"Atque affigit humo divinæ particulam auræ. substituting credulous acquiescence for rational evidence, slavish subserviency for filial obedience, dogma for faith, form and ceremony for spiritual piety, sanctimony for sanctity, fasting for abstinence, pilgrimage for mortification, and penance for repentance."* They will see that their priesthood, where they could not by their authority suppress, have endeavoured, by their commentaries, to obscure the Word of God; and they will feel as if they had never before been permitted to enjoy the cheerful light of spiritual day, or been privileged to breathe the blessed and the balmy influence of the Gospel. How readily will they recognise the difference between auricular confession, and the throwing open the heart to God; between priestly absolution and the answer of a good conscience; between the feeble glimmering of that false light by which they were cheated and deluded in the labyrinth of superstition, and that steady sunshine of the soul, which never fails to irradiate and transform the awakened and purified believer! How will the scales fall from their eyes, and the iniquity of priestcraft be discovered to them, when they have begun steadily to lay hold on the hope that has been set before them, and to look faithfully upon HIM who is the author and the finisher of their faith. In truth, they had before mistaken words for things; the will of man for the ordinances of God-and consequently they had been perpetually, like the Jews of old, making his word of none effect by their traditions. They had been content to receive it as it was expounded to them by dark and enigmatical interpreters, who were interested in obscuring its clearness and corrupting its simplicity. But now, they have heard for themselves the words of eternal life; they have listened to him who spake as never man spoke; they have ventured, as it were, to approach with faith, and to touch the hem of his garment, and felt that a virtue has gone out of him by which their moral maladies have been removed, and they have been, as it were, again privileged to taste of the fruit of the tree of life, by partaking of which they may live for ever. We should endeavour so to address their understandings as not to offend their feelings, and so to remove their errors as not, unnecessarily, to shock their prejudices or to shake their faith. For this purpose, it is expedient to shew them, not only in what particulars we differ from them, but also in what we agree. We should be particularly careful to impress upon them how sincerely we reverence ecclesiastical antiquity, and how fully our divine religion is supported by the concurrent sanction of the wisest and best of those holy men who lived in the earliest and the purest ages of the Church. Thus, we will deprive them of that most plausible pretence for adhering to their present superstition, by which so many of them are deluded; and which, if true, would not only justify their preference, but leave us without excuse for having ever departed from them. The principal consideration, we verily believe, which keeps thinking Roman Catholics in connection with their church, is, the fear that they must be involved in a sea of doubt and difficulty if once they depart from it. We must, therefore, seek to convince them that this is not the case; that they need be under no apprehension of being thus abandoned, without guidance, amidst the perplexities of controversy and the strife of tongues; that the Church of England is, as it were, a city of refuge whither they may betake themselves with a certainty of finding a peaceable habitation and a quiet restingplace;" that it has been built upon the foundation of the apostles and the pro 66 Observations occasioned by the Letter of J. K. L. &c. &c. preface xxvi. second edition. phets; that while it has rejected the additions and the corruptions which accumulated in ages of darkness and ignorance, it has guarded, with a scrupulous fidelity," the faith that was once delivered to the saints." "For," to use the language of Jeremy Taylor, "the religion of our church is, certainly, primitive and apostolic, because it teaches us to believe the whole scriptures of the old and new testament, and nothing else, as matter of truth; and therefore unless there can be new scriptures we can have no new matters of belief, no new articles of faith." "We also do believe the apostles creed, the Nicean, with the addition of Constantinople, and that which is commonly called the symbol of St. Athanasius: and the four first general councils are so entirely admitted by us, that they, together with the plain words of scripture, are made the rule and measure of judging heresies amongst us." Those who belong to a church which is thus anchored in the Holy Scriptures, and secured within the haven of antiquity, need not be afraid, as long as they abide by its directions, of being "carried about by every whiff and wind of doctrine." All things essential to faith and to godliness are so plain "that those who run may read them," and every necessary injunction for the guidance and the governance of a true believer is laid down in a manner so artless and so obvious that "the way-faring man, though a fool, cannot err therein." THE DESART WIND. On Afric's bare and burning plains From out the soundless solitude Save the invisible desart wind There is an hour of loneliness A solitude of heart, When we are single in the world, From all we lov'd apart. Oh, then the thoughts, we dare not speak, Are like that voiceless wind, Breathing along the waste of heart, The desart of the mind. M. S. A DAY AT LOUGH-SHEELAN. "How pleasant is the Fisherman's life, Sing hey! sing merrily O! While distant from the world and its strife, Kind nature's boon with joy we receive, Sing merrily, merrily, merrily O! Then homeward over the friendly wave, Opera of " The Burning of Moscow.”