stretched to its utmost tension to compass the depth and elevation of his thoughts, it is almost impossible to realize that they were written on a piece of leather in the midst of his workmen, or in the chimney corner, with a bellows on his knee, and with one foot rocking a brawling child to sleep. It is, nevertheless, a reality; and adds new confirmation to the hackneyed remark that "truth is stranger than fiction." As late as 1809, Professor Kidd, of Aberdeen, wrote to him as follows: "When I read your address, I admired your mind, and felt for your family; and from that moment began to revolve how I might assist merit emerging from hardships. I have at length conceived a way which will in all likelihood, put you and your dear infants in independence." The plan of the Professor was to induce Mr. Drew to enter the lists for a prize of twelve hundred pounds for an essay on The Being and Attributes of God." He entered, but did not win, much to the sorrow of his kind-hearted adviser. But the work, in two volumes, was subsequently published, and augmented the fame of “The Metaphysical Shoemaker." 66 By the agency of his friend, Dr. Clarke, he was engaged to write for several Reviews, "receiving - guineas for every printed sheet. He also commenced lecturing to classes on grammar, history, geography, and astronomy. Several years were spent in these employments. They paved his way, and prepared him to enter a larger field of labour, on a more elevated platform of life. In 1819 he was invited to Liverpool, to take the management of the "Imperial Magazine,” published by the Cax tons. He accepted it, and parted with his awl and ends. This was a new enterprise, both to the editor and the proprietor. But it succeeded to admiration. His own reputation attracted seven thousand patrons at the start. Whatever may have been the tastes of Mr. Drew as to dress, he had never been in circumstances that allowed of much attention to his personal appearance. The family of Dr. Clarke, who now resided near Liverpool, and who were warmly attached to him, set themselves to reform his costume, and polish his manners. An epigram of the Doctor's comprises a full-length likeness of the figure he presented. He was passive under the management of his young friends; and they did not pause until a manifest change in the outside man was effected. When he next visited St. Austell, he was congratulated upon his juvenile appearance. "These girls of the Doctor's," he said, " and their acquaintances, have thus metamorphosed me." His residence at Liverpool was abridged by the burning of the Caxton establishment. The proprietors resolved to transfer their business to London; and they could not leave their able and popular editor behind them. He accordingly repaired to the metropolis. Here all the works issued from the Caxton press passed under his supervision. He augmented his own fame, and multiplied the number of his learned friends. Of his labours he says: "Besides the magazine, I have at this time six different works in hand, either as author, compiler, or corrector. 'Tis plain, therefore, I do not want work; and while I have strength and health, I have no desire to lead a life of idleness; yet I am sometimes oppressed with unremitting exertion, and occasionally sigh for leisure which I cannot command." But leisure came not till the weary wheels of life stood still in 1833. A Chinese proverb says, "Time and patience will change a mulberry leaf into a silk dress." They have wrought greater wonders than this in the intellectual and moral world. As illustrative of their power in any pursuit of life, how attractive and impressive are the incidents in the history of the poor Shoemaker of St. Austell. Through their agency, vice, ignorance, and poverty were transmuted into virtue, knowledge, and independence; a youth of idleness was followed by a manhood of industrious diligence, and an age dignified by success in the noblest aspirations that can swell the human breast. To the student, the lover of knowledge, the aspirant for literary distinction and usefulness, such histories have a voice whose utterance is a melody of encouragement. Drew's life is a beacon blazing on the coast of time; himself a star of the first magnitude, brilliant in the firmament of truth, serene in its orbit, endless in the sweep of its influence. ROGER WILLIAMS. ROGER WILLIAMS was the founder and lawgiver of the State of Rhode Island in America. He was born at Conwyl Cayo, near Lampeter, in the County of Carmarthen, South Wales, in 1606. His father was a small landed proprietor, and lived upon his ancestral estate, called Macstroiddyn, in the hamlet of Maestroiddyn. There are no records however of his early life, and we are left entirely in the dark respecting the character of his parents. It is nevertheless, more than probable that they were God-fearing people, and that Roger was nurtured and brought up in the fear of the Lord. For, towards the close of his long life he says, "From my childhood, now about threescore years, the Father of lights and mercies touched my soul with a love to himself, to his only begotten the true Lord Jesus, and to his holy scriptures." It is at all events certain, that love to God was the governing influence of his life, and the rule of all his actions and enterprizes. We shall have ample opportunity hereafter to prove the truth of this assertion, and to set forth the practical results of the religion which he professed. For no one was ever more faithful to his convictions, more devoted to his Master's work, or more unceasing in his