66 which stood at its south-east end; it has been long entirely removed. Instead of the sharp acclivity which rose up to a point from each side of the river, the road over the Clyde is now as level as that of Waterloo Bridge in London. On the farther side, too, where the body of the insurgents were once mustered, grove now "nods on grove," round the beautiful entrance to Hamilton park, in all the plentifulness of ornamental plantations. But I checked myself by remembering the Frenchman's definition of a Tory-that he was one who, if he had been living at the creation, would have said, "Let chaos be," and I endeavoured to discover what might render these egregious improvements less distressing. When I expressed my disappointment to the toll-keeper, he forthwith took me to a point whence I perceived that, though on one side the bridge was much changed, the other side was yet unaltered. One looks with deep interest on those buttresses, now gray with age, and partially overgrown with grass and low shrubs, as one thinks that they were the very objects on which the eyes of the Covenanters and their persecutors had alike rested-that Hamilton, Burley, and Hackstone, on the one side, and Monmouth, Dalzell, and Claverhouse, on the other, had manoeuvred in view of them; that here the deadly battle had raged; and that the river which flowed beneath that bridge in 1679, poured its tide along as deep and rapid as it does to-day, though then it bore with it gallant bodies, and ran red with the blood of the slain.-Footsteps of our Forefathers. EPHESUS. It is with feelings of no common interest that the eye of the Christian traveller catches the first sight of castle and ruins of Ephesus. As he advances, the large mosque, supposed by some to be the church of St John, begins to attract the attention; but all around it is a sea of ruins and desolation. Imagination can scarcely picture the change which two thousand years have made on this place. Some centuries passed on, and the temples of Messiah were thrown down to make way for the mosques of Mahomet, -the keble is substituted for the altar,the cross is removed from the dome, and the crescent glitters in its stead. A few years more, and all is silent ruins. A few unintelligible heaps of stones with some empty mud cottages, are all the remains of the great city of the Ephesians. The busy hum of its noisy population is still as the grave. Thy riches, and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners, and thy pilots, thy calkers, and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all thy men of war, are fallen." The Epistle to the Ephesians is read throughout the world, but there is not one Christian residing at Ephesus to read it now. The Ephesians are now a few Greek peasants living in extreme wretchedness, dependence, and insensibility,-the representatives of an illustrious people, and inhabiting the wreck of their greatness; some, the substructions of the glorious edifices which they raised; some beneath the vaults of the stadium, once the crowded scene of their diversions; and some by the abrupt precipice in the sepulchres which received their ashes. In January 1824 the desolation was complete. A Turk, his Arab 'servant, and a single Greek, composed the entire population. So hath the secret providence of God disposed affairs, too deep and mysterious for man to search into, that the decay of the three great religions of this world is here presented at one view to the eye of the traveller as lying buried in the same tomb. Not a vestige remains of the heathen worship, or of the silver statue made by Demetrius, which was said to have fallen down from heaven. The cross of Christ, and him crucified, which was preached here by the apostle of the Gentiles, and heard by the elders who fell on the neck of Paul, and sorrowed most of all that they were to see his face no more, is proclaimed now no longer. And low as either of the other two religions, the worship of Mahomet in this place has almost ceased to exist, and the minaret of the Mussulman, the emblem of another triumphant service, is seen to totter and sink into the surrounding chaos. Nothing remains save the enduring hills around, and the mazy Caystrus, the waters of which run under the bridge changeless still, and the same as before. Once the seat of enterprise and active commerce, the very harbour is now deserted, by the sea having fled from its solitary ruins. Its streets, formerly crowded, are now ploughed over by the Ottoman serfs. Its squares, once so gay, are now browsed upon by the sheep of the hospitable Turk. Its houses, once so elegant, are now the haunts of serpents and the dens of wild beasts. Not a vestige can be seen of the famous temple of Diana, which was burned the very day Alexander the Great was born. Erostratus fired the temple on purpose, and being put to the torture, in order to force him to bring out his motive for committing so infamous an action, he confessed that it was with the view of making himself known to posterity, and to immortalise his name by destroying so noble a structure. The very site of this stupendous edifice is yet undetermined. Its very ruins seem to be buried under the soil, or swallowed by an earthquake A Sibylline oracle foretold that the earth would tremble and open, and B The whole that this glorious building would fall headlong into the abyss: and really present appearances might justify the belief, that some such overwhelming catastrophe had exactly fulfilled the prediction. The extensive ruins at the head of it are supposed by some travellers to have marked the site, but like the rest of the mouldings, arches, fallen walls, broken porticoes, and prostrate pillars, they merely show how insignificant the remains of earthly glory come to be in a few years. Excepting from the associations of the scene, all the recompense the pilgrim gets for his travel of fifty miles from Smyrna, is the sight of an extensive marsh, some fishing wears, and a bar of sand where the