"I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the public. We want such men to rescue this _enlightened age_ from general irreligion." I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days, but at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries his fame was great and deserved. As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence, Coleridge estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy Taylor. When Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests, and England alone of European countries still stood erect, uninvaded and undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert Hall's place of worship on the eve of their departure to Spain. The occasion was memorable and moving, and the preacher's splendid periods deserve to be preserved from oblivion:-- "By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually extinguished; the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the free towns of Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are the only people in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of equal laws and a free constitution. Freedom, driven from every spot on the Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she always chose for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here, and threatened with destruction. The inundations of lawless power, after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and we are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture where it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopylæ of the universe. "As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race; for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the latest posterity shall be born; their fortunes are entrusted to your care, and on your conduct at this moment depends the colour and complexion of their destiny. If liberty, after being extinguished on the Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence is it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night that will invest it?