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THE

Imperial Magazine;

OR, COMPENDIUM OF

RELIGIOUS, MORAL, & PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE.

APRIL.] "PERIODICAL LITERATURE IS THE GERM OF NATIONAL LEARNING."

MEMOIR OF THE REV. DANIEL ISAAC.

(With a Portrait.)

WHEN a biographer attempts to catch the likeness of a living character, who was never solicited to sit to the task, and who, if requested, would modestly decline, he should, in addition to the greatest precision, have at immediate command much quickness of perception, that every feature and peculiarity may be instantly caught, as the subject, unconscious at the moment of the design of the artist, flits before the eye. The same diffi. culties are not to surmount in other cases, as in this,-when, for instance, a father sits to his son, or one friend to another; or, in other words, when the subject himself cautiously deals out select materials for the composition, furnishing not only the easel, the canvass, the stretching frame, palette, and pencil, but even descending to the sponge on the one hand, in order to wipe off any imperfection, and ascending to the colours on the other, not forgetting the tulip and the rose, which never fail to bring with them the breath of spring. Self-furnished tints are invariably improved by admixtion, by softening and toning down with colours of a sedater character; for whatever may be the boast of disinterested friendship, it will be generally found to be more kind than honest, and will withhold from the canvass those broad masses of shade, which go to complete the picture, and give full effect to the sudden openings and streaks of light, flickering like patches of sun-shine over the face of a landscape.

In the present instance, and it may serve as an apology for any apparent poverty of incident, though more might have been added-in the present instance it may not be improper to state, that a thorough knowledge of Mr. Isaac's hostility to appear in public, like others whose memoirs have often been published, prevented all personal communication with him on the subject; and than himself, no one will be more surprised to find that he is both in letter-press and copperplate. He has been caught flying, but caught by those who have been on the wing with himself; and while they have been toiling for the gratification of his numerous friends, without any expenditure of 136.-VOL. XII.

[1830.

time or talent of his own, he ought not to be displeased with that gratification, though at the expense of a little personal feeling. His own modesty, not to notice other reasons, leads him to resist the solicitations of appearing elsewhere; and his real worth, without his own knowledge, and consequently consent, brings him forward here, brings him forward as a man, a christian, a talented minister of God, and a profound controversialist.

Still however, though the subject of the present memoir is to be contemplated as a whole, and the whole can only be constructed out of the detail, it is not so much with his private character as a christian, that we feel ourselves concerned, as with his character in the capacity of a public teacher from the pulpit and from the press. In reference to the latter, he is public property, and here it is that we find our justification for the public part which we now take; and as it regards the former-christian character, his admission to the sacred office among the body to which he belongs, together with his continued union, are sufficient securities against what suspicion might surmise or malice invent ;-a body, to its honour be it proclaimed! rigid in its adherence to the sacred writings as a guide, in keeping the WAY as narrow for the walk of its members, as the GATE is strait on their entrance.

Mr. DANIEL ISAAC was born about the

year of our Lord, 1780, at Caythorpe, in Lincolnshire, a small village situated between Lincoln and Grantham, about eighteen miles from the former, and only a few from the latter. Like the founder of Methodism, who also was born and cradled in the same

county with himself, he had a narrow escape from death by fire. This was occasioned by his falling against the grate of the fire-place, when a child; a circumstance of which he has been heard to state, he retains but an indistinct recollection. He was severely burnt, and although he grew away from most of the scars left by the accident, two of them, one on each side of the mouth, are still slightly visible. Both of these, which he is destined to carry with him to the grave, are left as mementos of that overruling providence, which thus snatched him

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Memoir of the Rev. Daniel Isaac.

from death, and threw him back upon life
to be a blessing to its possessors; and the
writer has been reminded of Mr. Isaac's own
temporal deliverance, while hearing him ex-
patiate on the mercy of God in the final
destiny of children, from “It is not the will
of your Father which is in heaven, that one
of these little ones should perish ;”-
-a pas-
sage which will receive no injury by an ac-
commodation even to the present life.

