A diligent student of history, and biassed, perhaps, in some degree, by his Nonconformist associations, he attached himself to the liberal party, whose great advocates at that time were Fox and Burke, although the horrors of the French Revolution had frightened the latter from the calmness of true philosophy, and from the proprieties of his political youth. To the young student History taught one great truth-that despotism is utterly incompatible with a free commerce and with the condition of an enlightened commonwealth; that those states have been most secure and happy which were in the completest sense politically free; and that tyranny is to be resisted, not merely because it is destructive to political and social justice, but because it is opposed to the highest interests of humanity. Those stirring times in which his youth was passed had no little influence in the formation of his political opinions. The contest between the mother country and her great North American colony had terminated disastrously for the one party, and triumphantly for the other. The consummate prudence and caution of Washington had secured the success of the provincial forces, and had led to the declaration by the Congress of the independence of the colony. England, with an ocean between herself and the seat of war, and with as yet no steam navigation to overcome the hostility of winds and waves, and exerting only a small portion of her gigantic strength, had been compelled to reap the bitter fruits of suicidal legislation, and to content herself at once with an inglorious peace, and with the loss of her noblest colony. A free state had been formed on the other side of the Atlantic, which was to exert a great reformatory influence on European policy. Scarcely had the American contest ceased to agitate the waters of European life, than a new cause for disquietude and alarm arose in the outburst of the great French Revolution. The French troops, who had fought under the banners of Washington, returning to their own land, imported also the ideas of liberalism which they had acquired in their transatlantic warfare. Already, society in France was ripe for a change. Weary of the despotism which had wasted the resources and crippled the power of their country, the French sighed for freedom. A feeble and vacillating monarch, unequal to his terrible posi

tion, without either the ability to rule or the wisdom to reform, by his very inefficiency hastened the approach of the crisis in which he and his dynasty perished together. Now cajoling and now threatening, at one moment coquetting with the populace, and again attempting their coercion by his hated Swiss and German mercenaries; the dark hour arrived in which hundreds of years of wrong bore their harvest, and the evils of misrule, accumulated especially during the reigns of Louis XIV. and of his effeminate successor, burst upon the unhappy monarch, who suffered for the sins of ages. Europe was horror-stricken by that fearful Revolution. Far and wide throughout France rushed the fire-flood of Democracy. The upheaving of that terrific volcano of revolution not only swept from France much that was venerable and beloved; but it destroyed monarch and peer, priest and deputy. Ostracized religion fled affrighted from the land where her temples were desecrated and her name profaned. Liberty, driven from her own halls, abandoned the scene in which, had reason prevailed, she should have been enthroned; and that which man loves of peaceable and gentle, of virtuous and excellent, found a home in other lands from the bloody violence of an infuriated rabble. That painful convulsion had caused Europe to vibrate beneath its impulses. Germany, Spain, and Holland were alive to a new and strange fear; and England, needful of cautious and judicious reforms, was shaken to her centre. The state of British society was universally unhealthy. On the one hand was an aristocracy desiring ever its own aggrandizement; on the other were the masses discontented and gloomy, because poor and hopeless. The whole political atmosphere foreboded tempest. Sick at heart with their partial government, and under a régime utterly unsuited to the dawning nineteenth century, all classes, except the exclusive of the wealthier orders, longed for change. Among the associates of Pye Smith, at that time, and through life his faithful friend, was James Montgomery, the poet, who now, in the sunny winter of his age, receives that honour which is justly due both to his genius and to his worth. Fired with the love of liberty, and drawn into some political errors by the enthusiasm and warm-heartedness of youth, Mr. Montgomery, who at that

time conducted a newspaper in Sheffield, by his zealous advocacy of reform principles, and perhaps by the use of language, which was considered intemperate, if not treasonable, had made himself obnoxious to the vigilant government of the day, and was sentenced to imprisonment. During this incarceration, Pye Smith wrote frequent articles for his friend's journal, hasty and jejune productions, doubtlessly, and which might have been subjected to severe criticism. But these were written, as has been happily remarked, under similar circumstances, of Edmund Burke, during his apprenticeship to the literary art; when each succeeding day pointed out to the writer defects and incongruities of style, which only continual practice in composition would remove.

