have the special pleasure of finding, in all the sentiments of its inmates, a substantial identity with my own. I must tell you that this is indispensable to perfect complacency: at least to me (who cannot enjoy things by halves) it is so. And And may I venture to add, the more so for this reason, because there are few sentiments of which I am tenacious, that have not, as I conceive, some direct concern with the true happiness of human nature. If, therefore, I ever oppose any one's way of thinking, it is not because I think it at war with abstract truth, but because I deem it hostile to their own happiness. For instance, I should think it very needless to reason with a Roman Catholic on the opinion of transubstantiation; but if I found either Roman Catholic or Protestant placing what was outward in the room of what is inward, then, indeed, I should conceive there was a point to be contended for with all the mental strength I should be possessed of. Thus, also, I should feel no great wish to discuss the topic of predestination; for I am persuaded that, too, is almost always a matter of abstract speculation: but where I found any thing whatever substituted in the place of moral righteousness and purity as a ground of confidence, I own all my zeal would be ready to come forward, though I hope still not intemperately.

I beg your pardon for thus slipping from the higher to the lower ground, from my friends to myself; but I honestly own I am not as great an enemy to egotism as the writers of Port Royal were. Excess is, doubtless, to be here especially guarded against; but absolute abstraction is, I

think, a worse excess: I mean the making mere truth talk to us, rather than an embodied spirit like ourselves. I have heard Nicole condemned as dry; and I own, with all his excellences, I have seemed to myself to feel something like this: I now am ready to think it owing to his so steadily keeping himself out of view. This, however, is not what human nature can like. Our sentimental faculties are far stronger than our cogitative; and the best impressions on the latter will be but the moonshine of the mind, if they are alone. Feeling will be best excited by sympathy: rather, it cannot be excited in any other way. Heart must act upon heart and in order to this, the person who addresses you must personify himself in a decent and proper degree to you,-the idea of a living person being essential to all intercourse of hearts. You cannot, by any possibility, cordialise with a mere ens rationis. Even "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us," otherwise we could not "have seen his glory," much less "received of his fulness;" as St. John again seems to imply in the commencement of his 1st Epistle. In all this, however, I am not pleading for any sort of obtrusiveness, but merely against the stated exclusion of both the first and second person in literary intercourse; for you will observe, that where the first is shut out, the second does not readily come in. Every thing, to be sure, may be carried to an extreme, and perhaps nothing more easily than the use of the monosyllable I. There is, however, a degree of dramatic liveliness necessary to the full effect of the plainest prose, if the point in hand has

any concern with our feelings, and such a quality will be scarcely possessed where there is vox et præterea nihil. I am not sure that there is much sense in this plea for egotism, but as I have written it I will let it go.

The mention of dramatic liveliness leads me to revert to a subject which Mrs. — and I were lately conversing on. I had been reading to her a passage in one of Madame de Genlis's "Tales of the Castle," where an account is given of a Moravian settlement in Holland, in which the hero of the tale had for some years found an asylum. And we both agreed, that when once the French shall have caught the true spirit of Christianity, they will be the most powerful instruments of diffusing it that the world could furnish. They possess a faculty of description so vivid, so insinuating, so irresistibly penetrative and magnetic, that when they apply themselves to express those feelings which belong to the new nature, and those results which arise from it, as they have expressed those which belong to the old, Christian piety will have a set of advocates till then unequalled.

Mrs. well observed upon this point, that the many exquisitely pious writers which France had produced, amounted to a sort of pledge of more general excellence and happiness being one day extended through the nation; it being utterly impossible that the good God would not, at one time or other, visit, with more than common favour, a people who, in the midst of general faultiness, had, notwithstanding, furnished such distinguished witnesses to the best of causes.

I conceive, indeed, that we can yet have but very poor ideas of the grandeur of God's designs respecting Christ's kingdom upon earth; and it is remarkable that the most, even of serious Christians, seem to have very slightly adverted to the subject. They have generally confined their view to what is indeed of prime, but not of ultimate importance, the salvation of individuals; and, consequently, have thought comparatively little of that collective salvation which the prophecies of both Testaments authorise us to anticipate. Hence, every thing in the visible Church has been estimated by such persons in proportion to its present effect on individual minds; and, consequently, those less obvious, because more profound, arrangements for influencing and finally transmuting the mass of society, have been, for the most part, undervalued, and frequently condemned as abuses and incumbrances; for example, national establishments. Perhaps, however, if our views were more extended, we should see that not only these, but even the continuance of the Romish religion itself in a portion of the visible Church, have been, and are, serving the great purposes of Heaven in a way that would put many an honest but rash Protestant to the blush. Is it not, for instance, extraordinary, that the Romish Church of France should have abounded so much in the most spiritual writers, while, probably, you could not, and most surely I cannot, name one thoroughly spiritual writer of the French Protestant Church? There may be such, but if you know them, as I have said, you know more than I do.

The great scheme of divine goodness, doubtless, demands essentially that there should be an adequate provision for advancing things toward their destined perfection; but it is, surely, of no less moment, that there should be sufficient means of preserving what has been already attained: the more so, as there may be some danger that benefits already possessed may be lost sight of, in the eager pursuit of new objects. That Protestantism was called into being for the advancement of the Church to higher excellence, and that it will not finally fail of its purpose, we must gratefully acknowledge. But there was a primitive excellence in the Christian church-a sublimity, as well as simplicity of piety; in which, without any puzzle of the head, there was a seraphic glow of heart, a fire of divine love without the smoke of dark dogmas. This pure essence of religion lives and breathes in the ancient writers; but though there are many happy instances of Protestants participating in this principle, and some instances, especially in our own Church, of a perfect exemplification of it; yet most certainly it is not, as yet, the prevailing spirit even of pious Protestants: it is not the natural Protestant turn. It is blessedly enshrined in our Liturgy, like the pot of manna in the tabernacle. Yet I can find the complete resemblance, as I conceive, but in one writer amongst ourselves, and in one amongst the Lutherans:-Jeremy Taylor the one; John Arndt the other. Leighton, indeed, has the spirit in all its primitive ardency; but we see it through a vehicle which disguises it -the Calvinistic theology, which lessened the