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the happiness of kindred, and parents, and children. We welcome you to the immeasurable blessings of rational existence, the immortal hopes of Christianity, and the light of everlasting truth!

LESSON LXXI.

In Behalf of Catholic Emancipation.-REV. SYDNEY SMITH.

THERE are a set of high-spirited men, who are very much afraid of being afraid; who cannot brook the idea of doing any thing from fear, and whose conversation is full of fire and sword, when any apprehension of resistance is alluded to. I have perfect confidence in the high and unyielding spirit, and in the military courage of the English; and I have no doubt, but that many of the country gentlemen, who now call out No Popery, would fearlessly put themselves at the head of their embattled yeomanry to control the Irish Catholics. My objections to such courage is, that it would certainly be exercised unjustly, and probably exercised in vain. I should deprecate any rising of the Catholics, as the most grievous misfortune which could happen to the empire and to themselves. They had far better endure all they do endure, and a great deal worse, than try the experiment.

But, if they do try it, you may depend upon it they will do it at their own time, and not at yours. They will not select a fortnight in the summer, during a profound peace, when corn and money abound, and when the Catholics of Europe are unconcerned spectators. If you make a resolution to be unjust, you must make another resolution to be always strong, always vigilant, and always rich; you must present a square phalanx of impenetrable strength, for keen-eyed revenge is riding round your ranks; and if one heart falter, or one hand tremble, you are lost.

You may call all this threatening; I am sure I have no such absurd intention; but wish only, in sober sadness, to point out what appears to me to be the inevitable conse

quences of the conduct we pursue. If danger be not pointed out and insisted upon, how is it to be avoided? My firm belief is, that England will be compelled to grant ignominiously what she now refuses haughtily.

It is very difficult to make the mass of mankind believe that the state of things is ever to be otherwise than they have been accustomed to see it. I have very often heard old persons describe the impossibility of making any one believe that the American Colonies could ever be separated from this country. It was always considered as an idle dream of discontented politicians, good enough to fill up the periods of a speech, but which no practical man, devoid of the spirit of party, considered to be within the limits of possibility. There was a period when the slightest concession would have satisfied the Americans but all the world was in heroics; one set of gentlemen met at the Lamb, and another at the Lion: blood and treasure men, breathing war, vengeance, and contempt; and in eight years afterwards, an awkward looking gentleman in plain clothes walked up to the drawing-room of St. James's, in the midst of the gentlemen of the Lion and the Lamb, and was introduced as the ambassador from the United States of America.

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Mild and genteel people do not like the idea of persecution, and are advocates for toleration; but then they think it no act of intolerance to deprive Catholics of political power. The history of all this is, that all men secretly like to punish others for not being of the same opinion with themselves, and that this sort of privation is the only species of persecution, of which the improved feeling and advanced cultivation of the age will admit. Fire and faggot, chains and stone walls, have been clamoured away; nothing remains but to mortify a man's pride, and to limit his resources, and to set a mark upon him, by cutting him off from his fair share of political power. By this receipt, insolence is gratified, and humanity is not shocked.

The gentlest Protestant can see, with dry eyes, Lord Stourton excluded from Parliament, though he would abominate the most distant idea of personal cruelty to Mr. Petre. This is only to say that he lives in the nineteenth, instead of the sixteenth century, and that he is as intoler

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ant in religious matters as the state of manners existing in his age will permit. Is it not the same spirit, which wounds the pride of a fellow creature on account of his faith, or which casts his body into the flames? Are they any thing else but degrees and modifications of the same principle?

The minds of these two men no more differ because they differ in their degrees of punishment, than their bodies differ because one wore a doublet in the time of Mary, and the other wears a coat in the reign of George. I do not accuse them of intentional cruelty and injustice : I am sure there are very many excellent men, who would be shocked if they could conceive themselves to be guilty of any thing like cruelty; but they innocently give a wrong name to the bad spirit which is within them, and think they are tolerant, because they are not as intolerant as they could have been in other times, but cannot be now. The true spirit is to search after God and for another life, with lowliness of heart; to fling down no man's altar, to punish no man's prayer; to heap no penalties and no pains on those solemn supplications, which, in divers tongues, and in varied forms, and in temples of a thousand shapes, but with one deep sense of human dependence, men pour forth to God.

