1848.] Profound Spiritual Influence. 401 On the whole, we would say, that only by approaching the Apocalypse as a sublime poem, as a work of faith and feeling and imagination, can one fully and fairly appreciate its power for the conscience. Unless so approached, it is a sealed book. So approaching it, we feel that the time is, indeed, at hand, and that its sayings are faithful and true. As Daniel, in closing one of his visions, said, "The vision of the evening and the morning which was told is true: wherefore shut thou up the vision; for it shall be for many days"; so John, in closing his vision, says, or represents his angel as saying, "These sayings are faithful and true : and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly be done. Behold, I come quickly blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book,"language, indeed, which may well remind us of the claims of the whole volume which these special revelations so happily complete. These sayings of the Apocalypse its sublime spiritual sentences, as well as its searching moral monitions are true and faithful, faithful to the universal conscience of man, faithful and true echoes of the hopes and the fears of every heart which has heard the sound of the prophetic word of Christ. To every thoughtful heart that has heard the voice of the Teacher of Nazareth, the gorgeous poetry and scenic life of the Apocalypse will not veil, so much as reveal, the momentous character of those profound and eternal realities which are too great to be represented in any other way than by being shadowed forth thus darkly, but powerfully, through allegory and parable. The seven churches will be perceived and felt to stand for all Christian churches in all ages of time; the struggles and successes of the faith, set forth with such a wealth of typical imagery, will be felt to represent what is still going on in the world; in the thunderings and lightnings that accompany the opening of the seals will be heard the warnings and be seen the sword-flashes of conscience, the avenging angel; and in all, the spirit will hear God talking with it, as with the voice of a trumpet, to awaken it from the sleep of lukewarmness, to encourage it amidst the conflict with trial and temptation, and to rouse it and keep it nerved to the strife for ever going on between "the lamb " and "the beast" in human society and in human character. Thus studied, St. John's great poem will make us feel the essential ugliness of sin amidst all its borrowed charms, and the majesty of down-trodden righteousness. It will impress upon us, that Heaven is not indifferent to this great struggle between the bestial and the saintly in the world and in the hearts of men, - that God, and Jesus, and the spirits of just men made perfect are all on the side of struggling virtue and righteousness, and that "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; In reading and studying this Revelation, how thrillingly will the promise, sounded as through a trumpet, to him who overcometh, fall upon our ears! How will the rebuke pronounced against the dead-alive formalist smite our consciences. And how shall we yearn to be found among those arrayed in white robes, the hundred and forty-four thousand who sing the new song before the throne, who follow the true and faithful Captain in his triumphal march, and who enter in after him through the gates into the city! Let no one be so thoughtless as to forget that the Apocalypse, poem though it be, reveals solid truths and solemn realities, which are only the more solemn and momentous, because they cannot be fully expressed in plain speech, and because the highest and profoundest imagery can but dimly shadow forth their vastness and eternal importance. John saw in vision "a great white throne," and "the dead, small and great, came to judgment." And where is the man who has not, even with our measure of the spirit, frequent glimpses, even through the glare and shadow of this world of anxiety and delusion, of that judgment-throne and of Him who sits on it, — that throne of awful and appalling whiteness and ghostliness to the spirit conscious of guilt, of lovely and peaceful whiteness and purity to the child-like and obedient? In vain would any man banish that throne out of sight for ever; let him so live, that it shall win, and not warn only, shall inspire solemnity, but not gloom. - The author We have only one more thought to suggest. of the Apocalypse speaks of "these things" as about to take place soon. How many have gone to the grave, and to the scenes beyond it, who in their life-time had heard much speculation and witnessed much fanaticism respecting the end of the world and the coming of Christ, and pleased them 1848.] Piscataqua Association of Ministers. 403 selves with the secret assurance that it would not take place till after their death! As if this very event of their death were comparatively of no account! As if this very event were not, to them, the great consummation and conflagration of all things! In view of the certainty and the swiftness of the coming of that event to every man, ought not every one to take to himself a meaning from those words, The time is at hand. He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still"? What an impressive and awakening idea is here suggested of the importance of the present and passing moments! It is as if it were said, The time is so short and swift, that, unless men do what they have to do now, they must go as they are. How true it is, that "now is the accepted time"! Let such be the burden of the Revelation of St. John, the burden of that whole Scripture which it so beautifully and solemnly closes. C. T. B. ART. VI. THE PISCATAQUA ASSOCIATION OF MINISTERS.