moner in favor of repealing the hated tax; and it was remarked that on the same occasion the House for the first time heard the eloquent young Irishman, Edmund Burke. One small circumstance is mentioned casually this year with regard to America, which has a curious interest in our own day-it is the notice of an order by his Majesty's government to divide the colonies into a northern and southern district, the boundary to be the river Potomac, and a line drawn westward from it. The king lost an able supporter this year in his uncle the Duke of Cumberland, who seems to have been as much loved and lamented in England as he was hated, from the remembrance of Culloden, in Scotland. How different is the union of feeling now between the countries!

In 1765 there were no wars and no conquests by England, except the steady, onward march of the Honorable Company in India, which advanced in this season the length of Allahabad and Benares. Clive was then on his six months' voyage out to Calcutta, rich in the laurels already won; Hastings was not yet renowned.

A small acquisition was made very near our own shores; for, in 1765, the Isle of Man was purchased for the Crown from its King, the Duke of Athol, and great efforts were made to educate the natives, by printing books in the Manx language, then spoken by about twenty thousand of them, now almost obsolete. We wonder if Gaelic and Irish will be as little known a century hence?

A brilliant host of literati were at this time gathered in London round their autocrat, Johnson. Among these the names of Goldsmith, Burke, Boswell, and the great artist Reynolds, are still well known, while those of many other members of "The Club," equally or even more highly rated at that day, are utterly forgotten now. Gibbon was not then known either as a historian or as an assailant of Christianity; Hume, however, had launched his first attacks, and found but too many admirers in a time when faith was dim and love was cold in England. Still, we may be thankful to this day that our country possessed such a man at the head of literature as the truly wise and pious Johnson, instead of a wicked wit like Voltaire, whose

evil genius was "sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind" at a future time in infidel France.

We can only name a few of the other distinguished men then alive and known as authors in England. There was Gray of "The Elegy;" Young of Night Thoughts, who died in 1765; Akenside. Lyttelton, and Langhorne; Hannah More, whose sacred dramas were at that time greatly admired; Adam Smith, Robertson, and Beatty in Scotland; Churchill, once extremely popular, but now very little read or valued: the polished Chesterfield, Sterne, Garrick, Horace Walpole, Chatterton, and Ossian M'Pherson. But of all the minds of that day, the very noblest, perhaps, was then shrouded in dark eclipse; and little did his fashionable relations think that the time would come when not one of them would be remembered except as having been connected with the crazed and wayward man in Dr. Cotton's private asylum at St. Alban's, afterwards to be known forever in English literature as the author of "The Task "-William Cowper.

Let us now take a glance at certain nurseries in England, watched over by tender mothers; there was one at Hayes, where a pale and precocious little boy of six years old amazed his father with his wise words, and was destined to eclipse even that father's fame, as the second and greatest William Pitt! Another little "Billy" of six years old was growing up at Hull, to be the deliverer of thousands yet unborn-William Wilberforce. A gallant boy of seven was playing in the garden of the pretty rural parsonage of Burnham Thorpe, in Norfolk, England's future hero, the great Nelson; and far away, in Scotland, by a lowly cottage door, at Alloway, in Ayrshire, a merry bright-eyed six years' old herd-boy was running wild with his barefooted brothers and sisters, who was hereafter to make the name of Robert Burns the delight of his native country. Who can say what children of promise the nurseries and careful mothers of 1865 may be rearing for the world? We find in this thought a new application of the solemn words, "Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones."

Turning to a very different side of the picture, we find that there was yet

another world of life in 1765, as there is in 1865, of which the philosophic, literary, and political world knew nothing; and, if we are to judge of it by the records of punishment in those days, it will appear black indeed. Even if we take into account the severity of the laws as a reason for the number of capital punishments, there remains enough in the records of bold crime to show that it was rampant a hundred years ago. Highwaymen by land and wreckers on shore made travelling dan gerous; "kidnappers" and "crimps" exercised in English and Scotch seaports the same iniquities which menstealers practiced on the African coast; smuggling was prevalent, and led to much iniquity; while the profligate example of too many in the higher ranks of life was copied in a coarser form by those below them. Many trustworthy accounts show that there was a fearful amount of heathen ignorance among the poor, especially in rural districts, while the clergy were, for the greater part, cold and indifferent. The Church had lost her "first love," and no longer preached the doctrine of the Cross as the remedy for the ruin of the Fall with the zeal of earlier days; she sought to reform men's manners, but the evil had a deeper root, and it was well discerned by such a man of God as Venn, who says in one of his letters, dated 1760: "The crying abomination of our age is contempt of Christ. In proof of this you may hear sermons and religious books much extolled, where there is not so much as any mention of the Prince of Peace, in whom God was manifest to reconcile the world unto himself."