308

noble, independent spirit, which he has exhibited through life, living not upon others, but rejoicing in its own.

Lincolnshire, which has not yet lost the glory of its mud floors, could boast of a village, when Daniel was yet a boy, which had made such slender advances towards the gaieties and fineries of life, that neither gentle nor simple, the wealthy farmer no the thrifty husbandman, indulged themselve with a carpet. A patriarchal simplicity per vaded the domestic circles; the ancien pewter dishes, the heirlooms of the family, shining like silver on the shelves, the clean swept floor of the kitchen, and the still more cleanly scoured boards of the upper chambers, possessed a charm to the eye of purely rural spirits, which no modern decorations could afford, while the drapery of the floors would have been considered an useless expenditure of money, much better employed in purchasing clothing for the poor, than carpets for the house. Caythorpe seems to have been a nook by itself; and the village, which could not furnish books sufficient for the head, thus refused, not from poverty or parsimony, but simplicity and hardihood, a carpet for the foot. Mr. Isaac has been heard to relate, with his characteristic humour and keenness, his first introduction to a carpeted floor, which was about the twelfth year of his age, at Grantham, in the house of a respectable grocer.

Some of the peculiarities of his contemplative mind were manifested at an early period, in the indulgence of various reveries; and once in particular, when between three and four years of age, rolling on the ground, and looking up to the heavens, he was awed and delighted with some of the most sublime thoughts of God, of space, and of eternity, which it is possible for the infant mind to possess, and which, though perfected in riper years, never afterwards so completely absorbed, filled, and affected the soul in the same way. This will be readily credited by the more intellectual of our species, from finding similar coincidences in their own personal history. Such impressions are also partially recognized in the experience of the Hebrew bard, whose words may be considered as divinely poetical: "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.—When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" He acquired an early taste for reading; and this, as in all such cases, excited a restless anxiety for literary food. The village itself could furnish but few supplies of works from the press, and his resources from domestic quarters, had they been much greater than they were, would not have been equal to his wants. Never, however, was a bibliomanist more inventive, more honest, and more independent in procuring means to enable him to go beyond the line of regular and ordinary purchases, than was little Daniel; for while still in boyhood, he spent some of his leisure hours from school in going into the fields and woods to collect goose and crow-quills, and in making pens, which he carried to the nearest market towns, sold them to the stationers and book-encing the gospel of Jesus Christ to be the sellers, and made literary purchases with the cash. In this way he enlarged his little library, looked upon it as chiefly the fruit of his own industry, and quenched his thirst for knowledge at these springs of learning. No conqueror ever returned from the field with the spoils of war, in greater triumph than did our youthful tyro with his books; and here it is that we perceive the buddings of that

His thirst for knowledge was ever on the increase, and his improvement kept pace with the means within his reach. At an early period we find him usher in an academy at Denton, in Lincolnshire; and in the nineteenth year of his age, residing in Nottingham. Here he became acquainted with T. Jerram, Esq. now of Beeston, near Nottingham, with whom he associated as a companion, and slumbered on the same couch. Mr. Jerram, whose brother is a highly gifted clergyman of the established church, and who himself has long been an ornament of christian society, experienced a lively interest in the religious welfare of Mr. Isaac, and invited him to the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. Here he soon found that something more was necessary to form the christian, than moral character; and on experi

power of God to salvation, he united himself to the Wesleyan body. After a residence of between one and two years in Nottingham, he removed to the city of Lincoln, where he kept a seminary for the instruction of young people, acting at the same time in the capacity of a local preacher. While a resident in this city, he was "in labours more abun dant." He taught his pupils in the course

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Memoir of the Rev. Daniel Isaac.

of the week, and the members of the christian church on the Lord's day. It was no unusual thing with him to preach three times, and walk from thirty to forty miles on the christian sabbath; and to add to the toils of the Sunday, a twenty miles' walk from the country to the city, on a Monday morning, to be ready for the reception and instruction of his pupils.