river enters the ocean. Further up the stream there are stone embankments, which seem to have been erected for the purpose of confining the river at several places, still visible. beach looks to the eye a foul unwholesome fen, and the only lively sight is the water still winding clearly and rapidly without any impediment through the seven arches of the bridge. The main bulk of the extensive ruins seem to be below the bridge, on the southern bank of the stream, and about two miles from the sea. The sides of the mountains are here and there broken into very stupendous precipices, and others are scooped into hollows in which a few stately trees seem to grow. All is silence but the scream of the eagle and the howl of the jackal. There too is heard a strange sound like the rattle of a policeman ;—it is the noise of the stork, and plenty of them are to be seen seated on many a ruin, hovering over many a column, and setting their nest high up on the buildings. These jackalls, foxes, and serpents, are now the only tenants of the scene, unless when some enthusiastic stray traveller like myself, traverses its ruined fragments, or a povertystruck shepherd drives his flock of goats to browse on the scanty herbage. Upon the whole, it is a solemn and forlorn sight, awakening nothing but the deepest sensations of melancholy, and reminding us how the Ephesians left their first love, and returned not to their first works. Therefore their candlestick has been removed out of its place, and the great city of Ephesus is no more.-Aiton's Lands of the Messiah, Mahomet, and the Pope. POPERY A NOVELTY. THE truth is, that our religion is the old one, and theirs the new; only their corruptions do not wear the garb of novelty, because they came in without being perceived, silently and gently, through a long lapse of time; whereas our reformation of them, and restoration of the primitive faith, When was made suddenly and all at once. you scour a room, you remove, in an hour or two, dirt which had been gathering for several days; yet that is only called keeping it clean, not changing it; and so, when you wash your face, or brush your clothes. If the corruptions of the Church of Rome had been thrown off one by one, each soon after it came in, no one would have thought such a continual keeping the church clean to be innovation. But, because they were left to accumulate too long, and a great general correction had to be made suddenly and at once, therefore, the restoration of the old state of things seems, to ignorant people, the bringing in of a new one. What is called "the change of the style is a striking instance of a seeming innovation, which was really a restoration, being a return to the right course, by a sudden correction of a great error that had resulted from the accumulation of imperceptibly small ones. The year contains 365 days and (almost) a quarter. To keep the reckoning right an additional day is inserted in February, every fourth (leap) year, to make up the four quarters of a day. But this addition is a very little too much; the excess amounting to three days in every 400 years. And this continually increasing error went on uncorrected (in this country) till it amounted to eleven days. In the middle of the last century we corrected it, by adopting what is called "the new style," and at once cutting off those days; just as one puts forward the hands of a clock which has lost. But this, though it was, in truth, only a restoration of the true time, appeared to ignorant people a great and offensive innovation, because it was a correction made all at once, of an error which had crept in by little. Archbishop Whately. THE NECESSITY OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT. BUT the point which Roman Catholics love most to dwell on is the weakness of private judgment, which they represent as a prevailing reason why we should rather give ourselves up to the direction of an infallible guide. In answer to this, several Protestant writers have very well defended the right of private judgment; others have preferred to regard it as a duty, and in truth the exercise of it is both a right and a duty; or rather, a right because it is a duty. But the most important consideration of all is the necessity of private judgment. A man who resolves to place himself under a certain guide to be implicitly followed, and decides that such and such a church is the appointed infallible guide, does decide on his own private judgment, that one most important point, which include in it all other decisions relative to religion. And if, by his own showing, he is unfit to judge at all, he can have no ground for confidence that he has decided rightly in that. And if, accordingly, he will not trust himself to judge even on this point, but resolves to consult his priest, or some other friends, and be led entirely by their judgment thereupon, still he does, in thus resolving, exercise his own judgment as to the counsellors he so relies on. The responsibility of forming some judgment is one which, however unfit we may deem ourselves to bear it, we cannot possibly get rid of, in any matter about which we really feel an anxious care. It is laid upon us by God, and we cannot shake it off. Before a man can rationally judge that he should submit his judgment in other things to the Church of Rome, he must first have judged,-1. That there is a God; 2. That Christianity comes from God; 3. That Christ has promised to give an infallible authority in the church; 4. That such authority resides in the Church of Rome. Now, to say that men who are competent to form sound judgments upon these points are quite incompetent to form sound judgments about any other matters in religion, is very like saying, that men may have sound judgments of their own before they enter the Church of Rome, but that they lose all sound judgment entirely from the moment they enter it.