To remedy such a state God, in his mercy to our country, raised up a number of men who counted it their highest honor and their roblest work to win souls from the kingdom of Satan into the glorious kingdom of Christ. In our own day we may thank God that such has been the progress of truth, that it is not possible for us to count or name those who labor in his service, preaching faithfully the doctrine of salvation through the atonement of Christ alone. At that time each man who thus preached was a marked man-marked on earth, but "written in heaven" also, where

those who turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars forever and ever. Whitefield and Wesley are, perhaps, the most distinguished among these, both for the wonderful effects of their eloquence in arousing the masses to care for their own souls, and for the amount of opposition and obloquy which they incurred. In the Church of England the same great truths were faithfully preached by Newton, Henry Venn, Ber ridge, Hervey, Fletcher, Walker, and others; while Charles Wesley and Toplady gave us a rich treasure of hymns more prized now than ever. These men "rest from their labors, and their works do follow them;" they are now in a state where they know full well that their hopes were not vain, nor their earnest labors in saving souls a mere empty pursuit. The world knew them not-but the world makes many mistakes; even in her own matters the story of a hundred years shows us how often she has mistaken the great for the small, the temporary for the enduring. But the greatest mistake of all is one into which the world in her wisdom falls as readily now as ever she did that of despising, forgetting, ignoring a great eternity! My dear reader, if you have hitherto done so, let me ask you to think how it will be with you when you look back in 1965 from a state forever fixed upon all that interests you now, and say, I might have sought and found a Saviour a hundred years ago!"

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, M. P.

AMONG the leading influential statesmen of England at the present time is the Right Honorable WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. His career since he entered the English Parliament, thirty-four years ago, has been successful and brilliant. His position and influence in the govern ment of England has been eminent. He is still a rising man. On the recent death of Lord Palmerston, Mr. Gladstone was nearly becoming his successor in that high and responsible office. Probably his turn will soon come. accurate portrait of this distinguished statesman will be found at the head of this number of THE ECLECTIC, which

An

we hope will please our readers. A brief biographical sketch will add interest to the portrait.

Mr. Gladstone is the fourth son of the late Sir John Gladstone, Bart., an eminent merchant of Liverpool, by a daughter of the late Provost Robertson of Dingwall, N. B. He was born at Liverpool in 1809, and received his early education at Eton, and afterwards at Christchurch, Oxford, of which he was elected a student in 1829, and where he graduated as a double first-class in 1831. Having spent several months in a tour through a great portion of the continent, he was elected member of Parliament for Newark, in the Conservative interest, in December, 1832, through the influence of the late Duke of Newcastle, just at the time when the struggle of parties was past its height. His mercantile origin, the success of his university career, and his habits of business, in which he strongly resembled the late Sir Robert Peel, all joined to recommend him to the notice of that statesman, who, on taking office in December, 1834, appointed Mr. Gladstone a Lord of the Treasury; and in February, 1835, Under-Secretary for colonial affairs. Mr. Gladstone retired from office, together with his leader, in the following April, and remained in opposition till Sir Robert Peel's return to power in September, 1841, when he was sworn a member of the Privy Council, and appointed VicePresident of the Board of Trade, and Master of the Mint. In this position it was his duty to explain and defend in Parliament the commercial policy of the government, in which his mercantile origin and connection proved of great service. The revision of the British tariff, in 1842, was almost entirely his work. When brought before the House of Commons, this laborious work was found to be as admirably executed in its details as it was complete in its mastery of principles; and it received the sanction of both houses with scarcely an alteration. In May, 1843, he succeeded Lord Ripon as President of the Board of Trade, but resigned office early in 1845. In January, 1846, Sir Robert Peel announced his intention of proposing a modification of the existing corn laws. Mr. Gladstone, who had recently succeeded Lord Stanley in the

post of Secretary of State for the Colonies, adhered to his leader, but, being unwilling to remain under obligations to the Duke of Newcastle, he resigned his seat for Newark, and remained out of Parliament for several months. At the general election of 1847, however, he was chosen as representative of the University of Oxford. In this Parliament the questions of university reform and the repeal of the last remaining Jewish disabilities were frequently agitated. Mr. Gladstone consequently found himself frequently opposed to his own friends, and finally separated himself from the rest of the Conservative party, by refusing to take office under the Earl of Derby in February, 1852. In the July of that year he was again returned for the University of Oxford, and in the following November it was mainly in consequence of his able speech upon Mr. Disraeli's budget that the Derby ministry were thrown out of office. On the accession of Lord Aberdeen to power, Mr. Gladstone was appointed to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, in which office the thorough knowledge of finance which he had acquired in early life proved again of the greatest assistance.

In his private capacity Mr. Gladstone has always been highly esteemed, and his name is not unknown to fame as an author. His treatise, entitled The State Considered in its Relations with the Church, published in 1840, and his Church Principles Considered in their Results, in 1841, each in one volume 8vo, stamped him, while still a young man, as a deep and original thinker. His views, we need hardly say, as unfolded in those books, had been formed by the education and associations of Oxford, to which University they are dedicated. They were thought worthy of discussion at the time by Mr. Macaulay in the pages of the Edinburgh Review. In the fifteen years which have elapsed since he published those works, his religious views have, however, undergone a considerable modification; and they are now far less theoretic, and more in harmony with the existing condition of things both in Church and State.

His Remarks on Recent Commercial Legislation, published in 1845, gave an able and elaborate detail of the beneficial