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of Illingworth, near Halifax, passed into the spiritual world, aged 60 years. In his early life he was connected with the Embsay Society. He then took great interest in Sunday-school work and in the establishment of the day-school there. Some years since he removed to Shaw Mill, Ovenden, Illingworth, near Halifax, where he established himself as a spindle-manufacturer. Though unable to attend any New Church service by reason of distance, his attachment to the doctrines became more ardent as years passed on. He continued to subscribe to the Society at Embsay, and showed a lively interest in the progress of the Yorkshire Colportage Association and other New Church institutions and labours.

November 4, 1877, Ellen Ann, wife of Captain John Howling, of Brightlingsea, passed away from earth, after a long and painful illness, at the age of 35. Educated from her earliest infancy in the doctrines of the Church, she was able to look death in the face; and her friends rejoice in the hope of her resurrection to the home where God Himself shall wipe all tears from her eyes.

November 14th, at Granton, near Edinburgh, Albert, son of Mr. William Salmon of Brightlingsea, entered the spiritual world in the 19th year of his age, after a short illness. No longer in a strange land, he has gone home to his Father's house.

November 7th, 1877, Eliza Ann, wife of Wm. Minter, sen., and mother of Mrs. Howling, whose departure is recorded above, terminated her earthly career at the age of 71.

Her life on earth was doubtless shortened by her solicitude for her daughter, Mrs. Howling, and in the good Providence of God" in death they were not divided." The members of the Committee of the New Church Society attended her funeral, and carried her mortal remains to the grave; and on the following Sunday the minister preached a funeral discourse, from Ps. xxvii. 13, to a large and attentive congregation.

Departed this life, at her son's residence, Parliament Street, Derby, Nov. 28th, Mrs. Knight, aged 66 years. The deceased was the wife of the late Mr. James Knight, who for some years was the respected leader of the Derby Society,

a notice of whose departure appeared in this Magazine for Dec. 1858. Mrs. Knight was a great sufferer, and for years confined almost entirely indoors. But whenever it was deemed practicable she was most anxious to be in her place at public worship. Three months since she was able to attend the church, and partook, for the last time, of the Sacrament of the Holy Supper. It was her great privilege and comfort to possess a daughter who, through all her afflictions, nursed and tended her with unfailing care and exemplary filial devotion.

Departed this life, December 9th, 1877, Mrs. Sarah Iveson, of Hartshead, near Huddersfield, aged 85 years. Mrs. Iveson was the daughter of one of the earliest readers of the writings of Swedenborg in the county of York, and had been from early life connected with the New Church. She was an esteemed member of the Church at Dalton, and had attended its services when held at Coln Bridge and Upper Heaton, many years before the erection of the church at Grove Place, Dalton. She was an intelligent and thoughtful reader of the writings, and an affectionate and pious member of the church. Her habits were those of a quiet, refined, and cultured Christian lady. Her attendance at church was constant so long as she could conveniently attend. With advancing years this became impossible; but, though absent, her heart was in the sanctuary. She loved the truth, and walked in its light; and now, at the close of her earthly pilgrimage, has doubtless entered the world of light for which she had prepared herself on earth.

REV. EDWARD MADELEY.-Just as our present number is completed, we have received information of the departure of this esteemed minister to his eternal home. He had a severe stroke of paralysis on the 14th of December, and on the 21st peacefully passed away. For the last fifty-five years Mr. Madeley's name has been before the Church, and for nearly the whole of this long period he has been actively engaged in the work of the ministry. His pastoral labours have been confined to Birmingham, but he has rendered valuable services in many parts of the kingdom. In our next we hope to give an extended notice of his life and labours.

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CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO CANON FARRAR'S VIEWS, AS SET FORTH IN HIS RECENT DISCOURSES ON THE SUBJECT IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

ALL who believe in the immortality of the soul must feel deeply interested in the subject of the future life. That world in which every human being, after a few brief years' existence upon earth, is to live on through the countless ages of eternity, has the highest possible claims on our attention and regard. The first and chief matter of concernment for us all, no doubt, is to know that our condition in the eternal world is determined by the character we form for ourselves in this, a truth which is revealed with sufficient clearness in the Scriptures. But there are other facts, subordinate and subsidiary to this, which our hopes and fears inspire us with the desire to know. We crave for some knowledge of the heaven and happiness we hope for and strive to attain, and of the hell and misery we fear and seek to escape. Where there is a longing after immortality, or, with the knowledge of a future existence, an earnest aspiration after a more perfect and enduring happiness than the world affords, He who inspires these cravings of the soul will also provide the means of satisfying them. The Divine Being ever gives His creatures knowledge according to their desire and capacity to receive it, and their disposition rightly to use it. He deals with them collectively as He deals with them individually. He hides from the wise and prudent