-Archbishop Whately. THE IDOLATRY OF SAINT-WORSHIP. AGAIN, the invocation of departed saints, and especially of the blessed Virgin Mary, as practised in the Church of Rome, is a thing plainly contrary to the spirit of the Gospel. For-not to mention that it is at least very doubtful as to some of their so-called saints, whether they ever existed at all-and as to others, whether they were not mere crazy fanatics-and as to others, whether they were not very wicked mennot to mention this, and supposing these "saints" to have been all really good Christians, you will readily see that asking a dead person to pray for you, when you do not know him to be present, is quite a different thing from asking a living person to pray for you. The Scriptures never tell us that the dead can hear or know the requests which men make to them; so that asking their prayers at all is a piece of "will-worship" that cannot be justified. We might, for all that appears, just as reasonably go down on our knees and ask a good man in America to pray for us. But when it came to be believed that a holy person, when removed from earth, can hear the addresses of thousands and millions calling on him in all parts of the world, and can know the secret dispositions of mind in each several person that invokes him, this belief did, in fact, deify him. Whatever subtle explanations may be attempted of the way in which "glorified saints" are able to hear, from various regions, and repeat, more prayers in the day than there are minutes in the twentyfour hours, it is plain that at least the great mass of their worshippers must regard them no less as gods than the ancient pagans did the beings they worshipped. For the pagans acknowledged that many of the gods whom they worshipped had been men; only they fancied that, after death, their souls had obtained great power and influence over the management of things in the world; which is what was meant by calling them gods.-Archbishop Whately. LOYALTY OF THE FIRST SECEDERS. FROM a series of original and valuable papers in "The United Presbyterian Church History," written by the Rev. Dr Ferrier, and appearing from month to month in the "Canadian Presbyterian Magazine," we extract the following:-" To these notices may be added, in conclusion, an anecdote, hitherto unpublished, but which has been carefully transmitted and preserved in the family of the writer, from its incidental connection with his maternal grandfather. When the city of Perth and its neighbourhood were in the hands of the rebels, Mr Moncrieff, of Abernethy, gave proof of his bold and decided loyalty, in opposition to the interests of the Pretender, by praying publicly, and in the hearing of many of the rebels, for King George the Second. In consequence of the activity and zeal of this distinguished father of our church, in the cause of British liberty, both he and his family suffered considerable annoyance. In his neighbourhood the Pretender's friends were numerous and powerful, and indeed had such command over the district, that they exacted cess from the inhabitants in support of their cause. Mr Moncrieff, who was proprietor of the estate of Culfargie, peremptorily refused to pay the cess. The consequence was, that the rebel army seized his son Matthew, afterwards his successor in the ministry, and Mr John Muckersie, afterwards minister at Kinkell, then living in the family, both being students of divinity under Mr Moncrieff, and carried them as hostages to Perth jail. When the news of the seizure of these young gentlemen, who were great favourites with the people, spread through the neighbourhood, the large congregation of Mr Moncrieff seemed to turn out in a body, and, indignant at the insult done to the family of their beloved pastor, they proceeded to Perth, and, crowding around the jail, demanded the surrender of the two prisoners. They were told, however, by the leaders of the rebellion, that their request could not be granted-that if they continued to barricade the jail, and to create disturbance, orders would be given that the two prisoners should be suspended from the windows-a threatening which they would have unscrupulously executed; but that if they returned home Notices of New Publications. HISTORY OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable. give the reader an idea of the character of such a work, is all we can pretend to, and this by quotation from its own pages. The tracing the course of its confused and am plified details, is far beyond our present limits. After a brief retrospective sketch of the various circumstances and social and political concurrences which finally issued in the Council of Trent, M. Bungener thus dramatically sums up the details, and sketches the ambiguous outset of this grand hocus pocus imposition upon mankind: "And now, before proceeding farther, shall we pause for a little, and take a retrospect of what had been done? We have been rapid enough in our narrative for the attentive reader to seize its general features, and to deduce its legitimate consequences. Mutual distrust, intrigues, misapprehensions, and quarrels of all sorts, acts of violence and acts of baseness, together with the most inextricable mingling of interests, views, and passions, all manifestly and grossly human,-such was the chaos from which the council was to emerge; such was the basis on which that seat was to be constructed from which God himself was to be considered as about to speak. Meanwhile, he who had been contemptuously called by Leo X. a 'clever fellow, had been permitted by God to see Europe pervaded with his doctrines; and that council which Luther had called for in 1517, and which he might have dreaded in 1520,-in 1545, even before it had been opened, had altogether ceased, before he descended to the grave, to give any serious ground of alarm to the Reformation. It had lost its charm before it met. Twenty-five years of delays had proved superabundantly "To some, that Rome did not wish for the Council, never had seriously wished for it, and could not have any wish for it; "To others, that the princes who had most