search after places of honour or emoluments, were the most severe against the Nonjuring principles. The reason is obvious. The Whigs were seeking for places; the Tories were discarded. Had the Non-jurors not meddled with the affairs of government in England, they might have lived in peace; but wisdom is not to be conveyed to fools, nor knowledge to men of no understanding. In plotting against the Government, they involved their hearers in many difficulties, and some of them were apprehended and executed. They have dwindled away, and possibly there are not above twenty meetings of them in England. They read the Church service; but instead of praying for King George, they pray for The King in general terms (meaning the Pretender); but then it must be observed that no more than five of them are permitted to meet together, exclusive of the minister and the clerk. That they should subsist long, cannot be expected; that they have subsisted so long, is an insult to common sense.' But it is to the religious, rather than the political, opinions of the Non-jurors that we usually refer, when we have occasion to allude to them; except so far as the latter were in alliance with the former; for they held, both in secular and spiritual concerns, the most bigotted, arbitrary, and despotic principles; they were enemies to liberty civil and religious; they respected neither the rights of conscience nor those of the British constitution; and had they obtained sway, we should have been slaves both in body and soul. Three of their clergy, Suatt, Cook, and pseudo-bishop Jeremy Collier, upheld Perkins and Friend, who were condemned to death for treason and attempting to assassinate King William; and who admitted that they held the Pretender's commission to levy war against the legal government of England. These three Non-juring clergymen openly absolved Friend and Perkins upon the scaffold; "A strain of impudence," says Bishop Burnet, "as new as it was wicked, since those persons died owning the ill designs they had been engaged in, and expressing no sort of repentance for them." Their notions of toleration may be gathered from the declaration of Dodwell; "No salvation out of the Church of England;" which church he confined to the adherents of the Non juring bishops. Yet, after all, we admire those among the Non-jurors who, like Sancroft and Ken, made sacrifices of their worldly interest to their conscience; while we cannot regard without much suspicion the conduct of such divines as the two Sherlocks, who, even if they were conscientious, changed their opinions just at the moment when the change happened to be politic. William, the father, did not submit to King William till after the battle of the Boyne; and Thomas, the son, (the future bishop) it was said, owed his conviction to the battle of Preston, which confirmed the throne to George the First. On the Sunday after the battle, he preached a loyal Revolution sermon at the Temple Church; upon which the Benchers remarked, that "It was a pity he had not delivered it at least the Sunday before." The wits hitched these in cidents into rhyme : "As Sherlock the elder, with his jure divine, Did not comply till the battle of Boyne; So Sherlock the younger, still made it a question Dr. South abounded with caustic jeers upon these rapid changes of opinion; and a witty bookseller seeing William Sherlock walking in St. Paul's Church-yard, with a lady whom he had just married, and whose wealth and arguments were considered to have affected his views, remarked: "There goes Dr. Sherlock, with his reasons for taking the oaths on his arm." There were time-servers on each side; for the cause of the Stuart family was not for many years so desperate as not to enlist interested adherents. REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. WORKS ON THE CONDITION OF ITALY. 1. Sketches of Protestantism in Italy, past and present. By ROBERT BAIRD (D.D.). Boston (Massachussets), 1845. 2. Italy, Austria, and the Pope; in a Letter to Sir James Graham, Bart, By JOSEPH Mazzini. London, 1845. 3. The Romanism of Italy. By Sir CULLING EARDLEY SMITH, Bart. London, 1845. 4. Italy; General Views of its History and Literature. 2 Vols. By L. MARIOTti. 5. The Encyclical Letter of our Lord Pope Gregory XVI. issued May, 1844. Translated by Sir C. E. SMITH, Bart. With the Latin text, and authorised Italian translation. London, 1844. 6. The Christian Alliance organized at New York, May, 1843, for diffusing useful and religious knowledge among the natives of Italy and other Papal countries. New York, 1843. 7. A Letter to his Holiness Pope Gregory XVI. By the Rev. HORACE BUSHNELL, D.D., United States. London, 1846. THE death of the Bishop of Rome, and the disturbances in Italy, force us upon a topic from which we have long shrunk. And what is the topic? and why have we shrunk from it? The topic is the condition of Italy; and the reason why we have shrunk from dilating upon it, is, not that it is of slight interest or small importance, but because we believe that England placed itself, at the general pacification after the subjugation of Bonaparte, in a false position with regard to Italy; and that the state of affairs in that country is now so complicated, that we can hardly touch upon it without placing ourselves also in a false position. We are Englishmen, Anti- Bonapartists, Legitimists, Conservatives, and members of an Established and Episcopal Church; yet sooth to say, we find our predilections in these matters outraged by the secular and ecclesiastical condition of Italy; so that we cannot follow up truth without touching upon some of the questions at issue between insurgency and despotism; and having some occasion to blame the national policy of England, in regard to arrangements which unquestionably our statesmen intended for the best, and made great sacrifices to effect. For many years Italy has been -we cannot say reposing-but superposited upon a volcano; and the writers in the Christian Observer were among those who predicted, at the adjustment of affairs after the termination of the great European struggle, that such would be the case; and in this opinion they were supported by that class of statesmen who viewed with grief and apprehension the restoration of decayed Popery by British influence, and without due regulations for securing mild and equitable government, and those civil