is of the highest order. The thoughts are valuable, and most eloquently expressed. Every page bears the mark of a mind burning to express its patriotic and religious ideas. We know no work which more powerfully witnesses against the falsehood and tyranny of the Papacy. Our religious societies should circulate it everywhere, and use it as a lever to overthrow the great obstacle to the progress of Christianity. Does not the following extract fully express what our ministers of the gospel think of the Papacy. It is the conclusion of a letter to the priests of Italy:

"We again repeat these words to the priests of Italy, with a deep sense of affection and hope. May God enlighten them for the sake of the country, and for the sake of the Church. May he awaken in them faith in works, holy hopes, the charity which transforms the languor of unbelieving souls into the fever of life. The Church is Caesar's, let them return it to God. The hierarchy is changed into a parasitical plant, consuming the life of an institution destined to enlarge and raise itself with humanity. Let them uproot it, and let them renew the institution in the election, and in the inspirations of the people. The word of Jesus is destroyed, betrayed, sacrificed to the falsehoods of those who call themselves the princes of the earth; let them re-establish it in honour. Humanity thirsts after progress, and faith after an authority freely erected and obeyed; and the Pope replies, immobility and passive obedience. To the council, to the council. The Church shall furnish another answer."

Again, in "the first lines of the gospel, the evil spirit offers Jesus dominion over the kingdoms and principalities of the earth, provided that he will serve him and betray his mission. Jesus, despising him, refuses. When you see the heads of your hierarchy leaguing with princes, cursing the people for them, and shedding its blood, in order to preserve for themselves a portion of Italian land, does that page of the gospel never recur to your minds? In another page Jesus, the gentlest, meekest, and most loving spirit that has descended upon earth, armed himself with a scourge, and, in the impulse of holy indignation, chased the traffickers from the temple. Do you never think of that page, my brothers? Is the temple now free from buyers and sellers? The Pharisees-the sectaries of the dead letter; have they all disappeared? Does the word of God shine pure and life-giving, as when it was spoken by Jesus ?"

Men and brethren, let us aid in regenerating this fearful house of sin and blood. In opposing the Papacy, we should be fighting, not against religion, but the mask of religion. As Christians, are we not summoned to the warfare. Truth points to the power of Rome, deliberately violating the divine law and says there is evil, and must be combatted. And whoever neglects to do so, through egotism or sloth, is guilty. Who serves evil, abandons the cause of God, the only Lord. And who is not for him, is against him.

IV.

SCEPTICS' RELIGION.

Under this department, sceptical objections, and systems or principles advocated as hostile to Christianity, are dispassionately considered.

THE DISPATCH OF CANT.

MR. THOMAS CARLYLE, the illustrious and erratic author of many works, and the inventor of more words, has of late been indulging in a trip to the moon, mounted on his grey goose quill; and the result is the second biography of the late John Sterling, which the Dispatch, by a happy and profound combination of words, calls "sterling coin." This felicitous joke heads an article under the title "History and Politics," and is followed by a very smart attack on Balaam's ass, which the editor belabours most unmercifully, since he mistakes it for one of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith, or at least one of the incomprehensible mysteries of Christian theology.

Between Balaam's ass and Jonah's whale, the gospel seems in a very critical position; for we all understand these to be the pillars of our faith; we could almost suspect that the writer of the article in question, had received some personal affront from the Christian religion, for which he takes severe revenge, in a critique on the life of a man who was not worthy of two biographies.

We have nothing to do here with the sentiments into which Carlyle has fallen, in his life of Sterling, these have been admirably exposed in an article in the Times, which has subjected that paper to nearly equal disgrace with Christianity itself.

The following hot, furious, and cloudy effusion, issued from the Liberal weekly organ, on Sabbath morning, November 16th, 1851.

THOMAS CARLYLE'S "STERLING COIN."

