province, and called it peace; and she still continues to bribe, to anathematize, to send and receive temporal ambassadors; to bear about the metal keys of St. Peter; to wear a crown; to muster an army of soldiers, and to call herself the Catholic church of Christ!

Another point, nearly akin to the foregoing, in regard to which the same plan of caricature has been as signally put in,execution, is the papist expedient concerning the Rule of Faith. It is a short task to find in the Bible the right guaranteed to every individual, to go to the Law and to the Testimony, for himself concerning himself, in all matters of faith and conscience. The duty of searching the scriptures is expressly enjoined; a congregation of people are unequivocally praised for the daily exercise of private judgment, in comparing even apostolic preaching with the Bible; there is a case mentioned where the person must (comparatively) hate father and mother, husband or wife, brothers and sisters, to obey the word of God, speaking in his own conscience; and the whole evangelical system, with its individual responsibility, its direct intercourse between individual souls and God, and its distribution of personal rewards and punishments, has the right and the duty of private judgment, for its foundation, a foundation most honourable to God, because it recognizes His word as an intelligible book, adapted to illuminate the human mind, not as a bundle of enigmas, a wizard's lamp, whose various and many coloured rays are more confounding than darkness itself. But according to Rome, the inspired writers are obscure philosophers, whose words and thoughts cannot safely be entrusted to man, lest, as says the immaculate Council of Trent, "his temerity should cause more evil than good to arise from it;" for not Matthew, nor Paul, nor Luke, nor John, nor even Prince Peter himself, inspired by the Spirit of God, has been able to bring his words down to men's business and their bosoms with sufficient clearness, nor "to paint out and describe with a solid and treatable smoothness," the doctrines which God addresses to human souls, without the infallible decrees of Popes and Councils, the authoritative judgments of Bellarmine and Baronius, and the luminous sentences of the Fathers, in his aid. She claims that the living oracles speak in her favour; but their voice is dangerous, without her infallible interpretation upon it; she must be the oracle of oracles, interpreter of the Interpreter's house, revealer

of Revelation, corrector of the proof-sheets of the Divine Spirit, or else, (more cowardly than Philip of Macedon himself, who bribed the oracle to Philippize, but placed no perpetual guard around the pythoness) she will neither hear, nor allow to be heard the testimony of those oracles; if it can be prevented, not only by her claims of infallible interpretation but by declaring a loose, inferior translation of the Bible to be authoritative; by inserting into the sacred canon, books containing weak and silly things, and making no pretensions to inspiration; by mangling the sacred text itself; by appending to it notes and comments obviously incongruous with its meaning, and sometimes even flatly contradictory to it; and actually in one of her decrees, (that which forbids wine to laymen at communion,) where the knot cannot be untied by legerdemain, but must of necessity be cut, she declares that she so decrees, notwithstanding (non obstante) the different teachings of scripture. And still, after all this moving of heaven and earth to drown the testimony of the scriptures against herself, and to make them Romanize if possible, her victims may not enjoy, unlicensed by authority, even the ruined image of the word of God which she abides by. This is Rome's substitute for that mental freedom, which is one of the best gifts of the Spirit of the Lord; and for that personal responsibility to Himself, under which the revealed will of the Creator lays his creature, man. And yet she cannot make a solitary aggressive movement, even so far as to proselyte and pervert one poor, sliding Puseyite, without fairly abandoning her principles, and appealing to his private judgment, between herself and her sister of Lambeth and Oxford, concerning the true bearing of those dim medieval rays of evidence in which they both profess to bask. Her logic is not locomotive at all. It is a wheel upon a fixed axle, ever returning upon itself. She can argue with no one out of her own pale, without becoming involved in self-contradiction; with her weapons, no warfare can safely be waged, except upon men already dead; her first principles beg every important point; her reasonings must meet with previous unquestioning faith, before they become at all conclusive. When Dr. Wiseman and Dr. Brownson spread their nets, they must either appeal to the individual judgment of the unhappy persons whom they find floundering in patristic darkness, or else they must find themselves in the less eligible and comfortable predica

ment (but for the oblivion of the means which success produces,) of asking them to believe that Rome is the true church, because Rome says she is the true church; and when the scriptures are alluded to, preferring the still farther, and equally reasonable request, that Rome be permitted infallibly to interpret the scriptures, so as not to interfere with her claims. The jugglery is perfect, when Cardinal Bellarmine tells the world that if the Pope should enjoin vice and prohibit virtue "we ought to believe vices to be good and virtues evil." The prince of the powers of the air caricatured the voice of God with the mutterings and ravings of Delphi and Dodona, in earlier times; can we avoid the perception of his handiwork in this caricature of the later times?

