This is also characteristic of the Doctor’s writing. He has used the press extensively. I see he has just issued an account of one of the sufferers in that unhappy missionary expedition
to the island of Terra del Fuego, the result of which was the slow death, by hunger, of the parties engaged. His cheap series of tracts, entitled ‘Happy Home,’ are considered, by the religious world, exquisite productions. They are much in demand. This, however, is easily accounted for. The pastor of a rich London congregation can always have a good sale for his works. The wealthy members of his church will buy them for distribution; even the very poor will make an effort to procure them. Bad or good, they are sure to have a respectable sale. Happily, in Dr. Hamilton’s case, this respectable sale is deserved. His publications have the same beauties as his sermons. It is to be regretted that the small tracts, published by well-meaning men, with the best of motives, should be so little adapted to that end. In reality, they do more harm than good. The very class they are intended for do not read them; and those who do are precisely the class that need to be stimulated into some life higher and grander than your small tract-writer can generally conceive of. It is to the credit of Dr. Hamilton that he does not disdain to write little books on great subjects, and thus seek to rescue the tract system from
the contempt into which, owing to the injudiciousness of its friends, it has so extensively fallen.
We have only to add here, that the Doctor sides with the Free Scotch Church, and that, of that remarkable movement, he was one of the earliest and warmest friends.
Miscellaneous.
THE REV. WILLIAM FORSTER.
Aristophanes, were he alive now, I imagine, instead of aiming his wit at the philosophers, would have a turn with the theologians. Theirs is the real cloud-land. In spite of the inherent conservatism of human nature in theology, you cannot keep up the old landmarks. Nay, such is the perverseness of human nature, that the more you try to do so the less chance there seems of your succeeding. To the reign of the Saints succeeded the madness and the profligacy of the Restoration. Lord Bolingbroke always said it was Dr. Manton’s Commentary on the 119th Psalm, which his mother, much against his inclination, compelled him to read, which made an infidel of him. Holyoake, the leader of the Secularists, was brought up in the Sunday School at Birmingham. Thomas Cooper, the
author of the ‘Purgatory of Suicides,’ was a Methodist local preacher. William Johnson Fox, who has done as much as any man to destroy orthodoxy in persons of intelligence and position in society, was at one time pastor of an Independent church. Sterling was long a clergyman of the Church of England, and poor Blanco White traversed every point of the religious compass, earnestly seeking rest, and unfortunately finding none.
Is there, then, no religious truth? Is man ever to be surrounded by doubt—to be ever void of a living faith—from age to age to turn an anxious eye above, and there see
‘no God, no heaven, in the void world—
The wide, deep, lampless, grey, unpeopled world’?