INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

BY THE REV. M. A. Dɛ WOLFE HOWE, D.D.

THERE is no name in the annals of the present century, which awakens so universal and grateful an interest in the religious world, as that of Reginald Heber. Henry Martyn was as devoted a Missionary, but he was no Poet. Keble has enchanted the Church with his sacred lyrics-but he is a quiet, country parson in one of England's rural parishes, a sphere too tame and void of romance to lend any adventitious interest to the man or his productions. Besides, Keble has been identified with a school of men in the English Church, who have (innocently or otherwise) incited sharp controversies. And he has so linked the distinctive opinions of that school, and the Ritual, and organic peculiarities of his own Communion with the sweet harmonies of his verse, that his place of pre-eminent regard as Master of the Christian Lyre, has been won for him rather by the fervent devotion of his spirit, and the captivating music of his diction, than by the particular shade of religious sentiments with which they are interfused. The rhythm of Tennyson is inimitably musical, but his sentiment lacks the tone of an heavenly piety. The

Author, whose melodies of thought and expression we here endeavour to present in a garb befitting their beauty, was at once a Christian of no ordinary grace, a Missionary of unsurpassed devotion, a Poet of exquisite taste, chastened fancy, and faultless harmony of measure, who breathed into his verse, as into all his productions, that catholic piety of sentiment which finds an echo in every heart wherein the spirit of Jesus is pleased to dwell.

With the present century began a new era of missionary enterprise in Protestant Christendom. The giving of the Gospel to the heathen, was an idea which for many ages had seemed to be obsolete, and forgotten in the Church. Even the Church of England, which has now such an honourable preeminence in this "work of faith and labour of love," had not at that period conceived the thought of sending her threefold ministry to every land on which she had unfurled her blood-red standard, marked with the double signet of the Cross. Reginald Heber was only not the first Missionary Bishop stationed in a British colony on the eastern hemisphere. The learned Middleton had been his sole predecessor in the See of Calcutta; and he, like the three who succeeded, had just entered on his work when he was called to his reward. In the space of ten years, five Bishops, in swift succession, endowed with the honours and blessed with the prayers of the Church of England, bore the staff of her authority, and stood pledged at her altars to live and die for Christ, in India-Middleton, and Heber, and James, and Turner, and Wilson. The last, now Metropolitan of all India,

still waits, in a good and vigorous old age, his translation from toil and care on earth, to rest and reward in Heaven.

We advert to these items of missionary history to illustrate more forcibly the measure of Heber's zeal and self-sacrifice in consecrating himself to the work of missions, at that early day, when so few had made experiment of its exposures and trials, and when, in his own peculiar office, none had preceded him whose experience afforded him any hint, save of exhausting labour and premature death.

Missionary life is now, comparatively speaking, an every day affair. Memoirs of eminent men who have since given their lives to the service, form no inconsiderable part of our popular religious literature. Labourers, who have braved the dangers, intrinsic and casual, of residence among the heathen, to rebuke their idolatries, and urge upon them the humbling doctrines of the Cross, have returned from their missions, and tidings can be had from them in almost every religious community. Commerce has increased beyond all computation, and made the comforts and luxuries of life transmissible to every part of the habitable world. Communication of friend with friend, however separated, may be frequent as heart could wish. Distance is annihilated. The "farther India," is no longer far. Indeed, it is not the same thing to be a missionary now, as it was in the time of Reginald Heber. A more venturous spirit of enterprise, a more burning zeal, a more implicit trust in God, were then required to qualify a soldier of the Cross for service in the enemy's land.

In proof that Reginald Heber possessed all these in their fulness, we may refer not only to the fact that he went forth with his life in his hand, to stand in the breach where his gifted predecessor had so suddenly fallen, but to the fact not generally known or realized, that his Missionary Hymn-admired and sung by all Christian people who use the English tongue-was written while he was yet a parish minister at his paternal living. at Hodnet, in Shropshire. His recognition of the claims of the heathen world upon the sympathy and aid of the Church of Christ, did not wait to be inspired and called into expression amid the abominations of Paganism. He was a missionary in heart, before he became one in fact.

And yet it would seem that the condition, education, and social relations of Reginald Heber had been such as to preclude a lively interest in any work so rough and enterprising as the mission which his imagination foreshadowed, and his whole nature subsequently entered upon. Born of gentle parents, his father a beneficed clergyman of the old school, whose religion, if we may judge from the little that is said of him in the Memoir of his more distinguished son, contemplated only a traditional constancy in the doctrine, morals, and worship of the Established Church; himself a refined, tasteful, placid man, whose childhood has been passed amid the sweet and subduing influences of a quiet rural parish, in the centre and source of its sobriety—the sequestered parsonage; whose youth had ventured no farther than into the cloisters of an University, and there acquired scholastic habits, which opened to him all the elegant literature

of his times; whose maturity, (for he became resident rector of Hodnet at twenty-four-a benefice which he neither resigned. nor deserted until, at the age of forty, he went forth as Lord Bishop of Calcutta)-whose maturity addieted him to employments and associations, calculated only to develope an exquisite. taste, a quiet conservative spirit, a studious application of mind, whose pleasurable divertisement should be found in the haunts of poetry or the refinements of polite society-it would be said that nothing in his origin, temperament, or pursuits had been likely to inspire him with pity for the benighted Pagans, or to enlist him for their illumination. It may be said of a true missionary, as Horace said of a poet, "Nascitur non fit." God called him; and in his new creation by the Spirit of God, he received his special qualification for his sphere. And this gives a peculiar interest to his history-that none of his endowments helped to make him a missionary; alone they would have hindered him-but, consecrated by his consecration, they all served to beautify a life and enforce a work which were not too brief to yield honour to God, though they disappointed all the hopes of

man.

To American readers at least, it is believed that the poetry of Bishop Heber is little known. The few of his productions which are familiar to us are universal favourites. Indeed, his reputation-the knowledge of his existence, and of his office rests with the multitude upon the fact that he was the author of "The Missionary Hymn." One or two of the sweetest of our fireside songs-remembered and repeated still (though fashion decrees.