there, by God's help, a flourishing cause. And now he felt assured that if a man with pure motives sought the welfare of any congregation, he would not have to mourn over non-success, or that his people were unmindful of his interests. Several other friends addressed the meeting, and the choir sang a selection of Kent's anthems in a very creditable manner. WOKINGHAM, BERKS.-The Rev. P. G. Scorey, who has been the pastor of the Baptist Church in this place for nearly six years past, has just resigned that charge, in consequence of his acceptance of an invitation from friends at Ashford in Kent, to labour amongst them. On Lord's-day, morning and evening, September 3, he preached farewell sermons, and in the afternoon administered the Lord's Supper. The congregations were large, and the sermons and address to the communicants at the Lord's table were solemn and appropriate. On the following Wednesday about 250 friends partook of tea in the British school-rooms, after which they retired to the chapel, where a devotional parting service was held. Several brethren having engaged in prayer, Mr. Scorey concluded the meeting, delivering an affectionate farewell address. During Mr. Scorey's pastorate at Wokingham a new chapel has been erected and paid for. He leaves the church in a hopefully progressive state, and the separation of minister and people is amicable, and a small token of esteem is presented to him on his leaving. PROVIDENCE CHAPEL, CANTON.-Services in connection with the recognition of Mr. D. B. Jones, of Pontypool College, were held on the 13th and 14th of August, when the following ministers officiated. On the Sunday, both morning and evening, two powerful discourses were delivered by the Rev. Isaac James, of Beaumaris. On the Monday, at half-past ten, the devotional exercises having been conducted by the Rev. M. Starling, of Mr. Spurgeon's College, a very elaborate discourse was delivered by the Rev. N. Thomas, of Cardiff, on the "Nature of the Christian Church;" then the usual questions were proposed, and the ordination prayer offered, by the Rev. Rhys Griffiths, of Cardiff; after which the Rev. Dr. Thomas, President of Pontypool College, delivered the charge to the young pastor. At two o'clock the ministers and friends met together, when two very suitable addresses were given by the Revs. N. Thomas and Dr. Thomas, after which the friends sat down to tea, purposely got up to welcome the newly-elected pastor. At halfpast six the Rev. Alfred Tilly, of Cardiff, delivered the charge to the church. The meetings throughout were well attended, and were of a most interesting and edifying character. LOWER WESTWOOD, WILTS.-The opening services of the Baptist chapel, Lower Westwood, Wilts, which is in connection with Back-street Baptist chapel, Trowbridge, were held on Wednesday, August 9th. The opening service was commenced by the Rev. J. Moss, of Trowbridge, reading the Scriptures and offering prayer. The sermon was preached by the Rev. W. Barnes, pastor of the parent church. Tea was provided in a spacious tent, and a public meeting was held in the same place, at which the Revs. J. Moss, and D. Wassell, of Bath, gave energetic and stirring addresses. Mr. W. H. Hayward and Mr. J. Payne, of Trowbridge, who have been principally engaged in directing the erection of the chapel, also spoke. The building gave great and general satisfaction to the numerous visitors who inspected it, the universal conclusion being that it was well and cheaply built. The total cost is not expected to exceed £130, nearly all of which has been subscribed in Trowbridge, Bradford, and Westwood itself. On Tuesday, August 8th, centenary services were held in the Baptist chapel in this village, to commemorate the hundredth year of opening the present building. In the afternoon an admirable sermon was preached by the Rev. Hugh Stowell Brown, of Liverpool, from Matt. xxviii. 20. A tea-meeting was then held in a marquee in a field adjoining the chapel, as also in the school-room, and about 300 friends assembled. After the tea a lecture was delivered in the chapel by the Rev. H. S. Brown, subject-" Common Sense." The attendance of neighbouring ministers and friends was large, and a liberal collection was made towards some necessary improvements in connection with the chapel. The Revs. C. J. Middleditch, of Blockley; W. R. Irvine, of Ascott; and J. Allen, B.A., of Hook Norton; with the pastor, the Rev. J. M'Michael, B.A., took part in the engagements of the day. BIRCHES-LANE, DERBYSHIRE.