LESSON LXXII.

The Reward of Monarchs.-E. EVERETT.

ABOUT half a league from the little sea-port of Palos, in the province of Andalusia, in Spain, stands a convent dedicated to St. Mary. Sometime in the year 1486, a poor way-faring stranger, accompanied by a small boy, makes his appearance, on foot, at the gate of this convent, and begs of the porter a little bread and water for his child.This friendless stranger is COLUMBUS. Brought up in the hardy pursuit of a mariner, with no other relaxation from its toils, but that of an occasional service in the fleets of his native country, with the burden of fifty years upon his frame, the unprotected foreigner makes his suit to the naughty sovereigns of Portugal and Spain.

He tells them, that the broad flat earth on which we tread, is round;-he proposes, with what seems a sacrilegious hand, to lift the veil which had hung, from the creation of the world, over the floods of the ocean;—he promises, by a western course, to reach the eastern shores of Asia,—the region of gold, and diamonds, and spices; to extend the sovereignty of christian kings over realms and nations hitherto unapproached and unknown;—and_ultimately to perform a new crusade to the holy land, and ransom the sepulchre of our Saviour, with the new found gold of the east.

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Who shall believe the chimerical pretension? learned men examine it, and pronounce it futile. The royal pilots have ascertained by their own experience, that it is groundless. The priesthood have considered it, and have pronounced that sentence so terrific where the inquisition reigns, that it is a wicked heresy;-the common sense, and popular feeling of men, have been roused first into disdainful and then into indignant exercise, toward a project, which, by a strange new chimera, represented one half of mankind walking with their feet toward the other half.

Such is the reception which his proposal meets. For a long time, the great cause of humanity, depending on the discovery of these fair continents, is involved in the fortitude, perseverance, and spirit of the solitary stranger, already past the time of life, when the pulse of adventure beats full and high. If he sink beneath the indifference of the great, the sneers of the wise, the enmity of the mass, and the persecution of a host of adversaries, high and low, and give up the fruitless and thankless pursuit of his noble vision, what a hope for mankind is blasted!

But he does not sink. He shakes off his paltry enemies, as the lion shakes the dew-drops from his mane.That consciousness of motive and of strength, which always supports the man who is worthy to be supported, sustains him in his hour of trial; and at length, after years of expectation, importunity, and hope deferred, he launches forth upon the unknown deep, to discover a new world, under the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella.

The patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella!-Let us dwell for a moment on the auspices under which our country was brought to light. The patronage of Ferdinand

and Isabella! Yes, doubtless, they have fitted out a convoy, worthy the noble temper of the man, and the gallantry of his project. Convinced, at length, that it is no daydream of a heated visionary, the fortunate sovereigns of Castile and Arragon, returning from their triumph over the last of the Moors, and putting a victorious close to a war of seven centuries' duration, have no doubt prepared an expedition of well appointed magnificence, to go out upon this splendid search for other worlds. They have made ready, no doubt, their proudest galleon, to waft the heroic adventurer upon his path of glory, with a whole armada of kindred spirits, to share his toils and honours.

Alas! from his ancient resort of Palos, which he first approached as a mendicant, in three frail barks, of which two were without decks,—the great discoverer of America sails forth on the first voyage across the unexplored waters.— Such is the patronage of kings! A few years pass by; he discovers a new hemisphere; the wildest of his visions fade into insignificance, before the reality of their fulfilment; he finds a new world for Castile and Leon, and comes back to Spain, loaded with iron fetters. Republics, it is said, are ungrateful;—such are the rewards of monarchs!

LESSON LXXIII.

Reflections in Westminster Abbey.-ADDISON.

WHEN I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed the whole afternoon in the church-yard, the cloisters, and the church; amusing myself with the tomb-stones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another-the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are

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