THE PASTORAL CHARACTER AS DEVELOPED | lowing pages commences them with no small

BY THE LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON.

BY THE REV. G. W. LEWIS, M.A.,

Minister of St. Peter's, Southwark.

fear of incurring a charge of inconsistency. He has to present to view an individual who, if contemporary records have brought down his fame, and learning, and graces truly, was so nearly faultless as to prevent reviewers the whole character of his mind and life. The rigid strictness, therefore, which is contended for in narrating the actions of remarkable men seems here to be impossible; for what can be said in doubt of excellencies, in admiration of which foes themselves were univocal with friends? and what can be urged in suspicion of infirmities, the bare existence of which neither friend nor foe ever even surmised? Nearly 160 years have passed away since Robert Leighton* was committed to the tomb, and no man has penned a word+ imputing to him a single error beyond that of judgment. And hence all that concerns himhis sentiments and his principles, the events in which he was a leading actor, and the details of his daily life-are surrounded with the utmost interest. He is a study alike to the active philanthropist and the retired Christian; his ideas and conduct are invested with importance equally to the abstract enquirer and the practical philosopher. To know what such a man thought is of great moment; but, further than this, to mark what such a man did through his seventy years of stay on earth, is to learn no common lesson of wisdom, holiness and truth. With an intellect naturally strong, and to the last increasing in power by exercise and culture, he could not speak without throwing light on the subject before him, beyond the reach or experience of lower minds; and with such an approach to celestial natures in the clear, open and unbroken sanctity of his life as had not been surpassed since the apostles' days, he could not be seen without benefit and edification to every docile soul.

Few things perhaps are less easy than faith-from speaking in any but a laudatory tone of fully and fully to pourtray the character of others; and the difficulty is increased in proportion to the celebrity, whether in good or evil, of him whose moral and intellectual features are delineated. So large a portion of common feeling and conventional sentiment sways every writer, that probably no one, however uniform his pursuit and love of truth, can always send forth his sketch untinctured by some prevailing colour in his own trains of thought. It is indeed the course of a healthful understanding first to fix on a sound code in morals, and then to form its estimate of individuals, as of communities and nations, according to the precision with which their known character quadrates with that code. But that very pre-occupation of mind unfits, in a certain degree, even the most cautious enquirer to mark, in all their bearings, the qualities which distinguish any given person amongst the mass of his fellow-men; not that in the strict sense of the term such an observer can be charged with prejudice, or that he draws his outline with any disingenuous purpose, either excessively to praise rundeservedly to criminate. His end is very different from this, it being obvious that he designs only to commend what is allowed to be excellent, and to censure what is proved to be blame-worthy. Yet so many and ine are the shades of character at that point, where, according to the ordinary standard of man judgment, actions are deemed proment neither in good nor evil, that in their description the most tried rectitude will sometes be insufficient to prevent the intrusion of an author's partiality in one case, or his antipathy in another. The biography of It is not the design of the writer of this persons but recently departed appears the essay to aim at what has been already better most open to this objection. When a done by others, i. e., to give a complete outwriter has known by personal observation the deeds, the genius or the accomplishments of some illustrious ornament of our race, there it is all but certain some good qualities will be extolled, and some bad ones softened down in a manner and to an extent which popular enthusiasm may palliate but cannot justify. Biography is indeed no more than history in miniature, yet is it often of the very highest value, and a reverence for a future age and its unborn millions should lead him who compiles it to be specially careful not to transmit the legacy in a coin adulterated by any counterfeit ingredients.

Sensible of this duty, the author of the fol

line of this great man's history. The limits to which he is confined would forbid the attempt, did no other considerations render it inexpedient. The end proposed is rather to condense into as small a compass as possible a view of such features in that history as specially illustrate the pastoral character in its purity, details and obligations. The author has indeed to repeat the expression of his fear

He died in June, 1684.

+ We must except dean Swift, who, in two or three notes to Burnet's History of the Reformation, has spoken of Leighton in a harsh and surly tone. This, however, was but too uniformly and unhappily his practice, since he could never even glance at extraordinary virtue without ribaldry and bitterness.

of running into the warmths of impassioned | stitution of the church, he paid to truth the eulogy; yet, with truth as his polar star, he cannot apprehend that in any material point he shall mislead either his readers or himself. He ventures to hope that he shall not even offend against sobriety if, in contemplating the grand, the beautiful and vast, in the landscape before him, his love of nature occasionally burst forth in the language of intense delight.

