understanding, you yourself have cast upon it."— Had Dr. Johnson been thus addressed, what would have been his reply?— "Though an angel from heaven declare it, I will not believe."
This "stricken deer," thus abandoned by the herd, and thus withdrawn, "in secret shades to die alone," we may now bring into contact and comparison with the former object of sympathy.
Misery more hopeless than either of these cases once embodied is rare even in this world of sinners and sufferers. Recovery from equal depths of moral depravity as the one, and prostration of intellect as the other presents, is rarer still. But that the subjects of such humiliating afflictions should be exalted, like the first, to the summit of influential piety, and like the second, to supremacy of commanding genius —especially, that they should be associated during life, and after death in their respective honours, must be ranked with the few examples which "He that doeth what he will among the inhabitants of the earth" places on record, at long intervals, to teach us, that of no human being, who once possessed reason and conscience, can it be absolutely said "there is no hope for him in this life,— useless to himself, it is impossible that he should ever be useful to others." These very individuals— for the pictures here drawn are not from imagination but from fearful realities— these very individuals, dissimilar as they were in rank, education, habits, and all external circumstances, in the sequel became bosom-friends and counsellors, and were long engaged as fellow-labourers, with heart and hand, in the work of the Lord on earth. Nor did they serve their transient generation only, by the exercise of their distinguished talents; each of them has left behind him some works which the world will
