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rensic arena, and conveyed in language which would become the lips of a merciful judge sentencing for crime, rather than of a prosecutor magnifying the enormity against which he pleads ;all these excellencies grace Mr. Napier's reply; and, although the noble Lord who has merited its reproofs may naturally suffer under them, even he must feel that the severity consists altogether in a faithful exposure of the arts and acts to which Lord Monteagle has been, whether inadvertently or not, an assenting party.

The spirit of Mr. Napier's letter may be judged of from the brief extracts which we subjoin without a word of

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"The Papacy is a double system-a Church with a code of doctrine; a State with a code of laws and a course of policy. As a State, it has been the ancient assailant of the constitution; as a Church, the more modern antagonist of the Reformed religion of our country. In this latter aspect of the controversy with Rome, we must rely on Scripture and right reason; leaving conscience without restraint, and opinion free. The Churches of the Reformation, in combined power and individual effort, are required to use the strength and privilege, the light and freedom, which God has bestowed upon them, for a mighty contest of contending principles. legislation, no state policy, no prohibition, no penalties, can supply what is needed for this department of our warfare. But there is another aspect not to be disregarded. There is a State conflict-an assault on our laws and constitution, an effort to subjugate to foreign power the subjects of this realm, the constitution of which solemnly repudiates all foreign jurisdiction, pre-eminence, or authority. Thus the state policy of Rome conflicts with the constitution of the United Kingdom; and our state policy has uniformly opposed the power of Parliament to the state aggression of the court of Rome. Our religious policy relies on other agencies."—pp. 44,

45.

"You have, my Lord, intimated an apology for the paucity of your references; but this cannot explain their obvious inconclusiveness. You certainly have not repeated the bold assertion of the unbroken chain from the time of St. Patrick, continued with unbroken links to the present hierarchy of the Church of Rome. So far you have been abstemious; but the 'unbroken succession for 300 years, as regular as in the Established Church,' is, though not so bold,

at least not more worthy of credit. Mr. Shirley, in the modest preface to his most interesting collection of state documents (letters and papers) connected with the Irish Church (and these are the historical witnesses accredited by the sound and elevated mind of Edmund Burke), says: They may, perhaps, be of service in assisting to prove that the assertion of those modern statesmen, who affirm that the Romish Church has existed in Ireland in unbroken succession from the time of the Reformation, rests on a very inadequate foundation; it is evident that, although from the distracted state of the times the Reformation was necessarily very imperfectly carried out in Ireland, the true succession of bishops in the Church was ever preserved, and that solely in the line of prelates acknowledged by the State; the Romish intruders into their dioceses have derived their orders from Italy and Spain, and not from the Irish Church."-pp. 56, 57.

"Did the rejection of the Papal supremacy destroy the succession in Ireland? then how has it been preserved in England? Did the adoption of the reformed doctrine and the retention of the ancient creeds? then where is the title of the English branch of the Church? The Church also retained its ancient domestic discipline, fixed by the laws which the Constitution acknowledged. Hence, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction which commenced after the Church Christian was established and took possession of the country, was allowed and preserved, because it agreed to enforce no rule, decree, or canon, which had not been accepted as part of the king's ecclesiastical law, and so incorporated into the known general law of the land. This is explained with singular ability by Mr. Justice Crampton, in his most able and instructive judgment in the great marriage case. Such jurisdiction is part of the law, subject to its control, and bound by its commands. The Church of Rome, which sprang up after 1558, or (to fix a better date) after 1564, originated in Rome with a Papal creed, unknown to the early Church; it accepted the bondage of the canon law as part of its Catholic faith; it had not the sanction of domestic prelates, with a domestic title; it had not the lawful and limited discipline of the National Church theretofore in this land; it set up a profession of faith which the National Church had never accredited, and a code of discipline which the common law and our Church had openly rejected.

