heaven, and the chains of hell-such a church and the freedom of human reason and speech can no more co-exist, than two bodies can fill the same space at the same time; the one negatives the existence of the other. Such a church we mean by that of Rome. Such she is, and such must ever be; to strip her of these attributes is to slay her.

Now, the temper and institutions of democracies tend directly to produce in the mind a denial of such prerogatives; but he that denies these claims of the Romish Church, ceases, by that very act, to be a Romanist. This is the very result that our institutions are working in the Catholic masses brought to our shores. On their landing, they are baptized into a spirit directly the antithesis of Romanism. As they become fused with our population, they cannot fail to be affected with the intellectual and moral sympathies that enfold them like an atmosphere. Foreign priesthood and colleges can no more shut them out from these influences, than they can from the heat and cold of our climate. Conversion by this process, unnoted and unmarked by change of name, is constantly going on. The strict genuine Romanists among us would be found feeble, both in numbers and character, and those few rarely dare declare themselves. Multitudes in this country are Romanists only in name. From the most absurd and pernicious, yet most essential dogmas of that sect, they have long since cut loose. They have become Americans-they have become freemen, civilly and spiritually; they have learned to resist priestly dictation in secular matters; they yield to it little more than a nominal submission in spiritual. They acknowledge no temporal allegiance to Rome, and their ecclesiastical allegiance sits loosely on them. They assert and exercise liberty of reason and of faith. Should issue ever be joined between Romanism and Americanism-between their civil and ecclesiastical allegiance we should find them rallying, amid the foremost and warmest-hearted, around our institutions. This class of men we respect and honour; we do not wish to forget, that in times that have tried men they have been true-that they have been prodigal of their wealth and their blood for American institutions-that among those who perilled their lives and fortunes and their sacred honour,' in the assertion of the imprescriptible rights of a human being, stands the hallowed name of Carrol. We are aware, too, that in a recent political canvass, in New York, many have rejected indignantly the dictation of a Romish prelate, and nobly cast their suffrages for the political equality of all sects. We are sorry to be obliged, in speaking of an ecclesiastical system, to use a descriptive title that seems to embrace such men. It is to be regretted that a name, most justly odious, is retained when the reality has been repudiated. We regret the wrong often done to their character, and the injury inflicted on their feelings, by an indiscriminate warfare on names. But they must

remember that there is, properly implied in the name they wear, that upon which self-defence compels an American citizen to wage implacable war, and that they must charge the wrong they think done them, to the false and undefined position in which they stand: for though they may change, Romanism, properly so called, cannot change. There may be, in this country, for centuries to come, those calling themselves Roman Catholics, yet asserting for themselves and others freedom of faith, of worship, and of conscience; and, while nominally adhering to the decisions of the 'universal church,' may, by interpretation and construction of these œcumenical decrees, find latitude for the widest and wildest excursiveness of the human reason—a body rejecting her spiritual despotism and superstitions, the doctrines of saintly intercession and virgin worship, of penance and justification by works, of clerical celibacy, and of indulgences, of venal pardon, and the right of persecution, of paramount allegiance to Rome, and the exclusive salvableness of those within her pale-such a class as probably M. De Tocqueville himself belongs to; there may exist in this country a sect of this description, nominally adhering to the papacy; yet they will not be papists, and when they are the sole representatives of that name in this republic, papacy in this country, however great the number of her nominal adherents, is dead. We should not be surprised if this were the process of her dissolution. But we must never forget that these are not Romanists, nor be lulled into the delusive belief of the amended or mitigated nature of Romanism herself. This can never be. Amendment or mitigation, with reference to her, are absurdities and self-contradictions. She cannot cease to be a spiritual despotism, without ceasing to be at all; for this is her essence. this country she can live only by hypocrisy and disguise-she plays the Jesuit, and bides her time. Real amendment is to her annihilation; vital reform is suicide. All other despotisms have some power of assimilation, and are striving to eke out their lifetime by conciliating the spirit of the age. We see this verified in the present policy of Russia, Prussia, Turkey, and Persia, and other absolute governments. But Romanism cannot repent, or change; with her, to accommodate is only to dissemble-conciliation is but conspiracy. Her past assumption and tyranny she cannot renounce-she cannot plead immaturity, or ignorance, or error. All the arrogance, and the crimes that attach to her days of pride, she must continue to wear. Her purple of infallibility she cannot put off, though she finds it a shirt of torture. It cleaves to her, and is part of her-not a shred can she tear off-not a thread can she whiten-with all her stains of sensuality and blood uncleansed-her titles of arrogance and her names of blasphemy emblazoned upon it, she must wear it down through the light of the nineteenth century.

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If our language seem to our Roman Catholic fellow-citizens unduly

severe, or wanting in a discriminate charity, our reply is, we war with things, not names. To the terms Papacy or Romanism, we must attach the significancy developed in the crimson dictionary of history. By these terms we mean things. We mean a system self-bound to immutability. That system cannot change-an attempt to renovate or amend it, would be as fatal as that of the daughters of Pelias to restore their aged father to the graces and vigour of youth. Thus, whatever her nominal adherents may profess, the papacy itself is selfstereotyped. Pursued by the furies of crimes, she cannot repent-the shadows of her pride and power waiting in mockery around her decrepitude her imperial scarlet become a Nessian tunic-wearing the likeness of a crown she cannot throw off, though it burns her browher feet slipping in the gore of her innumerable slain—the crosier, the scourge, the brand, and the rusted keys, still clutched in her trembling hands, she must go down to the coming ages. What she has been, she must be or die,-or rather, must be and die.