—Sir J. STEVENSON, Angling, whether simply piscatorial, or with the adjunct of "loaves" to the "fishes," has become one of the ruling passions of the day. New, and splendid editions of old Isaac Walton are coming forth, and although the beautiful pastoral sketches which enrich the "complete angler" of the good old man, and are so true to simplicity, nature, and virtue, cannot be exceeded; yet, in the science of this rural sport, he must bow his diminished head to modern writers on the art. Daniel, Baines, Sir H. Davy, and Professor Rennie have combined practical knowledge and scientific research, while Christopher North, alias Professor Wilson, the great wE of Blackwood's Magazine, and Mr. Gregory Greendrake, in their graphic delineations and poetical colourings, carry the reader in his closet, along with them, through the delightful scenery which they decribe, and familiarize him to the virtue of patience exhibited by those "who toil all day and catch no fish," and to the pardonable exultation of the successful angler whose landing-net, not a mere inactive type of his art, is often protruded from bank or boat to receive the evidence of his skill or his good fortune. More dear to me, Mr. Editor, to live again over one day's good sport by pastoral stream, or on the wavy bosom of the island-studded lake, than all that the votaries of ambition, avarice, or town pleasures ever knew. And in the hope that some, if not all of your readers may partake of my feelings, I offer to your acceptance the following sketch of a day on Lough-Sheelan. The beauties of nature assume, under particular circumstances, such a variety of aspects, that however familiar a scene may be, it is capable of receiving new features and imparting new interests according to the state of the weather, the character of one's companions, or the temper of mind and perceptibility of "the sublime and beautitiful" with which the beholder may be endued. Lough-Sheelan has inspired our ancient bards, and I believe the Grace Nugent of Carolan has had her beauty reflected by its pellucid mirror, and, upon its borders, has been, “The cynosure of neighbouring eyes." Its ruins attest the gloomy and secluded ascetic, and the fierce and barbarous chieftain of the feudal times, while now its shores, for the most part, are clothed in the softer charms of modern cultivation and civilized security. It and its legends already constitute a part of "The Angling Excursions," but still, as I have already observed, there is that ever-changing variety in sylvan scenery that something new is ever to be perceived within the same limits; the passing of a cloud over the sun's disk, the ascension of vapour from the earth, the falling of a shower of rain from the heavens, brightness or gloom, calm or storm, all contribute to impart a protean character to the scene, and, in different ways, to affect varieties of tastes and the genuine admirer of nature. I will venture to say, that if thousands of persons, gifted with the highest descriptive powers, were to visit Killarney, or even one of our less distinguished lakes, and to publish the impressions made upon them, they would fail to anticipate and satisfy all that would be felt by successive visitors. If it were otherwise every scene could be viewed but once, through the arbitrary medium and influence of its first published description, and curiosity, the source of so much of our enjoyments, cease to be excited by differing opinions and susceptibility of feeling. Nature would receive but a sort of representative adoration, instead of being yielded the personal homage of all eyes and hearts. that wave in air the unseen wing, just as swallows or martens do; I see the little grist mill where, as I returned home weary and hungered, the kind old dame, with that cordial and native hospitality which even agitation has not yet extinguished in my yet dear country, was wont to fry on the griddle, heated by oat-chaff, a trout of my own catching, to which she would add a fragment of her oaten-cake: I have her person before me as she, kind soul! bustled to her cookery; her stuff gown, linsey woolsey petticoat striped blue and red, the coarse but clean coif that bound her head and from under which the white locks strayed over a furrowed but a cheerful brow; I remember too But to leave off all prosing, you must know, Mr. Poplar, that from my youth upward, even to the time in which I am inditing this day of days at Lough-Sheelan, I have been pas--nay I see it, the adjacent rustic gravesionately fond of angling, and I can retrace vividly, as if time were but a large telescope, the banks of my native stream, that first lured me to the angler's art; every winding of it is freshly impressed on the map of memory; its sharps and rapids gurgle on my ear; I see the dimpling eddies of the deep pool where its progress was interrupted by an abrupt turn of the bank; I see the longer reach awfully darkened by the shading willows, and its surface ever and anon broken into circles by the trout, generally the monsters of the deep, that love to envelope in gloom the indulgence of their voracity and the exercise of their organs of destructiveness; I see the dragon-fly, dressed in all its glorious colours of green, and scarlet, and pink, and torquoise, the russet of the hind and the gold of the monarch; I see him flying under that high and projecting bank, and destroying as he flies, or alighting on the flaggers that fringe the opposite and lower side of the pool-the dragon-fly upholds the systematic destruction that directs animal appetite, and sustains the strong by the sacrifice of the weak; he devours in his flight the smaller insects yard and chapel ruin through which my path often lay, and which, as I approached it at a late hour of solemn twilight, would suggest the fear of things unearthly and unholy. But, Mr. Poplar, I see more than all this-the dear and tender and honoured parents, who cherished my infancy, and brothers and sisters and playmates, and the dear friends of riper years, all laid in their graves, and my bosom heaves with feelings more deep and sacred than belong merely to the contemplation of vanished youth and lost pleasures. While I sigh for the days that are gone," I fearfully look through the backward vista of my life to discover breaches, on my part, of the fifth commandment, and repentantly to mourn for them. But too much, perhaps, of this, although fitly associated with a contemplative amusement. I was chiefly led to these juvenile reminiscences in order to show the London University Professor of Zoology (himself probably the most curious subject of his science) that he is not the only angler that recollects his pinkeen and crooked pin days— Days of my boyhood! whither have ye flown? Or have you identity with after years That led my varied life from stage to stage, Thro' paths of joy and grief, and hopes and fears, O! I have cherish'd oft the waking dream, That, Phoenix-like, my buried youth shall rise : Or stemming backward life's rough troubled stream, Strong joys, weak griefs, boy-friendship, virgin love- Of friends sincere, and perfect love, and truth, The thought is not to be dwelt on-it would make us hate the world-let us escape from it. The seventh of June, let it ne'er be forgot It was on that day, Mr. Poplar, in 66 or by those who did not. as the object rose to view, "look-is |