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things which He reveals unto babes. The Scriptures themselves afford abundant evidence of this. The Old Testament contains no direct revelation of the immortality of the soul, therefore none of a future state of rewards and punishments. There could be but one reason for God withholding the knowledge of a future life in the Old Revelation. The Jews were so unspiritually minded that they were neither disposed to receive, nor fit to profit by, a truth that transcended all their desires and hopes, and therefore had no place in their thoughts. It is difficult for us to think of a religion that has no direct reference to a future life. Yet the Jews had such a religion; and to those who faithfully discharged its duties that religion no doubt secured an eternal, where it promised only a temporal, reward; for religious principle, however simple or external, has a spiritual and · eternal element within it. The New Testament openly teaches what the Old Testament did not directly reveal. The difference, in this respect, between the Old and the New is indeed declared by the Apostle Paul, where he says that Jesus Christ hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel (1 Tim. vi. 16). Yet the New Testament itself, while it brings into clear light the immortality of the soul and the reality of eternal life, does not fully disclose, at least in plain language, the nature of that world in which the human being exchanges his mortal for an immortal existence; nor of the happiness enjoyed by the righteous, and the unhappiness experienced by the wicked. As in other cases, the Lord taught these things chiefly in parables, as His hearers were able to bear them. When they were alone He expounded all things to His disciples; and from them we might expect to hear His parables explained, or the subjects of them elucidated. But we believe the time was not yet come when the full light of Divine truth could be let in, with benefit to the Church and the race, on these utterances of the Divine Teacher, who manifests His wisdom and goodness as much in limiting as in extending the boundaries of spiritual knowledge, according as the state of the human mind requires it.

The teaching of the Lord and His disciples makes sufficiently clear the broad and practical truth that in the eternal world there is a place for the wicked and a place for the righteous; but the nature of the happiness which reigns in the one, and of the misery which prevails in the other, are less clearly revealed. They are described chiefly by similitudes; and the idea we derive from them depends on their interpretation. One great source of misapprehension has been, taking

literally what could only be intended to be understood spiritually. Of the similitudes employed to convey some idea of the two opposite abodes of the good and the evil, those which describe hell and its torments are far more easily taken in their plain literal meaning than those which describe heaven and its happiness. It is easy to conceive of hell as literally a lake that burns with fire and brimstone, but it is not so easy to form so definite an idea of heaven from its being compared to a marriage, and spoken of as Abraham's bosom. Some of the magnificent imagery of the Revelation may afford an idea more nearly approaching an actual representation of the abodes and occupations of the angels as the just made perfect, but even these can hardly be understood literally. While, therefore, heaven has been thought of indefinitely, hell has been generally understood as being actually what it is so often represented to be an unquenchable fire; and no ingenuity or eloquence is needed, where much of both has been employed, to impress the imagination with the horrors of an eternity spent in the unmitigated torments of unquenchable fire.

These images of Holy Writ have no doubt served the general purpose of inspiring hope and fear-the hope of reward for doing good, and the fear of punishment for doing evil; and this, we may conclude, was the highest lesson which mankind generally have hitherto been capable of receiving.

Yet the very horror of such a hell as that which has found its way into the creeds of Christendom has produced at various times a reaction in the minds of some on whom the conviction has been forced that a Being of infinite goodness, and even of perfect justice, could not inflict such a punishment eternally even on the greatest of sinners. Some of these have contended for the annihilation of the wicked, but the far greater number have maintained the doctrine of their final restoration.

One of the most distinguished of these, the Rev. Dr. Farrar, Canon of Westminster, has recently treated the subject in some eloquent discourses, in which he expresses his conviction of the general truth of this view with the utmost freedom. He does not dogmatize, but he tells his hearers plainly what, after years of study, he believes, and what he knows to be the belief of multitudes, and of yearly increasing multitudes, of the wisest and most learned in the Church of England. He does not, indeed, profess to believe with absolute certainty in universal restoration. He divides men into three classes. Of these, one class consists of saints, and another of reprobates, but "there is a vast

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intermediate class lying between them, yet shading off by infinite gradations from these two extremes." The saints are secure, of even the worst of the reprobates he is not without hope, but he pleads confidently for those who are not good enough to be saints, and not bad enough to be reprobates. He objects to theologians dividing by a sharp and impassable line the righteous and the wicked, and especially to their placing the vast majority of the human race on that side which dooms them, without mercy and without hope, to a never-ending hell. What," he says, "the popular notion of hell is, you, my brethren, are well aware. It is, that at the moment a human being dies, at whatever age, under whatever disadvantages, his fate is sealed hopelessly and for ever; and that if he die in unrepented sin, his fate is a never-ending agony, amid physical tortures the most frightful that can be imagined; so that when we think of the future of the human race we must conceive of a vast burning prison, in which the lost souls of millions writhe and shriek for ever, tormented in a flame that never will be quenched." He quotes Dante and Milton and Jeremy Taylor and Henry Smith, to show how poet and puritan and divine and philosopher, have employed their powers to depict the horrors of the popular hell. "Augustine dared to say that infants dying unbaptized would certainly be damned; and Thomas Aquinas lent his saintly name to the abominable fancy that the bliss of the saved may be the more keen because they are permitted to gaze on the punishment of the wicked." After stating some of the teachings that all have heard in sermons or read in books respecting the terrible and eternal agony of hell, to which, in the same breath, some maintain that the majority of mankind are doomed by an absolute predestination; Dr. Farrar proceeds: "If St. Paul again and again flings from him with a 'God forbid the conclusions of an apparently irresistible logic, we, surely, who have no logic of any kind against us in this matter, but only, in great part, spiritual selfishness and impenetrable tradition, do we not, in the high name of outraged conscience, of humanity, nay, in the far higher name of the God who loves us, of the Saviour who died for us, of the Holy Spirit who enlightens us; do we not hurl from us representations so cruel of a doctrine so horrible, that every nerve and fibre of our spiritual life revolts at it? Ignorance may, if it will, make a fetish of such a doctrine; Pharisaisni may write it broad upon its phylacteries; hatred may inscribe it instead of holiness to the Lord-instead of all the sacerdotalism in which it simulates and degrades the name of love; but here, in the presence of so many

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