to the hazard of the public peace; and is inoculating them with sentiments inimical to the rest of the community and the government of the country. She is working quietly, patiently, laboriously, and most hopefully, in a view of a not now distant time, when her numbers and position shall entitle her to demand, first, that she shall be made one of the established churches in Britain, and next, that she shall be declared the established church in Britain. These two things attained, the last and convincing step will soon follow: she will then seize upon the government of the country.

It were bad enough did such a state of things exist independently of Protestants, in spite of our efforts to the contrary. It were bad enough had Romanism got this footing of influence and power in the country solely in virtue of its own energy and resources. But this is far from being the case. We have opened the citadel of our constitution to this army of invaders; and not only so, we have pensioned and supported it. It is our money that maintains the war. Not only have we been apathetic and indifferent, which in such a cause were culpability enough, but we have conspired against ourselves by subsidizing the enemy. Without British gold lavishly and criminally bestowed, there would have been no such array as we now behold in Britain, of chapels, schools, nunneries, and monasteries, and no such army of bishops, priests, monks, and Jesuits. Within these few years back grants to Popish agents and Popish institutions have suddenly mounted up from hundreds to thousands, from thousands to tens of thousands, and from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Nor is there the least likelihood that the grants will stop where they are. They are still rising. The Popish clamor is as loud as ever: the disposition to concession among statesmen is as great as ever, and to what yet more portentous amount these grants may rise, no one can say. It is here that our guilt and our infatuation lie, that we are courting our own undoing, and forging with our own hands the weapons meant for our destruction. Let us go a little into particulars.

From Parliamentary returns, and from the careful and very accurate statistics compiled and published by the Scottish Reformation Society, it appears that the Church of Rome in Great Britain is in

the annual receipt of endowments from the British Government to the following amount: For schools in Great Britain, £36,314 7s. 3d.; for schools in Ireland, £102,842 18s. 9d.; for College of Maynooth, £30,000; for chaplains in the army, at home and abroad, £7229; for 186 chaplains, at £50 each, in workhouses, prisons, and asylums in Ireland, £9300; for 6075 Douay Bibles to the army, £451 10s. 2d.; for 700 Popish prayer-books, (The Garden of the Soul) £27 13s.; making a total of £186,165 9s. 2d. And to these are to be added sundry grants which are made by our Government to priests and schools in India, in Australia, and other colonies, as well as at home, the exact amount of which can not be ascertained. Taking these into account, we feel that we can not be in error when we say that the sum given annually by the British Government for the support of Popery, can not be less than Two HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS.

Our attention is solicited not only to the fact of these grants, and their truly formidable amount, but also to their portentous rate of increase. This vast Popish endowment is the growth of a few years; it has sprung up with the rapidity of the prophet's gourd; and should the same rate of progress be maintained for a few years to come-and why should it not?what will be the position of the Romish Church in Britain? It will be that of an established church so far as money goes. Already it nearly equals, in point of endowment, the Established Presbyterian Church, it will then far surpass it; and as regards the wealth of its revenues, and the number of its priests and dignitaries, it will have become the rival of the Anglican Establishment. Let us take, for example, the Popish appointments in the army, and see how both chaplains and salaries have multiplied of late years. In 1854, the number of Popish chaplains in the army, stationed in Great Britain, was twenty-four; and the amount paid as salaries £744. In 1855 the number of chaplains was twenty-three, and the amount of salaries £897. In 1856 the number of chaplains was thirty-seven, and the sum paid £1486. It will be observed that betwixt 1854 and 1856, the salaries to Popish army chaplains had doubled. But the increase of chaplains and salaries did not stop with the year 1856: it went on; and now we find, from the last Par

liamentary Return, that for 1858, the number of Popish chaplains is seventythree; and the aggregate of their salaries (including the pay of nineteen commissioned chaplains) £4938. The result presents us with this very formidable fact -namely, that during the past four years, the Popish chaplains in the army have increased three-fold, and their salaries nearly seven-fold. Not to weary our readers with details, and to state all under this head in a single sentence-in the whole British army at home and abroad we had in 1853 a band of seventy-nine Popish chaplains, while in 1858 the number had risen to 145. And as regards the money paid for the valuable commodity of their instructions, we gave in the former year £750; whereas in 1858 we gave no less a sum than £7229- that is, the sum paid in the latter year was nearly ten times greater than that paid in the former year; so prodigious is the growth of the grants. Equally rapid and startling has been the increase in the grants to Popish schools. The sum is already portentously large, (in Great Britain £36,000; in Ireland £100,000 in round numbers,) and has by no means reached its limit. It is larger this year than it was the last; it will be larger the year after than it is this year; and the year after that it will be larger still. In short, limits to its increase there are none. Popish avariciousness will continue to beg, and Protestant indifferentism will continue to give.

