THE INVIOLABILITY OF THE SEAL OF CONFESSION BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED. ST. JOHN NEPOMUCEN, M.-A.D. 1383. (Concluded from our last.) The tomb of the saint continued illustrious for frequent miracles, and was protected by a wonderful providence from profanations, which were often attempted by the Hussites, and again by the Calvinists in 1618, in the wars of Frederic the elector palatine. On that occasion, several officers and workmen, who set themselves to demolish the tomb of the saint, were deterred by visible judgments, and some by sudden death upon the spot, which was the misfortune, among others, of a certain English gentleman. The complete victory by which the Imperialists under the command of the duke of Bavaria, under the walls of Prague in 1620, recovered this kingdom, is ascribed to the intercession of this holy martyr, who, as many attested, was seen appearing in glory with other patrons, by the guards in the cathedral, the night before the battle, and whose protection the imperial army had earnestly implored; from which circumstance the illustrious house of Austria has shown a particular devotion to his memory. The emperors Ferdinand II. and III. solicited his canonization, which was at length procured by Charles VI. In 1719, on the 14th of April, the saint's tomb was opened, where the body had lain three hundred and thirty years. The flesh was consumed, but the bones entire and perfectly joined together, with the marks of his fall into the river behind his head and on his shoulders. His tongue alone was found fresh and free from corruption, as if the saint had but just expired. The saint had been honoured as a martyr from the time of his death in Bohemia; but to make his veneration more authentic and universal, his canonization was demanded, and several new miracles were juridically approved at Prague and Rome. Innocent XIII. confirmed his immemorial veneration by a decree equivaInt to a beatification; and the bull of his solemn canonization was published by Benedict XIII. in 1729. A narrative of many miracles wrought by his intercession may be read at the end of his life, as the wonderful preservation of the city of Nepomuc from the plague in 1680; the cure of various distempers in persons despaired of by the physicians; the deliverance of many from imminent dangers, and the protection of the innocence of many falsely accused. The count of Althan, afterwards archbishop of Bari, in the fall of a balcony in the palace of constable Colonna at Rome, was saved by St. John appearing in a vision, whose intercession he invoked aloud. Cardinal Michael Frederic Althan, viceroy of Naples, was cured of a paralytic disorder, by which he had entirely lost the use of one arm, and of a complication of several other distempers, the moment he began to address his. PRICE ONE PENNY prayer to St. John on his festival, in the Minims church. Pope Benedict XIII. dedicated an altar under the invocation of St. John Nepomucen in the Lateran basilic. In the sacrament of penance so indispensable is the law of secresy, and so far does it extend, that the minister is bound, by all laws, so much to be upon his guard in this respect, that he may say with an ancient writer, "What I know by confession, I know less than what I do not know at all." St. John Climacus remarks, that a special providence watches over the fidelity of this sacred seal, "For," says he, "it is unheard of that sins disclosed by confession should be divulged, lest others should be deterred from confessing, and all hope of health be cut off." Without this indispensable secrecy the very precept and obligation ceases. And this law is expedient also to the public weal, for by it the minister will often draw sinners from danger. ous designs which otherwise could never come to his knowledge, as F. Coton showed to the entire satisfaction of Henry IV. of France. TRUTH. ST. VALENTINE, PRIEST AND MARTYR. Third Age. THE ORIGIN OF VALENTINES. Valentine was a holy priest in Rome, who, with St. Marius and his family, assisted the martyrs in the persecution under Claudius II. He was apprehended, and sent by the emperor to the prefect of Rome; who on finding all his promises to make him renounce his faith ineffectual, commanded him to be beaten with clubs, and afterwards to be beheaded, which was executed on the 14th of February, about the year 270. Pope Julius I. is said to have built a church near Ponte Mole to his memory, which for a long time gave name to the gate, now called Porta del Popolo, formerly Porta Valentini. The greatest part of his relics are now in the Church of St. Praxedes. His name is celebrated as that of an illustrions martyr in the Sacramentary of St. Gregory, the Roman Missal of Thomasius, in the calendar of F. Fronto, and that of Allatius, in Bede, Usuard, Ado, Notker, and all other martyrologies on this day. To abolish the heathen's lewd superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in