THE OR, PIETY AND USEFULNESS EXEMPLIFIED, IN A MEMOIR OF THE LIFE OF SAMUEL HICK, LATE OF MICKLEFIELD, YORKSHIRE, BY JAMES EVERETT. FROM THE SEVENTH LONDON EDITION. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY G. LANE & P. P. SANDFORD, For the Methodist Episcopal Church, at the Conference Office, 200 Mulberry-street. J, Collord, Printer 1842. "That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere fragments of which the 'lofty grave tragedians taught in chorus or iambic,' and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes which a Plato found most hard to learn, and deemed it still more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as common-place, is a phenomenon which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk." Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, vol. i, p. 226. THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE Thus, agreeably to the above, Samuel, together with his less educated neighbours, would pray for the Lord to "wakken" the slumbering sinner. PREFACE ΤΟ THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH. BIOGRAPHERS have occasionally, though perhaps unconsciously, glided into two opposite extremes they have either depreciated the character of their subjects, or overrated their excellences. To the former extreme they have been led in various ways; and in none, among the less offensive, more than in writing far and near for character; and after securing their object, arranging the different materials in their works, like witnesses in a court of justice, to speak for the person in question. This, to say the least, is putting the subject on his trial. It is in this way that the Life of that excellent man, the late Rev. William Bramwell, has been doomed to suffer, and permitted to be swelled to a useless extent, by the publication of opinions* which were never given with a view to appear in print; and which, if even given for that purpose, would have the same weight with the public that the "Names of Little Note, recorded in the Biographia Britannica," had with Cowper, especially in support of the character of such a MAN; a man who required no such adventitious aid, but who, after all the prunings * This remark refers to a second volume published in England, but never republished in this country.-EDS. |