the first magnitude, so he was placed in a situation where he might have shone without any waste of his distinguished and supereminent glories.

But what crowned all or advanced his distinction as a man and a scholar into the highest value and lustre, was, that his pious character appeared not at all inferior to his great intellects, and acquired accomplishments. Nay, (let me not be thought, for I intimately knew him, to exceed the limits of truth in the ardour of my friendship) his pious character as much surpassed all else that was remarkable in him, as the sparkling eye in the countenance of a great genius does all the other features of the face. If Mr. Davies' good sense and learning were the pictures of silver, his graces and virtues were the apples of gold.*

Here let me stay awhile; and, though I shall only give you a few outlines of his piety and amiable disposition, yet let me be allowed to present you with such a view of him as shall not only be sufficient to demonstrate him to be the best of men and ministers, but as shall leave room for you to conclude that great additions might be made to his character by persons who had a longer acquaintance with him than myself, and the collected testimonies of, the friends who were favoured with his intimate correspondence.

He informed me in one of his letters, for I was honoured with a close intimacy with him several years, "That he was blessed with a mother whom he might account, without filial vanity or partiality, one of the most eminent saints he ever knew upon earth. And here, says he, I cannot but mention to my friend an anecdote known but to few, that is, that I am a son of prayer, like my name-sake Samuel the prophet; and my mother called me Samuel, because, she said, I have asked him of the Lord, 1 Sam. i. 20. This early dedication to God has always been a strong inducement to me to devote myself to him by my own personal act; and the most important blessings of my life I have looked upon as immediate answers to the prayers of a pious mother. But, alas! what a degenerate plánt am I! How unworthy of such a parent, and such a birth!"

From the accounts Mr. Davies gave of himself in the conversation that passed between us when he was here in England, I learnt, as the inference from related fact, that he must have been very assiduous in his studies. When he was about entering the ministry, or had not long entered upon it, if I remember right, he was judged to be in a deep and irrecoverable consumption. Finding himself upon the borders of the grave, and without any hopes of recovery, he determined to spend the little remains of an almost exhausted life, as he apprehended it, in endeavouring to advance his Master's glory in the good of souls. Accordingly he removed from the place where he was to another about an hundred miles distance, that was then in want of a minister. Here he laboured in season and out of season; and, as he told me,

* Prow xxv. 11.

preached in the day, and had his hectic fever by night, and that to such a degree as to be sometimes delirious, and to stand in need of persons to sit up with him. Here God gave him some glorious first fruits of his ministry, for two instances of the conversion of two gentlemen he related to me were very remarkable, and he had the satisfaction, as he informed me, to find in the after accounts of them, that there was good reason to believe that they were saints indeed: their goodness being by no means "like the grass upon the house tops, which withers afore it grows up, and with which the mower filleth not his hand," Psalm cxxix. 6, 7, but yielding the fruits meet for repentance in an holy and well ordered conversation.

Afterwards he settled in Virginia, a colony where profaneness and immorality called aloud for his sacred labours. His patience and perseverance, his magnanimity and piety, together with his powerful and evangelical ministrations, were not without success. The wilderness and the solitary places in the course of his stay there, bloomed and blossomed before him. His tract of preaching, if I remember right, for some time was not less than sixty miles, and by what I have learnt, though not from himself, he had but little of this world's goods to repay his zealous and indefatigable labours: but his reward, as he well knew, was in heaven ; and he felt, I doubt not, the animated joy that every negro-slave, which under his ministrations became the Lord's freemen, would furnish an additional jewel to his eternal crown.

