hardly to deserve the name of river; but this, on the contrary (the most rapid I have ever seen) rushes on to a neighbouring rock, whence thrown off, it tumbles into a deep vortex in a manner that excites the admiration of every beholder. From the reservoir thus formed we are abundantly supplied with water; nor only so, for it nourishes in its stormy bosom a multitude of fishes. What might I not say of the balmy exhalations that arise from this verdant region, or of the breezes that attend the flow of the river? or some perhaps would rather speak of the endless variety of flowers that adorn the ground, or of the innumerable singing birds that make our woods their home. For my own part, my mind is too deeply engaged to give much attention to these lesser matters. To our commendation of this seclusion we are moreover able to add the praise of an unbounded fruitfulness in all kinds of produce, favoured as it is by its position and soil. To me its principal charm (and a greater cannot be) is this-that it yields me the fruits of tranquillity. For not only in the region far remote from the tumults of cities, but it is actually unfrequented by travellers of any sort, a few huntsmen excepted, who make their way hither in search of the game which abounds in it. This, indeed, is another of its advantages; for though we lack the ferocious bear and the wolf that afflict your country, we have deer and goats, sylvan flocks, and hares, and other animals of the sort."—pp. 125, 126.

Happy would it be if this picture were faithful, but the author has left us many grounds to believe that the very contrary was the case. The subject of pilgrimage is next glanced at in this section, and is treated with learning and ability.

The chapter on Fanaticism of the Brand is chiefly occupied with reflections on the Papal Hierarchy as the prime or incomparable example of religious ferocity. The ancient idolatries, the author contends, were by no means, so atrocious; for, though it be true that the Druidical, Syrian, Scythinan, the Mexican, and Indian, religious systems, were cruel and sanguinary, "still, a broad distinction," remarks the writer, "presents itself, which places the Papal immolations and tortures on a ground where there is nothing to compare with them. It might be enough to say that an annual or triennial sacrifice of a few victims, or the gorging of captives reserved for that very purpose from the slaughter of the field, have in no country amounted to a tenth of the numbers that, in equal portions of time, have fallen around the altar of the Romish Church. But leaving this point, there is a clear difference, much in favour of the Pagan rites, between the shedding the blood of a victim (using the term in its restricted and proper sense) at the impulse of a sincere superstitious dread; and those executions and exterminations that have sprung, not from horrors of conscience, not from error of belief; but from a sheer rancour. Superstition does indeed tend to blood, and often is guilty of it; but Fanaticism-fanaticism such as that of the Romish Hierarchy, breathes revenge, and murder beats from its heart."

The author proceeds then to compare the Romish doctrine respecting the punishment of sin with that which is really taught

by the Christian religion. The prominent doctrine of the latter is mercy incomparably full, free, and available, and also an appalling declaration of the wrath of God, which may be incurred by impiety and immorality. But a different spirit is represented by the author to be indicated in the Romish doctrine. "The Papal Hell," he states, "is only the State Prison of the Papal Tyranny.-The future woe, converted into the instrument of its oppressions, has made it natural that the inflictions of the infernal dungeon should be taken as the examplers of sacradotal barbarity. All offences of a moral kind, even the most atrocious, having come under the management of the Church, and being made the subject of a mercenary commerce between her and the transgressor, so that while he submits implicitly to the direction of the priest (who farms heaven) he has nothing to fear, the bearing of the doctrine of retribution is wholly turned off from the consciences of men; and the genuine association of ideas, which connects sin and punishment, is broken up. The preacher may still declaim about the righteous judgment of God; but in fact, and in every man's personal apprehensions, the terror of justice has passed off obliquely, and is no more thought of in its due place. The future Retribution remains therefore at large to serve the turns of the hierarchy: it is nothing else than an ecclesiastical terror. The Romanish place of perdition awaits the infidel, and the heretic, and whoever provokes the jealousies of the Church."