honour of their goddess Februata Juno, on the 15th of this month, several zealous pastors substituted the names of saints in billets given on this day. We find that in all ages and countries the pastors of the Church have laboured hard to abolish this remnant of Paganism. St. Francis of Sales, as we read in his life, severely forbade the custom of valentines, or giving boys, in writing, the names of girls to be admired and attended on by them; and to abolish it, he changed it into giving billets with the names of certain saints for them to honour and imitate in a particular manner. P.S. Under the heading "TRUTH" we have been very brief to-day. The reason is, we intend to begin again, as it were, in our next number, and we were compelled to be brief here to enable us to finish all our articles. FALSEHOOD. (Concluded from our last.) whom the Sophia had substituted for the murdered Abel, as the father of the pnuematic or spiritual natures: they taught also, that he again appeared in the person of Jesus, as the redeemer of the world. The Cainites inferred from their doctrine of the distinction between the Creator of the world, the God of the Jews, and the supreme God, that all those who have been punished by the God of the Jews, and who were represented as evil doers in the Old Testament, were spiritual men, of the race of the Sophia, who had In his hatred to man, who now no longer subjected him- subjected themselves to the ambition of the Demiurgos. self to him, but to the great God, Jalbadoath created They boasted that, as spiritual men, they were related to from matter the Ophiomorphos, or the wicked spirit of the Cain, Cham, and Esau, to the turbulent Core, and the serpent: but the Sophia, resolving to frustrate the ambi. Sodomites. They gave the preference to Judas among the tious designs of her son, employed the spirit of the serpent apostles, as he had been enabled by his gnosis to raise himto tempt men (whom Jalbadoath had left in ignorance of self above their degraded state; for as he knew that the their higher destinies, that he might the more securely hold rule of the Demiurgos would be destroyed by the death of them in slavery), to a disobedience of the commands which Jesus, he hesitated not to accelerate it. As antinomions had been imposed upon them. By eating the forbidden fruit, and contemners of the laws given by the God of the Jewish their souls became enlightened, and they turned themselves people, they tolerated and practised the grossest excesses. from Jalbadoath to the Supreme Author of all being. In Teachers of a like antinomistic gnosis were Capocrates punishment of their transgression, they were expelled by and his son, Epiphanes of Alexandria. Everything Jalbadoath from the ethereal region, the paradise which Christian in their philosophic religious syncretism had been they had hitherto inhabited, into the dark, lower world so deformed that their party might be called a heathen where their ethereal bodies were exchanged for others, rather than a Christian sect. In their system, all things dark, gross, and suited to this earth. The Ophiomorphos, had sprung from the Monas, the father of all being, and who was punished at the same time, and in the same manshould flow back again into his bosom. The visible world ner, produced other six spirits of this world. These seven was formed by ambitious spirits that had rebelled against princes of darkness now hate and persecute mankind, and, the Monas. They rule over this their creation; but so by tempting them to sin, endeavour to draw them now from iniquitous are their laws, that it is the duty of man to the Supreme God as they had before from Jalbadoath. withdraw himself from their power by acquiring a true Against them and Jalbadoath, the Sophia combats to pre- knowledge of the Monas. In all nations, individual, serve in man the memory of his origin, and the knowledge extraordinary men, as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and of his relation with the kingdom of light. The Jews Jesus, have possessed this gnosis, and thereby freed them. worship Jalbadoath, whom they erroneously suppose to be selves from the laws of this world, from the circumscribing the Supreme God: the wicked, and all idolators, are sub-religions of the gross multitude. This, they taught, was jected to the serpent. The sighs of the Sophia drew down upon earth the Heavenly Christ, who was sent by God to redeem those who still retained within them seeds of Heavenly light. He was first united with the redeemed Sophia, and afterwards with the man Jesus, who was born of the Virgin, and whom Jalbadoath had destined as his Messias. Jalbadoath being thus deluded, effected by means of his Jews, the crucifixion of the man Jesus: the Christ and the Sophia had, however, previously departed from him, and returned to the kingdom of light. They thence imparted to him a vivifying power, by which he arose