homage of a thoroughly informed judgment, and therefore became successively deacon, priest and bishop. And never surely was that triple rank adorned by graces more after the mind and will of God, or more illustrative of the character of a lowly, devout, and ardent servant of the great Shepherd and Bishop of souls. For, while we ask in what age was it that he followed out his conviction by receiving episcopal orders, but in that of a sour and rabid puritanism, we must also ask in what age was it but that immediately following-an age of licentiousness the most daring-that his piety beamed upon the church in a lustre which recalled to memory its brightest and purest and primitive days? At one period of his career he took the office of a priest among a people with whom the very name was odious; and at another, more advanced, he lived an angel's life when the bare mention of sanctity was loathsome and reviled. Each course is explained by his one firm, single-minded purpose of doing what appeared to him his duty, after falling on his knees in prayer. To this, his uniform principle and practice, must be referred his voluntary relinquishment of the archbishopric of Glasgow, and his retirement to the villaget in Sussex, where he spent his last ten years in no inglorious ease, but in the most active pulpit and parochial services for his professional brethren. It may be doubted, indeed, whether he was right in taking so extreme a

Leighton's early training was adverse to the principles and polity of that church of which he afterwards became the chief pillar. As the son of a man whose faults, whether great or small, had been most cruelly punished by the tyrants of the starchamber, he must from his very cradle have grown up in the horror common to his countrymen, at the sway of a Laudian polity; and nothing but the convictions of his discerning and well-stored mind could have induced him subsequently to put on the mitre after seeing that symbol of hierarchy made instrumental to the torture of his own parent. Acting, as he ever did, on the impulse of a conscience most sensitive and holy, and evincing, as does every stage of his career, an entire mastery of himself, of all desires of rank and precedence, and of every selfish consideration, he showed, in a way alike memorable and striking, what his ideas of the constitution of the church were at a mature period of life, by his solemn and deliberate admission to orders within her pale. Too dutifully tender not too feel keenly the indig-step as laying down the crosier ex mero motu‡; nity and pain inflicted on his father, all natural bias must have been foreign to that part of the vineyard in which a spirit of intolerance, worthy only of the followers of Loyola, had so fiercely raged. But too wellread also in the page of ecclesiastical history+ not to be able clearly and fully to distinguish between the abuse of prelatic power and the need of prelatic authority in the essential conWithout attempting to justify or excuse the cruel punishment inflicted on the elder Leighton, it must in fairness be said that the unhappy sufferer's own disposition appears to have been untowardly, and his conduct unnecessarily provoking to the authorities. (See Pearson's exquisite memoir of abp. Leighton.)

ED.

nay, more than this, it may be considered, on the broad principle of catholic usage, that no circumstances arose or could arise, even in those troublous times, which could justify the voluntary deposition of his office by a governor of the church. Perhaps nothing but an hostile ejection from his position, nothing but the stripping him of his rochet by violent and resistless hands, could relieve the mind (reviewing the event calmly at this distant day) of an idea that love of seclusion, timidity of disposition, inaptitude for tumult or some other feeling, innocuous indeed, but personal and peculiar to himself, accelerated that event. Still is the rec

+ His amiable temper may have inclined him attitude of his character without the least times to concede too much for the sake of peace, but assuredly he was no latitudinarian. "I shall only add," says he in a letter on the subject of the episcopal church of Scotland-"I shall only add one word, which I am sure is undeniable, and I think is very considerable, that he that cannot join with the present frame of this church could not have lived in the communion of the Christian church in the time of the first most famous general assembly of it-the council of Nice. Yea (to go no higher up, though safely I might), he must as certainly have separated from the whole catholic church in the days of the holy bishop and martyr Cyprian upon this very scruple of the government, as Novatus did upon another occasion."

"Perhaps Leighton," says Mr. Bridges, in his work on the Christian ministry, when discoursing on the character of the confirmed and consistent Christian-" Perhaps Leighton may be said to have given the full portrait, both in his writings and in his character, with as little touch of human infirmity as can be looked for, till the brighter days of the church." + Horsted Keynes.

Quid est enim major," says St. Cyprian, "aut melior cura præpositorum quam diligenti solicitudine et medelâ salubri fovendis et conservandis ovibus providere; cum Dominus loquatur et dicat.”—Ezek. xxxiv. 4.

parishioners: the only object proposed is to point out the depth and fervour of the cura animarum, as well as the saint-like humility and benevolence, so prominent in this remarkable man.