When he had been about two years and a half a member of the Wesleyan society, and had resided about fifteen months in Lincoln, he was called to supply the place of the Rev. John Cricket, in the Grimsby circuit, of which Lincoln itself formed a part. Mr. Cricket was unable to attend to the work of the ministry, owing to declining health; and such was the state of the roads, that the horses were often in danger of being left as fixtures in the mud. Mr. Isaac had acted as a local preacher for the space only of about twelve months before he commenced his itinerant career; and it is no unimportant proof of the value put upon his ministry to find him advanced in the course of one year from a local to a travelling preacher, and called upon to exercise the functions of the latter, in the course of the first year of his itinerancy, in the sanie circuit in which he had exercised his talents in a local capacity, a circuit, which at a more subsequent period, he was again called upon to enter and to superintend.

The circuits, to employ the phraseology of his own community, in which he has successively travelled since 1799, are Louth, Lynn, Yarmouth, Wetherby, York, Newcastle, Shields, Malton, Scarborough, Lincoln, Leicester, Sheffield, Hull, and Leeds, at the last of which places he is now fulfilling the duties of a Wesleyan itinerant minister. At York, he has travelled twice; on one of the occasions two, and on the other three years; and on his removal to Leeds, the York societies strongly petitioned the Conference for him a third time. It was during one of his stations here that he led to the hymeneal altar his present wife, a lady richly meriting what she in fact enjoys, the good will and good word of all who have the happiness of her acquaintance. Since three-years stations became general in the Wesleyan connexion, he has generally enjoyed them; and Hull, one of the last places to yield to this modern regulation, was glad of the opportunity of making Mr. Isaac the first-fruit of its bendings.

Having thus measured our distances, in a hasty run over the scenes of his labour, we shall now return and notice a few of the circumstances which have given rise to some of his works, and notoriety to his name, and

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which otherwise tend to develop his real character, in its bearings upon civil and religious society.

When Mr. Isaac was stationed at Lynn, in 1802 and 1803, Mr. Vidler visited Wisbeach, which was then in the Lynn circuit. This gentleman, while advocating the doctrine of Universal Restoration, frequently made the Methodists the butt of his vituperations. On one occasion, he was heard by Mr. Isaac, who took notes of his sermon, visited Mr. V. the next morning, shewing him what he had penned, and asked him to be candid enough to state whether he had given a correct view of his arguments and objec tions. Mr. Vidler answered in the affirmative. Mr. Isaac then told him, that from the views he entertained of the nature and tendency of the doctrine, he felt it his duty to oppose it, and to guard those who might sit under his ministry against it; further adding, that he purposed to enter into a refutation of it the next Lord's day, and had waited upon Mr. V. for any correction he might offer, as he wished to do him perfect justice in correctly stating what he had advanced. Mr. Isaac accordingly preached against the doctrine, and out of this arose his publication of "Universal Restoration Refuted, in a series of Letters, addressed to Mr. W. Vidler ;"- -a work which bears the exact image and superscription of his own mind, in its endless resources, its deep, acute, varied, and original thinkings.

The Wesleyans, at different periods, and in different places, have not unfrequently become the subjects of public censure, for the noise accompanying several of their meetings. These extravagances, however, which are often the result of inexperience among persons who have been suddenly roused to a sense of danger because of transgression, and received sudden deliverance in consequence of a manifestation of divine mercy, have not been permitted to pass unnoticed and unchecked by the more grave and intelligent members of the body, nor less a matter of regret and abandonment by the persons themselves, when all high-wrought feeling has subsided, and solid progress has been made in the divine life; persons who can afterwards say, in reference to the infancy of both lives they have lived, natural and religious,-" When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." It must not be omitted at the same time, that many of those, properly "without," who rank themselves on the objective side of the question, are such as would have been offended at the noise of a religious assembly

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of old, when all the people, with no ordinary degree of earnestness and emphasis, shouted "AMEN;" or even at a modern christian assembly, entering heartily into the spirit of devotion, during the reading of the Litany of the established church, the soul rising higher and higher as supplication proceeds, till it is somewhat affected like the soul of Him, who, when he was "in an agony, prayed more earnestly."