Upon the decease of that excellent man the Rev. Mr. Jonathan Edwards, president of the college of Nassau-Hall, in New Jersey, Mr. Davies writes me word, that Mr. Lockwood in New England, a gentleman of worthy character, was chosen to fill up the vacancy. "I have not heard," says Mr. Davies, "whether he has accepted the place. The trustees were divided between him, another gentleman, and myself, but I happily escaped." But so it was ordered, by Mr. Lockwood's not accepting the invitation, that Mr. Davies was afterwards elected president of the college; and what concern, and indeed what consternation this choice gave him, his letters to me amply testify; and I could particularly relate to you what views he had of things, and what steps he took to determine what was his duty. At last he accepted the call to his important office of presiding in the college; and tells me in a letter, dated June 6, 1759, "That the evidence of his duty was so plain, that even his sceptical mind was satisfied; and that his people saw the hand of Providence in it, and dared not to oppose." Here he was settled for about eighteen months; and as he could exercise his ministry as well as preside over the college, great things might have been expected from that rare and remarkable union there was in him of what was great and good ; and with pleasure I have received the information from his friends how well he supported and adorned his character, and what high expectations were formed as to the benefit and blessing he was likely to prove to that seminary of religion and learning. "His

whole soul (says the letter that gives the news of his death) was engaged for the, good of the youth under his care." And again, "Nassau-Hall in tears, disconsolate, and refusing to be comforted."

But, alas! in the midst of his days, (little more than thirty-six years of age) he was called away from this but opening scene of large and extraordinary usefulness to the invisible world, the world of glory and blessedness, never to sojourn in mortal clay, or to irradiate and bless the church militant more. He is dead, he is departed-America in groans proclaims her inexpressible loss, and we in Great-Britain share the distress, and echo groan for groan.

Thus ended the days on earth of this truly great and good man; having in his little circle of life shed more beams, and done more service than many a languid and less illuminated soul, even in a public sphere, in the revolution of sixty or fourscore years.

Truly great and good I may style him without the suspicion of flattery, and without the flight of hyperbole. Let me call to your remembrance, as proofs of what I say, the excellent discourses he has delivered in this pulpit, and the several sermons of his which have been published, strong in manly sense, laden with full ideas, rich with evangelical truth, and animated with the most sacred fervour for the good of souls. And to these evidences of the admirable spirit that dwelt in him, let me add a few paragraphs from the many letters with which, in the course of about nine years correspondence, he has favoured me.

Speaking in one of his letters concerning his children, he says, "I am solicitous for them when I consider what a contagious world they have entered into, and the innate infection of their natures. There is nothing that can wound a parent's heart so deep, as the thought that he should bring up children to dishonour his God here, and be miserable hereafter. I beg your prayers for mine, and you may expect a retaliation in the same kind."

In another letter he says, "We have now three sons and two daughters; whose young minds, as they open I am endeavouring to cultivate with my own hand, unwilling to trust them to a stranger; and I find the business of education much more difficult than I expected.-My dear little creatures sob and drop a tear now and then under my instructions, but I am not so happy as to see them under deep and lasting impressions of religion and this is the greatest grief they afford me. Grace cannot be communicated by natural descent, and, if it could, they would receive but little from me. I earnestly beg your prayers for them."

In another letter, "I desire seriously to devote to God and my dear country, all the labours of my head, my heart, my hand, and pen; and if he pleases to bless any of them, I hope I shall be thankful, and wonder at his condescending grace.-Oh! my dear brother, could we spend and be spent all our lives in painful, disinterested, indefatigable service for God and the world, how serene and bright would it render the swift approaching eve of life! I am fabouring to do a little to save my country, and, which is of much

more consequence, to save souls from death-from that tremendous kind of death, which a soul can die. I have but little success of late, but blessed be God, it surpasses my expectation, and much more my desert. Some of my brethren labour to better purpose. The pleasure of the Lord prospers in their hands."

cess.