from the dead, and was clothed with an ethereal body. When at length all supernal light shall have left this lower world, and have been borne by Jesus to the Christ and the Sophia, to the region of the ones, then shall follow the end of the world. The Ophites were divided into sects violently opposed to each other. Some of them taught that it was the Sophia itself which assumed the form of a serpent and allured men to transgress the commandments of the Creator of the world; others believed that the heavenly Christ appeared to man under the appearance of the serpent in Paradise, for which reason Moses raised up in the desert the serpent of bronze. They therefore offered to the serpent a religious honour; and from them the whole party were named Ophites. Some branches of them seem to have existed before the time of Christ; those whom Origen knew in Egypt possessed amongst them nothing of Christianity. Most unchristian were those pantheistic Ophites who taught the existence of an universal soul, from which all things flowed, and to which all things would again return. In one of their apocryphal books, the Gospel of Eve, the contents of which, it was said, she received from the serpent of Paradise were these words: "I stood upon a high mountain, and beheld a man of large stature, and another very small; and I heard a voice as of a rolling thunder, which said, I am thou, and thou art I; where thou art, there also I am, for I pervade all things. If thou wishest thou canst gather me up, but in so doing thou only collectest thyself."" Similar in many respects to the Ophites, were the Sethians and the Cainites. The former considered Seth, the signification of the word Jesus, "Truth shall make you free." He who has obtained this gnosis, is powerful and exalted as the angels, like unto God, and in possession of a perfect imperturbable peace. Jesus was no more than the son of Mary and Joseph, but his soul had preserved, from its primitive state, when it was yet enclosed in the Monas, a clearer remembrance of the Divinity. Hence could he more easily, by the elevation of contemplation, unite himself with the Monas; from this union there flowed upon him a divine power, by which he was enabled to free himself, not only from the moral, but also from the physical laws of this world; by which he wrought miracles, and established a true religion in the place of the Jewish dispensation. But the souls of other men might become pure as the soul of Jesus; and many of the follow ers of Caprocrates hesitated not to exalt themselves above the apostles. Prayers and good works they esteemed no more than as external and vain practices; and he, they said, who deemed them of any worth, was the slave to the inferior Gods, who were the authors of the many forms of worship which were found in the world, and should continue to be their slave even after death, as his soul would migrate into other bodies. Only by faith and love, that is, by an absorption of the souls into the Monas, could man obtain peace in this world, and beatitude in a future life. Epiphanes (who died when a youth of only seventeen years of age, and was deified by the inhabitants of Same in Cephallene, the birth place of his mother), taught in his book, "On Justice," nature itself had instituted a community of all things among mankind; that human laws perverted all good order; that men, by their false maxims, which warred with the principles that God had implanted in them, first introduced sin into the world. Such ideas might well be the cause of the awful depravity of the Capocratians, recorded by St. Epiphanius. CIVILITY.-When the rich quaker was asked the secret of his success in life, he answered," civility, friend, civility." Some people are uncivil, sour, sullen, morose, crusty, haughty, really clownish, and impudent. Run from such, as for your life. "Seest thou a man wise in his own copceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him." THE REBUILDING OF THE VATICAN CHURCH OF ST. PETER. (Concluded from our last.) remains lie there in a silver shrine under the altar, exposed` to view. The other glittering rich ornaments of this place seem almost to lose their lustre when the statue of the saint is uncovered. It is somewhat bigger than the life, because raised high. Its bright shining gold, silver, and sparkling diamonds, especially in the crown of glory over the head, dazzle the eye. It is surprising to hear so many in these days inveigh against the splendor and magnificence of the ornaments of the house of God, as savour The other patriarchal churches, and principal basilicas in the city, are the church of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, wherein part of the real cross of our Saviour is preserved to this day, and the church of St. Mary Major, both of which are situated within the distance of about half a mile from St. John Lateran's. The church of St. Pauling too much of worldly pomp, and nourishing pride and stands on the Ostian Road, about five miles from Rome; vanity. On pretence of refining religion, and rendering it the church of St. Sebastian on the Appian Road, and of more spiritual, they cry out in the language of those who St. Laurence extra Muros, on the Tiburtian Road. These were filled with indignation on seeing the pious penitent seven churches form the seven stations of Rome. of the Gospel pouring out a precious ointment on the head of our Lord-"To what purpose is this waste and profusion? These valuable things might be sold, and the price given to the poor." But those who are not ashamed to exclaim thus against the rich decorations that become the house of God, and render it a figure of heavenly Jerusalem, shew that they are divested of all sense of piety or respect for God. They are generally people full of themselves and of their own wit and judgment, who are displeased at seeing that employed for the honour of the Almighty, which they would wish to be their own property. Can anything be conceived more splendid or more magnificent than the sacred vestments used by the priests in the Old Law? Or than the golden candlesticks, the lamps and goblets, the rich images of cherubims, the cedar altar, and tables covered with the purest gold, the censers and vessels of massive gold, &c. which God himself com The church of St. Paul is supported by one hundred and forty large and beautiful pillars, chiefly of white marble, taken out of Antoninus's baths, and from the tomb of Adrian. Some of them are of porphyry, some of granite. The church is very extensive, and contains five naves. The patriarchal altar is erected in the central nave, over a subterraneous chapel, wherein half of the relics of St. Peter and Paul is kept, and under a beautiful pavillion, that terminates above in the form of a pyramid. This altar is supported by four pillars of agate and porphyry. The twenty four elders mentioned in the Apocalypse, with Christ at their head, are beautifully represented in mosaic on the ceiling, with a wonderful variety of ancient historical paintings, &c. The two facades of the church of St. Mary Major, in the Ionic and Corinthian orders, with its elegant portals, octagon domes, spires, belfry, balustrades, statues, galleries, pillars, pilasters, basso relievos, pallisa-manded to be used in the temple of Solomon? Does not does, and the adjacent obelisks and fountains, make a most majestic appearance, and inspire the beholder with sentiments of reverence and respect for the house of God. The interior of this church is most richly embellished with gilt stucco and mosaic, with porphyry pillars and pilasters, with bronze stuatues and choice paintings. The roof is supported by thirty-eight columns of white polished marble, and four of granite. The patriarchal altar, in the grand nave, is formed of porphyry, and the elegant square canopy over it is sustained by four great figures of angels standing on porphyry pillars. Under this altar there is a subterraneous chapel, adorned with a number of white marble statues, and with a lively representation of Christ in the stable and manger of Bethlehem. Nothing can be more magnificent than the Borghesian, Confalon, and Sixtine Chapels, which are in this church. The walls are encrusted with the richest Egyptian marble. The altars are finished in the highest taste. The pillars are covered with Oriental jasper, the pedestals are enriched with agate, the bases and capitals are formed of gilt bronze, and the table and front of the altar of lapis lazuli. The city of Rome abounds with a great number of other stately churches, but the church of the Jesuits is one of the most magnificent piles of building in the world, next to the Vatican, and is not less admired for the elegance of the architecture than for its riches, consisting in costly beautiful ornaments of gold, silver, jewels, exquisite paintings, statues and carving, and a great profusion of fine marble. Among the many chapels which it contains, that of St. Ignatius is the admiration of travellers. His sacred this example of God himself authorize the embellishment of places of divine worship in the New Law, whereof the Old Law was only a type and shadow? Is it not alone sufficient to silence the enemies of religion? The rich decorations of Christian churches are so far from nourishing pride and vanity, that they serve to inspire the faithful with reverential awe and respect; and for this reason, those who have been most remarkable for their profound humility and solid virtue, were always the most zealous for the splendour and magnificence of everything relative to the service of God, as we learn from the history of all foregoing ages. IMAGINATION-It is often from the storehouses of imagination that strong minds draw the rich ore from which they manufacture splendid realities. Ambition finds there her materials-love his gayest robes; passion gains there many a choice for his own ends; and even science and philosophy have often to thank imagination for many a grand discovery, for many a bright and happy suggestion. EDUCATION.-Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress-no clime destroy-no enemy alienate -no despotism enslave. At home, a friend-abroad, an introduction-in solitude, a solace-in society, an ornament. It shortens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave! a reasoning savage! vacillating between the dignity of an intelligence derived from God,. and the degradation of brutal passions. A Refutation of the foul charges against TO THE INHABITANTS OF MANCHESTER AND SALFORD. There appeared in the Courier and Protestant Witness of Saturday last, a most foul and atrocious libel on the characters of those Catholics who went on Thursday evening, the 7th instant, to hear parson Macguire's lecture on the Invocation of Saints, &c. A modified report of the same calumny appeared also in the Guardian; but it is worthy of remark that the two newspapers differ in toto on a point of great moment. I now undertake to prove that the report was a lying fabrication; and I call upon the editors of the papers, if they love fair play, to give as much publicity to my contradiction as they have given to the statements which I now undertake to refute. I am obliged, in self-defence, to come before the public, for my name (though I was not at the lecture room at all), was the only one published. Why my name should be thus wantonly abused, I know not. However it is certain that the whole story is a base fabrication, and that will be clearly proved in a very few words. I begin, then, by asking a plain question-Why were the walls of Manchester, Salford, &c. covered with placards, announcing that parson Macguire would give a lecture in Hope-street school, &c.? If it be answered that all the public were invited, but that it never was supposed the Catholics would attend; I again ask, in the most emphatic manner, how did it happen they did not state on the placard that Catholics should not attend; or why did they not adopt the old cowardly practice of issuing their gagging tickets? One thing must be admitted, to wit, that parsons Stowell and Macguire, and all their friends engaged in the affair of the lecture, have sadly committed themselves. When men issue placards inviting the public to gather together, they must be prepared for the consequences. They invited the public, and the place was filled to overflowing. Was there anything wrong on the part of the invited? Certainly not. Who, then, was in fault? The man of course who was too cowardly to lecture, because the people who had been invited obeyed the summons, and in such numbers that there was no accommodation for one-third of them. "But," says the Courier, "a letter had been received containing the important intelligence that Mr. Cleary, a Romanist schoolmaster, was to head a mob, on the night in question, and that the lecturer would be put down by brute force." I ask who wrote the letter? And unless parson Macguire name the author, or the writer publicly avow himself, I, and every honest man of every community, will be led to maintain that the affair was a shameful and barefaced forgery. I have never had anything to do with mobs at any period of life; and there is not a Catholic who knows me, who did not feel fully assured that I would not attend at the lecture room. of the letter (if any letter had been sent), as a liar and a I proclaim, then, the writer forger of calumny. Again, I deny that Catholics behaved with any impropriety; and I assert that the tale of the poker was a fabrication. What, I ask, were the police doing, when they found an "Irish Papist" with a deadly weapon in his possession? Oh! they take the weapon which was guiltless, and they leave the man who was guilty. Is it for the support of such men that we ley-payers are so heavily taxed? Truly men who will swallow such stuff can be gulled into the belief of any absurdity. The Courier says the poker was carried to the school, the Guardian that it belonged to the school. Which is the true version? Both, it is evident, cannot be true. Why did not the police arrest the man with the murderous weapon? Because they could not arrest an invisible being; they were willing to do their duty; but as not even one prisoner was arrested, it is evident to the meanest capacity that the charges cannot be sustained, and that none but liars and reckless men would have made them. Let the letter be produced which carried the intelligence of my intended march at the head of a rabble. I defy any man to prove the charge; and I am ready to prove, as I did on last Monday evening, at St. Patrick's Hall, and will prove more fully on next Monday evening, that so far were the Catholics from being guilty, that I have strong Protestant testimony to establish the fact that whatever conStowell and Macguire. 