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there is here a reference to his "Ecclesiastical Claims."

It was during his residence at Leicester, in 1820, &c. that he published "Baptism Discussed: containing Scripture Principles, Precepts, and Precedents, in favour of Baptism of Infants and Little Children." This work came out in a district which might be considered as the garden of persons of directly opposite theological sentiments, and Mr. Isaac, with a view to correct any in the presence, so to speak, of the great impropriety, and yet, at the same time, to and the good Robert Hall and his flock. defend and encourage a hearty response, in | That, however, which might have been chaopposition to ignorant and malevolent cavil- racterised as obtrusive ignorance in others, lers, published, during his first appointment resolved itself into principle in Mr. Isaac, to the York circuit, in 1806, a small tract-principle operating on a fearless, uncomon the origin, meaning, use, abuse, &c. of the word "Amen." This, though replete with judicious remark, is noticed, not so much because of its necessity and seasonableness, though a writer of the puritanic age led the way before him, but because of the grave, deliberate manner in which he proceeds in his ministerial work; his manner, abstractedly viewed, being so dissimilar to what might be expected from its perusal, especially by a person possessed of a fiery spirit; and yet, on a nearer approach, and to a close and solidly devotional observer, so much in character with his ministry, which diverts the eye of a hearer from looking at others, and fixes it upon himself, turning inwardly, and there, from a sight of the hidden abominations of the heart, extorts from its depths, in the midst of its depravity, the heavy and the lengthened groan. A reprint of this tract has been repeatedly urged, and he has had thoughts of enlarging it, and of adapting it more immediately to the present state of the Wesleyan

connexion.

In addition to some excellent discourses on the" Person of Jesus Christ," published when he was in the Newcastle circuit, in 1808 and 1809, in which the divinity of the Son of God is established by scriptural evidence, and by a process of reasoning rarely brought to bear upon the subject in so small a compass, he is the author of several papers in the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, to which latter work he ceased to contribute, (a subject much to be regretted) after the death of the Rev. Joseph Benson, one of the first divines of the day.

Mr. Isaac's next work we purposely omit till nearer the close of this sketch, as it will require a more extended notice, from the personal character involved in it, and the occasion which has been made of it by the timid, the wary, and the ignorant, to draw upon him the vengeance of both church and state. It will be readily perceived, that

promising spirit, which compels personal respect and comfort, the smiles of friendship, in short, every thing on this side of truth and duty, to bend to the publication of that truth, and the performance of that duty. If Mr. Isaac had not had some private reasons for publishing, (of some of which we happen to be in the secret,) abstracted from its being a public question, we are inclined to think that he would not, from his naturally retired character, and from the intelligence and piety with which he was surrounded, in many of the members of the Baptist persuasion, have girded himself for the battle, and entered the field: but since he has actually engaged in the contest, it is not too much to say, that from his peculiar mode of treatment, the controversy assumes a new character in his hand, that there are features given to it which it never had before, or which, if it had, were either ill-placed, disproportionate, wanting in strength and beauty or not sufficiently prominent, and that a reviewer has not gone too far in affirming that the "arguments," employed in the work, "are numerous, strong, and formidable.' A second edition, that was soon called for, stamped a value on the book, which friendship and criticism often strive in vain to impart. But this was Mr. Isaac's work, and search must be made.

The publisher sent an advertisement of it for the cover of an extensively circulated periodical in the metropolis. Among the persons authorised to sit in judgment on advertisements, were some of Mr. Isaac's minor friends, who being unable to find any thing objectionable in the argument or illustrations in the body of the work, gravely started a numerical objection, which they supposed they had discovered in the title page. The consequence was, that the actual advertisement of the work hung in suspense through a few individuals linking their prejudices to a mere matter of business. Besides the impolicy of such an act, few per

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His hostility to forms of Prayer is supported by arguments less convincing to many of his brethren in the ministry than to the people, though conscientiously proposed, and satisfactory to himself. This opposition is stated to have been carried, on one occasion, a little beyond the wishes of his hearers, as well as the deference due to the estab

sons but would have been grateful for the obligation conferred by the publisher, not to say, that a man has certainly a right to tell his tale in his own way, while others retain the privilege of charging him for it. He tells it at his own cost. This did not surprise Mr. Isaac, and had the act been his own, more might have been made of it. It brought him, however, to the final determi-lished custom of the place, by reading the nation, of never more appearing in the inside of the pages of a periodical, by his own voluntary consent, while his works were adjudged as unfit for its cover.