"You, my Lord, shrink from the common law and the catholicity of the ancient Constitution: you turn your back on the ancient statute law and the

repentant legislation which ushered in the Reformation; the Act of 1829 you overlook; that of 1846 you overturn. I find you crouching in the dusk of times when the light of truth and freedom was but in its dawn. You are concealed under the crooked branches of this new plantation, severed from ancient roots; without domestic succession or historical title; a new ecclesiastical organisation in hierarchy, creed, discipline-in everything which constitutes the framework of a Church. In what position did it necessarily stand at this time; I speak of the latter part of the sixteenth century? It rejected the reformed religion; it repudiated the restored independence and the known lawful discipline which belonged to the National and Established Church, the constitution of which has never conflicted with the free constitution of the State. It could not have demanded greater privilege than any nonconformist body or communion, rejecting the discipline or disclaiming the doctrine of the Church by law established. Such other bodies, however, had no hindrance from foreign connexion; they simply required to worship God according to the dictates of conscience, yet subject to the Constitution of their country. But the foreign power of Rome and the domestic authority of England were in constant conflict and struggle, and not until this power was supposed to be sufficiently restrained, was the claim of the Roman Catholic allowed to be capable of adjustment. The name of Papist, which was appropriated to all in ostensible connexion with the modern Church of Rome, was exchanged for that of Roman Catholic, after solemn and general disavowal of some tenets which excited distrust and hostility. It was felt, too, that however the organisation of this Church, in its hierarchy, was Papal, its laity in these lands might not, nor should rea

sonably have any desire to live under the Court of Rome, if they could freely enjoy the Constitution of their own native country: they might be conscientious Roman Catholics and loyal subjects without the interference or allowance of foreign jurisdiction. The liberty of the Constitution was accepted, with solemn assurance that its independence would be preserved; the settlement of 1829 was the result: laymen and bishops joined in previous pledges and subsequent assurances that all would be arranged so as to secure the integrity of the Constitution in Church and State, without any compromise of the freedom of their Church in Ireland, and as the harbinger of peace and prosperity."— pp. 60-63.

"My Lord, I must draw to a conclusion. I have had this great subject before me in the senate. I had no desire to make any parade of my opinions upon it, but I did not hesitate to express them sufficiently, according as occasion required. I have had it again before me as a lawyer, under the sanction of professional responsibility. I have recorded the result of careful investigation, in a deliberate professional opinion. And, lastly, my Lord, as a private man, as one who much respects your Lordship, grateful for courtesy often experienced from you, I have, in quiet retirement, anxiously reviewed the whole in consequence of your pamphlet. I have done so with the most unfeigned desire to sift the truth, and to adopt it. It is my clear and decided conviction, that the recent act has not withheld one solitary right sanctioned by law, hindered one lawful function, or narrowed the freedom, civil and religious, stereotyped in the Constitution, to preserve and perpetuate which the people of this kingdom are bound to man as they are responsible to God."—p. 67.

CHRISTMAS WITH OUR OWN POETS.

BY JONATHAN FREKE SLINGSBY.

