om any one without respect of
parties. When a house is on fire Churchmen and Dissenters, Methodists
and Papists, Moravians and Mystics are all welcome to bring water. At
such times nobody asks, "Pray, friend, whom do you hear?" or "What do
you think of the five points?"

Even my good friend Canon Benham, who has done so much to sustain the
honourable fame of Cowper, and who would have been here to-day but for a
long-standing engagement, is scarcely fair to Newton. {35} It is not
true, as has been suggested, that Cowper always changed his manner into
one of painful sobriety when he wrote to Newton. One of his most
humorous letters--a rhyming epistle--was addressed to that divine.

I have writ (he says) in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and
as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing
away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penned;
which you may do ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging
about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to
the ground, from your humble me, W. C.

Now, I quote this very familiar passage from the correspondence to remind
you that Cowper could only have written it to a man possessed of
considerable healthy geniality.

At any rate, alike as a divine and as the author of the _Olney Hymns_,
Newton holds an important place in the history of theology, and Olney has
a right to be proud of him. An even more important place is held by
Thomas Scott, {36} and it seems to me quite a wonderful thing that Olney
should sometimes have held at one and the same moment three such
remarkable men as Cowper, Newton, and Scott.

In my boyhood Scott's name was a household word, and many a time have I
thumbed the volumes of his _Commentaries_, those _Commentaries_ which Sir
James Stephen declared to be "the greatest theological performance of our
age and country." Of Scott Cardinal Newman in his _Apologia_ said, it
will be remembered, that "to him, humanly speaking, I almost owe my
soul." Even here our literary associations with Olney and its
neighbourhood are not ended, for, it was within five miles of this
town--at Easton Maudit--that Bishop Percy {37} lived and prepared those
_Reliques_ which have inspired a century of ballad literature. Here the
future Bishop of Dromore was visited by Dr. Johnson and others. What a
pity that with only five miles separating them Cowper and Johnson should
n