--On Monday, Aug. 14, the corner-stone of a new Baptist chapel at Birches-lane, near Amberrow, Derbyshire, was laid by Richard Harris, Esq., of Leicester, assisted by the Rev. Thomas Lomas, of Leicester; the Rev. G. Needham, of Ripley; and J. Baxendale, of Derby. Under the stone was deposited in a bottle an account of the origin of the church, a copy of "The Baptist Reporter," "The Church," and "The Sword and Trowel." At four o'clock an excellent tea was provided by the members and friends, and after tea a public meeting was held, when Mr. Bembridge, of Ripley, took the chair, and addresses were delivered by the Revs. T. Lomas, G. Needham, J. Baxendale, and Mr. Lomas, of Swanwick. The day was favourable, and all the proceedings were very encouraging to the friends. HOLYWELI, FLINTSHIRE.-On the 26th and 27th of August, special services were held at the above place, on the occasion of the settlement of the Rev. Owen Davies, of the Baptist College, Llangollen, as pastor of the Baptist church there. The Rev. R. Jones, of Llanllyfni, delivered an address on the "Nature of a Christian Church"; the Rev. Dr. Prichard, of Llangollen, put the usual questions, which were satisfactorily answered; then the Rev. R. Ellis, of Llanefydd, offered the ordination prayer; the Rev. Hugh Jones, classical tutor of Llangollen, preached on the duty of the minister, and the Rev. Dr. Prichard on that of the church. The other services were conducted by the same ministers. Mr. Davies settles in an important sphere with encouraging prospects. BLACKFIELD-COMMON, HANTS. -- Circumstances having compelled the Rev. J. Light to resign his office as pastor of the Baptist church, Blackfield-common, Hants, a meeting for the purpose of enabling the surrounding ministers and others to bear testimony with reference to bis ministerial and Christian character, and then affectionately to bid him farewell, was held on Tuesday evening, September 5th. After a tea, at which a goodly number sat down, a public meeting was held. The Rev. J. B. Burt, of Beaulieu, took the chair, and addresses were delivered by the Rev. W. H. Bower, of Hythe (Independent); the Rev. W. C. Jones, of Lymington; and the Rev. R. Cavan, of Southampton. During the evening a purse containing a small sum was presented to Mr. Light as a token of respect and esteem from a few friends. OADBY, LEICESTERSHIRE.-Services have been held lately to celebrate the jubilee of the Baptist church at Oadby, near Leicester, and to liquidate the chapel debt, which was £77. The sum of £41 was privately contributed by friends in the village. The Rev. T. R. Evans, of Countesthorpe, and the Rev. J. A. Pictony M.A., of Leicester, preached, and there was also a public meeting, Mr. R. Harris in the chair. Addresses were delivered by the Revs. J. A. Picton, M.A., R. Cecil, Messrs. J. Bennett and S. Baines, of Leicester, C. Bassett, of Countesthorpe, E. Gilbert, of Oadby, and others. The collection reduced the sum required to within £6, which was kindly contributed by Mrs. Horspool, Mr. C. Bassett, J. Bennett, R. Harris, and C. Stevenson. SOUTH MOLTON. DEVON.-On Tuesday, September 5th, the foundation stone of a new house, intended as a parsonage for the Baptis minister for the time being, at South Molton was laid by T. Blackwell, Esq., of Barnstaple. The house is being built on a piece of ground adjoining the Baptist chapel, on property invested in trust for the Baptist Church. A few persons assembled on the ground at half past two, a few verses were sung, and the Rev. J. Martin offered prayer; Mr. Blackwell then gave an address, and a few donations having been laid on the stone. the Rev. M. Saunders gave a brief history of the Baptists in South Molton. USK, MONMOUTHSHIRE.-On the 4th of September, Mr. D. Morgan, of Pontypool College, was ordained pastor of the church at Usk. Services such as are usual on such occasions were conducted by the Revs. J. Jones, of Llangwm: C. Griffiths, of Merthyr; Dr. Thomas, of Pontypool; J. Lewis, of Tredegar; and G. Thomas, of Usk. Mr. Thomas commenced his labours here in May. Since that time the aspect of the cause has been improving, and there are cheering signs of future success. MINISTERIAL CHANGES.-The Rev. E. Man. ning, who has laboured during the last fortynine years at Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, has announced his intention, in consequence of increasing infirmities, to resign the pastorate on the first Sunday of October next.The Rev. A. W. Heritage, of Naunton, Gloucestershire, has received a cordial and unanimous invitation from the church at Canterbury, and entered upon his stated labours on the second Sabbath in September. -Mr. John Downie, jun., from the Baptist Association of Glasgow, has accepted a call to the pastorate of the Baptist church at Eyemouth, Berwickshire.-The Rev. E. Jones, late of Trowbridge, Wilts, has received and accepted a cordial and unanimous invita tion to the pastorate of the Baptist church. West Malling, Kent.-The Rev. W. Lione! Green, of Regent's Park College, has accepted a cordial and unanimous invitation from the church at Middleton-in-Teesdale, and has entered upon his labours.