innocent wife. The whole tenor of Edward's life proves that he was utterly incapable of revenge so uncatholic and base; and his declaration on his dying day, while it revealed the true nature of his engagement with Edgitha, also made manifest to all, the affection and respect with which he had always continued to regard her. Those who have made this calumny a justification for their hate to a king who was sainted by the Catholic Church they detest, have forgotten the favours heaped on the Godwin family by Edward, and the easy pardon they obtained after their ungrateful revolt-a pardon accompanied by complete restoration to all their forfeited honours.

Emma had not been a kind mother to Edward, but, far from revenging himself when he had the power, he always treated her with the greatest kindness: and when she was accused by her enemies of having held criminal conversation with Alwyn, the pious bishop of Winchester, nothing but the vehement representations of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the decision of a synod held at Winchester, could induce him to submit her to the trial by ordeal. In obedience to their sentence, Emma walked blindfolded over nine burning ploughshares, and being preserved (by the power of GOD) unhurt from this trial, Edward fell on his knees to demand her pardon. He was not satisfied with this humiliation, nor did he leave the Church, until, in the self-abnegating spirit of that age, he had received a severe discipline from the bishops who were present, as some expiation for the indignity he had been induced to offer to his mother. The Archbishop did penance by a pilgrimage to St. Peter's at Rome, and afterwards retired to his monastery in Normandy. Edward restored to his mother all her goods and estates which had been taken from her.

During the king's exile in Normandy, he had made a vow to perform a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Peter's at Rome, if God should ever please to put an end to the misfortunes of his family. Being now firmly settled on the throne, he began to make preparations for the fulfilment of his promise; but his nobles, who dreaded the dangers to which the kingdom would be exposed during his absence, opposed themselves so vehemently to his intended departure, that the matter was at last referred to the pope. Leo IX dispensed with his vow, on condition that, by way of commutation, he should give to the poor the money that his journey would have cost; and further, that he should build, or repair and endow, a monastery in honour of St. Peter. Edward scrupulously fulfilled these conditions; and the church of St. Peter's at Westminster was the fruit of his zeal. He was taken ill

during the ceremony of its dedication, and prepared himself for death with the most edifying devotion. "In his last moments," says Butler, "seeing his nobles all bathed in tears around his bed, and his affection ate and virtuous queen sobbing more vehemently and weeping more bitterly than the rest, he said to her, with great tenderness, Weep not, dear daughter; I shall not die, but live. Departing from the land of the dying, I hope to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.' Commending her to her brother Harold and other lords, he declared he left her an untouched virgin. He calmly expired on the 5th of January, 1066, in the sixty-fourth year of his age, having reigned twenty three years and some months."

Edward has been described by historians as a good king, though not a great one; yet if wisdom and virtue be deserving the attribute of greatness (and who shall say they are not?) certainly the King Confessor of England has some claim to this title of Great.' For more than twenty years he swayed the sceptre of England in peace; be repressed the haughtiness of the Dane, he tamed the turbulence of the Saxon noble; he raised the people from their deep subjection, and enforced so just an administration of the laws, that for years after his death the nation, when wronged and insulted by their Norman kings, were in the habit of demanding the laws and government of "the good king Edward." He was mild without weakness, just without cruelty, generous without extravagance. His charity was unbounded, and public buildings were his great delight; but his people were not taxed by his magnificence, for his private income sufficed alike for his own expenses, for his hidden charities, and public foundations. The only war which he ever willingly undertook was in a just cause, and was crowned by conquest. He gave a code of laws to his people, which, as part of the common law of England, are still in force, save where altered by later statutes; he remitted the "Danegelt," an oppressive tax, which had latterly been paid into the king's exchequer, and had become a part of his private resources; and when his nobles presented him with a gift of money, he refused to rob his people, and commanded it to be returned to the poor, from whose hard-earned pittance it had been unjustly wrung. If acts like these give Edward no claim to the title of Great, woe to the king who seeks by any other means to obtain it. Riches, and glory, and honour, may all be his; but his name will not live in the hearts of his people; he will go down to his grave and be forgotten, or remembered but as an object of just execration; while the deeds of the good king Edward, like those of all just men, shall

"smell sweet, and blossom in the dust." Amid all the contradictions of history and the malevolence of party, the Catholic feeling with which Protestants have honoured the memory of king Edward appears strangely inconsistent. The Protestant sovereign of England, on the day of his coronation, receives a crown which, if not that of king Edward, is made at least in imitation of it. The dalmatic and maniple were once a part of his royal robes of state; and no relics of the Catholic Church have been kept with more reverence than these have been preserved by the Protestants into whose hands they have fallen.

The custom of touching for the king's evil, which had its origin in the sanctity of the Saint, was afterwards continued by a long line of Protestant kings; though Elizabeth, trusting to the virtue of the royal touch alone, omitted the sign of the cross, which might possibly have been regarded by the humble Edward as the most essential part of the ceremony, and as the true cause of those cures recorded by all the historians of the days in which he lived.

