may gather them. While sages lose the idea of the Universal Parent in their subtleties, the lowly "FEEL after Him and find Him." Sentiment precedes reason in point of time, and is a surer guide to the noblest realities. Thus man hopes, loves, reveres, and enjoys, without the aid of writing or of the press to inspire or direct him. Many of his feelings are even heartier and more genuine before he has learned to describe them. He does not perpetually mistake words for things, nor cultivate his faculties and affections for a discerning public. His aspirations "are made, not marked." If he is gifted with divine imagination, he may "walk in glory and in joy beside his plough upon the mountain side," without the chilling idea that he must make the most of his sensations to secure the applause of gay saloons or crowded theatres. The deepest impressions are worn out by the multiplication of their copies. Talking has almost usurped the place of acting and of feeling; and the world of authors seem as though their hearts were but paper scrolls, and ink, instead of blood, were flowing in their veins. "The great events with which old story rings, seem vain and hollow." If all these evils will not be extended by what is falsely termed the Education of the Poor, let us at least be on our guard lest we transform our peasantry from men into critics, teach them scorn instead of humble hope, and leave them nothing to love, to revere, or to enjoy!

The Bible Society, founded and supported, no doubt, from the noblest motives, also puts forth pretensions which are sickening. Its advocates frequently represent it as destined to change all earth into a paradise. That a complete triumph of the principles of the Bible would bring in the rapturous state which they look for can never be disputed; but the history of our religion affords no ground for anticipating such a result from the unaided perusal of its pages. Deep and extensive impressions of the truths of the Gospel have never been made by mere reading, but always by the exertions of living enthusiasm in the holy cause. Providence may, indeed, in its inscrutable wisdom, impart new energy to particular instruments; but there appears no sufficient indication of such a change as shall make the printed Bible alone the means of regenerating the species. "An age of Bibles" may not be an age of Christian charity and hope. The word of God may not be revered the more by becoming a common book in every cottage, and a drug in the shop of every pawnbroker. It was surely neither known nor revered the less when it was a rare treasure, when it was proscribed by those who sat in high places, and its torn leaves and fragments were cherished even unto death. In those days, when a single copy chained to the desk of the church was alone in extensive parishes, did it diffuse less sweetness through rustic hearts than now, when the poor

are almost compelled to possess it? How then did the villagers flock from distant farms, cheered in their long walks by thoughts not of this world, to converse for a short hour with patriarchs, saints, and apostles! How did they devour the venerable and well-worn page with tearful eyes, or listen delighted to the voice of one gifted above his fellows, who read aloud the oracles of celestial wisdom! What ideas of the Bible must they have enjoyed, who came many a joyful pilgrimage to hear or to read it! Yet even more precious was the enjoyment of those who, in times of persecution, snatched glances in secret at its pages, and thus entered, as by stealth, into the paradisiacal region, to gather immortal fruits and listen to angel voices. The word of God was dearer to them than house, land, or the "ruddy drops which warmed their hearts." Instead of the lamentable weariness and disgust with which the young now too often turn from the perusal of the Scriptures, they heard with mute attention and serious joy the divine histories of the Old Testament and sweet parables of the New. They heard with a solemn sympathy of Abraham receiving seraphs unawares of Isaac walking out at even-tide to meditate, and meeting the holy partner of his days-of Jacob's dream, and of that immortal Syrian Shepherdess, for whose love he served a hard master fourteen years, which seemed to him but a few days-of Joseph the beloved, the exile, the tempted, and the sweet forgiver-of all the wonders of the Jewish story-and of the character and sufferings of the Messiah. These things were to them at once august realities, and surrounded with a dream-like glory from afar. "Heaven lay about them in their infancy." They preserved the purity-the spirit of meek submission-the patient confiding love of their childhood in their maturest years. They, in their turn, instilled the sweetness of Christian charity, drop by drop, into the hearts of their offspring, and left their example as a deathless legacy. Surely this was better than the dignified patronage now courted for the Scriptures, or the pompous eulogies pronounced on them by rival orators! The reports of anniversaries of the Bible Society are often to me, inexpressibly nauseous. The word of God is praised in the style of eulogy employed on a common book by a friendly reviewer. It is evidently used as a theme to declaim on. But the praise of the Bible is almost overshadowed by the flatteries lavished on the nobleman or county member who has condescended to preside, and which it is the highest ambition of the speakers ingeniously to introduce and to vary. Happy is he who can give a new turn to the compliment, or invent a new alliteration or antithesis for the occasion! The copious nonsense of the successful orators is even more painful than the failures of the novices. After a string of false metaphors and poor conceits, applauded to the echo, the

meeting are perhaps called on to sympathise with some uhhappy debutant, whose sense of the virtues of the chairman proves too vast for his powers of expression; and with Miss Peachum in the Beggars' Opera, to lament" that so noble a youth should come to an untimely end." Alas! these exhibitions have little connexion with a deep love of the Bible, or with real pity for the sufferings of man. Were religious tyranny to render the Scriptures scarce, and to forbid their circulation, they would speedily be better prized and honoured than when scattered with gorgeous profusion, and lauded by nobles and princes.