and religious blessings which would leave no room for hankering after new revolutions. The adjustment of the affairs of Italy, and even of France, was far from satisfactory to the religious body (if we may use that expression,) in this country. When Bonaparte broke loose from Elba, Mr. Wilberforce wrote in his diary, "How wonderful are these political changes! Yet it is curious that we have now grown quite used to Bonaparte on the throne again. It is a compensation to me that the Roman Catholic religion is stunted and injured by the change." And again, "I cannot but feel it a strong objection to supporting the Bourbons, that they are such firm Roman Catholics." We will narrate how the arrangements for Italy were spoken of at the time in our own pages; as the remarks shew what were the feelings and opinions of many wise and good men, who concurred with the revered senator just named in their views of public policy, and deemed that England, as a Protestant nation, and enjoying herself the privileges of civil and religious freedom, ought not to have fraternized with Austria, the Pope, and the Bourbons, in establishing a system of ill-judged arrangements opposed to everything which she herself approved and enjoyed. At that period Christian men whose predilections were utterly opposed to a democratical and levelling spirit, could speak with a moral freedom, which they shrank from assuming when the ill-judged (a light word) conduct of the ruling powers in various parts of Europe had caused incessant outbreaks, which had their termination in the revolutions of 1830;-or rather, had not their termination, as is proved by the conspiracies and disturbances which have occurred from time to time, and probably will continue, in Poland, Italy, and other portions of the Continent. France has been for some years in a happy measure exempted from them by the wise and firm government of Louis Philippe; but the discontented portions of Italy have been kept under solely by martial force. Austrian bayonets, not righteous laws and good government, have preserved the arrangements of the Congress of Vienna. CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 103. But let us recur to the manner in which those arrangements were spoken of at the time in our own pages; our wish being to rebut the charges urged by our American brethren and others against the religious body in England, of having abetted, or connived at, the proceedings of worldly-minded statesmen, who regarded the arrangements after the Peace entirely as a matter of secular policy, without reference to those religious considerations which should have induced them to refrain from restoring to Popery its obsolete powers; and without laying the foundation for public stability and happiness, in well-ordered institutions which would have left no pretext or wish for revolutionary changes. We turn to the Preface to the Christian Observer for 1814, written at the close of that eventful year, when God had burst the chain which bound the nations of Europe under the iron despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been hurled from his guilty elevation, and was a prisoner in the island of Elba. It was a moment of thrilling delight to every patriotic Englishman; but the Conductors of the Christian Observer confessed that their joy at this mighty deliverance was not unmixed with sorrow; first, because the emancipation of Europe had renewed the desolation of Africa, by the restoration under the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other governments, of the detestable slave-trade; which had been wellnigh suppressed while the British belligerent flag swept over the ocean, the harbinger of freedom, and the terror of lawless men:and secondly, because amidst the hopeful progress of Christianity throughout the world, "One dark cloud," said the Conductors of the Christian Observer, speaking the general feeling of the religious body in Great Britain, and espe 3 H and a that the course pursued by the Bourbons "was not particularly well adapted to give stability to the throne." It was a melancholy consideration that England had been expending her blood and treasure to produce these distressing results; and that her statesmen, in their just wish to restore legitimate institutions, did not refuse, as they had it in their power, to allow the re cially of those members of our Church to whom was popularly applied the epithet "Evangelical" 'One dark cloud has crossed the cheering prospect: Christian Observer cannot regard the re-establishment of the papal authority, and the revival of some of the worst institutions of Popery, without considerable alarm." Looking forward to the calamities which might occur, and which we have abundantly witnessed, our prede-vival of abuses, which were as imcessors added: "In the meantime, may we be all found looking for, and hastening unto, the coming of the day of God, that we may be able to withstand in the evil day that may be coming upon the earth, and having done all, to stand." In the same volume, the grief of the friends of religion is expressed at the unrestricted powers which had been given to the restored Pope, and the fearful misuses which he was making of them; and which every person must have foreseen who considered the narrow-minded, bigoted, intolerant spirit of Pius the Seventh. The Pope appears to be busily employed in reviving the different orders and Papal superstitions which had been overthrown by the revolutionary torrent. He has issued a Bull, restoring the Jesuits to all their former privileges, and calling on all Catholic princes to protect and encourage them. He has also taken measures for restoring the orders of regular clergy. In France also, at least in the hands of her Government, there are strong symptoms of reviving superstition; which, considering the state of public opinion in that country, is not particularly well adapted to give stability to the throne. What will the wits there say, and what can any rational man (any Protestant Christian) say to the solemn consecration of the kingdom of France to the Virgin Mary ?" It has frequently been the lot of the Conductors of our humble pages to predict events, not from any affectation of sagacity, but merely from observing the obvious signs of the times. Our predecessors foresaw in 1815 what the French revolution of 1830 proved, politic as