it shall be to use such forms in his Church on such occasions;" I do hereby set forth the following Form of Prayer and Thanks giving, to be used in the Congregations of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New-York, on the second Thursday in this month, being the day appoint. ed by the Governor of the State of New

York, as a day of public Thanksgiving and Praise to Almighty God.

JOHN HENRY HOBART, Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the state of New-York.

A FORM OF

Prayer and Thanksgiving.

The service shall be the same as that prescribed by the Church, in the Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving to Almighty God, for the fruits of the Earth, and all the other blessings of his merciful Provi dence, to be used yearly, on the first Thursday in November, or on such other day as shall be appointed by the civil authority;" except that the eighth Se lection of Psalms shall be used at Morning Prayer; and in addition to the Thanksgiving appointed in said service, to be used after the General Thanksgiving, shall be said, at Morning and Evening Prayer, the following:

God, who art the blessed and only Potentate, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, the Almighty Ruler of nations, we adore and magnify thy glorious name for all the great things which thou hast done for us. We render thee thanks for the goodly heritage which thou hast given us; for the civil and religious privileges which we enjoy ; and for the multiplied manifestations of thy favour towards us. Grant that we may show forth our thankfulness for these thy mercies, by living in reverence of thy almighty power and dominion, in humble reliance on thy goodness and mercy, and in holy obedience to thy righteous laws. Preserve, we beseech thee, to our country, and to all the nations of the earth, the blessings of peace. May the Kingdom of the Prince of Peace, come; and reigning in the hearts and lives of men, unite them in holy fellowship; that so their only strife may be, who shall show forth with most humble and holy fervour, the praises of him who hath loved them, and made them Kings and Priests unto God. We implore thy blessing on all in authority over us; that all things

may be so ordered and settled by their endeavours, upon the best and surest foundations, that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations. O Lord, continue to prosper our literary institutions; and shed, we beseech thee, the quickening influences of thy Holy Spirit on all the of this land. Save us from the people guilt of abusing the blessings of prosperity to luxury and licentiousness, to irreligion and vice; lest we provoke thee, in just judgment, to visit our offences with a rod, and our sins with scourges. And while thy unmerited goodness to us, O God of our salvation, leads us to repentance, may we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, a living sacrifice to thee, who hast preserved and redeemed us, through Jesus Christ our Lord; on whose merits and mediation alone we humbly rely for the forgiveness of our sins and the acceptance of our services; and who liveth and reigneth with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

¶ After the Collect for the Day, in the Communion Service, the following:

failed those who put their trust Almighty God, who hast never in thee, and dost honour the people who honour thee; imprint on our hearts, we beseech thee, a deep and that the only security for the conhabitual sense of this great truth, tinuance of the blessings which we enjoy, consists in our acknowledgeprovidence, and in humble and holy ment of thy sovereign and gracious Jesus Christ; to whom all power is submission to the gospel of thy Son given in heaven and in earth, and

who is one with the Father and the

Holy Ghost, in the eternal Godhead,

our Mediator and Redeemer. Amen. At Evening Prayer, the tenth Selection of Psalms

shall be used, and the first Lesson shall be Deut. x. 12. and the second Lesson, Romans xii. and the Collect for the Day, as in the Morning.

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SAMUEL JOHNSON.

(From Wilks's Christian Essays.)

the

A FEW practical remarks upon subject of the last hours of this illustrious man will tend to show that what Dr. Johnson's best friends and biographers have been almost ashamed to confess, and have industriously exerted themselves to palliate, constituted, in truth, the most auspicious circumstance of his life, and was the best proof of his increase in religious knowledge and holiness of mind.

