So let a welcome go to the old worthy, our hearts' brother, as he seems
to rise out of his two-centuries' grave. At a time when Satan appears
again to have been let loose for a season, and we know the power of
evil, described in the Apocalypse, in the fearful headway made by the
rebellious conspiracy of his servants, carried to such a point of
success, that statesmen, and scholars, and preachers, even of so-called
liberal views, on the farther shore, bow to it the knee, while the
frowning cannon at every point shows how remote the Millennium still
is,--thanks for the counsels, fit to our need, of a writer still fresh,
while the main host of his contemporaries are long since obsolete, with
dead volumes for their tombs. How many precious quotations from his
leaves we might make, but that we prefer to invite a perusal of the
whole!
We add to our criticism no drawbacks, as we like to give to transcendent
merit unstinted praise, and have really no exceptions in mind, could we
presume in such a case to express any. Looking on the features of
Fuller's portrait, which makes the frontispiece of his work as here
reproduced for us, we note a weight of prudence strangely blending with
a buoyancy of prayer, well corresponding to the inseparable sagacity and
ecstasy of his words, teaching us the consistency of immortal aspiration
with an infallible good-sense,--a lesson never more important to be
learned than now.
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