And are we to believe that around this shadow of ghostly power the democratic ages are to be attracted?-that they will rally to the support of her tottering steps, and kiss her sandals mottled with the gore of a thousand years, and bow in the dust before that eye, the light of whose cruel majesty has long since faded ?—that they will sluice their own veins to feed her failing life-streams-and for her wage battle and death? No, hers will be a retinue, not of living nations, but a pale host of such shadows as gathered on the soul of Richard on the field of Bosworth. On her steps will attend, not the accents of living acclaim, but voices like those from under the altar in the Apocalypse, swelling from a thousand heights and dales-from the city and the waste-from the Escurials and the Bastiles of half the globe-from the glens of the Alps, the plains of Provence and Holland-from the heaths of England, the mountains of Hungary, the sierras, and the Apennines-from a thousand years of darkened intellect, and abused faith, and seared conscience, and broken hearts, and lost souls-from stifled human reason and bleeding human nature-from outraged man and from blasphemed Heaven, will gather over her in one mighty cloud of accusation, and arraign her for the grave. Such will be the attendants of her final hour. The pomp the democratic ages will form for her, will be that of her funeral-the train they will bear, will be the robe of her sepulture-the chant they will sing, will be the pæan of the prophet of Israel over the monarch of Babylon.

That the coming era, then, will not be one of the triumph of Romanism, is, we think, as clear in the light of philosophy as of revelation. Nor is this conclusion invalidated by the recent movement of the English church towards Rome. This movement indicates no tendency of the democratic ages, but is in direct opposition to their spirit. It is not the product of our times, but of antagonist principles grafted

on the English church the century succeeding the Reformation-the hybrid papacy of the Stuarts attempted to be held in combination with protestantism. Our age simply witnesses the explosion. It is no farther responsible for Puseyism or Anglo-Romanism, than because its unceasing light and heat will not permit conflicting principles to be combined in the same system, but compels each to develope its affinities and disclose its consequences.

STATISTICS OF CRIME AND OF CREED.

CONSCIENTIOUS nonconformity to the prevailing religion around, may be supposed to induce in its professors greater circumspection of conduct, and a higher character for virtue and goodness. Abraham in Chaldea-Israel in Egypt-the Jews in Babylon-the Christians at Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome, were dissenters from the established system of religion, and their conduct may be appealed to in confirmation of our hypothesis. The Pharisees, as a sect, had a higher standard of moral conduct than their countrymen; and though many of them were hypocritical, devouring widows' houses, while for a pretence they made long prayers, yet as a class they were like their brother Saul of Tarsus, who, touching the true righteousness which is of the law, was "blameless." The Pietists and Momiers of France and Germany-the Covenanters of Scotland-and the Puritans and early Methodists of England, have all been characterised by, and reproached for the strictness of their manners, and the high standard of their morality. The maxim of our Divine Master, "by their fruits ye shall know them,” supplies a certain and a searching test of the characters of colleges and schools, of churches and individuals. The obligations imposed by their position and principles have not been forgotten by evangelical dissenters in the present day, who desire to keep themselves "unspotted from the world," and who have spent no small amount of time and property to teach the rising generation the same important lesson. the heat of the discussions occasioned by the proposed Factory Education Bill, full credit was not given them for their labours in this respect; and we regret that, in some quarters, most ungenerous and unjust imputations were cast upon them "for not educating their people at all, or not educating them in that effectual and experimental manner, which tells on the character, conscience, and conduct."

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The Rev. Hugh Stowell, of Christ Church, Manchester, publicly uttered these reproaches, which he attempted to substantiate by referring to the records of the New Bailey prison in that town. He stated, at the Corn Exchange, that, in the space of one year, 360 young persons, under seventeen, had been committed to that jail, the great proportion of whom were deplorably ignorant; and that, of that number, only 117 belonged to the church, while 243 to different denominations

of dissenters. This most startling statement could not, of course, be allowed to pass current without investigation. Happily the statistics of the prison were as accessible to the dissenting ministers of Manchester as to their clerical neighbours. The Rev. James Gwyther, pastor of the Congregational church, Sion Chapel, Hulme, applied himself to this inquiry, and the facts he had to adduce are these :The number of juvenile offenders, felons and others, under seventeen years of age, committed to the New Bailey from October 1839 to October 1842, is 975. Of these, 457 belong to the established church; 278 are Roman Catholics; 65 profess to belong to no religious persuasion; of eight it is stated that their religion is unknown; two are Socialists; one is a Jew; leaving to Protestant dissenters of all sects, only 164 that is to say, about one-sixth of the total number.

This important conclusion, which so completely turns the argument against Mr. Stowell, is sustained by the tables Mr. Gwyther procured, but which we regret are too extensive for our pages; the following are their most important facts:

The religious professions of juvenile offenders, from seven to sixteen years of age; felons, 302, those summarily convicted, 673, making a total of 975, who were imprisoned in the New Bailey, Manchester, from October 1839 to October 1842.

As to the state of their education, there were 262 belonging to the church who could not read at all-175 Catholics, and 81 dissenters. This discussion at Manchester led to an examination of the creeds of criminals in general at some other prisons. Edward Dawson, Esq., of Aldcliffe Hall, obtained the returns of prisoners confined in Lancaster Castle from January 1842 to April 1843, which were published in The Patriot as follow: