shakes the whole framework of society, but leads some men, it is to be feared, to certain destruction,-eternal death. Popery, in and by the practice of confession, makes distinction between sin and sin, teaches that in some other way it is to be atoned for than by the Lord Jesus' perfect and one sacrifice, denies the great truth, that by his obedience we are made righteous, that this is imputed to us; denies the indwelling of the Spirit, and that believers are like the Apostle Paul, who thus writes, "When I would do good, evil is present with me. But if I consent unto the law that it is good, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me;" denies, "that there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus;" denies" that none can lay anything to the charge of God's elect."

It turns the chastenings of God the Father into the exactions of God the angry and severe judge, and instead of displaying him as the gracious and reconciled to us in Christ, and because he loveth us, correcting us, and so soon as the wished-for and needful effect is produced, withdrawing the rod, represents him as never satisfied, but still demanding, demanding, demanding.

It thus opposes Christ; virtually and practically denies him to be the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world; the propitiation for our sins; the Lord our righteousness, who hath made reconciliation for iniquity, made an end of sin, and brought in everlasting righteousness; one Mediator between God and man; the merciful and faithful and compassionate High Priest; the ever-living Intercessor; the all-prevailing Advocate. This great engine of Popery, confession, is now recommended to England under the cloak of a relief to tender consciences. Yes. Young men, men of like passions unto us, are to be brought into the pest house, debarred the use of every disinfecting agent, exposed to the concentrated virus of centuries of vice: the produce not only of the refined licentiousness of courts, and the brutal sensuality of the camp, (1) but also of the hideous, revolting wickedness of the celibate. Yes. Young men are

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to stand and see ulcer after ulcer of the putridest sort (2) laid open by a cool and steady lecturer, who, with polluted mind and conscience, seared and brazen brow, and hardened heart, while they shudder, rebukes them and compels them to examine and analyse and pore into the corrupt mass, until infected themselves, (3) maddened by the burning poison as it courses with resistless speed through every vein, their heart turns putrid too. Then to go forth, all leprous as they are, separated and divided from every man, cut off from the common birthright of humanity, having no home, no "help-mate," as the only wise God, whose name is love, and whose every creature is good," designed and provided for man, to share his sorrows, to partake of his joys, to soothe him when weary with the toils and cares and anxieties of this brief life, to whom he might "give honour, as being an heir with him of the grace of eternal life,"—with whom he might " mingle his prayers," and with whom he might commune of the rest, which the "holy women of old, dwelling in subjection to their own husbands, and ornamented with a meek and quiet spirit, in the sight of God of great price," looked for, and into which they have long since entered;_no child, engraving his tenderest affections, "to bring up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;" no country to love, to guard with his strength, to profit by his ability, to intercede for with his prayers. but each one with his hand against every man, envious at happiness which he cannot enjoy, to go forth reckless of consequences, to spread through a too susceptible world, a deadly, soul-destroying plague.

No,

And this is the system the whiterobed Dr. Pusey would introduce and foster and encourage to relieve tender consciences.

How intimately one error is connected with another, we are not often aware until we examine. The whole Romish system is so connected, that you can no more have one part without having the whole, than you can take away one part without destroying the whole. It is a wonderful scheme, most subtlely devised, most skilfully

arranged, there is nothing lacking. The devout and the profane, the rich and the poor, the thoughtful and the careless, the imaginative and the practical, all can have their wants supplied. None are sent away but true penitents. Such a one can find nothing to satisfy his cravings,-he asks for mercy, Rome points to penance, he wants to be righteous, she points to the cell, he wants an internal purity, and she bids him fast, and meditate, and reject God's blessings, he wants rest, but she bids him strive, strive, strive, and leaves him still at a fearful uncertainty,-he wants a Saviour, and she points out an exactor stern and severe, he wants an eternal rest, and she points to purgatory. And this is the best that Rome can offer. The Christian cannot be content with this, and so protests against her; she denounces him as a heretic, and to still his audacious tongue, commits him to the tender mercy of her ever-ready executioners, and thus maintains her dominion, her boasted unity, by murdering every opponent.

But thus she proves herself to be Antichrist, the mystical Babylon, the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, and points to her doom, the fire and the torment for ever.

TESTIMONIES REFERRED TO IN THE PRECEDING ARTICLE.

(1.) The manuals put into the hands of the young confessor, are grounded upon the works of casuists, who made their questions for a horribly corrupt period. You find among them crimes perhaps never perpetrated except by the brutal soldiery of the Duke of Alva or Wallenstein, a mass of iniquity that would have been abhorred by ancient Sodom.-Michelet's (chap. 2) Priests, Women, and Families.

(2.) It behoves the confessor to be fully instructed. Let the chaste reader pardon me if I enter into details which exhibit more unseemly ugliness. Saint Alphonsus Liguori, &c. Although sad consequences be foreseen, it is lawful for confessors to hear confessions of women, and to read treatises concerning evil actions.-Ib.

How sad it was for me to be

obliged to learn by heart a treatise by Bouvier on the Sixth (Seventh) Commandment.

What conflicts for the imagination and the heart.-Rouaze, late a Romish Priest.

We were to be guided by Bouvier's Treatise on the Sixth (Seventh) Commandments; a more abominable book does not exist.-Stilmant, late a Romish Priest.

(3.) I have seen the most promising men with unimpeached characters obtain country vicarages. A virtuous wife would have confirmed and strengthened their purposes, but they were to lead the life of angels in celibacy. They were, however, men. Young women knelt before them, in all the intimacy and openness of confession. A solitary home made them go abroad in search of social converse. Love, long resisted, seized them, at length, like madness. Two I knew who died insane: hundreds might be found who avoid that fate by a life of systematic vice.—Blanco White.

How many scalding tears have already been shed at the senseless law of celibacy by those who have fallen into the net of an unprincipled priest!-Czerski, late a Romish Priest.

To these we will add the following from the Diocesan Statutes of the Roman Catholics of the Province of Leinster :

"We fear that there is no time in which the melancholy saying of St. Thomas of Villanova is not fulfilled in some confessors, That they send themselves and sinners down careless into hell!!'"

DR. WORDSWORTH ON THE REPEAL OF THE POPISH PENALTIES, 1847.

IT is proposed to relieve English Romanists from all penalties for asserting the Pope's spiritual supremacy in these realms, in opposition to that of the Queen: and for extolling and maintaining his pretended and usurped power over her subjects.

What is this but to call upon the State to legalize a public profession on their part, that they are not sub

jects of the Crown; and to make this non-subjection of theirs the occasion, ground-work, and reason for legislative innovations and aggressions against the Crown and the Constitution? or, in other words, because it is true that some persons are disloyal enough to deny the independence of the Crown, and to pay little regard even to the personal safety of the Monarch (for the Pope affirms that deposed Sovereigns may be murdered; and what Sovereign of England indeed, what Protestant Sovereignis not ipso facto deposed by the Pope?) --therefore the rights of the Crown, instead of being more vigorously asserted, are to be sacrificed; and the person of the Sovereign, instead of being more carefully guarded, is to be put in more imminent peril!

But, Sir, you may desire to know on what grounds such propositions as these are made.

I. First, then, it is alleged that the laws which these propositions would repeal are "the offspring of a dark age." A dark age! The age of Shakspeare, of Spenser, of Ben Jonson, of Burleigh, and Salisbury, and Raleigh, of Bacon, and of Coke, of Jewell, and Hooker, and of Andrewes! A dark age! Dark indeed, in a certain sense, it was, when those deeds of darkness were performed under the authority and with the approval of the Papacy, which rendered those laws necessary :-dark indeed, it was, when on the night of the 24th of August, 1572, St. Bartholomew's-day, above five thousand Protestants were butchered at Paris, and when within a few days after it, in six towns of France, five-and-twenty thousand more were slain :-dark it was, when as soon as he heard of this dreadful massacre, Pope Gregory XIII. went in procession to the Church of St. Louis, at Rome, to give God thanks; and when, to commemorate this event, he ordered a medal to be struck, which represents this savage work as performed by an angel of heaven, with a sword in one hand and a cross in the other, and which bears the inscription, Vgonottorvm Strages, the massacre of the Hugenots :-dark it was, when on the 1st of August, 1589, the friar Jaques Clement, "having learnt from