Another epistle tells me, "As for myself, I am just striving not to live in vain. I entered the ministry with such a sense of my unfitness for it, that I had no sanguine expectations of sucAnd a condescending God (O, how condescending!) has made me much more serviceable than I could hope. But, alas! my brother, I have but little, very little true religion. My advancements in holiness are extremely small; I feel what I confess, and am sure it is true, and not the rant of excessive or affected humility. It is an easy thing to make a noise in the world, to flourish and harangue, to dazzle the crowd, and set them all agape, but deeply to imbibe the spirit of christianity, to maintain a secret walk with God, to be holy as he is holy, this is the labour, this the work. I beg the assistance of your prayers in so grand and important an enterprise.-The difficulty of the ministerial work seems to grow upon my hands. Perhaps once in three or four months I preach in some measure as I could wish; that is, I preach as in the sight of God, and as if I were to step from the pulpit to the supreme tribunal. I feel my subject. I melt into tears, or I shudder with horror, when I denounce the terrors of the Lord. I glow, I soar in sacred extasies, when the love of Jesus is my theme, and, as Mr. Baxter was wont to express it, in lines more striking to me than all the fine poetry in the world, "I preach as if I ne'er should preach again ; And as a dying man to dying men."

But, alas my spirits soon flag, my devotions languish, and my zeal cools. It is really an afflictive thought, that I serve so good a Master with so much inconstancy; but so it is, and my soul mourns upon that account."

In another letter he says, 66 I am labouring to do a little good in the world. But, alas! I find I am of little use or importance. I have many defects, but none gives me so much pain and mortification as my slow progress in personal holiness. This is the grand qualification of the office we sustain, as well as for that heaven we hope for, and I am shocked at myself when I see how little I have of it."

In another of his letters, he acquaints me, "That he indeed feels an union of hearts which cannot bear without pain the intervention of the huge Atlantic, nor even the absence of a week. But our condescending Lord," adds he, " calls his ministers stars, and he knows best in what part of the firmament of the church to fix them and (oh the delightful thought!) they can never be out of the reach of his beams, though they shine in different hemispheres with regard to each other. This leads me, undesignedly, to a criticism on Jude 13, on which perhaps an astrono

mer would be the best commentator, Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever. Perhaps an astronomical critic would observe that false teachers are represented as planetary or wandering stars, that in their eccentricities run out into an eternal Aphelion from the Sun of righteousness, beyond the system which he warms, illuminates, and beautifies, and are constantly receding from the fountain of light, life, and bliss, and therefore must wander through the blackness of darkness forever; a darkness unpierced by one ray of the great Sun and Centre of the moral world-blackness of darkness, an abstract predicated of an abstract. How gloomy and strong the expression!"

Let me give you another quotation from his letters. "I am very much pleased and affected, (says he) with the subject of this week's study, and next Lord's day's entertainment, namely, A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench. Such a bruised reed at best am I : a weak, oppressed, useless thing: a stridens stipula that can make no agreeable melody to entertain my great Shepherd. Yet this bruised reed I have reason to hope he will not break, but bind up and support. This shattered pipe of straw he will not cast away, but repair and tune to join in the angelic concert on high. I am at best but smoking fax; a dying snuff in the candlestick of his church; a wick just put out in the lamp of his sanctuary. The flame of divine love, sunk deep into the socket of a corrupt heart, quivers and breaks, and catches, and seems just expiring at times. The devil and the world raise many storms to blow upon it. And yet this smoking flax, where the least spark of that sacred passion still remains which renders it more susceptive of his love, as a candle just put out but still smoking, is easily rekindled.—This smoking flax he will not quench, but blow it to a flame, which shall shine brighter and brighter till it mingle with its kindred flames in the pure element of love."

I shall conclude my extracts from his epistolary correspondence. with a part of a letter, dated Hanover, September 12, 1757.

My ever dear friend,

"I am just beginning to creep back from the valley of the shadow of death, to which I made a very near approach a few days ago. I was seized with a most violent fever, which came to a crisis in a week, and now it is much abated, though I am still confined to my chamber. In this shattered state my trembling hand can write but little to you, and what I write will be languid and confused, like its author. But as the Virginia fleet is about to sail, and I know not when I shall have another opportunity, I cannot avoid writing something. I would sit down on the grave's mouth, and talk awhile with my favourite friend; and from my situation you may foresee what subjects my conversation will turn upon-death-eternity-the supreme tribunal.