"Worthy gentlemen and friends,

tarnish. If he erred, he erred only in judgment, and there is nothing in the act indicating any of the tendencies of the carnal mind. To a common mind pre-eminence in rank, with its distinction, power and emolument, would have furnished motives for retaining the office, however great the Being informed that it is my duty to local or temporary discomforts it brought to present a person fit for the charge of the miits possessor; while it would have appeared nistry now vacant with you, I have thought an unmitigated evil to have abandoned all of one whose integrity and piety I am so fully his honours for an humble rural solitude, persuaded of, that I dare confidently to rewhich at once and for ever took him out of commend him to you as one who, if the hand the eye of thousands, from whom his talents, of God do bind that work upon him amongst worth and station drew profound and uni-you, is likely, through the blessing of the versal respectt. Most plain Most plain it is that he acted from no defective view of pastoral responsibility; for there are many passages in his works which prove the sense of that responsibility to have formed one of the most absorbing as well as constant of his principles of action. In his "Prælectiones Theologica"-a precious gem, whether we look at its pure and beautiful Latinity, its great and varied learning, or its glowing sublimity of devotion-are such heart-stirring appeals on the value of a soul, as show his conviction that, when compared to it, mines of gold are but dross, and that the only proper cause of a Christian's anxiety is that of securing his own and his fellow-man's eternal welfare. Among his works is a letter which he wrote, while bishop of Dunblane, to the chief inhabitants of a parish within his diocese, nominating a clergyman for their church, at the time vacant.Reference is not made to it here on any idea that, in the existing state of things, the course would be either expedient or practicable which he took, in leaving his official and authoritative appointment either to be accepted or rejected at the will of the

He seems to have believed that he should more effectually serve God by withdrawing from a scene of disorder and turbulence, too great for his control, to a lowlier sphere where his heavenly principles could have freer exercise, and where he might devote his remaining days and strength without distraction to the best interests of his fellow-men. Certainly, if this was his feeling, he was not the first, however mistaken, who supposed it innocent; for in one of the most honoured fathers of the early church we find something like the case supposed. While showing that pastors should have no desire for mere primacy and rule, St. Chrysostom thus speaks all but directly to the point : «Αλλ ̓ ὥσπερ ἐν τοῖς πολέμοις τὰς γενυπίες τῶν στρατιωτῶν ὁρῶμεν καὶ πολεμέντας προθύμως, καὶ πίπτοντας ἀνδρείως· ὕτω καὶ τὰς ἐπὶ ταύτην σκοντας τὴν οἰκονομίαν, καὶ ἱερᾶσθαι καὶ ΠΑΡΑΛΥΕΣΘΑΙ ΤΗΣ ΑΡΧΗΣ, ὡς Χριστιανοις ἐστὶ προσῆκον ἀνδράσιν εἰδότας, ὡς ἡ ΤΟΙΑΥΤΗ ΚΑΘΑΙΡΕΣΙΣ ΟΥΚ ΕΛΑΤΤΟΝΑ ΦΕΡΕΙ ΤΗΣ ΑΡΧΗΣ ΤΟΝ STEPANON."-De Sacerdotio, lib. iii. sect. 11.

↑ The parish register of burials records his name, in the orthography of the times, as 66 Robert Leighton, deckter," and it is well known that, in the modest simplicity which always characterised him, he studiously avoided the very title and address which becaged to his station.

same hand, to be very serviceable to the building up of your souls heavenwards, but is as far from suffering himself to be obtruded as I am from obtruding any upon you: so that unless you invite him to preach, and after hearing him declare your consent and desire towards his embracing of the call, you may be secure from the trouble of hearing any further concerning him, either from himself or me; and, if you please to let me know your mind, your reasonable satisfaction shall be to my utmost power endeavoured by your affectionate friend and humble servant,

"R. LEIGHTON."

(To be continued.)

Poetry.

FRAGMENT ON THE CREATION.

(For the Church of England Magazine.)
THERE was a time when earth was not.
No planet round her burn'd;
And o'er this fair created spot

Wild chaos darkly mourn'd.
A voice was heard amid the night
Of dim mysterious space,
When suddenly there broke a light
Of beauty in its place.

The orb of day 'mid paths of blue
Majestically rode,

And dazzling beams of splendour threw
Around his bright abode.

And order from disorder woke,

As chaos fled aghast;
The murmur of the ocean broke

The silence of the past.
The Spirit of the holy Three

Mov'd on the dreary void",
And formed this world mysteriously,
On laws superior buoy'd.
The vallies and their gushing rills

Amid the forest glade,

The cattle on a thousand hills*

Their Maker's call obey'd.

Majestic rivers mov'd along

Where lofty mountains rose,
And murmur'd forth a glorious song
To nature's fair repose.