to God and man. It is true that the drama of prelate and priest, which these functionaries have now been playing for more than three hundred years, is a very melancholy amusement; and that, in spite of its absurdity, few of the bystanders feel their gravity much shaken by it. But there is a limit to infatuation. The Erastians of the law Church know better than to assume the tone of the sainted Hildebrands and Beckets, when they stand in presence of Administration. The mimic march of the pontiff would be irresistibly absurd in a Doctor Howley or a Doctor Philpotts. Mr. Urquhart seems to have been struck with this distinction.

"The Church of Rome, upon the other hand, retains this vast advantage in utility and influence over the whole of the Reformed Churches, that it never did divide or yield its jurisdiction over every part of morals and of human conduct, made no surrender of its rights of counsel and reproof, and neither gave, nor suffered to be torn away, the power and obligation to give or to withhold the sanction of religion to the deeds of a nation, as well as to the private acts of men." (p. 22.)

"When I reflect on what the Church might do at this hour,-what it might prevent, how, at scarcely more than the cost of a mental and moral effort, it might reclaim England, and become at once its guide, protection, and authority, I have no difficulty in comprehending how that power of the Church which dazzles through the mists of nearly two centuries, was merited and obtained. No country has produced such remarkable Churchmen as England; and we have received their names as those of ambitious and dangerous men! When monks and priests could overawe the mightiest monarchs, and restrain the iron barons, by whom the soil of this island was conquered, the Church must have proved itself worthy of confidence. Whence such confidence? Can nations rise save by the comprehension of affairs? And who, amongst a rising state, can be powerful, save those that understand them best?.... In times less great than these, the Church held duties (now termed political as opposed to spiritual) to be a more solemn trust and obligation weighing upon it, than upon the other members of the state. It coveted the administration of justice, it applied itself to legislation as an institute of education and morals, -it interwove the mercy and the justice of religion's truth in the letter of the laws of Christian states,--and, causing common obligations to be respected by each of the separate states of Christendom, it became the source of international law. It took from war many of its worst characters, limited its frequency, and regulated the conditions, and established the forms, by which it should be made. Thus was the influence of the Church maintained, by its wisdom and usages... and men continued to revere an institution which, in a temporal sense, continued to fulfil a portion of those duties, which conferred on it the title of 'MOTHER." "-p. 17.

These were, indeed, the titles of the Church of England, when that Church was. As to the establishment, which arrogates the name, and occupies the temporalities of that Church, it were a contemptible thing to compare its non-feasances and misdeeds with those services to civilisation, of which even the above eloquent passage is but a scanty catalogue. Let us for a few moments examine what, for many past years, has been the character of our public acts. They will show how fatal to the nation's honour have been the nation's forgetfulness of God, and its separation from His Church. We again refer to the Report of the East India Committee.

"The war we are now examining," observes the committee, in its third collateral report,* *"does not stand alone in its causes, character, or consequences. About the same period, we assaulted Persia, without a declaration of war, and commenced our lawless invasion of China. We also piratically occupied Aden. We have thus simultaneously outraged every Asiatic people within our reach, the Affghans, the Chinese, the Arabs, the Belouches, and the Scindians. For the last twelve years, this country has been engaged in hostilities in every quarter; none of which have been preceded by those forms that render war legal. Such violations of law have therefore become habitual. Great Britain, that formerly earned a character for justice, by her respect of law, is now in danger of awakening against her the execration of mankind, and arming all nations for her destruction, unless the example she sets succeeds in subverting all law and order, and converts the world into a ‘societas leonum."

The first collateral Report+ examines this matter in detail. We extract a few, in addition to such as we have already enumerated. In 1826, England violated the law of nations, by her compact with France and Russia to settle the affairs of the Ottoman Empire, without its concurrence and consent. Into the examination of that treaty, and its untoward consequence, the affair of Navarin, we entered at large upon a former occasion. In 1828, as a further consequence of the same illegal treaty, without war, and without receiving any injury from Greece, England blockaded the Greek ports. In the same year she, for the first time, refused to fulfil her solemn engagement to protect Syria against Russian aggressions. In 1831, she suffered the barefaced violation, by Russia, of the Treaty of Vienna, with respect to Poland, to pass unrevenged, and the nationality, which she had guaranteed to

* Report of the E. I. Committee, &c. p. 125.

† Ibid. pp. 72-3.

the Poles, to be violently extinguished. In 1833 she again renewed, against her Ottoman ally, in conjunction with other powers, the illegal interference of which she had been guilty in 1826. In 1834, under pretence of settling the Peninsula, she convulsed it to its centre, and deluged it with blood; expending her own blood and treasure, in a too successful assault upon ancient rights and franchises, guaranteed to Spain by her own constitution. In the same year, she secretly concerted with Russia the same illegal interference in the affairs of her old ally, Persia, of which she had twice been guilty against Turkey. This illegal union continued during the three succeeding years, while Russia, with our connivance, was urging Persia to assault Herat. Under pretence of punishing the Persians for this act, which England herself had, in a manner, sanctioned in 1838, she suddenly declared herself no longer bound by her treaties with Persia, and, without any declaration of war, seized upon Karrak, but soon afterwards as precipitately abandoned it. In 1840, England falsely declared Naples guilty of breach of engagements, and made hostile demonstrations upon her coast. On the 15th July, in that year, she signed a treaty, stipulating warlike operations against Egypt, with which country she was not at war,- thus violating the law of nations, and her Minister stipulated the execution of the treaty before it was ratified in London, thus violating her own constitution also. In 1841 she established, by a new treaty, the infamous conditions of Unkiar Skelessi, against which she had before protested. And, finally, to use the language of the Third Report, "disregard of public law has been followed by disbelief in the practice of honour and justice. These public crimes are not only suffered, but justified, (if justification it can be called), by asserting that our whole previous career has been one of injustice: inferring, therefore, that injustice is the character of England, and that injustice is profitable." It is added, although the fact is immaterial to the purpose, that this assertion is altogether false,-justice having been, in past times, the character of England, and the only bulwark of her greatness.

With such startling enormities before our shamed regards, we can well afford to hear Mr. Urquhart's withering denunciations of our actual degradation. They afford him the means of unanswerably illustrating what he has recorded, of the influence, which the Reformed religion, had in perverting and corrupting the intellect of England and her heart. We are curious to know, what impression the following bitter challenge to Dr. Philpotts, as to the spiritual endowments of the Anglican establishment, made upon that most conscious of her prelates.

"The evidence of the Church's usefulness is to be found in the life and character of its flock. Does that flock do justice and love mercy? Is it moved with brotherly affection? Is it one that executes justice, shielding the weak, resisting the oppressor? Is it one that detests violence and rapine, and turns away from blood? No! this people is a house divided against itself, but it rises as one man to do wrong against the stranger. Its hand is swift to shed blood, and it exults in its transgression; and no words of rebuke have been heard, against the iniquities of earthly rulers, from the ministers of the God of Justice. They were silent in the face of the crimes of power. They bore no message to their Sovereign from the King of Kings, and they denounced no judgment and no retribution on a generation of evil doers; they had not taught justice; they could not denounce transgression."—p. 19.

Who is there, that has not read the memorable letter to the Protestant Bishop of London, which the present Archbishop of Tuam published in the summer of 1835? For such as have not read it, we wish the space and opportunity were afforded us, of transferring to these pages the magnificent contrast of the morality of the Church Catholic, with that of her rebellious child, pretending to the name of English Church. His grace, with happy judgment, selected for the parallel, two famous modern sermons; the one, preached by a poor attenuated friar at the inauguration of the Sovereign Pontiff, that still is the other, preached at the inauguration of the then reigning King of England, by Dr. Bloomfield himself, the Protestant prelate whom his grace was actually addressing. The one discourse made that august assemblage, where the highest princes of the Church and those of earth sat together, to tremble with fear and shame for the coming of their Lord in judgment, as they listened to the fearless words of his poor but faithful minister. The other sermon was a most courtly lecture upon one or other of the decencies of modern high life. It was polished, and, what is commonly styled in correct society, elegant and clever; but it was not impressive. "Epictetus might have been the composer," said its sarcastic commentator, "and one of his disciples might have been the preacher of it." What the sermons and preachers were, such were the societies which produced them. The parallel might be extended from Rome to Lambeth Palace; Berlin, Petersburgh, the Hague, or any seat of error would do as well as Lambeth in the contrast. It is only in the Church Catholic, that courtpreachers forget so far their courtesies, as to tell to royalty and excellency the truths, which these personages are apt to suppose to have been meant solely for the vulgar. It is only the Church Catholic, that employs against these personages, when sermons are found inadequate for

their conversion, a discipline of chastisement, which is unknown to them of the new learning, and would shock them, were it known, with its sturdy disrespect of persons and privilege. The Colonial Society, in its own way, has acknowledged some portion of this truth. When Peter I, it tells us (p. 53,n.) Erastianised the Russian Church, its powers and efficiency to control the passions of the executive were overturned. Before that event, even this schismatical and rotten branch of the Church did control the tyrants of Muscovy, but only "to a certain degree." In like manner, as Mr. Urquhart has very strongly but accurately put it, the Evangelical Church of Prussia is a mere utensil of bureaucratic despotism within, and of deception without it. Bad as the unhappy establishment is in our own country, and sunken deeply in almost hopeless degradation, it is, according to our author, the only one "of the churches severed from this original stock" (the Church Catholie), "that imposed upon itself the duty and preserved the functions connected with a teacher and a censor of the morals of the state." (pp. 22-3.) How, in the same writer's judgment, this least deformed of the excrescences of Reformation does, nevertheless, present itself, we have already seen. A Church that does not, or cannot, 66 teach men to be just," is something so bad, that we are unable to imagine how Russia or Prussia can produce a worse. Surely there is not a worse state for any nation to be brought to, than that of being "so ignorant as to sin without an intention," insomuch that "the value of conscientiousness is totally destroyed-not one just man remaining to testify and accuse."‡ (p. 25.) Yet it is to this degradation of heart, that the teachings of its Protestant preachers, or their inability to teach, have now brought down this once noble nation. The Church of England, we are elsewhere told, (p. 16) "from the protector, becomes the destroyer of the state; changed itself in character, it becomes the curse of the land whose blessing it was instituted to be." Even the appeal he makes to one among the prelates of that Church, is made rather to the man than to the ecclesiastic. He does not seem to anticipate very great things from the Church of England, even at the best. If only one of its ministers can be induced to examine into the state of his interior, under the head of his duties as minister, it is as much as Mr. Urquhart is willing to expect. "Has it no dignitary whose powers and patriotism may struggle while it is yet day, and, if he fail, and we perish, leave still upon the name of England one ray, amid the darkness of her decline-one son who had performed his duty?" Without awaiting his lordship's answer to the question with which Mr. Urquhart closes his

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