Delighting in literature, and possessed of the works of not a few of its great masters, it became necessary that he should make choice of a profession, in which he might advantageously employ his already extensive knowledge. With a heart susceptible of the happiest influences, and carefully educated in the strictness of the Nonconformist principles, religious without being austere, he resolved to make it his life-work to proclaim the divine truth and mercy to the deluded and the guilty of mankind. Nor had it been easy for him to have selected any profession which was so much in harmony as this with his early education, his tastes, and the emphatic piety of his character. With his incessant industry, and his correct habitudes of mind, he would have risen to eminence in any profession or in any walk of science; but his pure benevolence, together with the recollection that his maternal ancestry had been eminent for their Nonconformity, and had been also numbered among its ministers, induced him to attach himself to the Congregational dissenters, who, at that time, in comparison with their present position, were an inconsiderable and uninfluential party. The dissenting ministry presented no allurements to the studious or the ambitious. In that service were engaged some, who, for their writings in defence of the Christian faith, and for their life-long labours in its proclamation, deserve well of posterity; but profound and accurate learning was comparatively rare, in the latter part of the last century, amongst the Congre

gational ministers. The men of the age and of the grade of Doctors Watts and Doddridge, like themselves-had passed away; and their successors were not their equals. The dissenting laity too of that day, excepting in the larger towns, and in a few manorial houses in the country, were neither wealthy nor possessed of much sympathy with a refined erudition; although, it is probable, they were better able to estimate moral worth, and to esteem at their proper value religious truth and liberty, than the great majority of their countrymen. Nor had they those homes of wealth and comfort to offer their religious teachers, which the established clergy enjoyed. They possessed neither bishoprics, livings, palaces, or rectories. Their houses of prayer were not built after the designs of a Wren or of a Jones, nor were they adorned with the stained glass and the sculpture, the brasses and the carved work of those noble mediæval structures which are the glory of not a few of the English parishes. Among the worshippers at their chapels were not seen the titled and the wealthy, but, for the most part, the tradesman and the poor. But disadvantages such as these, could not deter him from the accomplishment of what appeared to him to be a righteous purpose; and, in furtherance of his design, he was admitted, as a student of theology, into Rotherham College, which, at that time, had for its president, the eminent Dr. Edward Williams, one of the ablest defenders of the Calvinistic theory in modern times. Mr. Pye Smith was singularly fortunate in having this gentleman as one of his tutors, who was not only a well-educated man, but acknowledged to be one of the profoundest thinkers of his age. His Essay on "Equity and Sovereignty," justifies this eulogium. The student sympathized with his tutor in hist habits of laborious study, of free and yet cautious inquiry ; in his profound and expansive views of all the parts, direct and collateral, of theological science; in his reverence for the Sacred Writings; and in his invincible love of TRUTH. If President Edwards did much to suggest and assist the investigations, and determine the opinions of Dr. Williams; it is no disparagement to Mr. Pye Smith to assert that, in many respects he was greatly indebted to both. He always held the character of his tutor in profound veneration; aud

his own life, truly beautiful, was, to a considerable extent, formed after that character as its model. Thus, under the tuition of this devout and philosophical controvertist, Pye Smith received instruction admirably adapted to the full development of his intellectual powers, and to that position which he was hereafter to occupy.

That portion of the Dissenting community who are termed "Independents" or "Congregationalists," have had, for more than a century, various colleges and educational establishments, both in the metropolis and in the provinces. Dr. Doddridge had presided over one of these provincial establishments, at Market Harborough, and subsequently at Northampton; an institution which attained considerable celebrity, and in which some of the most distinguished Nonconformists of the eighteenth century had received their education. In the metropolis, until a very recent period, there were three Nonconformist colleges, under the presidency of men who had a respectable reputation in the world of letters. In these Institutions it was endeavoured to combine the necessary discipline of a collegiate life with the comforts and friendliness of the family, as the number of students in each was limited; and the experience of many years has proved that the design of the excellent founders of these colleges was completely realized. The college at Homerton was the oldest educational Institute amongst the Nonconformists of this country; consisting of two Foundations, one of which was established about 1689, and the other in 1730. Homerton is an inconsiderable village, in the suburbs of London, abutting upon those marshy flats through which the Lea-Isaak Walton's favourite stream-directs its course. Here, in their little college, and in a suitable retirement from the din of the tumultuous city, had been educated a long succession of laborious, useful, and, in not a few instances, erudite ministers, who are the connecting links between the ancient Nonconformity and the more modern Dissent. In the year 1800, the Chair of Theology in the college at Homerton became vacant, and to that post, the highest which, among his own party could be occupied by any of its ministers, Mr. J. Pye Smith was appointed. Although only twenty-five years of age, his attainments as a linguist, a mathematician, and a