of Honolulu, as many of our readers no doubt are aware, has been founded on the direct application to our Queen and to the Archbishop of Canterbury of the King himself. He is, we have reason to believe, one of the most remarkable men of the day. The heir of a race of absolute rulers, whose word was law, and who possessed the unrestricted power of life and death, he has gladly co-operated in giving to his country a free constitution, and in governing it according to the laws. Of an enlightened intelligence, familiar with all the literature of Europe, an adept in all the mysteries of international law, and in manners and all bodily exercises a perfect English gentleman, if any ruler could add strength to such a mission as that which now leaves our shores, surely he would be the one. May our ardent wishes for the future be fulfilled through the wisdom and zeal of him whom our Archbishop and his assistant suffragans are sending out on this high enterprise; and may the time come when the Melanesian band which, under Bishop Patteson, is steering northward from New Zealand, may meet the southward progress of the Hawaiian Church, and all the rescued islands lift up with grateful accord their hands of thankfulness to God! ART. VIII.-1. Bicentenary of the Bartholomew Ejectment in 1862. St. James's Hall Addresses, by Rev. Robert Vaughan, D.D., Rev. John Stoughton, Alfred Rooker, Esq., Rev. J. Edmond, D.D., and Rev. J. Spence, D.D. London, 1862. 2. The Bicentenary, the Liberation Society, and to what do its Principles tend? A Lecture. A Lecture. By the Rev. J. B. Clifford. London, 1862. 3. Facts and Fictions of the Bicentenary. A Sketch from 1640 to 1662. By the Rev. T. Lathbury. London, 1862. 4. How did they get there? or, the Nonconformist Ministers of 1662. By the Rev. J. Venables. London, 1862. 5. The Bicentenary Commemoration of 1662. A Lecture. By the Rev. J. Bardsley. Cambridge, 1862. 6. A Ray of Light cast upon St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662. London, 1862. 7. Proceedings, principally in the County of Kent, in connection with the Parliament called in 1640. Edited by the Rev. L. B. Larking. Camden Society. London, 1862. HE projected commemoration of the Puritan partisans who paid the penalty of defeat by losing their spoil just two hundred years ago, is a very natural weapon for Dissenters to resort to in the circumstances in which they find themselves at the the present moment. Their cause is not prospering so much as it has prospered recently; and the enthusiasm of some of their adherents is beginning to wax faint. It is very intelligible that they should grasp at every available means for rekindling the fire which they fear is dying away. A recent example has shown the world that some kind of canonization is the natural resource of a religious community in distress. There is a strong difference, it is true, between the nature of the afflictions under which the Romanists and the Dissenters severally labour. The Pope is in trouble because he has lost the greater part of what he possessed, and is in a fair way to lose the rest. The Liberation Society have only to deplore that they have not as good a chance as they enjoyed a short time ago of appropriating the possessions of others. Both have sought a refuge from their present troubles in contemplating the heroism of the past; and in this point of view, taking quality and quantity together into consideration, both stand on a tolerably equal footing. The Pope canonizes martyrs who preferred to die by horrible tortures rather than renounce the faith of Christ; but he can only produce twenty-seven of them. The Liberation Society canonizes martyrs who preferred to abandon what they had wrongfully acquired rather than renounce the Scottish Covenant; but then it professes to produce two thousand of them. That a certain suspicion of fable attaches to the chronicle of suffering is equally true in either instance. In both cases, too, the useful and the sweet are mingled; and a sagacious forethought for practical needs adorns and tempers the self-abandonment of religious veneration. The commemoration of both sets of saints is intended not only to edify the consciences but to stimulate the political enthusiasm of the faithful. Reprisals upon the unbeliever, as well as amendment of life, are among the results which in both cases the religious ceremonial is planned to bring about. It is chiefly in its practical rather than its sentimental aspect that we are concerned to notice the commemoration that is to take place next August. If it were merely an outburst of religious zeal which had selected a false view of history as the channel for its expression, it would be no function of ours to dispel the error. We have no particular taste for iconoclasm; and if there be any whose religious sensibilities are involved in a veneration for the sectaries of the Great Rebellion, we have no desire to impeach their sanctity. It would not be the first time in the history of hagiology that party leaders have been rewarded for their services by a promotion to the Calendar. But the literature which has already been published upon this subject on the Dissenting side reveals that this commemoration of the sufferings of these holy men is connected with aims and aspirations of a less purely spiritual character. They are are to form the basis of an argument by which the wickedness of Established Churches in general and the English Establishment in particular is to be enforced. Under these circumstances we may be excused for devoting a few pages of inquiry to the claims for canonization which have been thrust upon us from a quarter so unexpected, and also to the abundant anathemas which have been bestowed upon the civil and ecclesiastical rulers of that day for the policy they pursued. We have no intention of denying all merit to the ejected of 1660 and 1662. Some, like Baxter, were men of distinguished piety; and for the remainder it may be fairly argued that it is always a meritorious thing to suffer any loss, whether great or small, rather than renounce in words the genuine convictions of the soul. But it is a kind of merit which, happily for mankind, is not so rare that it calls for a Bicentenary commemoration. It has plentifully adorned every age in which religious controversies have arisen; and our own epoch, though commonly accused of an undue tendency to compromise belief, has witnessed examples of it in great abundance. The officers in the army might as well have held a Bicentenary to commemorate the fact that Cromwell's soldiers did not run away at the battle of Worcester. It is perfectly true that the Puritan ministers, like the Puritan soldiers, stood manfully to their colours; but the same has been done by thousands of others before and since, who have been thought to need no special commemoration. They fulfilled the primary duty of their profession, the betrayal of which would have branded