moved by their able pioneer from their path; only the lighter and more hopeful labor devolves on themselves.

This venerable father of our cause, ripe in years, and full of honor, has departed from this world of sinful conflict to the regions of unbroken and enduring peace, has left us his benign example, and gone to his reward. To this reward we cannot add; but we may gratefully and effectually contribute to the inferior, yet valuable, meed of reputation. We would not that this attainment should be monopolized by the great in depravity; we believe it may be innocently coveted and enjoyed by the pious philanthropist, when undesignedly and honestly earned, and that it may be by such as certainly acquired. The names of mighty men who have left their impress on the changes of the world, whether for good or evil, will doubtless be borne to distant ages by the trump of fame; but widely different is the celebrity of the destroyer from that of the benefactor. In the heraldry of futurity, the Alexanders, Cæsars and Napoleons of the earth will bear their imposing emblems of blood emblazoned on the escutcheon of human wo, until the prevalence of Christian love shall cover every human crime in merciful oblivion; but the ever-during monument of divinely approved worth shall exhibit, unobliterated through eternity, and in characters of resplendent purity, the venerated name of WORCESTER.

ARTICLE VII.

LITERARY NOTICES.

1. A Tribute to the Memory of the Rev. NOAH WORCESTER, D. D. By WILLIAM E. CHANNING. Boston. 1837.

To the sketch of Dr. Worcester's life and character given above, we cannot refrain from adding this tribute to his memory from a pen to which the cause of peace and human improvement is so deeply indebted. Although "the author had time to give only his first recollections and impressions,” he has recorded some that will be of general and permanent interest.

The discourse, delivered in Boston, November 12, first discusses the peculiar benevolence which characterizes our religion of universal peace and love; and this preliminary part has some passages of much beauty and force.

"It is one of our chief privileges, as Christians, that we have in Jesus Christ a revelation of perfect love. This great idea comes forth to us from his life and teaching, as a distinct and bright reality. To understand this is to understand Christianity. To call forth in us a corresponding energy of disinterested affection, is the mission which Christianity has to accomplish on the earth.

"There is one characteristic of the love of Christ, to which the Christian world are now waking up as from long sleep, and which is to do more than all things for the renovation of the world. He loved individual man. Before his time, the most admired form of goodness was patriotism. Men loved their country, but cared nothing for their fellow-creatures beyond the limits of country, and cared little for the individual within those limits, devoting themselves to public interests, and especially to what was called the glory of the state. The legislator, seeking by his institutions to exalt his country above its rivals, and the warrior, fastening its yoke on its foes, and crowning it with bloody laurels, were the great names of earlier times. Christ loved man, not masses of men; loved each and all, and not a particular country and class. The human being was dear to him for his own sake; not for the spot of earth on which he lived, not for the language he spoke, not for his rank in life, but for his humanity, for his spiritual nature, for the image of God in which he was made. Nothing outward in human_condition engrossed the notice or narrowed the sympathies of Jesus. He looked to the human soul. That he loved. That divine spark he desired to cherish, no matter where it dwelt, no matter how it was dimmed. * His love to every human being surpassed that of a parent to an only child. Jesus was great in all things, but in nothing greater than in his comprehension of the worth of a human spirit. Before his time no one dreamed of it. The many had been sacrificed to the few. The mass of men had been trodden under foot. History had been but a record of struggles and institutions, which breathed nothing so strongly as contempt of the human race.

"Jesus was the first philanthropist. He brought with him a new era, the era of philanthropy; and from his time a new spirit has moved over the troubled waters of society, and will move until it has brought order and beauty out of darkness and confusion. The men whom he trained, and into whom he had poured most largely his own spirit, were signs, proofs, that a new kingdom had come. They consecrated themselves to a work at that time without precedent, wholly original, such as had not entered human thought. They left home, possessions, country, went abroad into strange lands, and not only put life in peril, but laid it down, to spread the truth which they had received from their Lord, to make the true God, even the Father, known to his blinded children, to make the Saviour known to the sinner, to make life and immortality known to the dying, to give a new impulse to the human soul. We read of the mission of the apostles as if it were a thing of course. The thought perhaps never comes to us, that they entered on a sphere of action until that time wholly unexplored; that not a track had previously marked their path; that the great conception, which inspired them, of converting a world, had never dawned on the sublimest intellect; that the spiritual love for every human being, which carried them over oceans, and through deserts, amid scourg