We call on all to ponder these facts. We call on every man who thinks that the Revolution of 1688 was a blessing, and that the rights and privileges it conferred on the nation ought to be maintained, to ponder these facts. They will show him that what was done then is in course of being undone; that the victory it cost us so long a struggle to win, is being insidiously snatched from us; that our rights are being frittered away; and that a course has been entered upon which can have no other termination than that of national humiliation and disaster. We call on every man who values his Protestantism, and regards it as the palladium of our liberties and the source of all that ennobles our country, to ponder these facts. They exhibit a line of policy which goes to the overthrow of the Constitution of the country, the destruction of its liberties, and the demoralization of its people.

We protest against this policy as UNconstitutional. It is directly in the face of the fundamental principle which we solemnly adopted as a nation at the Revolu tion. That principle was that the Constitution should be Protestant. What did that mean as a political dogma? It meant that the Pope was not to have jurisdiction or power in the country. And we accordingly proceeded to bring into harmony with this principle the framework of our Government. We declared that no one but a Protestant could occupy our throne, and that no one but a Protestant should have the making of our laws. The Nonconformists of this country have abetted the change in the Constitution which annulled the latter disability, on the ground which they have ever maintained, that no religious opinion should interfere with the enjoyment of political rights. But while, on this broad ground, and in honor of a principle which is most sacred to them, they have thus, in recent years, contended honestly for their Romanist fellow-countrymen, they must now protest, when they find the public money, of which they do not partake, lavished so abundantly upon the establishment of a system which they conceive to be not only a portentous religious falsehood, but a political curse. The Nonconformists number more than half the population of Great Britain, and they demand to know why privileges should be conferred, and money given, to this religious body, whose principles are so hostile to the free institutions of our country, while they neither ask nor receive such honors, or subsidy, in support of their churches? Why should their money be nefariously appropriated to uphold a creed which they believe to be damnable in its delusions and obnoxious to their own and the country's interests? They object to the support of one religious establishment, as an injustice not only to themselves, but to that truth which it professes to conserve. Now, they are urged by every recollection of their his tory, and every principle of their faith, to arouse themselves to uproot the young and malignant sapling which threatens, with such prodigious growth, to overshadow the land with a most deadly umbrage; and protect their country not from a second religious establishment, but from a second establishment which will establish irreligion and idolatry in its subtlest

The evil principle involved in the establishment of religion is now brought into most painful prominence, and we trust will be seen by many who hitherto have been blind to it. It is argued, if soldiers must have religious instruction and consolation, the Catholic soldiers must have it from their own priests; and, therefore, the Government must send and pay them. So of our jails; and now the cry is likewise raised for our workhouses. It is that deduction "therefore" which Nonconformists pronounce a "non sequitur," and demand that it shall not be put into force; and, where it has been, that it shall be rescinded as wrong in logic and fatal in policy. For any dullard may see that, by this reasoning, you must support lamas for your Buddhist, and gurus for your Brahmin soldiers; and if the Government provide religious instruction and consolation for those in jails, workhouses, reformatories, etc., according to the peculiar persuasion of each individual, a mighty host of spiritual directors will be required!

While, however, this general question of establishments is in debate, Nonconformists may render illustrious service to their country, as they have done before, and save the constitution from the plague of a Romish establishment, by requiring that the Catholics be treated as themselves, and refusing to bear fresh burdens of taxation for subsidies to them, which they scorn to receive.

stable and permanent in this country till the reigning family had become really Protestant. The Court and the Parliament evinced an incurable tendency to lapse in Romanism, and did so on more than one occasion, dragging the nation back with them. It cost us a struggle of one hundred and fifty years to reform the throne, and we were able to do this only at the Revolution. Since the Revolution, the Reformation has been stable in Britain. But now we begin to discover strong symptoms of a disposition to lapse back into Romanism; and why? because the governing power has changed its policy. Though from very different causes, it is substantially the policy of JAMES. It is the very same anti-national, time-serving, truckling course which landed the country in all the humiliations, disasters, and disgrace, from which we were happily rescued by the opportune appearance of the Prince of Orange on our shores. The same course will to a certainty conduct to the same issue.

We protest against this course as fitted to forfeit the favor of Heaven. What an ennobling spectacle do the Protestant nations exhibit, as contrasted with the Popish States of Europe; and especially Britain, the head of the Reformation, as compared with continental countries. Blessed with peace, enriched with commerce, adorned with art and industry, the abode of liberty and letters, and crowned with social and domestic virtue, our country rises a sublime monument, in the midst of the earth, of the value of Protestantism; while Italy and other Popish lands, ravaged by war, torn by faction, scourged by ignorance and vice, and a prey to all the evils of beggary and slavery, lift an equally emphatic protest in the face of the world against the Papacy. Shall we reject that with which God has so wisely connected his blessing, and shall we choose that which he has so visibly and awfully branded with his curse? What, in that case, can we expect but that we shall be forsaken of Heaven?