Edward is the Saint of the Catholic line of English kings, as Charles the First has ever been of their Protestant successors: it might not, then, prove uninteresting to compare their respective claims to our admiration. They have both been described by historians as good men, but as weak kings, yet the dissimilarity of their manner of reigning was such, that we may be permitted to doubt if even this similarity of temperament existed between them.

Both reigned in troublesome times; but Edward, almost without bloodshed, compelled the Danes to submit to his power; while Charles sank beneath the resentment of his people. Edward made laws for the just government of the nation-Charles broke those which were already made. Edward pardoned those who had done him evilCharles signed the death-warrant of the most faithful of his friends. Edward was a Catholic, and at no one instant were his actions at variance with his professions of faith-Charles was a Protestant, but more than once he was the betrayer of his religion, as when he was about to marry the Infanta of Spain; and in a more especial manner, when he consented to the establishment of the covenant for the space of five years. Both are considered Saints in their respective churches, but all the energies of the one were directed to uphold the glory of GOD of the other, to exalt the prerogatives of the crown. Edward lived a Saint of his own free will-Charles died a martyr by the will of his subjects. And this thankless friend, this perjured king, this martyr for Church and State, whom the Protestant Church holds up to the

admiration of her children,—this faithless defender of the faith could consent to the virtual destruction of the religion in which he believed, and which he had sworn to defend, in the faint hope of preserving the life that, on the scaffold, he affected to despise. Charles has been exalted to the rank of martyr and saint by the unanimous opinion of the Protestant nation,—Edward has been declared a Saint by the Catholic Church, which only condescends to acknowledge those as martyrs who have poured forth their blood like water, and who have esteemed their lives as nothing in comparison with the preservation of the faith for which they have gladly died.

We have one word more to say to our readers before we conclude this imperfect sketch of the holy Edward's life. Westminster Abbey, as it at present exists, was begun by Henry III; but the old church, which stood there in the time of Edward, was repaired and magnificently endowed by him; he may, then, be in a great measure regarded as its founder. Among the idle crowds who wander among its tombs, some few may perhaps pause for a moment, amid more serious thoughts in the chapel where the bones of the saint are laid. They may run mentally over the long record of his life, untarnished by a single crime, and rich in every virtue that can add lustre to the nature of man. They may stand beside his tomb, occupied by the contemplation of his good deeds, as we loiter near a bed of violets enhaling unconsciously the fragrance they send up from the dust where they bloom. In that hour of secret communing with themselves and with the dead, should their souls become oppressed by a sense of awful veneration for him to the holiness of whose life that mighty edifice in the lapse of ages has become at once a testimony and a commemoration; we would entreat them to reserve some portion of their grateful admiration for the Catholic magnificence of those olden times, when kings were content to dwell in meaner houses, while they raised temples to the majesty of GOD, which, defying alike the hand of time and the assaults of fanaticism, have come down to us, to witness, in these our days of self-seeking ostentation, of the heaven-aspiring genius of our ancestors,-those noble spirits who lived before and about the times so emphatically condemned by the ignorance of later centuries, as the times of the Dark Ages.

Rogation Day.

M. C. A.

49

FRAGMENTS FROM THE HOLY FATHERS OF THE EASTERN CHURCH.

ST. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA.

(Selections from the Stromata.)

PHILOSOPHY Of the Gentiles.

GOD is the author of all good things; of some, indeed, in a principal manner, as the Old and New Testament; but of others by consequence, as the philosophy (of the Greeks); which perhaps was for a special purpose given to them, before that the Lord was pleased to call them, the Greeks, also. And thus philosophy taught the Greeks, like to a schoolmaster, as the law the Hebrews, to bring them to Christ: this is her preparatory work, preserving and guarding the way for him who is to be made perfect in Christ.

The same GOD supplied both Testaments, who also gave to the Greeks the philosophy through which the pre-eminence of fame has been secured to their nation. Hence is this manifest, that from the discipline of Greek philosophy, and of the law, those are congregated into one family, the chosen people on whom is bestowed salvation, who accept the faith,--these being built up in the truth, not by the influence of three antecedent races, in distinct succession, lest any should think that a triple nature existed (in the principles of truth), but by divers Testaments, whose author is one and the same,—the Word of the Lord. For, in the same manner as the Almighty desired the Jews should be saved, sending them prophets, thus also, amongst the Greeks, He set apart from the vulgar, certain most illustrious and gifted ones, as prophets of their own language, raised up to make known the goodness of GOD, in as far as their nation was capable of conceiving it.

FAITH.

Faith is not the subject of voluntary and free election, if it is a prerogative of nature, nor can he justly meet with retribution of punishment for not believing, when that has not been through his own fault; or of reward for believing, when that has come to pass without his own agency. No property, or distinction of faith and incredulity, can