laconic style. In the opinion of some, his diction was copious to an extreme. Yet Mr. Turton has correctly observed that scarcely any thing was really "redundant." "Expressions, nearly the same in sense, were employed in a very skilful manner, each succeeding one adding something to the beauty and force of what had gone before;" an observation this which the writers have repeatedly had occasion to make in the examination of Mr. Stoner's manuscripts.

His mode of delivery was quite consistent with his general habits. He was deeply serious. He had little or no action, except a slight inclination of the body forward in the more animated parts of his discourse. At all times he was earnest, but never vociferous. It has already been mentioned more than once that his utterance was rapid; yet not unpleasantly so. "Though rapid," observes Dr. M'Allum, "it was perfectly clear; every word fell full and distinct upon the ear; and its very rapidity fixed attention, and by that means gave the more effect to his discourse." In securing attention indeed he was remarkable. Some parts of his delivery, if judged by the rules of rhetoricians, would be pronounced defective; but its defects were forgotten amid the deep and fixed regard which he excited. "I have seen numbers of his hearers," says Mr. Turton, " rise almost involuntarily soon after he has begun his sermon, and remain on their feet to the end, so powerfully attracted by what they were hearing that they seemed unable to sit down."

No person could attend his ministry, either regularly or occasionally, without being struck with his incessant solicitude to do good. Every other consideration was swallowed up in this. "His prayer," remarks Dr. M'Allum, 66 was, Never may I preach one useless sermon ;' and the sermon under which believers were not strengthened, or sinners awakened, was, he thought, a useless one. With all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, he aimed at usefulness; and especially at awakening, quickening, and informing the conscience; and that not merely in the application of his discourses, but throughout the whole of them, from the commencement to the close. The sword he wielded was of keen edge from the hilt to the point. There was a certain peculiarity in his sermons. At the close of a paragraph, he would utter a petition suited to the tenor of it. After describing holiness in any of its beauties, for instance, he would exclaim, 'The Lord sanctify each of us!' Or, after describing the displeasure of God in any one of its frowns, he would pray, 'The Lord save us from the wrath to come!' Knowing the terrors of the Lord, he persuaded men; and preached as one who had death and judgment, heaven and hell, full in his eyes; as if this was the latest and the only opportunity of winning trophies to redeeming power, and of plucking brands from the burning. The thought of self entirely disappeared in the great business of delivering his message, and gaining attention to it. In his pulpit appearances, there was no one thing which could be mistaken as indicating a theorist, or a feeling of the honor that cometh from man. On the contrary, he labored instantly like one overwhelmed with the conviction, that souls were now perishing, and that this was the only day of salvation. The hearer was never allowed to think of the preacher, or of the composition; all is thoughts and concerns were forced in upon himself; and he went

away saying, not, 'What a great sermon have I heard!' but, God be merciful to me a sinner!' Appeal following appeal lightened upon the conscience, revealing at once the darkness and the light; the strong man trembled to be dispossessed of his goods; but bolt succeeded bolt till the building was shaken from the foundation to the corner stone. To appearance, he put all his strength into every sermon. Spiritual profit, the utmost profit, and present profit, was the thing aimed at, and by the blessing of God secured to most, by his sermons. The ruling passion, the ceaseless spring, the vehement thirst of his soul was to do good. The zeal of the Lord ate him up: it was a fire in his bones; it was a torrent on his lips; for the mouth of the just is a well spring of life. When there was a prospect of doing good, he conferred not with flesh and blood; for he loved the Lord with all his strength; and hence, after preaching thrice, and travelling in the country, he has often spent some hours in a prayer meeting; frequently engaging in prayer, in exhortation, and in praise. His zeal was not mere excitement; it was a stream whose strength is not in its current merely, but in its volume of water." "In the sermons I heard from him," remarks Mr. Clegg, "there was no appearance of design to preach in a learned, eloquent, or eccentric manner; but to pour out, as rapidly as possible, a torrent of Divine truth into the heads and hearts of his hearers; and then to direct it in various streams to their different characters and consciences; commonly concluding his numerous applications with a fervent prayer to God, that he would make his word effectual to the salvation of the people. In short, whether he preached in aid of missions, chapels, or Sunday schools, he seemed to aim directly at the great object of his ministry,-to 'turn his hearers,' at the time he addressed them, from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God.' His preaching had not only a tendency to do good to sinners and private Christians, but also to ministers of the Gospel. It was scarcely possible for them to hear him without feeling the vast importance of a faithful ministry, and forming purposes to be more urgent in the great work of' winning souls.'