Whoever considers with a Christian eye the death of Dr. Johnson will readily perceive that, according to the usual order of Providence, it could not have been free from agitation and anxiety. Johnson was a man of tender conscience, and one who from his very infancy had been instructed in Christian principles. But he was also, in the strict judgment of revealed religion, an inconsistent man. Neither his habits nor his companions had been such as his own conscience approved; and even a short time before his end we find one of his biographers lamenting that "the visits of idle and some worthless persons were never welcome to him," on the express ground "that these things drove on time." His ideas of morality being of the highest order, many things which are considered by men at large as but veniel offences appeared to him as positive crimes. Even his constitutional indolence and irritability of mind were sufficient of themselves to keep him constantly humbled and self-abased; and though among his gay or literary companions he usually appears upon the comparatively high ground of a Christian moralist, and the strenuous defender of revealed religion, yet compared VOL. I

truth, he felt himself both defective and disobedient.

Together with this conscientious feeling he had adopted certain incorrect, not to say superstitious, ideas respecting the method of placating the Diety. He seems, for example, to have believed that penance, in its confined and popish sense as distinguished from simple penitence, is of great avail in procuring the Divine favour and forgiveness. Thus when his conscience distressed him on aca count of an act of disobedience to his parent, we find him many years afterwards remaining a considerable time bare-headed in the rain, exposed in the public streets to the ridicule and the conjectures of every spectator.

As far as filial affection and true amiableness of mind are con cerned, the actor in such a scene deserves and ensures universal veneras tion and esteem. Even while we smile at the somewhat ludicrous nature of the action, we instinctively feel a sympathy and respect which perhaps a wiser but less remarkable mode of exhibiting his feelings might not have procured. But Johnson seems to have performed this humiliation from higher considerations than mere sorrow for the past; for he emphatically adds, "in contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiato ry."

If these words really mean any thing-and when did Dr. Johnson utter words without meaning ?-he must have intended by them to express his hope that the previous fault was really atoned for, in a religious sense, by the subsequent act of self-denial; or, in other words, that God accepts human penance as an expiation for human sins; a doctrine to which reveal

41

ed religion gives no sanction whatever. Johnson's system appears at this time to have been, as it were, a sort of barter between himself and heaven, and consequently his chief fear was lest the equivalent which he presented should not be sufficient to entitle him in the Divine mercy to the pardon of his transgressions. His trust on the Redeemer, though perfectly sincere, does not appear to have been either exclusive or implicit ; for though all his prayers for mercy and acknowledgments of blessing were offered up solely through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, he seems, in point of fact, for many years to have viewed the atonement rather as a medium through which God is pleased to accept our imperfect services, and to make them adequate, by the conditions of a remedial law, to the purchase of heaven, than as a sacrifice by which alone heaven is fully secured and freely given to the believing penitent.

To give, therefore, comfort to the mind of such a man as Dr. Johnson, there were but two modes; either by blinding his conscience, or by increasing his faith; either by extenuating his sins, or by pointing out in all its glories the sufficiency of the Christian ransom. The friends who surrounded this eminent man during the greater part of his life, were little qualified to perform the latter, and therefore very naturally resorted to the former. They found their patient, so to speak, in agony; but instead of examining the wound and applying the remedy, they contented themselves with administering anodynes and opiates, and persuading their afflicted friend, that there exist ed no cause of danger or aların.

But Johnson was not thus deceived. The nostrum which has lulled its millions to a fatal repose, on him, by the mercy of God, had no effect. His convictions of sin were as lasting as they were deep; it was not therefore until he had dircarded his natural and long-cherished views of commutation and human desert, and had learned to trust humbly and exclusively to his Saviour, that his mind became at peace.

Let us view some of the recorded circumstances of the transaction, and so doing we shall, as Christians, have much more occasion to applaud the scriptural correctness of Johnson's feelings respecting the value of his soul, the guilt of his nature, and the inadequacy of man's best merits and repentance, than to congratulate him upon the accession of such miserable comforters' as those who appear to have surrounded his dying pillow.

Finding him in great mental distress, I told him, remarks one of his biographers, of the many enjoyments of which I thought him in possession, namely, a permanent income, tolerable health, a high degree of reputation for his moral qualities and literary exertions, &c. Had Johnson's depression of mind been nothing more than common melancholy or discontent, these topics of consolation would have been highly appropriate; they might also have been fitly urged as arguments for gratitude and thanksgiving to the Almighty on account of such exalted mercies. In either of these points of view the piety of Dr. Johnson would doubtless have prompted him to acknowledge the value of the blessing, and the duty of contentment and praise. But as arguments for quieting an alarmed conscience, they were quite inadequate ; for what would it have profited this distinguished man to have gained all his wellmerited honours, or, even were it possible, the world itself, if, after all, he should become, as he himself afterwards expressed it, a cast-away?