efforts to promote the temporal as well as the spiritual happiness of his fellow men. With him, religion was a vital and allabsorbing principle; not a theory, but a divine reality, expanding the living spirit within him, and filling him with a boundless and immeasurable love. Hence his life was full of beauty, and adorned with all the virtues and graces which mark the highest Christian character. It is at once cheering and ennobling to behold how bravely he bears himself under the burden of his great difficulties; with what forgiveness and compassion he regards his persecutors; how readily he helps them in their necessities; and how firmly, and yet meekly and lovingly, he insists upon the truth which separates him from his brethren. This truth, viz., that the civil magistrate has no right to interfere in any matters of conscience, he carried with him into the wilderness, after his banishment from New England for maintaining it, and finally incorporated it in the constitution of the Colony which he founded in Rhode Island. to Williams was the first man that made the grand principle of toleration the foundation of government. Up to his time, and indeed long afterwards, there was a very imperfect apprehension of religious freedom. Protestantism had certainly announced the right of private judgment, the right of every man to think and act according to the dictates of his own conscience, but such was the power and influence of human tradition and authority, that no man could exercise this right with impunity, if he violated either the one or the other. From the reign of Henry the Eighth downwards, the state had always been invested with the power of punishing refractory confessors --persons, that is, who could not sanction the established doctrines and the established modes of worship. Ecclesiastical synods arrogated themselves the right of giving their own interpretation to the sacred scriptures; they abjured the Pope of Rome, to set themselves up in his place; and private consciences were made amenable to these priestly tribunals. Even the Puritans, to whom we owe so much, and who claimed so much for themselves, would recognize no man as a Christian who differed from them in what they held-and what essentially were, perhaps-points of scriptural doctrine: and many of their great leaders denounced unlimited toleration, as subversive of Christianity, of public morals, and of social law and order. The great distinguishing principle, therefore, which lies at the base of Roger Williams's character as a minister, a public teacher and a lawgiver, is, as before stated, this: that he denied the right of councils to declare what men should believe in relation to the scriptures, and of the state to punish them for disbelief. A man's belief, he said, rested between him and God: abandon this truth, and we open the door to endless persecutions and all manner of evil feelings and unchristian ways. For himself he adopted this truth with the fervour of an apostle, and practised it in all his dealings with men. Intimidation, suffering, scorn, contumely, and wrong, could not make him swerve one step from his purpose, or move him from the high vantage ground which he assumed and occupied. The history of this man, therefore, is intensely interesting and instructive. The true martyr spirit was in him-the true Christian spirit; and he was certainly one of the wisest and most learned men of his time. Even those good old Puritans who condemned him at Boston for his speculative opinions, honoured him for his character and Christian virtues. Not a breath of slander ever stained his spotless name, even when theological hatred was at ts highest, and all the passions which bigotry and a mistaken zeal engender and call forth were most active against him. There was no selfishness in his nature, no pride, no vindictiveness. From first to last he was a noble-minded, great hearted, wise and pious Christian. His devotion to his Colony and the immense sacrifices which he made for it, are beyond all praise, and prove him to be as patriotic as he was godly. but his writings, and his communion with some of the finest scholars of England and America, prove that he did not neglect the opportunity of learning which the beneficence of Sir Edward had thrown into his way. It is said that after Williams had graduated, he studied law for a short time, under his great patron; and it is certain that his public documents connected with Rhode Island, bear evidence of great legal skill and knowledge. But there is no good authority for this statement, although it is by no means improbable. One thing, however, is clear, viz., that he was admitted to Holy Orders in the Church of England before his arrival in America; and from a passage in his reply to the Rev. John Cotton, where he speaks of riding with that gentleman and the Rev. Mr. Hooker to and from Sempringham, it is not unlikely that he was settled over some church in Lincolnshire. Mr. Cotton was for twenty years a minister in Boston, before he went to America, and Dr. Williams was, during the greater part of that time, Bishop of Lincoln. Now, the fact that Cotton was a purely evangelical man, and an opponent of the oppressions, persecutions, and foolish formalisms invented or restored by Archbishop Laud, and that Dr. Williams was known to favour the Puritan views, renders the suppo One cannot but regret that so little is known of his early life, and that we have no means of tracing the growth of his mind and character from youth to manhood. His good parents, no doubt, sowed the seed which