The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity is another boasted institution of these cold-hearted days. It would annihilate the race of beggars, and remove from the delicate eye the very form and aspect of misery. Strange infatuation! as if an old class of the great family of man might be cut off without harm! "All are but parts of one stupendous whole," bound together by ties of antique sympathy, of which the lowest and most despised are not without their uses. In striking from society a race whom we have, from childhood, been accustomed to observe, a vast body of dear associations and gentle thoughts must necessarily be lost for ever. The poor mendicants whom we would banish from the earth, are the best sir curists to whose sustenance we contribute. In the great science-the science of humanity-they not rarely are our first teachers: they affectingly remind us of our own state of mutual dependance; bring sorrow palpably before the eyes of the prosperous and the vain; and prevent the hearts of many from utterly "losing their nature." They give, at least, a salutary disturbance to gross selfishness, and hinder it from entirely forming an ossified crust about the soul. We see them too with gentle interest, because we have always seen them, and were accustomed to relieve them in the spring-time of our days. And if some of them are what the world calls impostors, and literally" do beguile us of our tears" and our alms, those tears are not shed, nor those alms given, in vain. If they have even their occasional revellings and hidden luxuries, we should rather rejoice to believe that happiness has every where its nooks and corners which we do not see; that there is more gladness in the earth than meets the politician's gaze; and that fortune has her favours, "secret, sweet, and precious," even for those on whom she seems most bitterly to frown. Well may that divinest of philosophers, Shakspeare, make Lear reply to his daughters, who had been speaking in the true spirit of modern improve

ments :

"O reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beasts!"

There are many other painful instances in these times of that "restless wisdom" which" has a broom for ever in its hand to rid the world of nuisances." There are, for example, the plans of Mr. Owen, with his infallible recipes for the formation of character. Virtue is not to be forced in artificial hot-beds, as he proposes. Rather let it spring up where it will from the seed scattered throughout the earth, and rise hardily in sun and shower, while the "free mountain winds have leave to blow against it." But I feel that I have already broken too violently on my habits of dreamy thought, by the asperity into which I now and then have fallen. Let me then break off at once, with the single expression of a hope, that this "bright and breathing world" may not be changed into a penitentiary by the efforts of modern reformers.

I am, Sir,

Your hearty well-wisher.

*We have given a place to the foregoing article, which, though it came anonymously, leaves a full conviction on our minds that it is the work of no other pen than that of our late lamented and worthy friend, George Pertinax Growler, Esq. of Kennelhowlbury-Hall, Berkshire, who represented that county during many successive Parliaments, and, though a Tory, was a zealous member of Opposition. Respect for the memory of our beloved Growler, overcomes all the reluctance of our personal opinion as to the admissibility of the paper. Poor George! the last time we saw him in London he refused to dine with us, merely because we had taken an eighteen-penny fare by water, one beautiful summer morning, in order to look at that " splendid nuisance," Waterloo Bridge, shortly after its completion. He may be wrong as to the blessings which society derives from mendicants, or as to the advantages that would have accrued to legal eloquence from the inebriety of lawyers; and he strikes us as heretical on the subject of the Bible Society. But let none imagine that George Growler was himself addicted to the bottle, or an encourager of vicious mendicity, or an enemy to the education of the poor. On the contrary, he had no failing, even in principle, except alarm at innovation. To that he was indeed an enemy. The orphan nephew of whom he speaks was the subject of his tender but very troublesome thoughts. The youth was detected by his uncle, at the age of 19, in having become a member of the new philosophical club, a very genteel one that met for literary and liquid recreation at the Cat-and-Bagpipes. This circumstance required our intervention to propitiate the old gentleman's wrath. The word new, as his nephew said, would

have offended him even in the mention of "The New Jerusalem." The same poor nephew being afterwards smit at Birmingham with the love of sacred song, a second time offended him almost to the danger of disinheritance, by writing a Sonnet on the Steam Engine, which began "Hail, wonder-working power!"--but we happily made up the breach. Bred a Tory by his father, who hated the Hanoverian rats, George Growler at first opposed the late Mr. Pitt as a presumptuous young minister, and latterly, because he flagged in Tory zeal behind Mr. Burke. What side he would have now taken in politics can be only conjectured to us it seems, he would have still opposed ministers as the most radical of innovators. Be that as it may, he departed this life in 1818. His death was occasioned by a fever, on which the opinions of his physician and apothecary were divided. The former pronounced it nervous, and occasioned by the conversation of his neighbour Sir Francis Fluent, on the subject of New Improvements; the latter attributed it to typhous infection, caught during one of his walks in stopping to speak with a "Cumberland beggar."

ON THE ORIGIN OF THE CELEBRATION OF CHRISTMAS.

IT was no strange circumstance that, at the dawn of Christianity, every festival which was observed by the Jews should be equally solemnized by the Christian converts of the first century. A great portion of these converts had gone over from the Jewish to the Christian faith; and this portion was, for a long time, unable wholly to emancipate itself from the trammels of early impressions. Nay, the Apostles themselves were tenacious of the Jewish feasts, and retained, amongst others, those of the Passover and Pentecost. It was but by slow degrees that the Christians were able to estrange themselves from the Jewish observances, to throw off the usages of the sons of Abraham, and transform the festivals, which they had brought with them on the day of their conversion, into Christian anniversaries. Far, however, from seeking to abandon the customs and solemnities which had once been received into their new church, they set themselves about rendering them typical of some important occurrences in the history of their religion. By this permutation, the festival of Easter was grafted on the feast of the Passover; Pentecost was converted into an annual commemoration of the descent of the Holy Ghost; and out of the Jewish Sabbath arose our Sunday, than which no other day in the seven could by possibility be of deeper importance or more awful interest to the believer in the Saviour's resurrection.