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prayers otherwise than in the order in which they are intended to be read. He has been known to direct the current of opposition against the introduction of the Liturgy, where To Instrumental Music, established Forms attempts have been made; and it is said, of Prayer, Ordination, and Popery, as con- that he has objected to an appointment to nected with the christian church, he has an the metropolis, in consequence of his being, insuperable objection; and to Atheism and | by such appointment, subjected to the neInfidelity, the foes of that church, he is an cessity of either reading them contrary to all avowed enemy. His opposition to the first judgment of propriety, or of opposing them of these has long been known, but it was from principle. At all events, his brethrennot evinced in public debate, till the ques-highly creditable to their respect for his chation of introducing an organ into Brunswick chapel, Liverpool, came before one of the Conferences held at Sheffield, several years back. He was found one of the sturdiest opposers of organ advocates, and they experienced no small trouble in answering his objections.

Having expressed his sentiments in private, and before the Conference, and finding applications multiplying for the erection of organs to the last court of appeal, he stepped forward in the midst of the bustle occasioned by the Leeds case, and published his sentiments to the world in a pamphlet, entitled "Vocal Melody." An attempt was made to answer this pamphlet, but the author was not the man to measure swords with Mr. Isaac. The Leeds separatists calculated on Mr. Isaac as a powerful auxiliary, on his appointment to one of their circuits, from the simple circumstance of his being an anti-organist, but in this they were disappointed; for though he differed in opinion from some of his brethren on the subject in question, yet he had no quarrel with the system itself, but hugged it to his heart with affectionate gratitude for what it had done for himself and for thousands; and full of trust in its capabilities, under God, of still effecting more. But though his hostility extends to all instrumental music in places of worship, (for which no candid man will condemn him till he has first read and answered the pamphlet satisfactorily for himself) yet he is most at variance with the violin in the assemblies of the saints,-"those squeaking shoulder-height things," as he contemptuously denominates them. opposition does not originate in a want of taste for music, for he is seen now and then, in a left-handed way, fingering the piano-forte.

His

racter and feelings-have hitherto avoided stationing him in circuits where the Prayers are read.

Though great talent and learning are employed on the Ordination question, so called, in support of its claims, yet the majority of the Wesleyan Ministers are opposed to it, among whom Mr. Isaac-without at all detracting from the glory of others--may be considered as the leader. At the Conference of 1822, held in London, the subject was formally discussed. Dr. Clarke was President, and could, of course, take no part in the debate. Some of the most highly gifted spoke long, eloquently, and argumentatively in favour of Ordination; others took the opposite side, yet no one was more distinguished than Mr. Isaac on the occasion, who, added to his arguments, had public prejudice in his favour. He warily lagged behind in the march, and after several set speeches had been delivered, rose in the midst of the assembly with his pocket Bible in his hand. Unusual attention was paid; the hopes of numbers hung upon him; he adverted to chapter and verse-stripped the various texts of appeal of the glossaries put upon them—and, by a course of ratiocination,occasionally wedged in by sudden strokes of irony, repartee, and wit, bore away the palm. It is certain that the question was not carried by those who pleaded in its favour.

On the subject of Dissent, Mr. Isaac is an exception, generally speaking, to his brethren; for the Wesleyans are not, in the proper acceptation of the term, Dissenters: and he is as thorough-paced in his protestantism as in his dissenterism,-the Church of Rome and the Church of England meeting with equal courtesy, when their abuses look him in the face.

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