ings, and fastings, and imprisonments, and death, was a new light from heaven breaking out on earth, a new revelation of the divinity in human nature. Then it was, that man began to yearn for man with a godlike love. Then a new voice was heard on earth, the voice of prayer for the recovery, pardon, happiness of a world. It was most strange, it was a miracle more worthy of admiration than the raising of the dead, that from Judea, the most exclusive, narrow country under heaven, which hated and scorned all other nations, and shrunk from their touch as pollution, should go forth men to proclaim the doctrine of human brotherhood, to give to every human being, however fallen or despised, assurances of God's infinite love, to break down the barriers of nation and rank, to pour out their blood like water in the work of diffusing the spirit of universal love. Thus mightily did the character of Jesus act on the spirits of the men with whom he had lived. Since that time, the civilized world has been overwhelmed by floods of barbarians, and ages of darkness have passed. But some rays of this divine light break on us through the thickest darkness. The new impulse given by Christianity was never wholly spent. The rude sculpture of the dark ages represented Jesus hanging from his cross; and, however this image was abused to purposes of superstition, it still spoke to men of a philanthropy stronger than death, which felt and suffered for every human being; and a softening, humanizing virtue went from it, which even the barbarian could not wholly resist. In our own times, the character of Jesus is exerting more conspicuously its true and glorious power. We have indeed little cause for boasting. The great features of society are still hard and selfish. The worth of a human being is a mystery still hid from an immense majority, and the most enlightened among us have not looked beneath the surface of this great truth. Still there is at this moment an interest in human nature, a sympathy with human suffering, a sensibility to the abuses and evils which deform society, a faith in man's capacity of progress, a desire of human progress, a desire to carry to every human being the means of rising to a better condition and a higher virtue, such as has never been witnessed before. Amidst the mercenariness which would degrade men into tools, and the ambition which would tread them down in its march toward power, there is still a respect for man as man, a recognition of his rights, a thirst for his elevation, which is the surest proof of a higher comprehension of Jesus Christ, and the surest augury of a happier state of human affairs. Humanity and justice are crying out in more and more piercing tones for the suffering, the enslaved, the ignorant, the poor, the prisoner, the orphan, the long-neglected seaman, the benighted heathen. I do not refer merely to new institutions for humanity, for these are not the most unambiguous proofs of progress. We see in the common consciousness of society, in the general feelings of individuals, traces of a more generous recognition of what man owes to man. The glare of outward distinction is somewhat dimmed. The prejudices of caste and rank are abated. A man is seen to be worth more than his wardrobe or his title. It begins to be understood that a Christian is to be a philanthropist, and that in truth the essence of Christianity is a spirit of martyrdom in the cause of mankind."-pp. 7-11.

"Within a few days, a great and good man, a singular example of the philanthropy which Jesus Christ came to breathe into the world,