DEAR FRIENDS AND GENTLE READERS,-Here we are at the last month of the year "dark December." Eleven months of this year have passed over us. Ah! how have they passed for each? For some, fleeting as the foot of the antelope or the wing of the swallow-joyous and jocund, as if life were all a jubilee, and sorrow and suffering but the fictions of the romancer, to enhance, by their contrast, the joys that, from their very constancy, might become insipid. Some such there be, but they are the few others there be, but they too are few we hope, for whom the days and hours and months moved wearily onward, as moves the foot of a toil-worn traveller over the shingly thoroughfare or the thorny pathway; grief and trouble and trial, sickness and privation, marking each month with melancholy emphasis-to whom spring brought no budding promise, summer no richblown joy; for whom autumn reaped no golden harvest of fruition, and the dreary winter, with its shower and its frost, seems to them but a truer emblem of their tears and their desolation. But for most of us life has moved on changeful and checquered, with varied motion and with varied speed-now swift and bounding as is the step of the child chasing the painted butterfly through the sun-lit fieldsnow loitering and devious as the pace of him who wanders pensively by the bank of some tortuous and sluggish-rolling river-now slow and toilful and full of pauses, like the progress of one who breasts some rugged hill, and wavers and staggers up the painful ascent, and stops oft to regain his breath and brace his energies for fresh struggles. For most of us the year has passed on, full of mutations like the months that composed it-sunshine and shadow, light and gloom, fervour and chill, calm and tempest in the world without us, apt types of the changes in the moral world within us. Good with its probationary evil-evil with its compensating good; joy laughing away sorrow, and sorrow again dashing the cup from our lips and withering the smile upon our brows; hope and despair chasing each the other, as figures on revolving lamp-shades seem in turn the pursued and the pursuer; health and sickness, strength and weakness, each at the appointed hour executing its mission, while peace and passion soothe and agitate our souls in unceasing succession. Thus is it, doubtless, that most of us, dear friends, have travelled through these stages along life's highway, and here we are now at our last change, pulling up for a moment, as it were, at the ancient hostel under the sign of the Goat," while we wrap ourselves up more warmly as we look at the gloomy heavens and the wintry earth, and prepare for the short distance that now remains to be accomplished. But you and I, dear friends, when once we start from this common point, shall not meet again till we are commencing the journey of a new year, if haply even such a meeting be reserved for us. And as I have contrived somehow or other to fall in with you at almost every posting-house in the journey we are now travelling, to give you a kindly greeting, and, to the best of my poor ability, offer something pleasant or profitable, if it were only a stave of a song or an observation on the weather, it seemed to me very meet that we should have one more greeting, were it even no more than to say "God send you safe to your journey's end.'

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Well, then, my first observation will be to remind you of that excellent, though homely old saw, “make the best of everything." Everything has two sides, and two handles. Let us always look at the fairest side, and lay hold of the proper handle, and we shall find that there are few objects which will not afford us some advantage or pleasure to contemplate, and few burthens that we cannot bear all the lighter, that we lift them in the right manner. December is not all gloom and desolation and cold without. If the sunshine be not long and sultry, yet it often blinks out cheerily between the cold sleet-showers, or glitters pleasantly on the icicle and the snow-wreath. If the pinching frost and the blustry autumn winds have left the forests leafless, and the gardens desolate, there are yet a few trees and flowers, true old friends, that cheer us on through the

winter with the fidelity of genuine affection, looking gaily and lovingly on us till the children of the spring come laughing to us with the sunshine. The crisp, bright holly shows still its pleasant, shining, green leaves; the yew and the pine and the fir are still verdant, and the ivy, evermore green and lovely, that emblem of faithful hearts, clings to the ruined arch, or mantles round the winter-stripped tree, covering its nakedness with loving and reverent piety. And have we not still the rose that flushes with a sweet and healthy brightness, even while the white snow is lying beneath it? and does not the nightshade flower in the hedges, and the crysanthemum in the parterre? True it is that

"Now no more at evening pale

Singeth sad the nightingale,
Nor the blackbird on the lawn,
Nor the lark at dewy dawn,"-

but the poor little sparrows and the chubby redbreasts come now almost to our hand, and chirp with as homely a sweetness as the cricket that makes the clear, bright hearth ring with his fireside song.

"Winter white is coming on,

And I love his coming,

What, though winds the fields have shorn-
What though earth is half forlorn-

Not a berry on the thorn

Not an insect humming;

Pleasure never can be dead,

Beauty cannot hide her head!

Look, in what fantastic showers

The snow flings down her feathered flowers,
Or whirls about in drunken glee,

Kissing its love, the holly tree.

Bheold the sun himself come forth,

And send his beams from south to north

To diamonds turns the winter rime,

And lends a glory to the time."

Yes, winter is coming, and so let us even make the best of it.

