that will reach to them: we suspect it to be very like the enchanted pavilion in the Arabian story, which was capable of covering an army, yet so minutely reducible, as to be easily put into the pocket. Whilst the Church of England is illegally coerced, the law sleeps amidst the murders, enormities, and diabolical deeds, which occur in Ireland; the priesthood, like Alecto, "Medias ululata per erbus," are unrestrained in insolence and aggression; they utter threats, or denounce persons from the altar, yet though arson or murder, or both united, are often shortly afterwards recorded in the chronicles of the day, those, to whom belongs the power, like Gallio, care not for these things. Without inflicting on our readers the frightful catalogue of atrocities too well known, or describing the rapid strides of rampant Popery, we ask, if the greater efficiency of the ministrations of the Church of England has been the sincere object of the Government, how harmonizes with such an object the facility given to the spread of heretical opinions, from which our Church itself is reformed? The Church of England and the Church of Rome cannot both be true in doctrine-a Government watching over the welfare of the community should support the true and restrain the false—when it proposes to increase the efficiency of the Church of England, it virtually presupposes its truth and therefore acts oppositely to its own presupposition in everything by which it adds energy to the Popish faction. But, on the idea that a Government secretly inclined to Popery might find a dominant Church diametrically contrary to that, to which it is inclined, we can easily imagine such a close adoption of the precise measures of which we complain, as those which have been adopted by our own Govern ment. The establishment of monasteries and nunneries all over the land is at variance with those acts which established the Reformation: it is contrary to our laws that there should be communities, the inmates of which are restricted from free agency, and in cases of necessity debarred from magisterial interference. If toleration has been granted to individual sects, toleration which permits the increase of a religion, whose object is to destroy the Church recognized by law, and which ultimately would destroy the very sects with which it is incongruously allied, ceases to deserve the name, and becomes licentiousness, and want of principle. Whether the elements of this union are or are not discordant, is not exactly our present enquiry; but it should be the enquiry of a government, whose duty is to superintend the general welfare, and prevent discordant elements from hereafter creating chaotic confusion. The power of the confessional is one, which cannot co-exist with the safety of the national religion; having been proved by authentic history, on many occasions, not to have been confined to the examination of the heart and conduct, but to have been misapplied to temporal purposes, and to become a power of most dangerous exercise, formidably Jesuitical, and one whose nature should have prevented the repeal of the laws against the religion that enjoined it. It L might be deemed irrelevant to cite arguments from Scipio Ricci : but to our knowledge the confessional has been abused in London. The monastic system is in a great measure withdrawn from the operations of our laws, and yet is tolerated by our present Parliament. Whatever may be the external laws of the realm, they have no internal operation in conventual buildings-the liberty of the subject is merged in the will of the superior. A report has reached us of the immurement of a nun in the west of England, some few years since: but we know that on a very late occasion, in the west of England, when a physician was summoned to a nun, whose malady was more mental than bodily, the abbess refused to leave the room, that the nun might not disburthen her mind; nor was it till the physician threatened magisterial interference that her intrusion was stopped. The consequence was that the physician acted peremptorily, and removed the nun to her parents. Is not this an imperium in imperio, the exercise of which would not be allowed in the Church of England? But the Church of England desires no such unhallowed power to be vested in her clergy: it suits her not to arrogate to herself exorbitant authority; it is her aim to walk humbly with her God. If outrages like this be permitted, and doubtless there are many more, which will only be revealed by the Father of our spirits when he shall summon the dust of departed man before the throne of his glory, and make the evil-doer testify against himself, on what principle is the Church of God in this land founded and cemented by Christ, the God and Lord of the Church, the object of worldly persecution and political rapine? On what principle is a demoralized Church, whose very existence tends to the subversion of all civilized laws, assisted to dominion, and advanced to the power of working spiritual wickedness in high places? If, indeed, a weak and irresolute policy, one which, to overthrow our Establishment, and, as it were, exclaiming with Juno, "Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo," will sanction such dangerous communities in the empire, preparing, perhaps, the brand and the faggot for its present advocates, on a contemptible plea of expediency, should not these communities be restrained by certain provident enactments? Should it not be enacted that there should be inspecting visitors (no Papist being allowed to be a visitor, on the rule that no man can be a witness for himself) who, at least four times in every year, and as much more frequently as expediency may direct them, should separately see and converse with every inmate of these pseudo-religious prisons? In such a case they should primarily inquire whether the novice, monk, or nun, were in the convent with his or her own consent? If so, whether he or she desired to remain ?