Professor Tholuck; and shortly after begins to preach in a neighboring village, residing meanwhile at an orphan-house erected by Professor Franke. But his was not a nature to do things by halves. Drawn into natural sympathy with a neighboring settlement of Moravians, whom Müller so much resembled in thought and spirit, he was prompted to offer himself as a foreign missionary; and learning that the "Continental Society" in England meant to send some one to Bucharest, he repaired at once to the country in which the substance of his days was to be spent, and began to try his hand at that most hopeless of tasks, the conversion of the Jews. This was in the service of a very respectable and efficient organization, we are not told under the auspices of what Church, but apparently not of the Establishment. And yet, though the superintendence was as light as possible, it was more than Müller could bear. It troubled his conscience, that unconverted men should have the ordaining of a converted preacher like himself; that he should be obliged to obey men, and not the Lord alone; that mere rank, without reference to piety, should stand as the figure-head of a ship in which his soul as well as body were to enlist for the voyage of life. His resignation was sent to the managers, with the offer to continue in their service without any salary, provided he could do the work in his own way. Probably they lost nothing in being relieved of one who could not draw in the traces; certainly, so sensitive and imperative a conscience was not made to be the servant of any man or body of men. Thereupon he commences the ministry of Ebenezer Chapel at Teignmouth, on a salary of some forty pounds a year; which he feels obliged after a brief period to relinquish ;-first, because pew-rents made an unchristian distinction between the rich and poor; second, because they often had to be paid at a season when some of the humbler members were in want of means; and last, because the preacher might be tempted to conceal his convictions from fear of losing his salary, as he had himself experienced in adopting Baptist opinions through the study of Scripture. His preaching gave the earliest glimpse of the spirit which distinguished his charitable operations afterward. He left the subject of discourse always to Divine direction.

Sometimes he read twenty chapters prayerfully "before it pleased the Lord to give him a text; nay, many times he has gone to the place of meeting without one, and obtained it only a few moments before he was to speak. The preacher, he concludes, cannot know the particular state of the various individuals who compose the congregation, but the Lord knows it; and if the preacher renounce his own wisdom, he will be assisted by the Lord."

His next step was to marry a sister of that Mr. Groves whose missionary labors Kitto was assisting in Asia, a lady of spirit kindred to his own. With her entire sympathy, he determines to trust himself wholly to the Lord, relinquish all his private means, lay by nothing for the morrow, ask no man for a farthing, depend wholly upon prayer, permit no public appeal in his behalf, and prepare nothing in advance for sickness, increase of family, old age, or any casualty. Upon this literal application of a Christian principle intended to be temporary and specially adapted to the period of persecution, more than twenty-five years of a most useful life have passed happily away. In a different nature, this perpetual uncer- . tainty would create a chronic uneasiness; the body would suffer first, and then the mind; dyspepsia would be followed by derangement; the continually strained cord would snap asunder, and the bow be broken, sadly enough. But this singular being's peace is his perpetual boast. This absolute dependence on daily Providence satisfies him better than a princely income. He rejoices that he has personal tokens of God's love, and that, as he shall ever love on, he can never fail of the same abundant mercy. "It is impossible," he declares in the last part of his narrative, "to describe the holy joy that has often flowed into my soul by means of the fresh answers which I have received from God after waiting upon him for help; and the longer I had to wait, and the greater my need, the greater the enjoyment when at last the answer came. do therefore solemnly declare, that I do not find this life a trying, but a very happy one; and that the longer I go on in the service, the happier I am, and the more I am assured I am engaged as the Lord would have me be."

I

Having apparently failed at Teignmouth, his congregation

diminishing and his own zeal flagging, in 1832 he changes his field of labor to Bristol, and, with a Brother Craig, becomes the regular minister of two chapels, Gideon and Bethesda, supported on this singular plan, not only of voluntary, but of unasked, irregular, and perpetually varying contributions. These contributions were not for the maintenance of their two families alone. Had there been the least taint of selfishness, the stream which flowed into their subscription-boxes would have soon dried up. They were the support of two charity schools, which grew afterwards to six; and, in 1834, of “the Scripture-Knowledge Institution." This was no high-sounding organization, with a splendid prospectus, a corps of wellpaid officials, levying heavy subsidies upon Christian benevolence, and a dazzling front of such distinguished titles as head nearly all the popular charities in Great Britain. The resolution was, first, to contract no debts and establish no salaries; secondly, to reject the assistance of unbelievers, and hold no fellowship with existing associations; thirdly, to rely upon God above in his answers to immediate prayer; and lastly, to do all the work for which the means were thus provided, confident that such work was all that needed to be done. In this childlike trust, this perfect assurance, which never was impaired and never disappointed, the ScriptureKnowledge Institution was so prospered, that, up to 1850, three hundred thousand dollars had been spent in its service, the unsolicited offerings of persons, frequently unknown, through the post-office or in the chapel-boxes, never by any public meeting or personal urgency, and for charities as various as human want and as extensive as the globe. Day Schools and Sunday Schools, Missions and Bible circulation, besides other instrumentalities of spiritual good, have been sustained year after year, with ever-increasing efficiency, by this remarkable man's unaided energy, wisdom, faith, and love. At present, the Institution rather the man under this name -disburses about thirty thousand dollars annually in these widely different yet really co-operating kinds of benevolence.