"Another recruit to the army of honest authorship! Yea, a volunteer -an individual contingent to the muster-roll of truth, worth a whole army of Bullcalfs and Pearmains. Thomas Carlyle has fairly come out from among the mass of those who stand as coward mutes. He has come to suspect that "he who lets falsehood live, helps on the lie." He will not suffer the hypocrite and the fanatic to thrive upon the simple by the silence of the intelligent. He stalks forth from the fastness of his study, and belabours all lusty shams until they roar again. The act is doubtless daring, magnanimous, heroic. The man lives by his pen. His

books sell well, and have the sterling ring about them, which steady calls for new editions indicate. Yet he perils all this, risks expulsion from the eden of boudoir and the paradise of the drawing-room, dares the world to withdraw him from its literary custom and gain-giving good will, and with chivalrous martyr-spirit, calls aloud and spares not, prophetically, and from the altitudes of duty, speaking the truth that is in him, it is time that a voice crying in this wilderness of life, should say to all builders of baseless fabrics and castles in the air, "repent ye!" The message of truth has come to Carlyle; and with genuine self-sacrificing, fearless apostleship, he hastens on his way, to tell what he has been told. The act is a note-worthy social phenomenon. While women are getting rid of the petticoats, because they gather mud and impede locomotion, here is a man shaking his soul out of its mythologies and antiquated useless spiritual garments, and striving to convince mankind that they were better to go spiritually naked than to hug round them the fantastic rags which time and habit have taught them to admire and feel warm in. The writer of this book calls it, the "Life of John Sterling." We call it the Death of Theological Cant. The mass of reviewers have blinked the polemical part of the work to praise the narrative -a strong symptom this of their secret sympathy with opinions they dare not praise, and will not condemn. The Times alone, to avoid the rheum of its grudge at the Author for what it calls "a breach of confidence," creditable to all parties concerned, sinks the biography to bother the biographer with a diarrhoea of modern balderdash. It is a noteworthy circumstance that this Pecksniff alone, of all the pilots of the press, continues the "dodge" which others are silently giving up from sheer disgust of the work, and is "shocked" in the most becoming manner, and reads the world", a great moral lesson" with all the unction of "the best of all possible instructors." To the Pharisee stomach, we can well understand that such meat as this new cook sets before it, will be neither palatable, masticable, nor digestible. "Hear what the spirit saith unto the Churches." The world is "overclouded to the zenith and nadir of it, by incredible, uncredited, traditions, solemnly sordid hypocrisies, and beggarly deliriums, old and new." The learned professions are built largely on speciosity, instead of performance, so clogged, in this bad epoch, and defaced under such suspicions of fatal imposture, that they are hateful, not loveable, to the young radical soul, scornful of gross profit, and intent on ideals and human nobleness." Worst of all are the parsons, established and dissenting, "those legions of black dragoons,' of all varieties and purposes, who patrol with horse meat and man's meat this afflicted earth, so hugely to the detriment of it." The cause of quarrel with, and scornful contempt for, these is thus indicated by implication "what the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril, do you try believing that." Orthodoxy, to this true man, is 66 sham" and "cobweb"- -"bottled moonshine." What to the deluded have appeared "all manner of sublimely illuminated places," have, "for the basis of them, only putridity, artificial gas, and quaking bog." In very truth, "the old spiritual highways and recognized paths to the eternal, are all torn up and flung in heaps, sub