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That the effect of such a ministry should be unusually powerful, is not surprising. Of Mr. Stoner it may emphatically be said, that "by manifestation of the truth he commended himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God." He was an honored instrument in the edifying of Christian believers, and the conversion of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sinners. "Few men," observes Mr. Entwisle, "since the commencement of the work of God under the name of Methodism, have been so successful in the conversion of sinners from the error of their ways.' I speak from my own knowledge on this subject. During the two years we were together at Bradford, a great number, I will not presume to say how many, were convinced of sin under his preaching. The hand of God was eminently with him.” "When I went to the Keighley circuit, in 1822," says Mr. Clegg, "I soon found that I was surrounded by persons who were attributing their spiritual conversion and happiness to his instrumentality; and that he was very popular through all the country around. But this popularity was of the very best kind. God had been pleased to honor him with such amazing usefulness at Bradford, and other places in the

neighborhood, that the people crowded in immense numbers to hear him. They esteemed him as an extraordinary messenger from God. They went to hear him with religious feeling and ardent expectation, hoping and praying that God would there and then pour out His Holy Spirit in a rich effusion, and greatly revive and extend His work: and, so far as I had the opportunity of observing, they were not disappointed.",

The preface tells us that this work was compiled by the Rev. Messrs. William Dawson and John Hannah; and we think we recognize in the style the hand of the excellent Mr. Hannah, who accompanied Mr. Reese on his visit to the American Methodists in 1824, as the one, according to the same preface, on whom the more laborious part of this compilation necessarily devolved.' We thank him for thus furnishing the Churches with the memoir of a man whose example for literary, intellectual, but more especially ministerial and spiritual acquirements, may be so safely and profitably held up for our imitation. And we again say to our younger brethren in the ministry, that this piece of biography, though small in its size and unpretending in its character, is well worthy of their serious perusal, as well as of the perusal of all who would become the followers of Christ. It may be had at the Methodist Book Store at fifty cents per copy.

WORKS OF THE LATE REV. ROBERT HALL, A. M. The entire Works of the Rev. Robert Hall, A. M. With a brief Memoir, and a Sketch of his literary Character, by the Right Hon. Sir J. Mackintosh, LL. D. M. P., and a Sketch of his Character as a Theologian, and a Preacher, by the Rev. John Foster. Published under the superintendence of Olinthus Gregory, LL. D. F. R. A. S., Professor of Mathematics in the Royal Military Academy. Three vols. 8vo.

WE Contemplate with mingled emotions of admiration and delight the characters of the good and the great. Splendid talents, directed by good qualities of the heart, exerted for the benefit of mankind, excite within us those pleasing emotions in which we delight to indulge. Such characters, from their rare occurrence, are the more valuable, because they form such a striking contrast to the generality of the world around us. They form a sort of moral sublimity on which the mind delights to contemplate, and their writings furnish us with a mental repast, an intellectual luxury on which we feed with exquisite pleasure, while a reflection upon their actions excites within us a laudable ambition to imitate their worthy example.

Such sensations have been produced by looking over the writings and reflecting upon the conduct of the late Rev. Robert Hall.Devoted to study from his youth, and at a suitable age conse

crating his powers to the work of the Christian ministry, in which he excelled most of his cotemporaries in the loftiness of his conceptions, the purity of his language, the urbanity of his temper, and the commanding nature of his eloquence, he has left behind him a name that will be revered by all devout Christians, as well as by all the lovers of science and literature. That he was possessed of these rare qualities, and that he exerted them in the best of all causes, the cause of religion and humanity, the volumes before us furnish the most ample testimony. And although we cannot pledge ourselves to every sentiment he advanced, nor hold him up as an example freed from human infirmity,-for what human being is thus freed?yet we think we may safely recommend his writings to all the friends of learning and religion, and his conduct as a pattern worthy of their imitation.