* WITH the constant accumulation of (so called) new literature, the periodical that would assume the office of a retrospective review can do so only by ignoring the present; for it would be as idle to wait for a pause in the torrent-like issues of the press, as it was for Esop's clown to tarry on the bank till the river had run by. But the publications named below recall the memory of a cluster of distinguished and venerable men, of whose worth and services we would make some inadequate record before the generation that knew them has wholly passed away. Probably the Piscataqua Association of Ministers at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century comprised more men of eminence in the pulpit, in council, and in the various walks of private duty, than any other similar association in the coun 1. Prayer-Book, for the Use of Families; prepared by the Association of Ministers on Piscataqua River, and recommended by them as an Assistant to the Social Devotions of Families. Portsmouth. 1799. 12mo. pp. 72. 2. The Piscataqua Evangelical Magazine for 1805. Portsmouth. 8vo. Pp. 240. try. They were almost all of them picked men, such as, in the process of absorption and centralization which drains our rural districts of talent as well as wealth, in favor of the great cities, would now be found only in metropolitan parishes. They were sufficient, each of himself, to give a name and a character to the town which enjoyed his services, and to attract to his parsonage the frequent society of many of the best and most distinguished men in every walk of life. We have ample manuscript materials for the biography of one of the circle, and shall append to our sketch of his life brief notices of several of his contemporaries in the same neighbourhood. In the historical pictures of the battle of Bunker's Hill, there is the figure of a clergyman in bands, and with the usual insignia of his sacred office. The person thus represented was the Rev. Samuel McClintock, D. D., of Greenland, N. H. He was born in Medford, Mass., in 1732. His father was one of the Scotch Irish whom manifold oppression had made twice exiles, and who have given race and name to not a few of the best families in New England. He was graduated at Princeton, in 1751, and was immediately invited by President Burr to a tutorship in his Alma Mater, which he declined, from an unwillingness to postpone his entrance on the profession to which he had consecrated himself from his early boyhood. In 1756 he was ordained at Greenland, a small and obscure country village, to which his chief attraction at first was the unanimous and earnest wish of the people that he should become their pastor; for he was among the most popular divines of his day, and had frequent intimations, both before his settlement and through the earlier half of his ministry, that situations offering much greater worldly advantages were at his disposal. We have before us two of his printed and the few that remain of his no less than three thousand manuscript sermons, and have been surprised, not only by their general soundness of thought and purity of style, but by their freedom from the lumbering subdivisions, improvement, and application, then almost universal, and their near approach to the simpler models of our own day. A sermon of his, published at a time when an unprecedented drought, a fatal epidemic, and the prospect of war with France, conspired to make the hearts of the people heavy, maintains the thesis, that any direct infliction of Providence is preferable to those 1848.] Rev. Dr. McClintock. 405 judgments in which God makes the wrath of man his sword, with an affluence and brilliancy of argument and illustration, and a freedom from all theological technicalities, which we had supposed hardly compatible with the rigid pulpit formalism of our elder divines. His ministry lasted forty-eight years, during which period the last Sunday of his life was the only one on which he was disabled for the performance of his usual public duties. His compensation was three hundred dollars a year, together with the use of a parsonage, and a farm so small as to preclude the employment of much labor other than his own, and that of the numerous 66 servants born in his house." On this scanty stipend he reared a family of sixteen children, maintained in full the external proprieties of his station in dress and housekeeping; and exercised an unstinted hospitality, his house lying on the great thoroughfare of Eastern travel, and his professional reputation and his social endowments furnishing either a cause or a pretence for travellers who could proffer the remotest claim upon his notice to make his house their inn. To meet these demands, which with clergymen of the old school stood on the same footing with debts of honor, his strictly personal and domestic expenses were, of course, brought within the narrowest possible limits. The cow, not without large aid from the unfailing well, stood chief foster-mother to the younger members of the household. The errant goose equipped them for their first experiments in penmanship. As fast as garments waxed old, they were rejuvenated in contracted forms for younger and less fastidious wearers. And of the application of the same rigid economy to the father's own habits his manuscripts bear conclusive testimony, the dozen sermons in our hands hardly covering the paper which we have sometimes devoted to a single discourse. But there was one point on which he was strenuous in effort and in sacrifice, the education of his children. Through his influence, there was sustained in his parish for many years a permanent school, of a grade corresponding to those elsewhere found only in our populous and compact towns. The teacher was commonly a recent graduate from the University, of worth and promise, attracted to this obscure field of labor by the opportunity which it afforded of familiar intercourse with one so much, revered and beloved. Among the young men who in this relation accounted themselves under great obligations to him for VOL. XLIV. — 4TH S. VOL. IX. NO. III. 36 |