The feelings of Dr. Johnson on this subject were more fully evinced on a subsequent occasion. One day, in particular,' remarks Sir John Hawkins, when I was suggesting to him these and the like reflections, he gave thanks to Almighty God, but added, that notwithstanding all the above benefits, the prospect of death, which was now at no great distance from him, was become terrible, and that he could not think of it but with great pain and trouble of mind.' Nothing assuredly could be more correct than Dr. Johnson's distinction. He acknowledges the value of the mercies

which he enjoyed, and he gratefully gave thanks to Almighty God' for them; but he felt that they could not soften the terrors of a death-bed, or make the prospect of meeting his Judge less painful and appalling. Hawkins, who could not enter into his illustrious friend's more just and enlarged views of human guilt and frailty, confesses himself to have been 'very much surprised and shocked at such a declaration from such a man, and proceeded therefore to urge for his comfort the usual arguments of extenuation. He reports that he told him that he conceived his life to have been a uniform course of virtue ; that he had ever shown a deep sense of, and zeal for religion; and that, both by his example and his writings, he had recommended the practice of it; that he had not rested, as many do, in the exercise of common honesty, avoiding the grosser enormities, yet rejecting those advantages that result from the belief of Divine Revelation; but that he had, by prayer and other exercises of devotion, cultivated in his mind the seeds of good ness,and was become habitually pious. This was the rock on which numberless professed Christians have fatally split; and to the mercy of the Almighty must it be ascribed that the great and good Dr. Johnson did not add one more to the melancholy catalogue. For what was the doctrine which the narrator attempted to inculcate but this, that his friend, like the Pharisee in the Gospel, ought to place his confidence upon his being more meritorious than other men, and instead of attributing the praise to Him, who had made him to differ,' was to 'sacrifice to his own net, and burn incense to his own drag.' Can we wonder that with such flattering doctrines constantly sounding in his ears, Dr. Johnson was suffered to undergo much severe mental discipline, in order to reduce him in his own esteem to that lowly place, which as a human, and consequently a fallen being, it was his duty, however high his attainments or his talents, to occupy.

"In a visit which I made him in a

few days, in consequence of a very pressing request to see me, I found him labouring under very great dejection of mind. He bad me draw near him, and said he wanted to enter into a serious conversation with me; and upon my expressing my willingness to join it, he, with a look that cut me to the heart, told me that he had the prospect of death before him, and that he dreaded to meet his Saviour. I could not but be astonished at such a declaration, and advised him, as I had done before, to reflect on the course of his life, and the services he had rendered to the cause of religion and virtue, as well by his example as his writings; to which he answered, that he had written as a philosopher, but had not lived like one. In the estimation of his offences he reasoned thus: Every man knows his own sins, and what grace he has resisted. But to those of others, and the circumstances under which they were committed, he is a stranger. He is therefore to look on himself as the greatest sinner that he knows of.' At the conclusion of this argument, which he strong ly enforced, he uttered this passionate [impassioned] exclamation: Shall I who have been a teacher of others, be myself a cast-away?"

In this interesting passage-inter esting as detailing the religious progress of such a mind as Dr. Johnson's

how many important facts and reflections crowd upon the imagination! We see the highest human intellect unable, at the approach of death, to find a single argument for hope or comfort, though stimulated by the mention of all the good deeds and auspicious forebodings which an anxious and attentive friend could sug gest. Who that beholds this eminent man thus desirous to open his mind, and to enter into a serious conversation' upon the most momentous of all subjects which can interest an immortal being, but must regret that he had not found a spiritual adviser who was capable of fully entering into his feelings, and adminis tering scriptural consolation to his afflicted mind ?