Medicine, there issue so many keen discriminators and denouncers of what is base and surreptitious. Then as to persecution—it is a system of policy as cruel in its operation as it is eventually fatal to the cause which it is intended to serve. Its very interference in the promotion of theological unity is a sufficient condemnation of the tenets it would advance; and yet in this particular field of contention, its exercise has been at once more sanguinary and selfdestructive than in any other sphere. It is an equivocal instrument in the business of salvation, which slays the body because the soul has an objection to be saved by means prescribed for it; as he would be considered a dangerous physician, who should overcome the imbibitious scruples of his patient by the administration of a lasting quietus. The swords of the magistrate and of the minister are of a contrary temperament: allegiance to spiritual authority-real soul-coercion-enforced by civil power, may possibly be made to assume the semblance of peace-but there is no peace. If we ask, What has Force effected for (avowedly) a spiritual Religion, we find a reply in the defeat of the system: and this result was inevitable; for Barbarism can never be the divinely-accredited representative of Benignity, and a process at which

our human nature shudders, is little calculated to reconcile our divine. And if we seek to authorise the cruelty of the agents by the contents of their credential, we find the Potentate's command-" Put up thy sword into the sheath!" and this rebuke of violence to him whose mantle has been claimed as the vest of spiritual supremacy, and whose weapon, in the unrestrained hands of his successors, has since deluged Christendom with gore, in glory of the Restorer of Malchus!

C-Ay, the records of Rome are too indelibly stained with characters which have but one expressive meaning through all time, to make the enlargement of her sheep-fold a welcome sight to the world.— May Heaven preserve mankind from her maternal mercies! The effect of distance is to diminish magnitude; and now, in the calm adoption of any creed or tenet, we are forgetful of the fiery trials of faith, when absolute conformity was enforced by torture. Looking back upon this or that crowded scene with an eye which a lack of interest enervates or intermediate objects divert, our vision is vague and dim; but let us preserve a special focus and a steady gaze, and our emotions of awe and horror become wellnigh as acute in the distant retrospection of these atrocities, as were theirs who had them in immediate review.

E--The places which should have illumined the benighted, were themselves ensepulchred in darkness; the declared home of Christianity-about whose portals, if the heavenly Guest hath indeed her dwelling within, are ever hovering the attendant-angels Charity, Commiseration, and Mercy-became an "habitation of Cruelty;" and

66

Victory sickened, ignorant where to rest." *

Upon human tenderness the tale of her terrible triumphs falls freezingly-it acts like ice upon the heart. In a little book, brought to me by my goddaughter many months ago-the Nun, was it not, Mary?-illustrative of that serious mistake, a monastic life, there occurs a recital of the discipline resorted to in the case of two sisters, whom the powers of darkness had influenced to assert the transcendental authority of scripture over tradition. The narrative is related by one of the victims, and is invested, in many of its details of suffering, with an air of unrepining sufferance and meekness, truly pathetic.No exaggeration of inflictions, nor show of supernatural endurance, nor sickly suppliance for sympathy, but a dispassionate revelation, bearing on its surface

*Wordsworth.

and in its secrets the impress of authenticity. A picture which cannot have failed to excite holy pity, is that wherein the exiled nuns are represented in a cell, lit by a sad and solitary lamp, and-saving the Presence which no barriers may exclude-are visited only by a spectral female attendant, cold as if carved from alabaster. One is bowed with the weight of years and the tyrannies of the holy Mother, and is in sickness, and not far from the strange bosom of Mercy; the other is occupied in administering solace from a purer source than the fountains of traditionary record; and over her dungeon-divinity time elapses unheeded and unknown:

"Seasons return, but not to them returns

Day or the sweet approach of even or morn."

This loneliness, and ignorance of day and night, suggest an idea of desolation, which, if not divinely redeemed from despair, would thrill through every feeling, as the type of Innocency in eternal abandonment: as it is, Humanity, incredulous, inquires if such recited cruelties can ever have been realised by sentient beings, and they, too, of the finer-fibred creation! Oh, if the accents of oppression ascend from the prisons of the bound, and if every wrong has its

regarded cry and its sure avenging, how fearful a retribution must be in reserve for these enormities; -perpetrated, too, by zealots, whose stony seclusion could not shut out the worst part of their nature, while it often perverted the best; and whom the incentive of an offended superstition did sometimes transform to furies-in furtherance of the CHRISTIAN faith!

C-It is not the least of many and great privileges peculiar to the age in which we live, that dread no longer interferes in exercises spiritual; that the scruples of Conscience are respected; and innumerable vagaries, which it would be difficult to affiliate to Conscience, are tolerated on the mere assumption of that honored but hacknied patronymic. But this privilege of exemption from dread, in which all classes may and do participate, operates, I apprehend, but feebly, as a stimulant to general thankfulness. A very large portion of the episcopalian community are deficient in this feeling, and "see no beauty, that they should desire" their Church, for her tolerancy to the turbulent, and for that soothing strain of hope, which refuses to "shut the gates of Mercy," where more denunciatory creeds would, sometimes savagely, enthrone Despair. As it regards the non-conforming body, it is not easy to conceive that thankfulness could