Many other points in her system appear to have been managed on the same plan; the development of which would require more space than is left for the present article. As she caricatures the truth, so also does she its application to the human heart; and in the Romish baptizer, as he stands at the font, with his exorcisms and signs of the cross administering, as the only regeneration which his communion knows, one of those sacraments of the new law, as she calls them, which he is accursed who does not admit "to contain and confer the grace which they signify," we behold what we can hardly view otherwise than as a mimic and ape of the Spirit of God, pretending to exhibit in visible and tangible form, that awful mystery of regeneration, which the Saviour declared, man could no more intelligibly explain, than he could open the mysteries of the invisible winds.

The whole scheme is not only preposterous, but there is about it something uncouth and satyr-like, reminding us of the lurid scene in the witch's laboratory in the Faust, where a magic mirror is set before the eyes of the mortal, for purposes of delusion, and a draught of liquid flame given him, that

"With this drink, what'er she be

He may in her a Helen see."

And there is in it a coherency of plan from age to age, a consistency and unity of purpose, extending over scores of the life-times of men which are of too great grasp and size, to be attributed merely to human ingenuity. In addition to the well known passages, in the Thessalonians, concerning the "man of sin," and in the Apocalypse, concerning the doomed city on seven hills, there is also a remarkable passage of scripture in the Second Co

rinthians, in which the Spirit of God, speaking by St. Paul, saw and spoke of a systematic caricature of the church of Christ, then commencing, by false apostles and deceitful workers, transforming themselves, in appearance, into ministers of righteousness and apostles of Christ; and declared it not to be a wonderful thing since Satan himself, the leader of the party, and the head of the mimic church, had succeeded in accomplishing the more difficult transformation of himself into the form of an angel of lightthe practicability of the inferior and less difficult work being proven by the actual accomplishment of the superior and more difficult. By the same reasoning there is no ground for incredulity as to the issue of a complete series of coinage from the same mint— a perfect anti-church-a complete ecclesiastical organization, with any necessary multiplicity of ranks and orders of ministry, with a ritual more imposing and more burdensome than the Jewish; a superstition grosser and more impenetrable than the heathen, yet having the name of Christ and the language of religion ever in its mouth. And for the deliverance of the vitals of the world, from this worse than the vulture of the Promethean fable, in unceasing, unresting warfare with every weapon of truth, we have prayerfully to look to the "wise and holy bounding and governing" of that providence of God, which is of a power above that of the evil Prince who wrought this system, and to the going forth of the residue of the Spirit from him, to turn the hearts of the deluded nations to the Lord Jesus.

ART. IV.-Reading of History.

EVERY one must be sensible that far less interest, as a general thing, is taken in history, than its importance demands; and that much less advantage is commonly derived from the perusal of historical works, than might reasonably be expected. Both these facts are no doubt in a measure to be attributed, to the entire want of any definite object in the mind of the reader. He reads history as he would a story, for the mere narrative. We wish to urge the importance of every student reading with his eyes open, and his mind awake, examining the causes, rela

tions, and consequences of the events which the historian details.

It must be admitted, that it is often difficult to discover the causes of the facts of history; because when men are under the influence of corrupt passions, there is a great temptation to conceal their real purposes. The plans of statesmen are often shrouded in mystery. Men shrink back from the open acknowledgment of motives which are considered dishonourable, or which would be disapproved by the wise and virtuous. In all such cases there is a presumption, that there will be a studious concealment of the ultimate end; and unhappily many such examples are found in history. This temptation to cover evil with the guise of goodness and to deck crimes with names of virtue, increases the difficulty of which we have spoken. But still some progress may be made towards a just and rational conclusion, and we may at least approximate the truth. We are not at liberty however, to assume that certain motives exist without proof. We are no more at liberty to slander the dead than the living; and evil motives which are charged on an individual, when there is no evidence to prove their existence, constitute the essence of slander. We are under no obligations to believe, or to assert what we cannot prove, and if the evidence to establish a given fact does not exist, we may safely excuse ourselves from forming any opinion about it.

In all successful enterprises, men of course accomplish their purposes. Here then, it would seem, we have a clue to the motives of men. If the end is good the design must also be good. But even here we are embarrassed with difficulty. A good action may proceed from a bad motive, and vice versu. The man who establishes civil liberty among his countrymen, may do so from mercenary and selfish motives. Besides due allowance must be made for human plans thwarted, and human hopes disappointed. Men may be the unwilling instruments of doing good, because restrained and governed by influences which they cannot resist. There is a power which often says to the wicked man, Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther. In all cases however, there is a presumption that a good deed proceeds from a pure principle; and an evil deed from an unholy principle. Corrupt passions, like Christian graces, are gregarious. They are not often found alone. The existence of one therefore, may lead us to expect to find others also. Indeed the uncontrolled dominion of one sometimes proves the existence of