This little work needs nothing from us to recommend it to attention. In its incidents it presents more that is keenly interesting, both to the natural and to the spiritual feelings, than it would have been easy to combine in the boldest fiction. And then it is not fiction. The manner in which the story is told leaves realities unencumbered, to produce their own impression. It might gratify the imagination, and even aid in enlarging our practical views, to consider such scenes as possible, and to fancy in what spirit a Christian might meet them; but it extends our experience, and invigorates our faith, to know that, having actually taken place, it is thus that they have been met.

The first missionaries were wont, at intervals, to return from their foreign labours, and relate to those churches whose prayers had sent them forth, “all things that God had done with them” during their absence. To the Christians at Antioch, there must have been important edification, as well as satisfaction to their affectionate concern about the individuals, and about the cause, in the narrative of Paul and Barnabas. Nor would the states of mind experienced, and the spirit manifested, by the narrators themselves be less instructive, than the various reception of their message by various hearers. In these pages, in like manner, Mr. Groves contributes to the good of the Church, an important fruit of his mission, were it to yield no other. He had cast himself upon the Lord. To Him he had left it to direct his path; to give him what things He knew he had need of, and whether outward prospects were bright or gloomy, to be the strength of his heart and his portion for ever. The publication of his former little Journal was the erection of his Eben Ezer. Hitherto, said he to us in England, the Lord hath helped me. And now, after a prolonged residence among a people with whom, in natural things, he can have no communion, and who, towards his glad tidings of salvation, are as apathetic as is compatible with the bitterest contempt; after having had, during many weeks, his individual share of the suffering, and his mind worn with the spectacle, of a city strangely visited at once with plague, and siege, and inundation, and internal tumult; widowed, and not without experience of “flesh and heart fainting and failing,” he again “blesses God for all the way he has led him," tells us that “the Lord’s great care over him in the abundant provision for all his necessities, enables him yet further to sing of his goodness;" and while his situation makes him say, “what a place would this be to be alone in now” if without God, he adds, “but with Him, this is better than the garden of Eden." “The Lord is my only stay, my only support; and He is a support indeed."

It is remarkable, that at a time when the fear of pestilence has agitated the people of this country, and when the tottering fabric of society threatens to hurl down upon us as dire a confusion as that which has surrounded our brother, in a country hitherto regarded so remote from all comparison with our own; at a time when the records of the seasons at which the terrible voice of God has sounded loudest in our capital, are republished as appropriate to the contemplation of Christians at the existing crisis; this volume should have been brought before the Public, by circumstances quite unconnected with this train of God’s dealings and threatenings to our land. The Christians of Britain ought to consider, that there is a warning voice of Providence, not only in the tumults of the people, and in the terrors of the cholera around them, but even in the publication of this Journal. It is not for nothing that God has moved Mr. Groves, as it were, to an advanced post, where he might encounter the enemy before them. The alarm may have, in a measure, subsided, but if the people of God are to be ever patiently waiting for the coming of their conquering King, this implies a patient preparedness for those signs of his coming, the clouds and darkness that are to go before him, in the very midst of which they must be able to lift up their heads because their redemption draweth nigh. To provide for the worst contingencies is a virtue, not a weakness, in the soldier. That Christian will not keep his garments who forgets, that in this life, he is a soldier always. No army is so orderly in peace, or so triumphant upon lesser assaults, as that which is ready always for the extremest exigencies of war.

To those who are looking for the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, this volume will exhibit indications of the advancement of the world towards the state in which he shall find it at his coming. The diffusion in the east of European notions and practices; the desire on the part of the rulers to possess themselves of the advantages of western intellect and skill; and on the side of the governed, the conviction of the comparative security and comfort of English domination; the vastly increased intercourse between those nations and the west, and the proposals for still further accelerating and facilitating that intercourse: all these things mark the rapid tendency, of which we have so many other signs, towards the production of one common mind throughout the human race, to issue in that combination for a common resistance of God, which, as of old, when the people were one, and had all one language, and it seemed that nothing could be restrained from them which they had imagined to do, shall cause the Lord to come down and confound their purpose. Already has this unity of views and aims, with marvellous rapidity, prevailed in the European and American world; the press, the steam-engine by land and water, the multiplication of societies and unions, portend an advancement in it, to which nothing can set limits but the intervention of God: and now it appears that the mountain-fixedness of Asiatic prejudice and institution shall suddenly be dissolved, and absorbed into the general vortex.