Have not we, too, leaves that no frost can sear, no wind can dissipate?-the leaves that grow thick upon the tree of knowledge; the leaves of books! turning our homes into winter gardens, as the London folk talk about doing with the Crystal Palace; the tale and the song at the evening fireside; and the healthy out-door exercise, that keeps the blood from chilling by day.

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But the glooms of winter hide within them ONE DAY, the brightest and the cheeriest that the circling year brings round, as the barren, arid desert holds within its bosom the verdant oasis and the fresh bubbling spring. Yes, CHRISTMAS Comes in dreary December; and could it come at a more welcome seaAs Almighty Wisdom brought physical illumination out of the night of chaos, and Almighty Love brought spiritual light out of the darkness of sin, so out of the dreariest portion of the year, when days are contracted to their shortest, when the gloom and the fog that dim the heavens weigh down and darken our spirits also, and the frosts that pinch our outward members would creep almost chillingly upon our hearts, dawns this bright, festive, glorious day, with its solemn, religious glory, its holy charities, its blessed memories, its cheerful institutions, its heart-flowing kindlinesses, its merry meetings, its mirth, its games, its wassail-bowl, and its mistletoe; a day whose very anticipation makes the heart glad for weeks before, and leaves it so through the rest of the dying year, creating, as it were, a twilight of love and joy that precedes and follows its rising, and dissipates the darkness of sorrow and care:

"Ecce nova gaudia

Anni reduxit orbita;
Facit hæc solemnia
Nativitas Dominica
Quapropter cuncti mortales

IIilariter, hilariter, hilariter, hilariter,
Conjubilemus."

So may it be while the world lasts, and the name of Christ is named each coming year more widely over the regions of the earth!

Amongst the many good old customs which Christmas brought, there is one which is fast dying away. For days before its advent, the sounds of music and the voice of minstrels used to be heard upon the night air, playing sweet airs, and singing their joyous carols. Right welcome, I wis, were these minstrels at every door. The elder folks would turn themselves round from the blazing fire close by which they were sitting, and stop for a season their interminable old-world gossip to listen; the younger people would steal over to the windows, and draw back the curtains, or, if the night were fine, even venture to open a little of the casement; while at the tale of love, the maiden's eye would melt, and her hand would fling down the bright silver piece, the guerdon for the grateful song. Often, too, the youth would slip down to the door, and draw in from the wintry air these sons of song, and treat them delicately, and give them of the best, and hear all their minstrelsy, and then dismiss them with thanks and bounty.

Dear friends, it occurred to me, that you should not be without your carols; and so I have culled some for you, and have got some choice minstrels to come with me, and we shall be at your door anon gleefully. Give us, then, entertainment befitting the season, and such as minstrels immemorially of right may claim; and now, my masters all, and matrons, blooming maidens and merry lads, old and young, great and small, here we are, "your honours' waits," in our yellow livery, and the royal badge of good Queen Bess upon our breasts. Listen to our chanting :

I.

GOD give you joy these Christmas times;
Gentles, listen to our rhymes.

Fleecy snow-clouds now are sailing
In the chill and clear moon light,
And the wintry wind is wailing

To the ear of lonely Night.
Snow-drifts on the roofs lie heavy,

Ice-drops glisten from the eaves;
Boughs in autumn that were leafy,

Now are clad with snow-born leaves.

God give you joy these Christmas times;
Gentles, listen to our rhymes.

II.

Hark! from out the ivied steeple
Clangs the jocund peal of bells,

Waves of sound, like billows, ripple
On the night in solemn swells.

See, with merry pipe and tabor,

At your doors we play and sing;

Listen to our grateful labour,

Deign to hear our carolling.

God give you joy these Christmas times;
Gentles, listen to our rhymes.

III.

We have songs of pride and glory
For the ear of lord and knight;

We can sing a true-love story

To the heart of maiden bright.

We have ditties sweetly tender

That will make you pleased, tho' sad;

Deftly we know how to render

Eyes more bright, and hearts more glad.

God give you joy these Christmas times;
Gentles, listen to our rhymes.

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