1 call upon Mr. Consterdine, fusion took place originated with the partisans of parsons curate of Christ Church, Salford, and he can bear testimeeting in Hope-street school, neither made a breach of mony, if he will, that the Catholics who attended the the peace, nor did they seem disposed to do it. The affair is a very strange one, and to say the least of it, the Prohave evidently betrayed a want of judgment, of prudence, testant party connected with the school, the lecture, &c. of sincerity, and of Christian charity. The whole party I remember very well, if Mr. Stowell and his friends do seem bewildered, and they are proved to be very forgetful. not, that when the friends of secular education called a meeting at the Town-hall, King street, that he and his ful for Mr. Stowell and his friends in Manchester, was friends went and upset that meeting. Now what was lawequally lawful for those Catholics who thought proper to go to Hope-street school on the night in question. That is to say, if they had by a majority upset Mr. Macguire, and voted that no lecture should be delivered by him, they would have been perfectly justified in doing so; they would have only followed the example of Mr. Stowell, and for the protection of the good and the punishment of the there is no law that could punish them, for the law is only bad; that however is not a crime which is recognized by the laws by which all public assemblages are governed. But I deny that the Catholics even made use of such a privilege, and I am prepared to meet any man either on the platform or in the press who maintains the contrary. What, I ask, prevented parson Macguire from giving his lecture? The letter received during the week? Impossible: for if they had been fore-warned they ought to have been forearmed. It is evident, then, that sheer cowardice alone was the cause: the man who had had the effrontery for some years, until he was checked by me some twelve months ago, Catholics, actually shrunk from the performance of the to wantonly trifle with our principles and our characters as task which he had imposed upon himself, when he found that the people, whose faith he was about to malign, were present and outnumbered his own friends. If this be a specimen of true Christian courage, if such conduct be in accordance with Protestant teaching, the sooner we get rid of it the better. Want of space obliges me to be very brief, I must therefore resume the subject next week. At present I shall content myself by informing the public, head a mob,-and that there was not a single Catholic at First, that I neither headed a mob-nor did I intend to the school who was not perfectly assured that I would not go there. wantonly insulted many Catholics, by cutting and bruising Second, I am prepared to prove that the Protestant party trying without any authority to imprison them in the antisome, by tearing the clothes of others, when they were room, and by endeavouring in sundry ways to provoke them to a breach of the peace; but that the Catholics for the sake of their religion, for the sake of their own characters, and even on my account, patiently bore with all the ill-treatment which their sanctimonious opponents inflicted upon them. out authority, attempted to imprison certain parties, and I our opponents know full well, that the pulling down of the THE ILLUMINATOR. MANCHESTER, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1850. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. In the preceding articles we finished our arguments upon the general grounds of the Catholic faith; we were compelled to be brief; however we have said not only as much as our limited space would permit, but as much as was necessary to redeem our pledges, and to satisfy every reasonable man: We shall now, with the kind permission of our numerous readers, briefly sum up the principal points discussed already, and make such reflections upon them, as may cause you to see at a glance their nature and force, and induce you, at your leisure, to examine them again more fully. One thing is certain, and that is, our arguments will stand the test of the strictest examination; and the more they are considered, the more they will convince you that the Church in which alone the Catholic faith is taught, is built upon the strongest foundations. Christ himself is both its founder and its chief corner-stone; its law-giver, supreme invisible head, and perpetual protector. He laid the first foundations of it by personally preaching the word of life for three whole years. When he was at the eve of his departure out of this world, he comforted his apostles with a promise of sending down to them the Holy Ghost, who "should guide them into all truth," (John xvi. 13), and “bring all things to their remembrance, whatever he had said unto them.” (John xiv. 26). Some time after his resurrection, he committed the charge of his whole flock in a special manner to St. Peter (John xxi. 15, &c.) and by that established the form of government which was ever after to be inviolably observed in his Church. A little before his ascension into heaven, he gave his apostles | their commission to "go and teach all nations," which he accompanied with a promise of "abiding with them to the end of the world." (Matt. xxviii. 