-and in case of a negative they should be empowered to emancipate as many as might desire emancipation. In this respect the falsely called toleration would advance towards consistency. All imprisonment, all corporal punishments, especially the death within four walls by starvation, undue restraints, the inheritance of the property of monks and nuns, the improper intrusions of superiors, &c., should be stopped: and notice should be given, under penalties, to the visitors of every illness and every death; that, in the one instance, proper medical aid might be afforded, that, in the other, the coroner might investigate the cause and treatment. We see not why the inmates of these houses should less be the objects of legislative care than the inmates of lunatic asyla. We wish, moreover, that every monastery or nunnery, be licensed at the quarter sessions, that every novice before profession or taking the vow shall subscribe a declaration of free-agency before a magistrate, that, independently of the ordinary visitors, the justices of the peace shall examine the state of these institutions, and that every deed of gift shall be void which shall not have been executed in the presence both of the ordinary visitors and the justices of the peace, the donors being subjected to interrogations on the causes of the donation. Since the Papists, through O'Connell and his company, legislate for us, let it not be deemed surprising that, if the law will tolerate these prisons, we would legislate for them, so as to deprive them, in a great measure, of their iniquitous tendency. We would rather stop their growing ascendancy, indeed, altogether. We trust, however, that our remarks will meet the eyes of some of the Protestant members of the Legislature. That we have not been incorrect respecting the enmity of the present Government to our Church, let the quotation of the 14th section of the Bill for the better ordering of Prisons convince our readers : "And be it enacted, that in every prison, in which the average number of prisoners professing any one and the same religion differing from that of the Established Church, confined at one time during the three preceding years, shall not have been less than fifty, it shall be lawful for the justices or other persons having the appointment of the chaplain of such prison, if they shall see fit, to appoint or remove, at pleasure, a teacher, or a clergyman acting as such, at the time of such appointment," &c. So that, coupling this facility sought for Popish priests to enter the prisons, with the impudent request of some Popish females lately made to the magistrates, that they might seek proselytes in the cells of the prisons, and perceiving in this bill no provision in favour of those whose creed might differ from that of the fifty, nor any provision for different chaplains, should there be several fifties in the classification of creeds, whilst we cannot avoid noticing the weakness of the section, its plain object appears before us in all its enmity and imbecility-in fiend-like consistency with the other assaults on our Church. Has it not, therefore, been rendered manifest that in proportion as attempts have been made to depress and injuriously use the Church of England, attempts have also, pari gressu, been made to give the sway to Papists and Dissenters ? The gravamina which we suggest, are not equal to those which are proposed against ourselves. 128 ANECDOTES. ULRICH VON HUTTEN.-Ulrich was a cotemporary of Luther, and exceedingly like him in disposition: he rendered himself remarkable as a scholar, poet, and reformer. He was born in 1488, at his family castle, Stakelberg, in Franconia, and combined with the love of poetry an inclination to military deeds. He was small in person, but strongly moulded; and inured himself to every hardship, as an epitaph, which he composed for himself, when once ill in Padua, shows: Pauperiem, morbus, spolium, frigusque, famemque, The freedom of his language raised many enemies against him; but in all his actions he was open, noble, and sincere. He began his military life in his twentieth year (1508), when he went to Italy, in the Venetian war. Here he remained till 1517; but had little opportunity of showing his spirit in heroic deeds, but great in evincing his endurance of all sorts of hardships. About this time he dedicated a part of his Latin poems, and his laudatory poem on Germany and the German nation, to Albrecht of Brandenburg. After his return to Germany he was knighted by the Emperor Maximilian I., as the reward of his chivalrous character; and crowned at the same time with the poetic laurel, the garland of which, Constantia, the handsomest girl of her time in Augsburg, and daughter of Conrad Pentinger, the celebrated historian, wove. As Luther, about this time, began his opposition to the Pope, it was impossible that Hutten could long remain doubtful which party he should embrace. Actively participating in all that concerned the