-The Rev. W. B. Bliss, of Pembroke Dock, has accepted the invitation from the church at Hemel Hemp stead, Herts, and will remove to his new pas torate early in October.-The Rev. J. Lee, of Moulton, after eleven years of faithful service, has resigned his charge, and accented the earnest invitation of the church at We-ton-by-Weedon, to the pastorate vacant by the death of the late Rev. R. Pyne. He will enter upon his stated labours about the middle of October. VOL. VIII.-NEW SERIES. [NOVEMBER 1, 1865. THE CHURCH. "Built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone." NOVEMBER, 1865. MEMORY IN ANOTHER WORLD. BY THE REV. A. MACLAREN, B.A. "Abraham said, Son, remember!"-LUKE xvi. 25. THAT is a very striking thought, that Christ, if he be what we suppose him to be, knew all about the unseen present which we call the future, and yet that such constant silence marked him in reference to it. Seldom is it on his lips at all. Arguments drawn from another world he has very few of. Sometimes he speaks about it, but rather by allusion than by anything like an explicit revelation. This parable out of which my text is taken, is almost the most definite and continuous of his words about the invisible world; and yet all the while it lay there before him; and standing on the very verge of it, with it spread out clear before his gaze, he reads off but a word or two of what he sees, and then shuts it in in darkness, and says to us, in the spirit of a part of this parable, "You have Moses and the prophets-hear them: if these are not enough, it will not be enough for you if all the glories of heaven and all the ghastliness of hell are flashed and flaming before you." And yet, if we are to "prophesy according to the proportion of faith," it will never do that we should leave out altogether references, and such motives as may be based upon them, to a future life in its two departments; only, I think, we ought always to keep them in the same relative amount to the whole of our teaching in which Christ kept them. This parable, seeing that it is a parable, of course cannot be trusted as if it were a piece of simple dogmatic revelation, to give us information, facts, so as to construct out of it a theory of the other world. We are always in the double danger, in parables, of taking that for drapery which was meant to be essence, and taking that for essence which was meant to be drapery. And so I do not profess to read from this narrative of my text any very definite and clear knowledge of the future; but I think that in the two words I have ventured to take as a text, we get the basis of very impressive thoughts with regard to the functions of memory in another world. 2 "Son, remember!"-It is the voice, the first voice, the perpetual voice, which meets every man when he steps across the threshold of earth into the presence chamber of eternity. All the future is so built upon and interwoven with the past, that for heaven and for the lost alike this word might almost be taken as the motto of their whole situation, as the explanation of their whole condition. Memory in another world is indispensable to the gladness of the glad, and is the darkest and deepest note in the sadness of the lost. Of course, I do not need, I presume, to dwell at any length on the simple introductory thought, that there must be memory in a future state. Unless there were remembrance, there could be no sense of individuality. A man cannot have any conviction that he is himself, but by constant, though often unconscious, operation of this subtle act of remembrance. There can be no sense of personal identity except in proportion as there is a clearness of recollection. Then again, if that future state be a state of retribution, there must be memory; otherwise, there might be punishment, and there might be reward; but the why and the wherefore of either would be entirely struck out of a man's consciousness, unless memory existed and had received a force altogether unknown to it in its present operations. If, then, we are to rise from the grave the same men that we are laid in it, and if the future life has this for its characteristic, that in both of its halves it is a state of recompense and reward, or of retribution and suffering-then for both the clearness and constant action of remembrance is certainly and inseparably needed. But it is not to the simple fact of its existence that I want to direct your attention now. I wish, rather, to suggest to you one or two modifications under which (it seems to me) it must work in another world. When men remember there, they will remember very differently from the way in which they remember here. Let us look at these changes in Remembrance constituting it, on the one hand, an instrument of torture; and, on the other, a foundation of all our gladness. First, in another state, MEMORY WILL BE SO WIDENED AS TO TAKE IN THE WHOLE LIFE. I believe