In the present day, which boasts itself the very meridian of intellect, it is a wonderful fact that the Cerberus of popery, (the unclean beast that of a verity guards the doors of hell, if not of heaven,) should be again raising with applause its triple-crowned front. Popery, the system of intolerance and superstition, finds favour in an age of liberalism and infidelity! popery, the essence of which consists in the spiritual and temporal tyranny of one weak man, claiming to be irresponsible and infallible, this monstrous weed of the darkest ages, is flourishing in our cultivated soil, and strangely twining around the uncongenial thistles of republican opinion.-Is there not something of judicial blindness here? Are we not approaching the "prius dementat?"—

Without doubt, there are, and ever have been, many persons of truly Christian principles and practice in the communion of the church of Rome; it would be worse than illiberal, it would be false, to think or say the contrary:-but this, so far from serving that church as a boast, has necessarily happened in spite of her system. It is a fact, that she has uniformly persecuted her truly religious members,— Fenelon, Quesnel, and Blaise Pascal occur to the mind at once and as for the people of God beyond

her pale, the world is red with their blood: bear witness, Turin, Berne, Madrid, Paris, London, and the mother of abominations, papal Rome.

It is a mere contradiction, however our modern sophists may argue the matter, to suppose that a man is liberal, and enlightened, while he can befriend a system built up of darkness, and intolerance. To hinder evil is to help good; and the foe to bigotry is the true liberal. But words have lost their just signification; the rebel is dubbed a patriot, and the churl said to be bountiful. According to the commentary of these latter days, it would appear we must marvellously alter that saying of old time, "The liberal man deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things shall he stand:" out on such puerile tautology! and let modern politicians thus expound the text,

"The liberal pusheth his economy, beyond meanness, even to injustice; the liberal when he seeth traitors consenteth unto them, and hath been a partaker with the rebellious; the liberal grindeth the face of the poor, and grudgeth the widow's pension; the liberal cringeth unto lewd fellows of the baser sort, and lieth in the dust, while they trample on his neck; the liberal abetteth superstition; the liberal refuseth succour to the only system of religion which can make men free indeed; the liberal voteth abundance of money not his own to aid in upholding systems of acknowledged error, which degrade men's minds, and fetter their consciences; the liberal filcheth from the needy, to add more provision to

himself; the liberal taketh much account of the failings of the good, and lightly regardeth the felon and the murderer; the liberal sweareth unto his neighbour, and deceiveth him; the liberal despiseth honour, and rebuketh generosity: and so, by devising things most illiberal, most unjust, most besotted, most absurd, by extremities of meanness shall he stand."

And let us not hear in answer, that the name "liberal" has many senses, for its modern usurpers have ingeniously abused them all; in matters of mind, not less than in matters of money, in dealing with men's souls, as well as with their substance, the term, as now applied, is a misnomer: if men love and covet that noble epithet, let them so act as to deserve it, and not, for gross demerits, hear it in bitter irony; if they will be what they have been, let the bastard-children of liberality be named, according to their deeds, the Belial-sons of licence.

CZAR PETER.

TURN, wondrous shade of an immortal man,
And give my welcome favourable heed,
While my mute soul considers each bright deed
That gems thy crown, imperial artizan,

Whose patriot labour thy rude country freed From Scythian darkness; for to thee, great prince, Despite a Jezebel-sister's curséd plan

Of luring thee to pleasure's guilty ways,
Justly belongs the honourable praise

Of waking a barbarian world of slaves
To fame and power, that have not faded since:
Nobly the bronze colossus tells thy worth,

For he that blesses, helps, improves, and saves, Is the true hero of this strife-torn earth.

The life of Peter the Great by Voltaire has made the leading facts of his life familiar to all. Before the reign of Peter, who was proclaimed czar in 1682, when only ten years of age, Russia was in a state of more than comparative barbarism. The early talents of the child, military and civil, were seen with suspicious jealousy by his half-sister Sophia, who most wickedly attempted to corrupt and enervate his masculine mind by surrounding him closely with the seductions of pleasure: an atrocious design, for which precedents were furnished in the treatment of the son of Dion by Dionysius, (as narrated by Cornelius Nepos, x. 4,) of the Earl of Warwick by Henry the Seventh, and, unless popular ideas be erroneous, an example has been lately shown to the world in the life and early death of the Duke of Reichstadt.

Peter was in many respects a type of true greatness he could lay aside the ensigns of royalty, and toil as a common labourer in a dockyard; he could emulate Roman Brutus in sacrificing a traitorous son, Alexis, for the weal of Russia; he could imitate, at least for once, the noble Scipio, in giving up the object of his passion to another: he could listen to the wise counsels of an obscure foreigner, his