"Hereafter, I believe, some metaphysical Columbus will arise, traverse vast oceans of thought, and explore regions now undiscovered, to which our little minds and weak ideas do not enable us to soar."--_Samuel Drew._ SAMUEL DREW. The life of Samuel Drew, the author of a once famous book, "The Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul," is in some respects as remarkable as that of William Gifford,[32] and in others even more so. For Drew, unlike Gifford, received no collegiate training, nor was he ever favored with the rudiments of education in an ordinary boys' school. In his childhood he was sent to a school along with his brothers, but his childish indifference to learning and his removal before he was eight years of age prevented his making any progress worth speaking of. His life, published by his son, speaks of him, with perfect truth, as the "Self-Taught Cornishman." [32] See Chapter IV., _William Gifford_. His reply to Paine's "Age of Reason," and his book on the "Immortality of the Soul," both of which were written and issued from the press during his life as a shoemaker, brought him into notoriety, and obtained for him a name as an acute thinker and able controversialist. He afterward published several theological works of great merit, edited and wrote the chief portion of a history of Cornwall, and finally became an editor on the staff of the Caxton press in Liverpool and London. His contributions to the literature of his own religious denomination, the Wesleyan Methodists, were very numerous; and for many years he was a constant writer in the _Eclectic Review_. From the beginning to the close of his public life he was held in high esteem as a preacher in the "circuits" of Cornwall, Liverpool, and London. The two universities of Aberdeen and London paid him a valuable compliment; the one conferring on him the degree of A.M., and the other, through certain members of the council, requesting him to be put in competition for the Chair of _Moral Philosophy_. But before all these things he was an earnest, high-souled, useful Christian man, who found his principal delight in diffusing around him the influence of a good example and a benevolent Christ-like spirit. His best memorials were inscribed on the hearts of the people among whom he spent his valuable life. His writings may now be but little read, and his name but little known outside the Christian community to which he was attached, yet he made a record as a faithful servant of God that will never perish, and obtained a memorial for his name that is safe against all the influence of time and change.