63, 133, 134. We were weary of marking all the instances which might have been produced on this or the foregoing heads.

his system, to invest with all the form and preparation of a regular siege. He has, however, discovered so litile temper in the management of it, that his readers will be tempted to infer, from that circumstance, the opinion which the author himself entertained of the strength of the citadel.

From the general imperfection of human knowledge, the assailant of any proposition or doctrine has an apparent advantage over the defendant. Difficulties, which abound on subjects the most uncontroverted, may be magnified, and pressed with so much pertinacity and force, by a dexterous adversary, as to make "the worse appear the better cause;" and tempt the inexperienced maintainer of a demonstrable proposition to surrender it as untenable.

Mr. Blunt, for so we must call our facetious theologue, endeavours to throw an obscurity over the subject, which, in the present publication, he undertakes to examine; and for this purpose employs his first letter to prove the perfect equipollency of the English definitive, with the Greek article. He had an additional object in view; and that was, to gain a new audience, and a numerous one. The field of the sophist, like that of the demagogue, is the multitude; and now, instead of a few hundred Greek scholars, the cause is brought before a whole nation of vernacular critics. The Port Royal Grammar, it is true, affirms, in a general and introductory manner, that the article had the same effect among the Greeks, as it has in most modern languages; (Mr. Blunt will recollect that that Grammar was originally written in French): and Bishop Lowth, according to our author's quotation (p. 12), notices the "near affinity between the Greek article and the English definite article." But are such loose and general observations to be applied universally to two languages, which differ so essentially in their genius and construction? The question does not deserve a serious answer: and the assertion, which is intended as a prop to this baseless supposition, that the English writers,. particularly the translators of our present version of the Bible, were as accurate as the original writers of the. New Testament, in the use of the article, is as contradictory to all the evidence which the subject admits, as can easily be conceived. In the

English language, the sense of a sentence or expression is determined, for the most part, by the collocation of the words which compose it; and this being generally analogical, attention to the connecting particles is less necessary. It is well known, and admitted by those whose prejudices will suffer them to admit it, that the writers of this country, who flourished about the time of our translators, were extremely negligent with respect to the insertion or omission of the smaller particles. The Greek is a transpositive language, and can maintain that advantage only by a strict attention to such minutiæ; we may, therefore, naturally expect in Greek writers a greater degree of such attention.

Here, for the sake of preventing the trouble of a reference, which would otherwise be necessary, we will transcribe the rule of Mr. Sharp, which contains the substance of his theory, and is the chief object of attack. "When the copulative xa connects two nouns of the same case, [viz. nouns (either substantive, or adjective, or participles,) of personal description respect ing office, dignity, affinity, or connection, and attributes, properties, or qualities good or ill] if the article &, or any of its cases, precedes the first of the said nouns or participles, and is not repeated before the second noun or participle, the latter always relates to the same person that is expressed or described by the first noun or participle; i. e. it denotes a further description of the first named person." (Remarks, &c. p. 3.)

With the advantage which Mr. Blunt endeavours to make of the word "always," occurring in the preceding passage, we have but little concern; inasmuch as a consideration of the nature of human evidence has taught us the value of high probabilities. We therefore proceed; and at p. 34, we meet with somewhat of an approach to a concession which we deem of considerable importance, and which is less reluctantly expressed, p. 52. "They" (the opponents of Mr. Sharp) "may allow that your rule generally prevails, without allowing as you contend, and must contend, in order to apply it in the way you wish, that it always prevails." This passage is only quoted for the concession; and it is of the more importance for being extorted. We pass over, as only indicative of the opinion which CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 18.

Mr. Blunt entertains of his own cause, the loop-hole which he endeavours to secure to himself, by the supposition of an ellipsis. Neither do we think it of importance to notice what has been observed, a thousand times before Mr. Blunt wrote, of the general uncertainty with respect to the presence or absence of the article. In the context of what appears to us the misquoted motto* from Bishop Pearson on the creed, the reader will find enough to that purpose. (Expos. of the Creed, fol. edit. 3d. p. 150, note.) The question is, is the presence, or absence, or peculiar position of the article in no instances decisive? And now we seem to be coming to a point; for if this question be determined in the affirmative, in any particular instance, it may be so determined in others. Now there is no rule in the Greek language more generally admitted by grammarians and critics, than that, when two substantives are connected together in any proposition as subject and predicate, the former is

distinguished from the latter, by the article being prefixed. See, for some curious instances of this rule, Campbell on the Gospels, note on John i. 1. The rule itself is observed by Harris, Hermes, p. 230; and may be found in so common a book as the Port Royal Greek Grammar, book i. c. iv. § ii. art. 34. Here then is one unquestionable exception to the general uncer tainty in the use of the Greek article; and why others should not exist, is more than Mr. Blunt has informed, or, we believe, is able to inform us.

The conclusion of the second letter is taken up with an attack upon the limitations of Mr. Sharp's rule, in which there is nothing more worthy of observation than a gross misrepresentation of Bishop Pearson, p. 40, whom he very consistently ridicules after having caricatured him. The offence was, that this prelate's obser

We think it misquoted, because it certainly is so, if intended to be quoted from the third edition, folio; and we suspect this to be the edition from which the quotation is made, because in a reference to the same work (p. 40,) the page agrees with this edition.

+ Has the English article any thing to answer to this property of the Greek? or is the English article ever placed before a proper name? What becomes then of their perfect equipollency, and of the ar gument supported by it?

3 A