subsequently germinated and produced so beneficent a harvest. But we can only infer this from the passage already quoted from Williams's letters-we have no authentic account of them. It appears, however, from the archives of the Univer-sition that Roger Williams was settled sity, that he entered Jesus College at Oxford, in 1624, on the 30th of April, when he was only eighteen years of age. He had previously lived for a short time in London, and had attracted the notice of Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer, by the accuracy of his short-hand notes of speeches delivered in the Star Chamber. He was not then more than fifteen years old, but why he was in London, or for what object, does not appear. In a note attached to one of Williams's letters, which he addressed long afterwards to Mrs. Sadleir, daughter of Sir Edward Coke, it is stated that the good knight sent Williams, out of real liking for him and his talents, to Sutton's Hospital, now the Charter House; and the records of the Hospital show that he was elected a scholar of that Institution, June 25th, 1621, and that he obtained an exhibition, July 9th, 1624. How long Williams remained at Oxford there are no means of determining; in the diocese of Lincoln very probable. For he would naturally seek for the fellowship and spiritual communion of related souls, and plant himself where he would be freest to follow the dictates of his own conscience in regard to preaching and worship. At length, however, when Cotton, Hooker, Higginson, and other godly ministers, had been prohibited, by the influence of Laud, to preach any more in their own way, Williams—who must either preach in his, or not at all-seems to have abandoned his charge, and to have fled to America, for "freedom to worship God." He accordingly arrived at Boston on the 5th of February, 1631, after a voyage of sixty-six days, in the Lyon, having sailed from Bristol. Eleven years before, the Pilgrim Fathers, as the first colonists of New England are called, landed on the same shores, in the little ship, May Flower, and established themselves at a place which they called Plymouth. They were also driven from their native country for conscience' sake, and from 1608 to 1620 (which last date is the period when they landed on the shores of Massachusetts), they were exiles at Leyden, in Holland, for this cause. Now on the arrival of Williams, they had built up a republic and a civilization. Various settlements known by the name of the "Colony of Massachusetts Bay" had sprung up, and the whole were constituted a body politic and corporate, by the royal charter of Charles I., executed 1629, with power to elect annually their own Governor from the free men of the Bay, their Deputy Governor and eighteen assist ants, and to enact their own laws, which were to be according to the spirit of the laws of England. They were now absolute, therefore, in their own right, and, having such powerssuch large immunities and liberties awarded to them-they attracted great numbers of Nonconformists from the mother country, amongst whom were 200 under the charge of the Rev. Francis Higginson, 1629. Two years later-as we have seen-Roger Williams also came amongst them; and here we must inquire, for a moment, into the real condition-so far as spiritual freedom is concerned-of these colonies at that time. The truth is, and we say it with sorrow, that they did not know what spiritual freedom was;-that is to say, what liberty of conscience was. They had dissented from prelacy, and had been persecuted by the prelatical party in England for that dissent, which in their case they deemed to be absolutely wrong; but they would not allow any one to dissent from them, without in their turn becoming persecutors. The Bible was God's word, and they were the interpreters of it. If any one differed with them, they invoked the power of the civil magistrate to punish him, to imprison or to banish him. This was the grand error of the Reformation itself; for, by allying the state with the church, the early reformers recognized the right of the state to rule the church, and coerce the consciences of the people to the established formulary of belief. It was placing the magistrate upon the throne of God, and ignoring the liberty of the human soul. Neither the Puritans of New England, nor, indeed, the religious parties in Old England, saw this: they had not yet grown out of the political idea of the Reformation; and it required long years of thought and struggle to enable them, and the religious world, to see that God alone could be man's judge in matters of conscience. Roger Williams was the pioneer of this truth in the new colonies, and, as we said, the first incorporator of it in the government of a state. A short time after his arrival in America, he became an assistant to the Rev. Mr. Skelton, pastor of the church at Salem. The magistrates, however, interfered to prevent his appointment, on account of certain opinions he held, which were, they said, a "breach of the first table." The general court of the colony met also at Boston, and expressed their disapprobation in the matter, desiring the church of Salem to annul the contract. This, however, they would not do; and boldly stood out against the magistrates, regarding the attempt made to coerce them as unjust and arbitrary. On the 18th of May following, Williams took the necessary oath, and became a freeman of the colonies. On the same day the general court ordered, "That no man for the time to come shall be admitted to the freedom of the