has been taken away; and as it was my happiness to know him more intimately than most among us, I feel as if I were called to bear a testimony to his rare goodness, and to hold up his example as a manifestation of what Christianity can accomplish in the human mind. I refer to the Rev. Noah Worcester, who has been justly called the apostle of peace, who finished his course at Brighton during the last week. His great age, for he was almost eighty,— and the long and entire seclusion to which debility had compelled him, have probably made his name a strange one to some who hear me. In truth, it is common, in the present age, for eminent men to be forgotten during their lives, if their lives are much prolonged. Society is now a quick-shifting pageant. New actors hurry the old ones from the stage. The former stability of things is strikingly impaired. The authority which gathered round the aged, has declined. The young seize impatiently the prizes of life. The hurried, bustling, tumultuous, feverish present swallows up men's thoughts, so that he who retires from active pursuits, is as little known to the rising generation as if he were dead. It is not wonderful, then, that Dr. Worcester was so far forgotten by his contemporaries. But the future will redress the wrongs of the present; and in the progress of civilization, history will guard more and more sacredly the memories of men who have advanced before their age, and devoted themselves to great, but neglected interests of humanity. "Dr. Worcester's efforts in relation to war, or in the cause of peace, made him eminently a public man, and constitute his chief claim to public consideration; and these were not founded on accidental circumstances or foreign influences, but wholly on the strong and peculiar tendencies of his mind. He was distinguished above all whom I have known by his comprehension and deep feeling of the spirit of Christianity, by the sympathy with which he seized on the character of Jesus Christ as a manifestation of perfect love, by the honor in which he held the mild, humble, forgiving, disinterested virtues of our religion. This distinguished trait of his mind was embodied and brought out in his whole life and conduct. He especially expressed it in his labors for the promotion of universal peace on the earth. He was struck, as no other man within my acquaintance has been, with the monstrous incongruity between the spirit of Christianity, and the spirit of Christian communities, between Christ's teaching of peace, mercy, forgiveness, and the wars which divide and desolate the church and the world. Every man has particular impressions which rule over and give a hue to his mind. Every man is struck by some evils rather than others. The excellent individual of whom I speak was shocked, heart-smitten, by nothing so much as by seeing that man hates man, that man destroys his brother, that man has drenched the earth with his brother's blood, that man in his insanity has crowned the murderer of his race with the highest honors, and, still worse, that Christian hates Christian, that church wars against church, that differences of forms and opinions array against each other those whom Christ died to join together in closest brotherhood, and that Christian zeal is spent in building up sects, rather than in spreading the spirit of Christ, and enlarging and binding together the universal church. The great evil on which his mind and heart fixed was war, discord, intolerance, the substitution of force for reason and love. To spread peace on earth became the

object of his life. Under this impulse, he gave birth and impulse to peace societies. This new movement is to be traced to him above all other men, and his name, I doubt not, will be handed down to future time with increasing veneration as the 'friend of peace,' as having given new force to the principles which are gradually to abate the horrors, and ultimately extinguish the spirit of war.

"The history of this good man, as far as I have learned it, is singularly instructive and encouraging. He was self-taught, self-formed. He was born in narrow circumstances, and to the age of twenty-one was a laborious farmer, not only deprived of a collegiate education, but of the advantages which may be enjoyed in a more prosperous family. An early marriage brought on him the cares of a growing family. Still he found, or rather made time for sufficient improvements to introduce him into the ministry before his thirtieth year. He was first settled in a parish too poor to give him even a scanty support; and he was compelled to take a farm, on which he toiled by day, whilst in the evening he was often obliged to use a mechanical art for the benefit of his family. He made their shoes, an occupation of which Coleridge has somewhere remarked, that it has been followed by a greater number of eminent men than any other trade. By the side of his work-bench he kept ink and paper, that he might write down the interesting thoughts which he traced out, or which rushed on him amidst his humble labors. I take pleasure in stating this part of his history. The prejudice against manual labor as inconsistent with personal dignity, is one of the most irrational and pernicious, especially in a free country. It shows how little we comprehend the spirit of our institutions, and how deeply we are tainted with the narrow maxims of the old aristocracies of Europe. Here was a man, uniting great intellectual improvement with refinement of manners, who had been trained under unusual severity of toil. This country has lost much physical and moral strength, and its prosperity is at this moment depressed, by the common propensity to forsake the plough for less manly pursuits, which are thought however to promise greater dignity as well as ease."-pp. 12-15.

Dr. Worcester, having first distinguished himself as a controvertist of excellent spirit, was drawn from his obscurity by a request to take charge of the Christian Disciple in Boston.

"This work was commenced very much for doctrinal discussions; but his spirit could not brook such limitations, and he used its pages more and more for the dissemination of his principles of philanthropy and peace. At length he gave these principles to the world in a form which did much to decide his future career. He published a pamphlet called 'A Solemn Review of the Custom of War.' It bore no name, and appeared without recommendation, but it immediately seized ou attention. It was read by multitudes in this country, then published in England, and translated, as I have heard, into several languages of Europe. Such was the impression made by this work, that a new association, called the Peace Society of Massachusetts, was instituted in this place. I well recollect the day of its formation in yonder house, then the parsonage of this parish; and if there was a happy man that day on earth, it was the founder of this institution.