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devoted himself to the sacred profession, and was made extensively useful. His learning was rather wide than deep, but his natural acuteness and ingenuity either supplied or concealed the defects of his education. His peculiar views in theology are a compound of the Calvinistic and Arminian schemes at least so they are generally represented-but we believe few in the present day of any school, are disposed to think that he has successfully united the hostile theories. For a time Baxter's views had an extensive influence among the nonconformists. Men were proud of owning themselves Baxterians, and his views had well nigh formed and perpetuated a distinct sect. But their influence has become lost through their refinement and subtlety.—It is now most generally thought that Baxter was fitted rather for practical, than for speculative divinity. All parties conspire to do homage to his piety, integrity, and talents. Dr Barrow said, his practical writings were never mended, and his controversial ones seldom confuted. The honourable Robert Boyle said, "he was the fittest man of the age for a casuist, because he feared no man's displeasure, nor hoped for any man's preferment." Archbishop Usher condescended importunately to request him to write on the subject of conversion, and thereby he evinced the high value he set upon his works. Dr Manton thought he came nearest the apostolical writings of any man of his age. Dr Bates said, "his books for their number and variety of matter, make a library. They contain a treasure of controversial, casuistical, and practical divinity."

As to his works in detail, it is quite impossible to recount them here. In the new edition lately published in London, and which contains only a part of them, there are 22 vols. 8vo. "The best method of forming a correct opinion of Baxter's labours from the press, is by comparing them with some of his brethren, who wrote a great deal. The works of Bishop Hall amount to ten vols. 8vo.; Lightfoot's extend to thirteen ; Jeremy Taylor's to fifteen: Dr Goodwin's would make about twenty; Dr Owen's extend to twenty-eight-Baxter's, if printed in a uniform edition, would not be comprised in less than SIXTY VOLUMES! Several of his works have been translated into all the European languages. Of one of his works, The Call to the Unconverted,' 20,000 are said to have been sold in one year.

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Describing the most prominent features of this remarkable man, Mr Orme observes" I have no better or more appropriate term which I can employ than the word unearthly; and even that does not give a full view of all that was absent from, and all that belonged to his character as a Christian, a minister, and a divine. Among his contemporaries there were men of equal talents, of more amiable dispositions, and of greater learning; but there was no man in whom there appears to have been so little of earth, and so much of heaven; so small a portion of the alloy of humanity, and so large a portion of all that is celestial. He felt scarcely any of the attraction of this world, but felt and manifested the most powerful affinity for the world to come.”'

'Orme's Life.-Biog. Brit.

John North, D. D.

BORN A. D. 1645.-died a. D. 1683.

Of the six sons of Dudley, Lord North, the eldest, succeeded to the title, and the greater part of no very large estate. The second son was Francis, afterwards Lord Keeper Guilford. The third son, Dudley, sought his fortunes abroad as a merchant. The fourth went to Cambridge, and rose in the church. The fifth son, Montagu, was a Levant merchant. The sixtb and last was Roger, who succeeded in the law, was the faithful friend and companion of his brothers, and wrote the lives of them all. Dudley North, after his return to England, obtained a principal place in the customs, and was knighted. When James II. ascended the throne, he came into parliament, where he took a princi. pal part in the debates. At the revolution he was left out of the commission of the customs, and retired into private life, in which he died, in London, in the year 1691.

The Hon. John North was born at London, in 1645. His reserved and studious temper, even in childhood, early marked him for the church. At the proper age he was sent to school at Bury, where he enjoyed the tuition of Dr Stephens, a celebrated cavalier pedagogue, "noted for high flights of poetry and criticism," but unfortunately, also, "a wet epicure, the common vice of bookish professions." In the year 1661, Mr North was sent to Cambridge, where he was entered a fellow-commoner, and afterwards a nobleman, of Jesus' college. Here he commenced that severe course of study which brought upon him a premature old age, and, in the meantime, encouraged that irritability of the nervous system, by which his whole subsequent life was tormented. "One would have expected," says his amiable biographer, " that a youth at the university, no freshman, nor mean scholar, should have got the better of being afraid in the dark; but it was not so with him, for when he was in bed alone he durst not trust his countenance above the clothes."

