"We will go to England, send a delegation to Birmingham, Sheffield, and Southampton, and return to Dublin by Kent, holding public meetings every where, and the motto on our banners shall be, Equalization with the Union, or Abolition of the Union.' Let our delegates then go from member to member in the House of Commons, and give every one of them a copy of our petition, and show them that we will have no parchment union with England."

Here we have the present working of Popery. The plot is laid in Ireland for England's destruction. In the hands of one man appear to be the destinies of empires. It is idle to say, that the Great Agitator has no power-his power is daily and hourly rising into colossal form—it is threatening and audacious-treacherous as it is villainous. The Government of England is, at this moment, in the hands of O'Connell! He holds the sceptre of Britain!--it is he who rules the empire! We are loath to confess it, but the fact is substantiated by the annals of history. Let O'Connell break through his "compact," and the present Administration will cease to exist. Its life is in his hands. He can either preserve or destroy it!

We have shown, we trust, sufficient of the workings of Popery to warrant us to call upon our countrymen to awake from their slumber and lethargy, and to rise up, as one man, in defence of Christianity. Popery is the corrupter of the Protestant faith. It is palpably opposed to freedom and prosperity. It is slavish and persecuting. It is systematically hostile to the Records of Heaven. The policy of Popery is to destroy all right-to nullify all lawand to overthrow all our venerable and hallowed institutions. With an enemy so great before us, never slumbering as we slumber, but ever active and determined, what can be done? Our apprehensions are great, because the foe is formidable; every plot of the Ministry is pregnant with mischief, because it is laid in Ireland. We may be called alarmists. We confess that we are alarmedalarmed for the Protestant faith and the Protestant institutions; not because we are wanting in power or strength to preserve them, but because we are backward in putting that power into action. The Radicals now are battering at the Constitution. The Dissenters are undermining the Church. The Papists are propagating their superstitions and idolatries. And we, to whom the blessings of heaven have been vouchsafed, are neither hot nor cold. We view the threatening of the torrent with indifference, and smile upon its blackness as it rushes to our altars and our homes. It is palpable that the Government of Britain is against us—for its acts are Anti-Protestant; but thanks be to heaven

"There is on earth a yet auguster thing,

Veiled though it be, than Parliament and King."

There is yet over England a Providence who will never desert her

there is a vast majority of Protestants, who are able, and we trust will be willing, to uphold the Established Religion, of these realms-a religion, for which our ancestors have shed their blood on the scaffold, and left their ashes at the stake-a religion of Christian purity—a religion that doth impart blessings in this life, and eternal joys in the life to come. We again, then, call upon our countrymen to awake, and the call is important and solemn. Every man is endowed by heaven with means to protect the institutions of his country. Now is the time to bring those talents into action-to confute the falsehoods of a Radical and Popish press-to bring to light the machinations and plots of the wicked-and to propagate the pure and heavenly tenets of Christianity. Or, if the talent of mind be wanting, then let men employ their pecuniary means towards supporting a faith which has no less an author than Divinity. Many are the SOCIETIES connected with our Church that we would recommend to their notice. The SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE should receive especial and decided support, as well as the different PROTESTANT ASSOCIATIONS that are forming throughout the empire. Our NATIONAL SCHOOLS should be supported, in which are taught the doctrines of the Church, and in which is received the BIBLE in its complete and perfect form. Many societies and schools are being formed, with deceitful and hypocritical names, as clap-traps to catch the unwary and ignorant. Many publications issue from the press, with insidious titles, for the purpose of sowing the poisonous seed in the human heart, and of converting the mind to Popery. It is difficult to guard against them, but at all times application may be made to the clergyman of the parish, who we are sure will most readily expose their tendency and point out their design. We are aware that very many persons have already been deceived by names and titles, and have given their support to institutions which have been formed to subvert the Established Church, and to publications which have disseminated doctrines of Popery and Dissent. An application to the quarter we have recommended, can alone, in a measure, remedy the evil and avoid its recurrence. Activity on the part of Protestants can only save the country from an involution of national misfortune. National guilt must ever be connected with national crime. And the crime of inactivity is the crime that is now resting upon England. Let that be once discarded, and the flames of persecution and intolerance may rage-the Popish faction may threaten -the Radical may excite revolution-the Dissenter may attempt to deceive, but the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church of God, for it is founded upon a rock, and that Rock is CHRIST.

NOTE. This Article is printed in a separate form, and may be had of the Publisher.

ART. VIII.-A Voice from the Font. London: Longman
and Co. 1838.

THIS is a neat little book, with an exceedingly neat vignette. It is written in a very attractive style, and is clearly the production of a polished writer. A vicar in an over-populous country town is represented projecting alterations in his church, for the purpose of gaining accommodation for a larger audience, and, whilst sketching and musing to effect the desired object, to have fallen into a reverie, and to have had his attention arrested by a still small voice which proceeded from the Font.

The voice utters an excellent harangue on the ancient and orthodox customs of the Church, and very properly censures the insertion of births in the Civil Register as a substitute for baptism. On the innovations in our Liturgical services, which have been projected, it is eloquent and sensible; and the careless disregard of the object of the Baptismal Sacrament, and the manner in which it is too often succeeded by carnal revelry, are very acutely and powerfully brought before the readers' attention. The neglect of the ordinance of Churching is also noticed:

"It was only yesterday," continues the voice, "that these very same personages, the clerk and the sexton, while occupied in placing the hassocks which you have just been taking with so much assiduity from my feet, observed, that the year had that day expired, since the Legislature, for civil purposes, had provided the mode of registering births independent of baptism; and that, whereas one thousand three hundred were publicly or privately baptized, upon an average of many years past, only six hundred were admitted to the rite in this, and they gave it as their opinion, that the numbers would, in probability, lessen in each coming year. Indeed, it grieves me much to observe the inroads made upon primitive doctrine and ancient discipline, and that falling off of the Clergy from both-that defection from Apostolicity, which more particularly marks the present age. Alas! that deep sense and feeling of religion, which characterised the early times of Christianity, and which were revived in this country at... the Reformation, when the doctrine and discipline of the ancient Catholic Church were restored, and Christians in this kingdom returned to the primitive worship established by the Apostles and their immediate successors -that sense and feeling of religion, unhappily, now only faintly exists, while a different spirit and a different system of doctrines are disseminated by a Sectarian Clergy continually making inroads, by their substitution of novel opinions for ancient doctrines, and by their repeated infractions of primitive discipline."