them with infamy-but they did no more. It cannot, therefore, be mere admiration for a sacrifice of no uncommon kind that is to unite all the Dissenting congregations in one simultaneous expression of feeling on the 24th of August next. It is another passion, more easily sustained, that is to be fed by a contemplation of the events of 1662. It is the alleged wrong, and not the virtue, which it is intended to commemorate: it is resentment, and not veneration, which that commemoration is intended to keep alive. But is the resentment better justified than the veneration? It is not sufficient to say that they were turned out of their livings. Before that fact arouses our indignation, we must be satisfied that they had any right to hold them. Before we commemorate the great wrong they suffered in being ejected from their parsonages, it is material to inquire how they got into them. It is obvious that there may be cases in which the misfortune of being compelled to surrender property may not necessarily command our sympathies. If a pickpocket has possessed himself of your handkerchief, and yields it up to you again under the gentle pressure of the police, his most admiring and enthusiastic friend would not think it necessary to preach a sermon sermon in his honour, upon the next anniversary of the event. Nor will the transaction be ennobled, if such vicissitudes of possession should be the result of political disturbance. Few people would be inclined to express any keen sympathy for the Napoleonic marshals when they were ousted of the dotations in foreign countries with which their master had cheaply paid them. Nor, if a like misfortune should befall the Northerner swho have quartered themselves in Southern country-houses, or the Taepings who have housed themselves in Ning-po, is it probable that any Bicentenary will, at any future period, commemorate their sufferings. The world, in short, has hitherto perversely refused to regard the enforced restitution of stolen goods as a claim to the honours of either political or religious martyrdom. It is difficult to understand why a different scale of measurement is to be adopted for the benefit of the religious belligerents of 1640, who were 'hoist with their own petard in the year 1662. Their title to the benefices of which they drew the revenues was precisely the same as Murat's title to the Kingdom of Naples, or Jerome's title to the Kingdom of Westphalia. They had risen by the sword, and by the sword they fell. They made an organised attack upon the Church of England, in which, at first, they were brilliantly successful. Though the whole of the Executive power was thrown into the scale against them, they succeeded in subverting the Church and Throne together, and made themselves masters of the power and revenues of both. The victories gained were vigorously followed up. It was against Episcopacy they had made war, and they hunted it down with unrelenting hatred. The Archbishop to whom they were specially opposed expiated upon the scaffold the crime of having provoked their enmity. The clergy were the special object of their animosity. So early as 1640, a Committee was appointed for the purpose of ejecting 'scandalous' Ministers; and as years went on, its area of operations was widened till it extended throughout the country. The Head Committees sat in London; and affiliated Committees armed with absolute authority were established in most of the counties of England and Wales. They were formed of the most desperate fanatics that could be got together, whatever their previous character or rank in life might have been. Their proceedings were carried on in the style which generally marks tribunals that have been instituted to carry out the political objects of a despotic executive. Their business was to dismiss the Ministers who were attached to the Church and Monarchy; and they did their work with diligence and effect. Emissaries were sent out to collect accusations, and it was seldom that some man was not to be found to father them. Men of the worst character, 6 character, living by the most infamous means, were eagerly welcomed by the Committees, if they brought with them an accusation. No charge against the parson was too extreme to be received as probable, and no testimony was too vile to establish it as proved. The forms observed by the Committees were distinguished by that simplicity and rapidity which usually characterises revolutionary tribunals. Divers were never called to answer,' say the Clergy in the Petition addressed by some thousands of them to Sir Thomas Fairfax: scarce one had any articles proved on oath or other legal process, and some were put out on private information given to Mr. White, the chairman.' Under circumstances so favourable, it must be recorded to the credit of their moderation that they did not in general prove heavier charges than those of drunkenness and immorality. But these were enough for the object they had in view; they sufficed to furnish as much of pretext as was required for the sequestrations which the Puritans desired to pronounce. They were ample for this purpose, and they were worth very little for any other. Until this year we should not have believed that there existed critics blind enough, or shameless enough, to blacken, upon the strength of such trials as these, the memory of the victims of the Puritan Persecution. It is evident, however, that an historical fact more or less is not to be allowed to dim the full glory of the approaching Bicentenary. The Dissenting advocates actually speak of the unhappy loyalists, whose ill fate it was to fall into the hands of these Plundering Committees, as men convicted of immorality.' One would have thought that the world was familiar enough by this time with that stalest device of tyranny-to mask, under the forms of a sham trial, the execution of its absolute decrees. Before partisan judges, selected without the slightest guarantee of their independence or impartiality, and appointed to carry out the wishes of the victors in a civil contest, convictions are matters of course. It is only lately that desperate historians have been bold enough to claim them either as a proof of the victim's guilt or a palliation of the tyrant's cruelty. We believe there are stern republicans who still believe that Marie Antoinette was guilty of the crimes of which she was convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal. M. Louis Blanc is certainly prepared to maintain the guilt of other sufferers before that court, on the ground of the remarkably sentimental and tender character of the jurors, who often wept when pronouncing the fatal verdict. Mr. Froude, we believe, is almost the only English historian who has displayed the same childlike confidence in the decisions of tribunals pronounced directly under the eye of a despotic authority. It is idle to attempt to reason against such a condition of mind. No argu ment |