John and his sister were stanch Presbyterians--are commemorative of the festival-days of the English Church. There are hymns for Passion Friday, for Christ’s Incarnation-day, for Circumcision-day, and for Christmas:--a proof that he must have had little in him of that abhorrence of Prelacy which characterized most of the Presbyterians of his time. And he seems, too, to have been of a more tolerating spirit; and, in the simple benevolence of his heart, to have come perhaps as near the truth on some dark points as men considerably more skilled in dialectics, and more deeply learned. “There are some people,” remarks the querist in one of his catechisms, “who say that those who have never heard of Christ cannot be saved?” “It is surely not our business,” is the reply, “to search into the deep things of God, except so far as He is pleased to reveal them; and, as He has not revealed to us that He condemns all those who have not heard of Christ, it is rash to say so, and uncharitable besides.”[9] One of the most curious poems in the manuscript, is a little piece entitled “An Imagination on the Thunder-claps.” It was written before the discoveries of Franklin; and so the imagination is rather a wild one--not wilder, however, than some of the soberest speculations of the ancients on the same phenomena. The green hillock on this occasion appears to have been both his Observatory and his Parnassus;--he seems to have watched upon it every change of the heavens and earth, from the first rising of the thunder-clouds until they had broken into a deluge, and a blue sky looked down on the red tumbling of streams as they leaped over the ridges, or came rushing from out the ravines. Though quite serious himself, his uncouth phraseology will hardly fail in eliciting the smile of the reader. AN IMAGINATION ON THE THUNDER-CLAPS. Lo! pillars great of wat’ry clouds On firmament appear, And mounting up with curléd heads, Towards the north do steer. East wind the same doth contradict, And round and round they run; And earth and sea are dark below, And blackness hides the sun. Like wrestling tides that in the bay Do bubble, boil, and foam, When seas grow angry at the wind, And boatmen long for home; Ev’n so the black and heavy clouds Do fierce together jar-- They meet, and rage, and toss, and whirl, And break, and broken are. Up to the place where fire abides These wat’ry clouds have gone And all the waters which they hold Are flung the fire upon. And the vex’d fire boils in the cloud, And lifts a fearful voice, Like rivers toss’d o’er mighty rocks, Or stormy ocean’s noise.