And to those who may have suspected, that the prospect of the return of Jesus of Nazareth to our earth for vengeance and expurgation of evil first, and then for occupation of rule, under the face of the whole heaven, is but a speculative subject for curious minds, this little book presents matter of reflection. By circumstances of such urgent personal concernment, as those in which Mr. Groves and his departed wife have been placed, the merely speculative part of religion is put to flight. But we shall find them in the midst of confusion, and bereavement, and horror, clinging to this one hope for themselves and for the world, that the Lord cometh to reign, wherefore the earth shall be glad; deriving from this hope a delight in God, in the midst of all that seems adverse to such a sentiment, which, if it be not a proof of practical power in a doctrine, what is practical?

On some few points, Mr. Groves has given a somewhat detailed expression of his own sentiments. One of the most important of these is re-considered in the notes by the writer of this introduction. Another, on which the interest of many has already been strongly excited, is the recognition of those men as ministers of God, who do not utter the word of his truth, and who are admitted to speak without the Spirit of his truth. The question, encompassed as it has been with difficulties foreign to itself, is but a narrow one. The preaching of the Gospel is an ordinance of God. The preaching of what is not the Gospel is no ordinance of God; and affords me no opportunity of shewing my respect for divine ordinances by my attendance upon it. That men possessing the Holy Ghost should confer spiritual gifts by the laying on of hands on those who in faith receive it, is an ordinance of God: that men, not having the Holy Ghost, should lay hands on others for spiritual gifts, is no ordinance of God.

If the outward fact of what is named ordination, determines me to regard as now made of God a teacher, a pastor, an evangelist, a bishop, him who, to all intelligent and spiritual perception, is what he was, in error, and ignorance, and carnality; this is not respect for divine ordinances at all, but a faith in the opus operatum, a faith in transubstantiation transferred to men, denying the truth of my own perception, and clinging to the conclusion of my superstition, just as in the mass the senses are denied, and bread and wine visibly unaltered, are called flesh and blood. The arguments by which this notion is supported, are too complicated, and too contemptuous of unity or consistency, to be meddled with in our limited space. That Christ bade men observe what the Scribes and Pharisees taught on the authority of the law of Moses, is made a reason for reverencing what is taught on no divine authority: Scribes and Pharisees, who pretended to no divine ordination, but rested their claims on their knowledge, are made specimens of the respect due to ordination, in the case of such whose ignorance and unsound teaching are allowed. But were not the Scribes and Pharisees in many things ignorant and unsound? Yes, truly; but were these the things of which the Lord said expressly, these things observe and do? To tell us that we must observe and do what is according to Scripture, however bad the men who teach it, ordained or unordained alike; what has this to do with ordination? True, this is no excuse for those who prostitute the form and name of God’s ordinance, and know that it is prostituted: who say, “receive ye the Holy Ghost,” and would laugh as being supposed to confer the Holy Ghost: but there is no necessity for running from this crime, to the error of which we have spoken. Let us acknowledge our wretchedness, and misery, and poverty, and blindness, and nakedness. When the laws were transgressed, and the everlasting covenant broken; then the ordinance was changed, as Isaiah foretold it should, among the causes why the earth is defiled under the inhabitants thereof.

The Apostolic Epistles contain little, if any thing, to establish the pastoral authority in a single person of each church or congregation: and the omission of all allusion to such an office is often very remarkable from the occasion seeming to assure us, that it would have been mentioned had it existed. The Epistles of the Lord to the seven churches are therefore resorted to for proof of the existence and nature of the place of a single pastor with peculiar and exclusive powers. But neither there nor elsewhere is the fact of ordination once referred to, in relation to the receiving or rejection of those who claimed to speak in the name of Christ. In these very Epistles there is a commendation for disregarding for the truth’s sake the highest titles of ecclesiastical office. “Thou canst not bear them which are evil: thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars." I believe, “not to bear them which are evil” pastors, evangelists or apostles, is as commendable in England as in Ephesus in the eye of the Head of the Churches. Is there a syllable in the Bible to lead us to suppose that these liars were detected by any other means than those which Paul had already taught the Church? “Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.” As for the ordinance, such passages as Titus , make selection a part of that ordinance: the bishop is to be one “holding fast the word of truth as he hath been taught.” Now, on what authority shall this part of the ordinance, viz. selection, be omitted, and no flaw follow: while the presence or omission of a manual act in certain hands is to constitute the reality or absence of Divine ordination?

A. J. SCOTT.
Woolwich, Auth, 1832.