These sensible and orthodox remarks are continued with great vigour and judgment; the aberrations of the Sectarian Clergy, from the spirit of the Apostolic Church, and their laxed notions of discipline, the dissenting spirit of innovation which is gaining upon them, the pernicious schism, calculated to destroy the peace of our Israel, which they engender and foment, and the attempt to lessen

the importance of our Liturgy, which begins to prevail, are attacked with a manly energy and a Christian zeal. The latter astounding fact we know to be true, and have even heard, that in weekly lectures there are instances, in one diocese of the West of England, where parts of this sublime composition are omitted: we would ask, why does not the Bishop enforce the canons? From such beginnings, such censurable laxity, enormous evils must arise, appalling detriment must ensue to the Church: for, as there are Clergy, who have been only distinguishable from dissenters by their use of the Liturgy, and the exercise of their ministry in a church, if that Liturgy be invaded, even this distinction will cease, and schismatical dissent will pollute the altars of the Eternal God. Priests, sons of Belial, will minister in our holy temples, and the rhapsodical effervescences of their brains will be substituted for that pure and sober, that solemn and piety-breathing worship, which has descended to us

from ancient times :

"I could name,” says the Voice, "several persons and places familiar to you, where the Litany in the Morning Service is again and again omitted, to afford more time, and to collect greater physical power and energy for the delivery of a sermon upon mistaken views of the Justification by Faith only, or upon the Millennium-upon the outward distinctions, by which the elect may be known from the non-elect, or . . . . a denial of that grace of the Holy Spirit which is conveyed through my instrumentality."

....

These are abuses which should occupy the attention of the spiritual heads of the Church, in rectifying which they should use instant and persevering assiduity. For, as the writer observes, when a minister languidly reads the Liturgy, or with abridgments and changes, that he may reserve himself for a rambling, uncogitated, extemporaneous effusion of great length and greater tediousness, he reverses the Apostolic words, and virtually says, "we preach ourselves, and not Christ Jesus, the Lord." When he describes the features and lincaments, the marks and signs, which designate himself and his party; when he dwells on "the symptoms of conversion-the feelings of personal assurance of final salvation-the perceptible, but indescribable nature of faith-the less than nothingness of good works; the indirect, if not direct, denial of human and divine cooperation--and, above all, the slight thrown on the two Sacraments of the Catholic Church, divesting baptism of its regenerating energy, and making it a mere imitatory, and the holy Eucharist a mere commemoration service," occasion a regret that such a contradiction to the better knowledge and practice of the early, and of the Reformed Church, should exist. The political harangues of some of the Clergy, the venal bazaars ostensibly collected for pious purposes, the intrusion of Clergy into others' flocks, the itinerations through the country of others, if not directly inveighing against the nefficiency of their brethren in their several locations, yet indirectly

conveying that impression," the Church Missionary Society, and the Pastoral Aid Society, which not being under Episcopal Government, are decidedly not of the Church'; the latter "authorising a system of lay-teaching, which it cannot approve, and instituting new regulations affecting the character of the Church itself, independent of all regular and constituted authority,"* are among the existing evils, of which the Voice complains.

The Church cannot sustain an imperium in imperio: episcopal government and republican unions cannot co-exist in the same Establishment. The effect of the union of different parties in the Bible Society, for which the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was neglected, is judiciously shown :

"The Sectarians having obtained the weight and influence of the Church in the establishment of this great Society, the moment they attained the power, the momentum, and the materials for working their machine, and could dispense with the ladder and scaffolding, by which they had reared and completed their gorgeous building, threw them aside. They at length refused to add to the Sacred Volume the apocryphal writings, and betrayed other Socinian and Sectarian views; now choosing their time for pouring out their tracts as the companions of their previous gifts, and thus virtually attaching their comments in a separate form to the copies of the Scripture, which they had disseminated so that the plea of distributing the Word of God without note or comment proves a mere delusion."

Every word here quoted is accurate truth: the Church has been made the means, by which the Dissenters have attempted an equality, and now, in these perverse and vicious times, attempt a superiority. In the Reformation Society too, where Churchmen join with dissenters in endeavours to convert the Romanists, the evil is the same let each act separately. If a Clergyman should convert a Romanist, the Romanist may join the Dissenters; and as the Dissenters hate the discipline and government of our Church almost in the same ratio as they hate that of Rome, it is self-evident that some ulterior object is concealed in their share of the union. The Churchmen by this union are assuredly making anti-episcopalian converts. The Dissenters now are as anxious to accomplish their wishes as they were in the time of Charles the First, and the Parliamentary proceedings show how much bolder, how far more daring and intolerant, they have become. The Reformation Society strengthens them, and furnishes them (proh pudor!) from the Church with arms against the Church. This is acutely compared

* Here let us quote the author's note:-"An incumbent of one populous town in the West of England applied for two lay-teachers, who were granted, but who, after establishing an acquaintance and intimacy with the parishioners, became dissenting ministers of the town, drawing to them those whom they had visited and taught as the delegates of the ineumbent !"