ing persons, the number of such is so great in these calamitous times as may render them useful to more than I desire. 3. And if my present grief [the death of his wife] may but excuse the publication, he that needeth them not may let them alone." The renowned author of the "Call to the Unconverted" is too well known and his life was too full of incident to make it necessary to give here more than the merest outline of his personal history. He was born, of godly parents, November 12, 1615, at the village of Rowton, in Shropshire, eight miles west of Shrewsbury, England, a village that has no other distinction. At the age of fifteen he was hopefully converted. He entered on public life, as a schoolmaster, first at Wroxeter, and then at Dudley, Worcestershire. In 1638 he was ordained to the ministry by Bishop Thornborough, at Worcester. He accepted (1639) an invitation from the church of Bridgenorth, the second town in Shropshire, to become their pastor. In 1641 he removed to Kidderminster, in the same county. After the breaking out of the civil war he retired, first to Gloucester then to Coventry. In 1642 he became the chaplain of Col. Whalley's regiment. Severe illness at length drove him from the army, and he found a home in the house of Sir Thomas Rous at Rous Leuch, Worcestershire. Here he wrote his "Saints' Everlasting Rest"—the abridgment of which has immortalized his name. He returned to Kidderminster in 1646 and entered on the great work of his life. On the restoration of Charles II. (1660) he was appointed one of the King's chaplains, was offered and declined a Bishopric, and, on the passage of the noted "Act of Uniformity" (1662), became a Non-conformist. Ejected from his pastoral charge, he passed the remaining period of his life in much disquiet and tribulation (2 Cor. xi. 26, 27), employing his brief intervals of repose in the preparation and publication of controversial and practical tracts and larger treatises. He died in great peace, at London, De cember 8, 1691. The products of his pen, according to Calamy, his biog rapher, amount to "four folios, fifty-eight quartos (besides single sermons), forty-six octavos, and twenty-nine duodecimos, with occasional sheets and prefaces to other men's books." In his pastoral work he has probably never been excelled. When he began his ministry at Kidderminster "there was scarcely a house in a street where there was family worship; when he left it, there was scarcely a family in the side of a street where it was not; and whoever walked through the town on the Lord's Day evening, heard everywhere the delightful sound of reading the Scriptures and prayer and praise." His well-known hymn, "My whole, though broken heart, O Lord! From henceforth shall be thine," is a song of tribulation; an utterance of hope in a sea of trouble. Several of the hymns attached to his "Poetical Fragments" were written so as to be sung to either L. M. or C. M. tunes, as in the following specimen of his style: แ "Blest is the man to whom the Lord Imputes not guilt of [any] sin, Nor calls him to a strict account What he hath [thought and] done and been. "Conscience permits us not to think That any [of us] faultless are; Who then can rigorous justice bear At God's most righteous [dreadful] bar? "But blessed be our Redeemer's grace, And washed us in his [precious] blood." BENJAMIN BEDDOME. 1717-1795. MR. BEDDOME was a Baptist minister, as was, also, his father, the Rev. John Beddome (1674-1757). In his early ministry the father was settled at Horseleydown, Southwark, and then at Henly-in-Arden, a market-town, nine miles west of Warwick, England. There Benjamin was born, January 23, 1717. Thence the family removed in 1724 to Bristol, the father having accepted the pastorate of the Pithay church in that town. After a suitable education the son was apprenticed to a surgeon apothecary. He was seriously impressed by a sermon on Luke xv. 7, preached August 7, 1737, in his father's church, by Mr. Ware, of Chesham. At the close of his apprenticeship, having become a subject of divine grace, he determined to enter the ministry, and became a student in Bristol College, under the tuition of the Rev. Bernard Foskett. Thence he repaired to London, and put himself under the instructions of the learned Rev. John Eames, of the Independent Academy, Tenter Alley, Moorfields. He was baptized, in 1739, by the Rev. Samuel Wilson, of the Little Prescot Street Church, Goodman's Fields, and was licensed to preach, February, 1740, by the church of the Rev. Joseph Stennett. At the expiration of three and a half years he was ordained (September 23, 1743) the pastor of the Baptist church, in the village of Bourton-on-the-Water, in Gloucestershire. He married, in 1749, Elizabeth Boswell, of Bourton. Though urged to become his father's colleague at Bristol, and afterward to become the pastor of the largest Baptist church in London (the one where he was baptized), he declined every invitation from abroad, devoting himself to the interests of his country charge, with perfect contentment, and with the happiest results. One of his sons died in 1765, another in 1778, and a third in 1784. At length, after a most faithful ministry of fifty-two years (eighteen with a colleague), he departed this life September 3, 1795. With the exception of the Circular Letter of the Midland Association for 1765, his only publication (1752) was "A Scriptural Exposition on the Baptist Catechism, by way of Question and Answer." Ten years after his decease two volumes of his sermons were published (1805), each entitled "Twenty Short Discourses, adapted to Village Worship; or, The Devotions of the Family." A third volume of "Sermons" appeared in 1835. "Mr. Beddome," says the eminent Robert Hall, “was, on many accounts, an extraordinary person. His mind was cast in an original mould; his conceptions on every subject were eminently his own." "Favored with the advantages of a learned education, he continued to the last to cultivate an acquaintance with the best writers of antiquity, to which he was much indebted for the chaste, terse, and nervous diction, which distinguished his compositions both in prose and verse." "He was eminent for his colloquial powers, in which he displayed the urbanity of the gentleman, and the erudition of the scholar, combined with a more copious vein of attic salt than any person it has been my lot to know." Many of his hymns which have long been in familiar use are selected from "Hymns adapted to Public Worship or Family Devotion. Now first published from the manuscripts of the late Rev. B. Beddome, A.M. With a Recommendatory Preface by the Rev. R. Hall, A.M. London, 1818." More than fifty of these had been contributed (1787) to Dr. Rippon's "Selection," and so had found their way into other Collections and periodicals. The volume contains 822 hymns and 8 doxologies, all original. The most of them were written to be sung in connection with the author's discourses, after the manner of Drs. Watts and Doddridge. Montgomery speaks of his hymns as "very agreeable as well as impressive, being for the most part brief and pithy. A single idea, always important, often striking, and some times ingeniously brought out, not with a mere point at the end, but with the terseness and simplicity of the Greek epigram, constitutes the basis of each piece." His name would deserve to be held in everlasting remembrance if he had left no other memorial of the excellent spirit which was in him than the few humble verses: "Let party names no more," etc. A single specimen-the 557th of his book—will abundantly confirm these commendations: "Jesus, my Saviour! bind me fast, "Draw me from all created good, "Oh! lead me to thy mercy-seat, "Oh! draw me by thy providence, Thy spirit and thy word, From all the things of time and sense, To thee, my gracious Lord!" NATHAN SYDNEY SMITH BEMAN. 1785-1871. THE REV. DR. BEMAN was born in the town of Canaan (now New Lebanon), Columbia County, New York, November 27, 1785. His father, Samuel Beman, was of German descent, highly respectable, of good intellect, a man of business, a gentleman of old-school manners and habits, wearing breeches and buckles to the last (1845), and an |