benefit of mankind, he instantly wrote against Leo X., and all who opposed the Reformation, a mass of vigorous essays in Latin and German, in verse and in prose, as his spirit urged him, and in a noble epistle exhorted Luther assiduously to persevere. As a specimen of his spirited style, we select this among other passages :-" Ferunt excommunicatum te. Quantus, O Luthere, quantus es, si hoc verum est!" He also edited the bull of the year 1520 with very pertinent and cutting marginal glosses, wrote in German a historical catena on the continual disobedience of the Roman pontiffs towards the emperors, and pushed it so far, that at last Leo X. signified to the Elector Albrecht von Mainz to send Hutten, bound hands and feet, to Rome. Albrecht could no longer protect him; and since this Papal edict was in the hands of several German nobles, Hutten became aware that prison or the stiletto would be used against him he therefore retired to Ebernburg, and thence wrote to the Emperor Charles V., to Albrecht von Mainz, and Frederic the Wise, of Saxony, letters, in which he defended himself, and demanded justice against the Roman Court. From this period he launched forth against all whom he considered as the enemies of spiritual and civil freedom, as the defenders of tyranny and folly, as opponents to intelligence and right feeling. He persecuted them with the bitterest satires, and mortified them by German songs, which were sung by all classes. But thus he increased the number of his enemies, whose power and vengeance he felt that he should at last experience; and since no more security remained for him in Germany, he fled to Switzerland, to a small island called Ufnau, in the lake of Zurich, where, through want and misery, and the restless energies of his mind, after a few years, he departed this life. GOOD FRIDAY EASTER SUNDAY.-Mr. Greswell, in his Harmony, has shown the futility of the public opinion as to the dates of many circumstances in our Saviour's life. Into the arguments by which his reasoning is supported we shall not enter. He conceives that our Saviour was really born A.U. 750, on the tenth of the Jewish Nisan, which partly coincided with April 5, and partly with April 6: with the former, if he was born on the evening of the tenth of Nisan, with the latter if he was born in the morning, on the principle of the nychthemeron. But it is rendered clear that the former was the most probable. It is further shown, that as there can be no doubt that our Saviour suffered on the 14th of Nisan, and on a Friday, the 5th of April in the year when he suffered coincided with the Friday in Passion-week: thus, that Good Friday was his actual birth-day. For in that year, the 5th of April and the 14th of Nisan answered to each other. It is likewise argued, that the 5th of April, A.U., 750, when our Saviour was born, was on a Saturday, and that as his birth took place in the evening, it was not on the Jewish Sabbath, on the first day of the week; therefore, that he was born and rose from the dead but on the first day of the week. This gives a harmony to the phrase, born or begotten anew from the dead. The list of events coincident with the 5th of April may be seen in the Harmony; and they may be reckoned among the most powerful evidences of the truth of Christianity. How the nativity became celebrated at a different time of the year, according to the vulgar opinion, Mr. Greswell has satisfactorily explained: in the Greek Church, in the time of Chrysostom, the vulgar opinion was only of ten years' standing, and is demonstrably wrong on the very grounds which Chrysostom has cited in its defence, BENEFIT OF CLERGY.-In ancient times, if a criminal capitally condemned could read a verse in the Bible, the book being opened at a venture, his education saved his life. This was called the Benefit of Clergy, and the verse which he read was styled the neck-verse. In subsequent times, the term acquired a different meaning, and became that which our law now understands by it. THE MILLENNIUM.-Among the whimsical ideas entertained by the celebrated and Rev. William Whiston, was an opinion that the millennium and the restoration of the Jews were at hand. About the time of his publication of this prediction, having a small estate to sell, he offered it to a gentleman at thirty years' purchase. Thirty years' purchase!" exclaimed the gentleman. "You appear astonished (answered Whiston), and yet, I believe, I ask no more for my property than other folks do." "I don't wonder at other people (replied the gentleman ironically), because they know no better; but I am certainly surprised to hear Mr. Whiston ask thirty years' purchase, when he feels sure that in half that time property will be in common, and no man's estate worth a groat." A LEARNED ARGUMENT.-The same divine, being in company with Addison, Steele, Secretary Craggs, and Sir Robert Walpole, they engaged in a dispute whether a Secretary of State could be an honest man! Whiston, being asked his opinion, he said, "he thought honesty was the best policy; and if a Minister would practise it, he would find it so." To this, Craggs replied, "it might do for a fortnight, but would not do for a month." Whiston demanded, "if he had ever tried it for a fortnight?" To which, no answer having been returned, the company decided in favor of Whiston. CLERICAL BENEVOLENCE.-The Most Reverend Dr. Boulter, Archbishop of Armagh, was distinguished as a popular preacher, and celebrated for |