body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same." This suicidal policy could not fail to arouse the spirit of Williams, and make him warn the government of the dangerous consequences which must inevitably result from it. "It was," he said, "to pluck up the roots and foundations of all common society in the world; to turn the garden and paradise of the church and saints into the field of the civil state of the world, and to reduce the world to the first chaos or confusion." For, "not only was the door of calling to magistracy shut against natural and unregenerate men, though excellently fitted for civil offices, but also against the best and ablest servants of God, except they be entered into church estate." Such were the views and speeches of Williams upon this extraordinary enactment, which it was soon afterwards found necessary to repeal. The magistrates, however, never forgave him or the church at Salem, for acting against their expressed wishes and remonstrances, but commenced and continued a course of systematic oppression and persecu tion against them. At last Williams was obliged to leave, and took refuge in the colony of Plymouth. Here he became assistant to the Rev. Ralph Smith; and Governor Bradford speaks in terms of the warmest affection and reverence for him during his stay there. The Puritans of Plymouth were wiser and more scriptural in their notions of church government than the colonists of Massachusetts; they had entirely separated from the church of England before they left Holland; and it was a fundamental maxim with them, that the temporal power could have no authority over the church. Hence the general peace and prosperity of that colony, and the cordial welcome which greeted Williams on his arrival, and the respect which was paid him during his residence amongst them. The condition of the colonies, with respect to defence against the Indians, was at this time anything but satisfactory. They were not bound together by any act of federation; but were isolated, and consequently weak. It was in the power of the Indians, by a general rising, to have cut them all off, root and branch! And the colonists seem to have been aware of this, although for a long time afterwards they took no steps for mutual defence. Williams however, not only saw the danger to which they were exposed, but determined to prevent it falling upon them, if possible, by going forth alone into the wilderness and trying to conciliate the Indians. Accordingly, during his residence at Plymouth, he made frequent excursions amongst them, studied their language, and by his invariable kindness and firmness, established a good understanding between them and the colonists. "God was pleased to give me a painful, patient spirit," he says, "to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes, even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem, to gain their language." And no other person ever had so much influence with the Indians in the purchase of lands, treaties, and councils, as he; because they knew him, and trusted his word. He never deceived them; but was to the last their friend. He used to talk to them about the Great Spirit, and his whole soul was moved for their conversion to the religion of Christ. He well knew, however, the difficulties which lay before him in this respect, and proceeded slowly in the unfolding of his gospel news to them, relying more at present upon the influence of his own character and example over them than upon doctrines and precepts. After Williams had been in Plymouth two years, he received a call to return to Salem, the good old minister of the church, Mr. Skelton, being too infirm to discharge his duties. There was a great struggle amongst his Plymouth congregation to keep him; but he felt that he must return to his old charge; and so in August, 1633, he resumed his labours amongst them; many of the Plymouth brethren following him, and changing their residence to Salem, that they might have the benefit of his advice and teaching. Williams had not been long in Salem before a fresh occasion of difference offered, upon which he felt bound to speak. The ministers in the Bay and Saugus had established a fortnightly meeting, where some question of moment was debated; and Mr. Skelton, as well as Williams, took some exception against it, fearing, from the experience which they had of ecclesiastical usurpation in England, that it might grow in time to a presbytery, or superintendency, to the prejudice of the church's liberty. This exception, which was a truly conscientious one, the ministers regarded as an officious interference, and it opened afresh the ancient breach between them and the church of Salem. Williams was truly sorry for this; but he was so jealous of religious and civil liberty, that he could not have acted otherwise. He was thoroughly conscientious, and boldly, without fear of consequences, spoke out the thought that was in him. In a treatise which he addressed to the governor and council of Plymouth, he disputed their right to the lands which they occupied, and concluded, "That claiming by the King's Grant, they could have no title, nor otherwise, unless they compounded with the natives." A copy of this treatise he sent, during his second residence in Salem, to the governor and assistants at Boston; and they met on the 27th December, 1633, to consider it. The truth is, they did not under stand Williams; they attributed his opposition to many things which he saw in the colonies, to a spirit and love of interference, whereas, it was the opposite of all this. He was naturally |