What is there in human nature to awaken respect and tenderness, if man is the unprotected insect of a day.

And what is he more if atheism be true?

Erase all thoughts and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man.

Apetite knowing no restraint, and poverty and suffering having no solace or hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws.

Virtue, duty and principle would be mocked and spurned as unmeaning sounds.

A sordid self interest would supplant every other feeling, and man would become in fact, what the theory of atheism declares him to be-'a companion for brutes!'

Generally speaking it seems to us that on principle, no less than by law and reason, the fact of the introduction into a public body of any person duly elected as a member of it, must of necessity admit his composition to be such that he may fill any post in that body which any other of its members may occupy, that is to say, that he is on an equal footing with all other representatives sitting there.

The presence then of atheists in that august assemblage whose privelege and duty are to make laws for a Christian Country, may lead to those atheists filling the highest offices of the State.

But if on the contrary it be conceded that persons not having the fear of God before their eyes, men

holding no belief in any one of the Ten Commandments -those unhappy Maugrabins who when they die expect to be resolved into the elements, and whose humanity is to melt into the general mass of Nature and be recompounded in the other forms with which she daily supplies those which daily disappear, and to return under different forms'if it be conceded that such beings are not fit to hold the position of statesman of the rank of Prime Minister, then why and on what principle are they permitted to form an integral portion of or even to enter that honourable House!

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Selborne, a man of great power, whose position not only officially and as a lawyer, but also intellectually stands so high, arguing for his party and strange to say, in favor of the admission of atheists to Parliament, has said that it is a part of his idea of Christianity that equal justice is due to Christian and infidel. In this idea we do not scruple to say we go with him— Christianity must inevitably be closely allied with Justice.

We do not however comprehend him, if he means that atheism and Christianity are to be placed upon a par! If so, it would be as logical to say that a man who entirely ignores the laws of God is qualified to administer justice to Christians! We confess that however narrowed may become the channel through which justice travels we should be very sorry to be placed upon our trial, guilty or guiltless, before a bench presided over by an atheistical judge.

CHAPTER XXI.

"Those who hold that the influence of the Church of Rome in the dark ages was, on the whole beneficial to mankind may yet with perfect consistency regard the Reformation as an inestimable blessing."

MACAULAY.

In attempting the introduction of another branch of our subject which in many of its aspects presents considerations of much delicacy and embarrassment, we cannot feel otherwise than oppressed with its magnitude and importance.

When we refer to the Church of England our readers will readily understand us, if we say we breathe a free'r, purer atmosphere of great relief after devoting ourselves to the horrible tenets of atheism-but they will at the same time perceive the difficulties under which we labour in descanting on the progressive influences of that great organization in the face of its present internal dissentions.

Prior to the Restoration history tells us that the hatred of the Papacy by the Protestants did not exceed that of the Government, and that the combination of those two powers and their united action culminated in the establishment of the Church of England.

It became a necessity in fact as a protest and a barrier against the further inroads of the Pope.

If such a barrier existed then, may we ask ought it, or ought it not to exist now?

Is the phase of the question we thus incidentally raise not an argument which should find favor amongst those Protestant Dissenters of England whose only objection is to the form!

Laid on the lines of the Church of Rome, the Church of England retained and still retains visible indications of the ground work.

'She copied' says Macaulay the Roman Catholic forms of prayer but translated them into the vulgar tongue and invited the illiterate multitude to join its voice to that of the minister.

Utterly rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation and condemning as idolatrous all adoration paid to the sacramental bread and wine, she yet to the disgust of the Puritans required her children to receive the memorials of Divine love meekly kneeling upon their knees.

Discarding many rich vestments which surrounded the altars of the ancient faith, she yet retained to the horror of weak minds, a robe of white linen typical of the condition which belonged to her as the mystical spouse of Christ.

Discarding likewise those pantominic gestures which in the Roman Church worship are substituted for intelligible words, she yet shocked many rigid Protestants by marking the infant just sprinkled from the font, with the sign of the Cross.

Whilst the Roman Catholic addressed his prayers to a multitude of Saints,-the Puritans refused the addition of 'Saint' even to the apostle of the Gentiles.

The Church of England though she asked for the intercession of no created being, still set apart days for the commemoration of some who had done and suffered great things for the faith, and gently invited the dying penitent to confess his sins to a divine, and empowered her ministers to soothe the departing soul by an absolution which breathes the very spirit of the old religion.

She appeals however more to the understanding and less to the senses and the imagination than does the Church of Rome.'

It is amusing to compare the clergy of the days we have been speaking of with those of the 19th century. At the former time the historian tells us that in general the divine who quitted his chaplainship in a great household for a benefice and a wife, found he had only exchanged one class of vexations for another. As children multiplied and grew, the household of the priest became more and more beggarly-holes appeared more and more plainly in the thatch of his parsonage, and in his single cassock.

Often it was only by toiling on his glebe, by feeding swine and by loading dung carts that he could obtain daily bread, nor did his utmost exertions always prevent the bailiffs from taking his concordance and his inkstand in execution.

It was a white day on which he was admitted into the kitchen of a great house and regaled with cold meat and ale. Study he found impossible,