In 1666 he was admitted fellow of his college, and began to indulge himself in the warmest passion which animated him, the love and possession of books. He appears to have directed his chief attention to the study of Greek, and so qualified himself to fill the chair of that language, to which he was afterwards elected. "Greek became almost vernacular to him, and he took no small pains to make himself master of the Hebrew language, and seldom failed carrying an Hebrew Bible (but pointed) to chapel with him." His relaxations from study were few and simple. Music was a favourite resource; and his morbid sensibilities found an innocent and amiable amusement in studying the habits and modes of the life of spiders. It appears, however, that he did not find himself quite comfortable in his college, for he resigned his fellowship of Jesus' college, and took up his abode in Trinity, of which Dr Barrow was then master.

Soon after he took orders, it fell to his lot to preach before the king (Charles II.) at Newmarket. He was not a little agitated at the prospect, but managed to acquit himself to the satisfaction of his royal au

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ditor. The Doctor appears to have had an extremely fastidious taste, and a morbid longing after perfection, in his own productions. Hence all his deep and long-continued researches came to nothing. The only evidence of his varied learning and intense application was a heap of notes. His papers were all, by his especial directions before his death, committed to the flames.

After Dr Barrow's death, Dr North was appointed to succeed him in the mastership of Trinity. The elevation added little to his personal comfort. He got involved in a squabble with the senior fellows, which, harassing his feeble and sensitive frame, hastened his death. He died in 1683, and was buried in the outward chapel, in order that, as he expressed it, the fellows "might trample upon him dead, as they had done living."

Henry More, D.D.

BORN A. D. 1614.-DIED A. D. 1687.

THIS eminent divine and philosopher was born at Grantham in Lincolnshire, on the 12th of October, 1614. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Eton school, where he remained three years; he was then admitted of Christ's college, Cambridge. Here, as he informs us, "he plunged himself immediately over head and ears in philosophy, and applied himself to the works of Aristotle, Cardan, Julius Scaliger, and other eminent philosophers," all of which he had diligently read over before he took his bachelor's degree in 1635. He next betook himself to the Platonic writers and mystical divines, whose writings entirely captivated his fancy, and gave a tone to all his subsequent speculations. In the year 1640, he commenced the composition of a singularly mystical poem, entitled 'The Song of the Soul.' In it he has attempted an exposition of the nature, attributes, and states of the soul, according to that system of Christianized Platonism which he had adopted. It is divided into four parts:-Psychozoia, or the Life of the Soul; Psychathanasia, or the Immortality of the Soul; Antipsychopannychia, or a Confutation of the Sleep of the Soul after Death; and Antimonopsychia, or a Confutation of the Unity of Souls. Southey has observed that, "amidst the uncouth allegory, and still more uncouth language of this strange series of poems, there are a few passages to be found of extreme beauty." The opening of the second part is a very favourable specimen of More's poetical genius :—

"Whatever man he be that dares to deem
True poet's skill to spring of earthly race,
I must hirn tell, that he doth misesteem
Their strange estate, and eke himself disgrace
By his rude ignorance. For there's no place
For forced labour, or slow industry

Of flagging wits, in that high fiery chace;
So soon as of the muse they quick'ned be,
At once they rise, and lively sing like lark in skie.

"Like to a meteor, whose materiall

Is low unwieldy earth, base unctuous slime,

Whose inward hidden parts ethereall

Ly close upwrapt in that dull sluggish fime,-
Ly fast asleep, till at some fatall time

Great Phoebus' lamp has fir'd its inward spright,
And then even of itself on high doth climb;
That earst was dark becomes all eye, all sight,
Bright starre, that to the wise of future things gives light.

"Even so the weaker mind, that languid lies
Knit up in rags of dirt, dark, cold, and blind,
So soon that purer flame of love unties

Her clogging chains, and doth her spright upbind,
Shee sores aloft; for shee herself doth find
Well plum'd; so rais'd upon her spreaden wing,
She softly playes, and warbles in the wind,
And carols out her inward life and spring

Of overflowing joy, and of pure love doth sing."

More, in his dedication of his poems to his father, says that it was the hearing of Spenser's Fairie Queen read to him on winter-nights by his father, that "first turned his ears to poetry." He has imitated his master occasionally with considerable success; but after all, it is too evident that his genius was not essentially a poetical one. He may

have perceived the capabilities of his subject, but he wanted the animating touch to waken it into life and beauty. His zeal could not, like the indignation of Juvenal, supply the deficiencies of nature. His diction is copious, not select; his versification rugged, and incorrect in the extreme." Yet his design was, in this, as in every thing else which he wrote, lofty and good.