20.) On the tenth day after his ascension, the promised Spirit of Truth descended visibly on the apostles, who therefore began immediately the exercise of their apostolical ministry, and that with such astonishing success, that in a very short time a numerous church was formed at Jerusalem, and a few years after the gospel was preached to the remotest parts of the world: as is attested by St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, i. 8, which was written only fifteen years after St. Peter's coming to Rome. Now it cannot surely be doubted, but that this stupendous success was much more owing to the hand of God, than to any concurrence of natural causes. As, for example, it was not humanly possible, that three thousand men should, by hearing a plain and short discourse, uttered by an obscure person, be in a moment prevailed upon to embrace a religion unheard of before, and the most seemingly contrary to reason; unless a supernatural power had come into his as sistance, and given a strength to his words above all the force that human eloquence was ever capable of: yet the fact is recorded by one, who had it from those that were witnesses of it. Neither was it, morally speaking, possible, that a world, drowned in sensuality and idolatrous super stition, should be persuaded to renounce both the one and the other, by the preaching of a few men, destitute of all worldly advantages, unless Almighty God had espoused the religion they preached as his own cause, and given a powerful blessing to their apostolical labours. So that it is manifest, that the doctrine they tanght came from Heaven, and had the divine approbation stamped upon it in the clearest characters. As the number of the faithful increased, the apostles took care to provide them with a proportionable supply of pastors, who being likewise vested with a power of ordaining others, might by a kind of spiritual generation preserve the succession of the prelatic and priestly order; by which alone the Church of Christ was to be governed in all ages. But the perpetuating of the priesthood of Christ was not their only concern,-that of perpetuating his sacred doctrine was of no less importance. They therefore spared no pains to instruct thoroughly those whom they had ordained, in all the holy mysteries of the Christian religion, and carefully deposited with them all the sacred truths, which God had revealed unto them, that they might thereby be enabled to communicate them to their successors, and they again transmit them to theirs, in order to have them securely conveyed down from pastor to pastor, in all succeeding ages. In this manner were the foundations of the Church of Christ fully perfected, and the superstructure itself considerably advanced by the apostles themselves. And since they followed faithfully in all things the directions of their heavenly master, it is plain, that whether we consider its origin, its establishment and constitution, or the sacredness of its laws and doctrine, every thing in it is wholly divine, and favours nothing of human invention. This Church has, ever since its establishment, been the nursery of innumerable eminent saints of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, the sanctuary of repenting sinners, the school of learning, and the faithful depository of all the sacred mysteries of saving faith. This Church has, by the lustre of her miracles, the exemplary holiness of her children, the decency and majesty of her public worship, and the purity of her morals, subdued the greatest monarchs upon earth, and extended herconquests even beyond the furthest bounds of the Roman empire. Finally, this Church has now already had a visible being for the space of above eighteen hundred years, and can shew in her own communion, an uninterrupted succession of bishops and pastors, from the apostles, down to this very time, in spite of all the powers of darkness, that have from time to time combined together to destroy it. Nay, for the first three hundred years she stood her ground not only against the unwearied malice of the Jews, but against the whole power of the Pagan emperors of Rome; and the large effusion of Christian blood, during the ten general persecutions, instead of weakening Christianity, only gave it a greater lustre in the glorious triumphs of its martyrs,. whose invincible courage and constancy, amidst the most cruel torments, not only drew upon them the admiration of the heathens themselves, but converted many thousands of them to the faith of Christ. So that the powerful hand of God appeared visibly in turning the very means intended |