FOR JUNE, 1833.

BIOGRAPHY.

MEMOIR OF THE REV. HENRY SERGEANTSON HOPWOOD: BY HIS SON, H. HOPWOOD.

HENRY SERGEANTSON HOPWOOD was born in the city of Lincoln, October 22d, 1785. His paternal grandfather and grandmother were members of the Wesleyan-Methodist society; and, after adorning the doctrine of God our Saviour, by a steady and exemplary piety, through the course of nearly half a century, died in peace. His father was a military officer, highly respected for his personal excellence and professional abilities. He died during the infancy of his son Henry, leaving him to the care of an affectionate mother, who, shortly after her husband's death, removed to Rochdale. Here she commenced an attendance on the ministry of the Wesleyan Methodists, taking her three fatherless children with her to the house of God. Although a woman of strictly moral character, she had hitherto lived a stranger to the faith of the Gospel, and the attendant blessings of salvation. The death of her husband proved a sanctified affliction. By directing her attention to the solemnities of death, and the realities of a future state, it taught her the emptiness of earthly objects, and the vanity of the creature, scattered the illusions by which the world had fascinated her heart, and thus awoke within her a desire of salvation, and inspired her with a resolution to seek the Lord, if haply she might find him. She sought him not in vain. Her heavenly Father had bruised, that he might heal; he had smitten, that he might bind her up; and when she turned at his providentia reproof, and sought his pardoning mercy with a broken and a contrite heart, he welcomed the returning penitent, and made her "accepted in the Beloved." Being thus graciously forgiven, and born from above, she gave her heart to God, and joined herself to his people; to whom she remained united in the sacred bonds of church fellowship for upwards of forty years. By a second marriage she became a subject of no little persecution for righteousness' sake; but in the day of her trouble she called upon her God, and he enabled her to glorify him in the fires. She came out of the furnace purified from earthly adhesions, and made meet for that blessed inheritance, "where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest." That inheritance she has now received; into the joy of her Lord she has now entered. She sowed to the Spirit, and now reaps the reward. She was faithful unto death, and now wears the crown. She departed to be with Jesus, August, 1830.

VOL. XII.

Third Series. JUNE, 1833.

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To return to the subject of this memoir. At Rochdale he was placed at a respectable school, where he received a classical education. He was diligent and persevering in the pursuit of knowledge, and laid the foundation of those future studious habits by which he was distinguished through life. But though his youthful mind was thus imbibing the knowledge necessary to qualify him for the future avocations of life, it remained destitute of that knowledge which alone is "life eternal." Yet he was not unvisited by the Spirit of grace. His mother having regularly taken him with her to the chapel, he was brought under the preaching of the word of life, and the salutary influence of public worship, before he reached his fourth year. The Lord was graciously pleased to open his infant heart, and even at that early age to impress it with a sense of eternal realities. These serious impressions were never wholly effaced; but, on the contrary, were at all times so far influential as to restrain him from those fatal sallies into impiety into which so many are urged by the native depravity of their hearts, when unrestrained by that divine influence which generally attends and honours religious instruction.

At an early period of his life, I believe about the age of fourteen, be became convinced of his depravity and danger as a fallen child of Adam, and earnestly desired to obtain the pardon and holiness proffered in the Gospel. Whilst some young men were holding a prayer-meeting in a house, he passed at the time when one of them was engaged in prayer, who had formerly been his companion in worldly amusement. Arrested by the voice, he entered; and the prayer of his companion was made effectual to awaken his soul from its spiritual slumbers, to excite his fears, to impress him with a deep conviction of sin, and call forth the anxious inquiry, "What must I do to be saved?" From this time he began to meet in class, and derived much spiritual profit from that means of grace. This awakening was, however, but the incipient work of the Spirit; one of those "gentle trials" which he makes "upon the spirits of men, and which, if men comply with them, may lead on to those which are more powerful and effectual." It was partly yielded to, partly resisted; and the natural consequence was, that his convictions began to fade away, and his desires for pardon and holiness became languid and intermittent. To him at that time it might justly have been said, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God." He esteemed religion, loved its ordinances, and would willingly have been made a subject of its saving power, if that great moral change could have been wrought within him by some mighty and irresistible agency, operating upon him as its passive subject. Here there was, in some respects, a nearness to the kingdom of grace, which excited the hopes and encouraged the faith of his friends. But to him, as to many, the foundation laid in Zion, as the only hope of the perishing sinner, was a stone of stumbling. He did not see that he was shut up unto the faith he had yet to learn the utter helplessness and hopelessness of his condition, and the necessity of submission to the

righteousness of God. Hence he attained not the object of his desire, because he sought it not by faith in the atoning blood of the Son of God. Here was a distance from the kingdom of grace, which left him still under the condemning sentence of the law, and the dominion of an unrenewed heart. In the spring of 1802 he was awakened far more powerfully than before; and his soul was filled with conviction, sorrow, and alarm. He was slain by the law; sin revived, and he died. His convictions of sin were at this time exceedingly poignant and distressing. He was truly broken-hearted and contrite, and earnestly desirous of salvation. His conflicts were severe in the extreme. The enemy came in like a flood, and powerfully assaulted him with infidel principles. Thus pierced with conviction, thus filled with sorrow and alarm, thus harassed by temptation, he felt life to be a burden, and was strongly tempted to extinguish his miserable life by the hand of violence. From this act he was mercifully restrained by his Redeemer, who, seeing in him the purchase of his own most precious blood, arrested his hand, and changed his heart. Hitherto a considerable degree of despair had been mingled with his sorrow; but now the promises of the Gospel began to cheer his soul, and inspire him with hope. Renouncing all trust and reliance, except in Him who proclaims himself as the sinner's only hope and Saviour, he sought for pardon, and obtained it. The Lord was merciful to his unrighteousness, and his sins and iniquities he remembered no more. He spoke peace to his soul, and gave him the Spirit of adoption, enabling him to call God, “Abba, Father."

The same year one of his brethren in the ministry heard him relate his religious experience at a love-feast, and bear a clear and explicit testimony to the pardoning mercy of the Lord. Through life he possessed an abiding consciousness of his acceptance with God, and enjoyed that peace of mind which springs from a sense of reconciliation to the Father of spirits, and alliance with him. His mind was never crossed with doubt as to the reality of his conversion. In some instances of conversion an obscurity rests upon the momentous period of that change, arising from indistinct or erroneous views of the nature of regeneration and its evidences, and often impairing the spiritual enjoyments of future years. No obscurity of this kind overhung the mind of my father. In the solemn hour of his spiritual birth he was clearly conscious of a transition from death unto life; from a state of condemnation to a state of acceptance. His former sense of guilt, and his apprehension of the wrath of God, were removed by a sense of pardon and reconciliation, as joyous and consoling as the other had been alarming and oppressive. At the last lovefeast which he conducted in Halifax chapel, Nottingham,-a love-feast at which God was eminently present to bless, he stated, in connexion with other points of religious experience, that he retained as clear a remembrance of the time and circumstances of his conversion as if they had occurred but yesterday.

Soon after his conversion, he began to feel a desire to proclaim to