called for it, really cared very little about it; "To the Protestants, that no concession whatever would be made to them; "To the Roman Catholics, that small abuses would be amended, and the great ones preserved; "To all, in fine, that it would not be the church's council, but the Pope's council. "And as for those, if there still were such, who persisted in hoping something from it, can it be imagined that they would at that time have dared to promise to its dogmatical decisions the authority which has been given to them since? No; the human springs of the machine had creaked too long and too lamentably. They were destined still to creak too long. The authority of the Council of Trent commenced, in fact, only after its close. This we shall prove, and without difficulty; but this is just what we think it of most importance to prove well. "The grand day of the opening approached at last, and all eyes in Europe were fixed on the small town which was to be rendered for ever memorable by the proceedings of that day. "On the 13th of March 1545, two of the legates, the Cardinals del Monte and SantaCroce, arrived at Trent. They came armed with two papal bulls: the one public, merely appointing them to preside in the council; the other secret, authorising them to dissolve it, should the Pope's interest seem so to require. This was nothing new. Martin V. had taken the same precaution when the Council of Pavia met. "A vast crowd greeted the cardinals on their arrival, and being received as princes, they responded to the popular enthusiasm, as princes indeed, but as princes of the church. Three years' indulgence was bestowed on all who were fortunate enough to see them pass. Then came a scruple to perplex them. Every indulgence proceeds from the Pope, but among the powers conferred upon them, that of granting indulgences had been omitted. Legitimately, therefore, they could grant none-no, not for three days; and yet they had granted one for three years. What, then, was to be done? They wrote to Rome. The Pope could ask for nothing better than to have to confirm what his legates had done. Three years! what is that to him? Thirty or three hundred years would have cost him no more. But, behold, he also finds a scruple to annoy him. It was all very easy to give validity to the indulgence for the time that had to run; but was it possible, even for him, to declare it available for the time during which it had been absolutely null ? himself cannot change the past. Let people do as they might, there must always have elapsed a certain time during which the faithful must have believed that they had what they had not. If any of them had died during that interval, they must have passed into the other world with a false passport. This apparently childish embarrassment proved really a most serious affair for a Roman casuist. There was no getting rid of it directly; but it was evaded by sending the legates a brief, antedated by several weeks, and which they were presumed to have brought with them from Rome. Pallavicini has been at great God pains to put this historical incident in a proper light, but has succeeded only in proving that he himself thought it very strange. "There had been a crowd, then, at the arrival of the legates, but people began to ask themselves where was the council. Not a bishop had appeared except Cardinal Madrucci, the bishop of Trent, who had preceded the legates in order to do the honours of his city and of his palace. Four hundred seats were nevertheless prepared in a place set apart for them in the cathedral. Although the legates were far from having any desire to see all these filled, yet such a huge void could not fail to be disquieting, and to have much the appearance of an affront. The Pope felt greatly annoyed. He was well aware that a number of bishops, particularly in Italy, had thought to pay court to him by not repairing to Trent; but he felt at the same time, that their absence would be attributed to him. How was he to contrive to bring together enough without there being too many? "The 14th of March had now come, still there was nobody; the 15th, still nobody, and the opening was adjourned. On the 23d, Diego de Mendoza, Charles V.'s ambassador, arrived at Trent, and begged that they would hasten proceedings. The legates held council as to what should be done. Three bishops had arrived, were they to open the council? But how open a general, ecumenical, and universal council with three Italian bishops? Let us wait, they said, for a few days. These few days were to be prolonged to nine months. "We refrain from repeating the jests that passed from mouth to mouth when people began to see the ridiculous issue of this solemn convocation of Christendom, after being twenty-five years of coming to the birth. Romanists and Reformed could not avoid meeting on the common ground of an ancient apologue, already suggested, no doubt, to our readers, and to which the name of the premier legate, Del Monte, or Of-the-Mountain, gave a burlesque application. But let us not laugh. This is a history, not a squib. It may, however, be very seriously remarked, that among so many persons to whom the Council of Trent has never appeared as anything but an immense and majestic assembly, there is surely more than one with regard to whom these first details must make us suspect at once, that the imagination has had something to do with what they have said of it. The Council of Trent,' says one of its apologists, was composed of all that was most illustrious in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Hungary, Bohemia, England, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Moravia, Illyria, and Greece.' We shall soon see what all this amounted to. When the imagination takes such a flight as this, it is very near deserving another name."-Pp. 23, 26. M. Bungener describes with a lively pen the intrigues, tricasseries, and dramatic incidents which characterise the history of this great event; and we are persuaded, |