It is usual to commence the biographies of famous men with an account of their honourable or respectable birth and lineage. In an account of Wm. Huntington this feature must be missing. His mother was the wife of a farm labourer who received but eight shillings a week, which (as her son truly said) "is but a poor pittance to bring up a wife and family upon." Moreover, the woman's husband was not the father of Huntington. A parentage more lowly and contemptible in man's estimation it is difficult to conceive. But it is written that God has “chosen the weak things of the world and things which are despised, yea and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.'' John Berridge…

One hundred years ago, on the 1st July 1813, the redeemed spirit of William Huntington was called to the realms of peace and love. “In vain the fancy strives to paint The moment after death”; But one can imagine the joy with which his tempest-tossed soul entered into the “rest which remaineth for the people of God.” He had been a man of war all his life. He was born in penury and in the midst of family strife; his childhood and youth were spent in a perpetual fight for a bare subsistence; after his call by grace he was at war with the world, the flesh, and the devil; and it is difficult to say which of these three was the greatest enemy. Moreover,…

Dear Brother in the Lord Jesus Christ,—I am come at last, according to my promise, which ought to have been fulfilled before. But, alas! I have sometimes leisure upon my hands, but no heart to work; no oil in my cruse, no spring in my well, no overflowings in my cup. At other times the wind blows, the spices flow out, and the spring of divine life rises; when perhaps I want leisure. And sometimes the poor tabernacle is weary or infirm, when much study becomes a weariness to the flesh. Never right, dear Joseph, nor can be; something will ever be out of joint, off the hooks, impaired, or displaced; something wanted, some­ thing missing, something deficient; until that blessed period arrives when we…

Few men have had to encounter such a storm of contempt, slander, enmity, and opposition as that eminent servant of God of whom these Recollections are given to the public by one who was well acquainted with him, and who, like most of those who sat and had profited under his ministry, entertains undiminished for him the warmest affection and deepest respect. The only doubt amongst those who despised and hated him was whether he were a fanatic or an impostor; and some very quietly and curtly settled the doubt to their own full satisfaction by pronouncing him to be both. This seems to have been the opinion of the late Lord Macaulay, who, in his "Essay upon Lord Clive," speaking of the mysterious horror…