Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 1.djvu/245

  and the fervid, active one of the present. O would that we could with like patience possess our souls!”

With regard to the system of Mr Sortain’s ministry, it suggests the usual difference of opinion whether every sermon to an organised congregation should contain an offer of free pardon and salvation to sinners, or whether each sermon should be a fragment of progressive religious instruction. On the one system the conviction is that, considering that to one or more of the hearers any sermon may be his last, a minister should always have one paragraph in his sermon stating the Gospel offer. On the other system, a knowledge of the Gospel offer is distinctly assumed, and it is judged to be inexpedient to be always laying the foundation and abridging the time to be spent in building. The latter has often been the idea of young men, and may sometimes have seemed to be Mr Sortain’s idea, his stock of knowledge being extensive and always ready to his hand. This may have occasioned the criticism of the younger John Clayton, written when that venerable divine was eighty years of age. It was not Mr Sortain’s lot to reach the confines of old age. Of a delicate frame, and under the pressure of too abundant and continuous labours, he died in his fifty-first year, on 16th July 1860. What Mr Clayton wrote of him from Torquay, 5th September 1860, was as follows:—

I have quoted the above in order to give the reply of Mr Aveling, the biographer of the Claytons:—

Mr Sortain was buried in his favourite churchyard of Hove, near Brighton. On his tombstone is this epitaph:—

In his own church a tablet was erected —

&#42;&#8270;* Mr. Sortain’s serviceable literary career began with Reviews for the British Critic. He was the author of the article on “Bentham’s Deontology” in the Edinburgh Review (1835) and of the article on Lathbury’s “History of the English Episcopacy” in the same Review (1836). He published a “Funeral Sermon on Rev. Henry Mortlock,” 1837; “Lectures on Romanism and Anglo-Catholicism,” 1841; “Life of Lord Bacon” (Religious Tract Society); “Hildebrand and the Excommunicated Emperor,” a tale, 1850; “Count Avensberg and the Days of Luther,” a tale, 1852; “Sermon on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” 1852. These varied performances were seasonable, having been suggested by the wants of the time. He had planned a work which should take a permanent place in literature, namely, “The Life of Grotius;” and in his search for materials, he had discovered twenty-three 