theologians whom he had consulted, that a tyrant might lawfully be put to death," went and assassinated his own Sovereign, your King Henry III.: dark it was, when on hearing the intelligence of that King's death, Pope Sixtus V. summoned a Consistory of his Cardinals, and in a set speech ascribed the murder of the King "to the providence of God," and spoke of it as a pledge that "the Almighty would still protect France: "-dark it was, when on the 14th of May, 1610, Ravailac the Jesuit effected what, in 1594, Jean Chastel the Jesuit had attempted, and murdered your Sovereign Henry IV., and after the deed was done, freely confessed that it was the book of Mariana the Jesuit which encouraged him to that design:-dark it was, when at several times after the publication of the Papal Bull against her in 1567 (Feb. 24), the life of our gracious Queen Elizabeth was attempted, as in 1572, by Story, again in 1583 by Somerville, again in 1585 by Parry, stimulated by the Pope's Nuncio, and in 1586 by Savage, having plenary indulgence from the Pope, as appears from the letter of a Cardinal di Como, dated Rome, 30th Jan. 1584, again by Moody in 1587, again by Patrick in 1594, by Lopez and York in the same year, again by Squire in 1598, by Winter, in 1602, from all which traitorous designs, set on foot by the arts and arms of Rome, she was delivered by the merciful interference of Divine Providence: and dark it was, when in the year 1605, a conspiracy was made to destroy the King, Royal Family, Lords and Commons of England, and when Bulls from Rome were ready to give complete effect to what was then decreed:

dark, I say, the age may well be called, when such acts as these were concerted and executed. But in another sense that age was one of light. Wisdom guided the councils of England, and sound laws were enacted, by which, under the Divine blessing, these dark designs were defeated, and the light of peace and liberty and public safety were diffused throughout the realm. But, if in a spirit of presumptuous contempt for the wisdom of that age, and of arrogant confidence in our own sagacity, we

abolish these laws, who shall say that we shall not bring back in all its gloom the thick darkness which they dispersed?

In the meantime, if we desire to prove that we are ourselves in darkness, we have only to be guilty of the folly as far as regards England, of calling that age a dark one. If that age was a dark one, O that we had more such darkness and less of our own light ! Oh, that we had more of its loyalty and piety, more of its steadiness of purpose, more of its faith in fixed principles, and more of its courage in carrying them into practice. In further justice to these laws, I shall content myself with referring to the character which is given of them by three of our greatest statesmen and lawyers, Lord Treasurer Burleigh, Lord High Chancellor Bacon, and Lord High Chancellor Clarendon.-From Dr. Wordsworth's Letters on the Destructive Character of the Church of Rome.

The above has been printed and widely circulated as a handbill by the Protestant Association.

POPERY IN THE ARMY.

THE Government has accepted the terms of the Roman Catholics. Popish priests are in future to be paid to teach our soldiers treason. The French monarch well observed, that the next war in Europe would be one of religion. We furnish him with the means of making it such, and of enlisting our own soldiers to act against ourselves. The very men out of whose chapels, when they preach in English, officers are frequently obliged to march their troops, are now to be admitted as paid confessors, directors, and advisers of their consciences. The Church of England enjoys no such privileges. The Established and Free Kirks of Scotland, which have thousands of its children in our ranks, and the 42d, 72d, 79th, 92d, and 93d, where they chiefly abound, and which certainly are not the least meritorious corps in the army, have no such privileges. The amount of crime in every regiment bears a pretty near proportion to the number of Papists in its ranks. Not content, however, with

endowing Romanism, the Premier is disposed to be yet more liberal. In the estimates for this year is included a grant for the payment of Mahometan muftis for the instruction of the ignorant Chinese to deny the divinity of our only Lord! Can liberality go beyond this? The question has been often asked. We answer, that it may, and that it will proceed. We say that Liberalism, not satisfied with equality, will demand supremacy; that Liberalism tends to Popery, just as centralization to universal despotism; and that when Popery and despotism shall be alike established, then that freedom which we gave so readily to the disturbers of order, the violaters of God's law, the disseminators of blasphemy, filth, and obscenity, will be refused ourselves. We love our Church most warmly. We love it each day more and more: but we cannot help avowing that our love for her is based on the services she renders for the defence and dissemination of God's truth. Her establishment, or non-establishment, makes no difference in her sacredness. Strip her of her endowments, and she may diffuse light, life, and liberty! but do not poison her with the deadly venom of Liberalism; do not let her be taught to think herself the sister, the equal, the companion of the apostate Church of Rome. Keep her from all connexion with that apostasy, as you would keep a loved and only daughter from the contagion of the worst of her sex. Rather would we see the Church of England stand forth in her majesty independent of all political influence, withdrawing all support from the parties who have betrayed her, than that her revenues should be divided between the votaries of truth, and the followers of idolatry; between the servants of God and the priests of Baal. There can be no middle course. Either our venerated Primate is a heretic and an impostor, who exists by betraying men's souls into eternal perdition, or the Pope of Rome, and all who vow him ‘allegiance, are intruders into a kingdom where they have no authority, which they enter only to pervert from allegiance to its Sovereign, its constitution, and its God.-Kentish Observer.