But the grand achievement of Müller's life is the new Orphan-House at Bristol, now sheltering, probably, a thousand beneficiaries. It has been seen that the closing portion of his

student life was passed in the extensive orphan institution erected by the influence and effort of the devout Dr. Franke. But the idea of a similar charity does not seem to have flashed into his generous heart for years; perhaps because of the vast extent of the Halle asylum, perhaps because he was its inmate only for a few months during the busy commencement of his career. Strange as it may seem, Müller was thirty years old, and had visited the Continent once to select a missionary for the Oriental field, to be supported by English generosity, before the biography of Professor Franke had attracted his attention, or come within his reach.

It seemed like a hand stretched down from the spirit-world to lead him into a new sphere of labor, though already one would have thought his burden greater than he could bear. A "minister at large" in a city of a hundred and forty thousand inhabitants, the director of an energetic Bible distribution, the principal patron of more than forty missionaries, the superintendent of adult day and juvenile Sunday schools, burdened with an annual correspondence of three thousand letters, and interrupted perpetually by such petty details as belong to the reception and disbursement of almost ceaseless charities, his hands would seem to have been already full. And yet this immense amount of work, besides the care of a large orphan institution, seems to have been carried on without jar or break, without confusion or trouble of any kind; and to be still going on prosperously under the shadow of those venerable charities with which old Bristol abounds, uncheered by their favor, unchecked by their frown.

The foremost motive for setting on foot another orphan asylum, where one already existed for females, was, "that God might be glorified, should he be pleased to furnish me the means, on its being seen that it is not a vain thing to trust in him; and that thus the faith of his children may be strengthened." Add to this, the knowledge that six thousand orphans were at that moment imprisoned in different parts of England for petty offences to which they had been tempted through destitution or abandonment; and that Müller en

*The death of the Halle Professor took place in 1787. VOL. LXVII. 5TH S. VOL. V. NO. I.

12

countered many little sufferers in his daily walks, who could not gain admittance into existing asylums for want of friends to press their claims.

His first step was to hold a public meeting. The result of it would have driven any less resolute spirit to despair. He required a thousand pounds to begin with, and he received ten shillings. The first contribution was actually a single shilling; but, true to his artless scheme, no subscription-paper was circulated, no contribution-box passed round, no influential names were employed as a bait to the waiting public. These ten shillings, probably the entire means of somebody poor as himself, showed more faith in the project than any thousand pounds afterwards given. From that moment, December 5, 1835, the stream began to flow, - irregular, under-ground, intermittent, sometimes almost ceasing, but stimulated, as he felt, by prayer so direct that he would even ask the Lord to cause more diamonds to be given, and adapted wonderfully to his pressing necessities. Nearly all the gifts were anonymous; nearly all from Christians of a similar stamp with himself; nearly all from the poor;- the offerings of the entire savings of the seamstress and day-laborer, of family heirlooms, of wedding rings and marriage spoons; and ranging, in the same day, from a few pence to a thousand pounds, from a pewter salt-cellar to a costly gold watch, from a flat-iron to a ton of coals, from a gallon of peas to a stately mansion. Not one individual was ever asked to give; not one paper circulated for contributors' names; not one bribe held out to wealthy patrons; not one meeting called to let the dilatory public know that the rice was entirely gone, the quarter's rent unpaid, the milkman likely to stop in vain at the orphans' door, because even his wholesome beverage was not to be taken on trust. Yet frequently the tide seemed at its ebb; day after day passed without any supply, his own furniture had to be sacrificed, and any other person under his responsibilities would have knelt to men as fervently as he knelt to God. The reason for this singular pertinacity was "simply that this work has for its first and primary end the benefit of the Church at large and of the unconverted world; to show that there is verily a God in heaven, whose ears are open to those who call upon him in the name of the Lord Jesus, and who put their trust in him."