Though connected with a denomination of Christians the most exclusive of all the sects in one article of their creed,-we mean the terms of Church communion,-yet Mr. Hall, at an early period of his ministry, burst the shackles of prejudice from his mind, opened his bosom to embrace all of every name who loved the Lord Jesus in sincerity, hailing them welcome to the table of the Lord as brethren beloved, though not washed in the laver of regeneration according to the ritual of the Baptist Church. In this particular he was followed by a distinguished divine in our own country, a minister of the Scotch Seceder Church, the late Rev. Dr. John Mason, whose treatise on the subject of free communion among Christians of different denominations has done much to remove the mounds of prejudice which existed among them, and unhappily separated them from each other. And surely every thing which shall have a tendency to batter down the walls of prejudice which sectarian rivalships had erected, ought to be considered as one of the happy precursors of Christ's universal reign upon the earth.

In the introductory remarks to the treatise on the Terms of Communion, the author thus expresses himself:

'The divided state of the Christian world has long been the subject of painful reflection; and if his feeble efforts might be the means of uniting a small portion only of it in closer ties, he will feel himself amply rewarded.

The practice of incorporating private opinions and human inventions with the constitution of a Church, and with the terms of communion, has long appeared to him untenable in its principle, and pernicious in its effects. There is no position in the whole compass of theology of the truth of which he feels a stronger persuasion than that no man, or set of men, are entitled to prescribe, as an indispensable condition of communion, what the New Testament has not enjoined as a condition of salvation. To establish this position is the principal object of the following work; and though it is more immediately occupied in the discussion of a case which respects the Bap

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tists and the Pedobaptists, that case is attempted to be decided entirely upon the principle now mentioned, and is no more than the application of it to a particular instance.'

In pursuance of this catholic design, Mr. Hall commenced an attack upon a practice which had long obtained in the Church of which he was such a distinguished minister, and which has marked it with a line of distinction from all other Christian sects, not only as an ordinance which ought to be observed, but as one essentially necessary to Church membership and Christian communion. A man less lofty in intellect, less fearless in avowing his honest convictions, or less celebrated for his piety and devotion, would hardly have had the boldness to make an attack upon a principle so long received and held as sacred by his own denomination. But raised above vulgar prejudice by the liberal principles he had cultivated, and remarkably fitted by the acuteness of his intellectual powers for close investigation, and by his commanding eloquence for the defence of whatever he considered to be true and right, while he firmly and practically believed adult baptism by immersion alone to be Scriptural, he could not consent to exclude all who dissented from him on this point from the communion of saints; and hence he boldly entered the arena of controversy with his brethren on this subject, maintaining, from the principle above laid down, that all who give satisfactory evidence of their true discipleship are entitled to the communion of the Lord's table, whether baptized by immersion or not.

As a specimen of his manner of reasoning upon this subject, we present the reader with the following extracts, which are designed to refute the arguments of Baptists, drawn from the priority of the institution of the ordinance of baptism to that of the Lord's Supper :

1. The commission to baptize all nations, which was executed by the apostles after our Saviour's resurrection, originated in His express command; John's baptism, it is evident, had no such origin. John had baptized for some time before he knew Him; it is certain, then, that he did not receive his commission from Him. "And I knew Him not," saith he, "but that He should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water." If the manifesting Christ to Israel was the end and design of John's mission, he must have been in a previous state of obscurity; not in a situation to act the part of a legislator by enacting laws or establishing rites. John uniformly ascribes his commission, not to Christ, but the Father, so that to assert his baptism to be a Christian institute, is not to interpret, but to contradict him. "And I knew Him not," is his language, "but He that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending and remaining on Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bear record, that this is the Son of God.". It was not till He had accredited His mission by many miracles, and other demonstrations of a preternatural power and wisdom, that our Lord proceeded to modify