they were wicked. They had a good right to say that civil despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny cannot have any legitimate sanc tion; that they may be inveterate without being time-honoured; and that it was not a sound argument, because the revolutions at the close of the eighteenth century had subverted existing institutions, that it was necessary to restore what was evil as well as what was good in them, for a new series of revolutions to trim the balance. We turn to another passage in our volume for the same year, in which there is an obvious foreboiling of what might be the issue of some of the pending arrange ments. "The Continental journals are filled with speculations respecting the course which affairs are likely to take in the Congress of Vienna; but it would be a mere waste of time and paper to notice them. We cannot help fearing, however, that the kingdom of Saxony, the cradle of the Reformation, that country so sacred in the eyes of the Protestant world, is about to become a province of Prussia; and that some other minor States are to be forcibly dispossessed of their independence, and annexed to neighbouring kingdoms. Such proceedings would deeply tarnish the glory with which the events of the last year have covered the allied powers of Europe." Turning to our next volume for 1815, after the escape of Bonaparte from Elba, we find the following passage describing the weapons which the Allies had placed in the hands of that bold, bad, able man, by the misjudged policy which they had pursued with regard to various countries, especially Italy. "The re-establishment of the Austrian and Sardinian power in Italy; the conduct pursued respecting Genoa; the bad faith alleged to have been observed towards the King of Naples; the intended dissolution of the Saxon monarchy; and the actual annexation of part of its dominions to Prussia; furnish topics which he well knows how to turn to his own purposes. That the Italians are almost universally favourable to his cause, cannot be doubted. The deep and irreconcileable hatred which they feel towards Austria in particular, and the indignation which they entertain against the Allies generally, for having disappointed their hopes of independence, and having consigned them over, without any regard to their own wishes, to governments which they detest, will probably produce a very extensive rising throughout the whole of the Transalpine provinces; and on this result Bonaparte has been able to calculate with tolerable certainty. The Saxons are a reflecting and moral people; and therefore whatever just cause of complaint they may conceive to have been afforded to them by the conduct of the Allies, we scarcely think they will hesitate between an adherence to their cause and the risk of again fraternizing with Bonaparte. With respect to Belgium our expectations are far less sanguine. The general feeling of its population, we fear, is adverse to the Dutch supremacy, and favourable to a union with France; and no means will be left unemployed to prepare them for seizing the first opportunity of manifesting their real sentiments [as they did in 1830; when the success of the Revolution in France enabled them to throw off the Dutch yoke, and to form an independent kingdom]. "We would confine ourselves for the present to one suggestion; and that is, that our Government should take care to have it distinctly understood, that in lavishing British blood and treasure for the freedom and independence of Europe, Great Britain must stipulate that she shall not be made to contribute, in any degree, to the revival of a French slavetrade; to the establishment of the Papal power; to the revival of the order of the Jesuits; or to the re-kindling of the fires of the Inquisition [all which, alas! occurred.] If a satisfactory arrangement upon these points were previously made, we should feel much less despondency in contemplating the issue of the approaching conflict. A cause which involves the defence of these institutions, cannot inspire with confidence those who regard the favour of heaven as of infinitely more consequence than the strength of mies; and we therefore most earnestly desire, because we desire the prosperity of our country, and the peace and happiness of the world, that we were delivered at the very outset from the ruinous incumbrance of any alliance which shall involve us in the guilt of upholding such enormities." In the succeeding month-the month before the battle of Waterloo-the same subject is renewed. "The Allies have abundant and just cause of war with Bonaparte; and we are clearly bound by our engagements to them, as well as by a view to our own safety, to prevent his establishment upon the throne of France. Still, however just may be our ground of war, however expedient and necessary it may be, we of probable success, the consideration that we appear, among other objects indeed of the highest interest to the restoration of the papal power, and world at large, to be fighting for the the maintenance of papal darkness-for the revival of the order of the Jesuitsfor the renewal of the French slavefor the establishment of the Inquisition trade. Is it necessary, we again ask, that we should go forward to the fight loaded with these impediments to success? Can nothing be done by great Britain to deliver at least herself from the guilt of upholding institutions which we can have no doubt are offensive to the Almighty, and which will probably ere long be swept away, involving those who support them in the ruin. Surely we may, as respects France, secure some prospective stipulations in favour of the Protestant churches, in case the Bourbons shall be restored. [This was not done; and hence the insurrections at cannot disconnect from our calculations Nismes, &c.] In short, let our government do all that can be done to provide for the grand interests of humanity, morality, and religion at this awful crisis; and they will have the further security for their success, that they will unite in their favour the wishes, the hopes, and the fervent unwearied prayers of all good men throughout the world.” When these passages were written, they were premonitory; for there had been no Italian Pellico or Mazzini; no French barricades; no outbreaks at German Universities; no hostile descents upon Italy; no Belgian revolution; no insurgency in Spain or |