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merged in unutterable boiling mud, oceans of hypocrisy and unbelievability, of brutal living atheism, and damnable, dead, putrescent cant; darkness, and the mere shadow of death, enveloping all things from pole to pole; and in the raging gulf currents offering us will-o'-the-wisps for load-stars-intimating that there are no stars, nor ever were, except certain old Jen ones, which have now gone out." Of course our decorous contemporary is decently and piously shocked at all this. It represents its name in its spirit-it is the Times, and not a day beyond the timesit is the ignorant present time," not the future tense in any thing. With a serious assumption of faith and devoutness, and a holy horror of the aceptic, its chief quarrel with Carlyle is, that he is too much in earnest -that he is such a thorough believer in truth, in its value, in the fact that there are realities that are worth believing-that he cannot rest quiet in the easy chair of current speciosities so as to suffer facts to be confounded with fancies, and the real to be clouded and lost in the ideal and the make-believe. When in the genuine spirit of a prophet, who has a God's message to deliver and obey, Thomas exclaims, "religion is not a doubt," the organ of the priest and Levite retorts that he had "for his unvarying object to make it nothing but a doubt, the most dismal, distressing, and hopelessly perplexing." The source of this antagonism of view is not far to seek. Carlyle means that nothing which is, as he terms it, an "unbelievability," can have any real bearing upon religion. The Times again, obviously, and in company with its patrons of the parson world, means that if we have not faith in the incredible and the contradictory, we can have no religion. In fact, it is the fallacy of the fanatics to confound their theology with religion; and it is the aim (and God speed him, say we) of doughty Thomas, to prove that myths, fables, and stories, have smothered and hidden religion out of sight; and that until we have cleared away the "unbelievabilities and dead putrescent cant," it is not possible that religion can be seen, but very possible that it may be throttled and strangled by being confounded with the monstrous and incredible inventions with which it has been identified by the hypocrisy, ignorance, and credulity of mankind. Carlyle acts but as the "Old Mortality" of true religion. He wanders among the memorials of a genuine faith, to clear the inscriptions of God's truth of the moss and rubbish of human fancy and men's device; and the hoary sextous, who live upon disease and death, cry out upon him for desecrating holy ground, by clearing the canker and corrosion of time from the tables of eternal truth, and removing the crumbling monuments of human history from "the fountain of living water," that it may "spring up unto everlasting life!" Of course the man who could dare to say of the three learned professions, that there is not one which does not "require you at the threshold to constitute yourself an imposter," must expect to be assailed with unmeasured imputations of uncharitableness-but let him be of good cheer the professions are casting down their idols with their own hands, and confessing their own charlatanism.

The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,

And the lawyer be-knaves the divine.

There is not a barrister who addresses a jury, who is not conscious that he is stating what he does not believe, and acting a part which is

not genuine-suppressing here-colouring there-misleading witnesses into involuntary contradiction-and bamboozling every body to gain a verdict. This is no vulgar prejudice, but a sober fact, avowed by Lord Brougham as actually the duty of a counsel-acted on by Phillips-and justified by all whose trade it is to "make the worse appear the better reason." The physician, if he be sincere, tells you that he is an impostor -that he gives pills, and draughts, and powders, to earn his fee, and not to further the cure that patients require to be cheated-that without humbug there can be no practice-and that patients insist on being deceived. Parsondom alone can only save its credit for sincerity at the expense of its understanding. For our part, uncharitable as we may be called, we cannot help thinking with Carlyle, that Egyptian Magi, Roman Augurs, and Popish priests, are not the only impostors among the "black dragoons." There are in round numbers 50,000 parsons, professors of theology, in these realms-the best educated, and in some respects, necessarily the ablest and most thinking members of society. They say "that there are no stars, nor ever were, except certain old Jew ones, and we say that we do not believe that they believe this. The real sceptics, the true infidels, are those who assert there is no religion, unless an ass became a prophet-and no Christianity unless the conjuring tricks of Moses and Aaron were realities-and no true faith unless three are one, and one is three, and contradictions and impossibilities are certain and facts. In an age of inquiry, intelligence, and insight, these "old Jew stars will shine no longer, and, if there can be no light without them, then the world will certainly be in darkness. But the soul is immortal -there is a God, the Father and friend of all-there is truth, and heaven, and an everlasting futurity-and these solemn and consoling veracities are not the less significant, real, and enduring, because the whale did not swallow Jonah, and Balaam's ass did not speak. Carlyle is striving betimes so to order human belief, that the Christian religion shall survive its mere mythologies and childish historical incrustations, and it is the duty of all earnest and well-ordered devout minds to help him. Let priests, parsons, and all men, then begin by taking to heart these golden words, "what the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible, that, in God's name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that"—for he who begins by striving to credit what is incredible, will end by doubting that which is true."

In commenting on this wonderful effusion, we cannot but compliment the Editor, on the clearness of his position, every one may see by reading, what he accounts extraneous mythology, namely, all "unbelievabilities,” and all will believe him; for none profess to believe or advocate such things.

The perspicuity of this wondrous article, is further manifest, in the plainness with which the believabilities are indicated; being all that we can see by the light of our own minds; which is the same as what we see by the light of our own eyes; that is, nothing at all.

Nor can we forbear congratulating our readers on the announcement,