that what a man is in this life, he is more in another that tendencies here become results yonder-that his sin, that his falsehood, that his whole moral nature, be it good or bad, becomes there what it is only striving to be here. We believe that in this present life our capacities of all sorts are hedged in, limited, thwarted, damped down, diluted, by the necessity which there is for their working through this material body of ours. We believe that death is the heightening of a man's stature-if he be bad, the intensifying of his badness; if he be good, the strengthening of his goodness. We believe that the moral nature, the contents of the intellectual nature, the capacities of that nature also are all increased by the fact of having done with life, and having left the body behind. It is, I think, the teaching of common sense, and it is the teaching of the Bible. True, that for some, that growth will only be a growth unto greater 'power of feeling greater sorrow. The man (if I may take such an illustration) grows up into a Hercules; but it is only that the Nessus shirt may wrap round him more tightly, and may gnaw him with a fiercer agony. But whatever be the condition in regard to true nobleness, in regard to salvation, or being lost he that dies is greater than when yet living; and all his powers are intensified and strengthened by that awful experience and whatever it brings with it. Memory partakes in the common quickening. There are not wanting analogies and experiences in our present life to let us see that, in fact, when we talk about forgetting, we mean, not the opposite of remembering, but the cessation of remembrance. Everything which a man does leaves its effect with him for ever, just as long-forgotten meals are in your blood and bones to-day. Every act that a man performs is there. It has photographed itself upon his soul, it has become a part of himself; and though, like a newly-painted picture, after a little while the colours go in -why is that? Only because they have entered into the very fibre of the canvas, and have left the surface because they are incorporated with the substance, and they want but a touch of varnish to flash out again! A man forgets nothing, in the sense of not being able, some time or another, to recall it; a man forgets much-that is to say, ceases to remember it. But oh! we know, in our own case, how strangely there come swimming up before us, out of the depths of the dark waters of oblivion—as one has seen some bright shell drawn out from the sunless depths, and gleaming white and shapeless far down before we had it on the surfacehow there come rising up to us, out of the dim waters of forgetfulness, past thoughts, we know not whence or how. Some one of the million of hooks with which all our life is furnished has laid hold of some subtle suggestion which has been enough to bring them up into consciousness, and we said we had forgotten them! What does it mean? Only that they had sunk into the deep, beneath our consciousness, and lay there to be brought up when needful. There is nothing more strange than the way in which some period of my life, that I suppose to be an entire blank if I will think about it for a little while-begins to glimmer into form. Just as the features of a photograph under the chemical solution, so the mind has the strange power, by fixing the attention (as we say-a short word which means a long, mysterious thing) upon that past that is halfremembered and half-forgotten, of bringing it into clear consciousness and perfect recollection. And, there are instances, too, of a still more striking kind, familiar to most of us-how, in what people call morbid states, states of disease and the like, when the soul at any rate is working more free from the limitation of the body than it does in health, men remember their childhood, which they had forgotten for long years. You may remember that old story of the dying woman beginning to speak in a tongue unknown to all that stood around her bed. When a child, she had learned some northern language, in a northern land. Long before she had learned to shape any definite remembrances of the place, she had been taken away, and had not used but had forgotten the speech: but at last there rushed up again all the old passionate memories, and the tongue of the dumb was loosed, and she spake! People would say, "The action of disease." It may be, but that explains nothing. It is the soul working freer from the body. This at any rate it shows—you forget nothing; it will come out some day! Our fragmentary recollections of the past, the recollections that we have now, stand up above the waters of forgetfulness, like some islands in an archipelago, that were once the summits of neighbouring mountains which were rooted together at their base. The junction is there yet. The solid land is down there |