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In 1639 he took his degree of M. A., and subsequently was chosen fellow of his college. He afterwards took the degree of D. D. He was of a remarkably meditative turn of mind, even in his childhood, as appears from various anecdotes recorded by himself and others; and the insatiable thirst of knowledge by which he was actuated, and especially the deep interest he felt on the subject of religion, induced him to devote himself to a life of study in the seclusion of his own college. Attempts were indeed made to decoy him into a bishopric: "his friends got him as far as Whitehall, in order to the kissing his majesty's hand for it; but as soon as he understood the matter, which it was then necessary to acquaint him with, and till then had been concealed from him, he could not by any means, or upon any account, be prevailed upon to stir a step further towards it." He is mentioned by Burnet, in conjunction with Cudworth, Whichcote, and others, as one of the founders of the Cambridge school of divines, known by the name of Latitudinarians, whose aim it was to restore the old connexion between religion and philosophy, and, by a new infusion of learning and active piety, to quicken the decaying energies of the church of England. He was also one of the earliest asserters of the Cartesian system, and a correspondent of Des Cartes himself. Burnet characterises him as “an open-hearted and sincere Christian philosopher;" and Hobbes is reported to have said, that "if his own philosophy was not true, he knew none that he should sooner like than More's of Cambridge."

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His principal prose works are the Mystery of Godliness,' the Mystery of Iniquity,' and his Philosophical Collections.' Addison styles his Enchiridion Ethicum' an admirable system of ethics; but

the most popular of his pieces is his Divine Dialogues' on the Attributes and Providence of God. His works were collected by himself in three volumes folio, 1679. He died in 1687.

Ralph Cudworth, D. D.

BORN A. D. 1617.—died a. D. 1688.

RALPH CUDWORTH was the son of a pious and learned divine of the church of England, and was born at Aller in Somersetshire, in the year 1617. His father's death left him, at a very early age, without an instructor, and apparently beclouded his prospects in life; but on his mother's second marriage, the place of a parent was amply supplied by his father-in-law, Dr Stoughton, to whom he was indebted for a most careful education. In 1630 he was admitted a pensioner of Emanuel college, Cambridge, where he pursued his studies with extraordinary diligence, and, in 1639, obtained the degree of Master of Arts with great applause. He was soon after chosen a fellow of the college, and became one of the tutors, in which capacity he rose to such eminence as to have had at one time the almost unprecedented number of twentyeight pupils under his care. After remaining in the college for some time, he was presented to the rectory of North Cadbury, in Somersetshire, worth at that time about £300 a year. The leisure which he thus obtained was not spent after the manner of many, in looking carefully after the emoluments of his office, and in diligently scraping together every fraction of tithe, but in the prosecution of those profound researches and reflections which had already begun to occupy his mind, and afterwards produced such an abundant harvest. In 1644 he published a discourse, which was received with great applause, and has obtained the praise of Bochart, Selden, and Warburton, concerning the true nature of the Lord's Supper, and in the same year appeared his "Union of Christ with the Church a Shadow." About this period he took the degree of B. D. A year or two previously, Hobbes's 'De Cive,' the first work in which he broached his peculiar opinions, had been privately circulated in Paris, and from the theses which Cudworth maintained on taking his degree, it appears probable that his attention had been already drawn to the reappearance in modern times of these antiquated dogmas, in the eradication of which his after-life was spent. The theses were, 1. Dantur boni et mali rationes æternæ et indispensabiles;-2. Dantur substantiæ incorporeæ sua natura immortales Shortly after taking his degree, he was appointed master of Clare-hall, Cambridge, in the room of Dr Parke, who was ejected by the parliamentary visitors, and, in 1645, he was unanimously elected Regius professor of Hebrew. To what act of his life he owed the favour of the parliament must remain doubtful, since it does not appear that he sided with either of the two great parties—which then convulsed the empire-more decidedly than to receive from the Roundheads the offices tendered for his acceptance. Few men took less interest in the politics of the day than Cudworth. While events were taking place, the most important which had occurred in English history, and which were destined to exercise no small influence over the fortunes of civil

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