Following up the subject more in detail, the author finally concludes that there is nothing in history which at all resembles papal executions; for, in respect of the prodigious numbers of the victims of her courts, and in the fact of almost all these victims having been confessedly guiltless of crimes visibly injurious to society whilst all other polities reserved punishments of excessive ignominy and torture for cases of peculiar atrocity, and for criminals of a certain rank; the Romish polity, says the author, defied all distinctions, and consigned to the flames with the same unrelenting indifference, the noble and the peasant. The writer, after these general remarks, proceeds to the consideration of the celibacy of the clergy belonging to the Church of Rome, and contends, at some length, that this law of celibacy cannot fail to produce, in a certain proportion of instances, a rancorous fanaticism. But the Church of Rome, though she is unrivalled in her cruelty, is not alone the church that has adopted it, and the present writer does not hesitate to state, that if she has not been eclipsed, she has been at least worthily followed by almost every dissenting community, with the exception of the Quakers. Those that have gone off, continues the writer, to the remotest point of doctrine and polity, and have adopted a system, in every article the antithesis of that of Rome, all have used, in the day of their pride, the engine of spiritual oppression with intolerant and merciless

hands; and the author expresses himself energetically in endeavouring to impress upon his readers that the responsibility under which every nation, church, and community, labours on account of this oppression, will one day be rigorously demanded of them. The Fanaticism of the Banner, the reader will have anticipated, refers to the Mahometan system, which carried the word of God, as its disciples pretended, over the world by the sword. One of the finest portions of this work is the passage in which the author contrasts the martial fanaticism of the Saracens with that of the Crusaders. Not only in their circumctances were these two holy enterprises carried on by the Mussulmans and the Christians dissimilar, but also that was the case with respect to the elements from which these projects sprang. The Moslem armies sought proselytes, they waged war in religious error, they endeavoured to drag the souls of men captive to the throne of God. The Crusaders, on the contrary, thought only of a local contest, and a definite victory.

"There was,' he observes, a harmony, sublime though terrible, in the early diffusion of the religion of Mahommed-the high-minded and never-conquered Arab-the same being in all ages and climates, and much less liable than other men to admit modifications of his opinions or manners from foreign sources, presented himself haughtily on the frontiers of every land-Africa, Spain, Persia, India, China, and in the same stern and sententious language summoned all men to surrender faith, or liberty, or life. But the Crusades poured a feculent deluge, upheaved from the long stagnate deeps of the European communities, upon the afflcted Palestine. The dregs, the scum, and the cream of the western world-its nobility and its rabble, in promiscuous rout, flowed toward the sepulchre at the foot of Calvary. The Saracenic conquests might be compared to a sun-rise in the tropics, when the deep azured night, with its sparkling constellations, is almost in a moment exchanged for the glare of day, and when the fountain of light not only darts his beams over the heavens, putting the stars to shame, but, but with a tyrannous fervour, claims the world as his own. The Crusades might be better resembled to the tornado, which, sweeping over some rich Polynesian sea, and rending up all things in its course, heaps together upon a distant shore, but the confused wrecks of nature and of human industry.'"-pp. 241, 242.

No inconsiderable portion of the section appropriated to the division of the work entitled, The Fanaticism of the Banner, is given to a historical notice of the Crusades, and after contemplating the most complete instance of aggressive religious war, and these cases in succession, in which the war was either of the mixed kind, or became a defensive one, the writer starts afresh to describe the memorable example of a nation gathering its strength to a frenzied effort for the rescue of its ancient and impassioned religious hopes. Need we add, that the Jewish nation is here meant? The author thinks it only justice to trace the growth and stages of progress of this fanaticism, which came to its height

in the Jewish war. From this topic, the author makes a natural transition to that sort of fanaticism which proceeds from an athiestical enthusiasm that seeks to destroy every religious profession. Such was the French revolution, and the promoters of that dire example of infatuation were mere zealots, dogmatical, and intolerant, and ready to imbrue their hands in the blood of the victims to their persecutions.

We come, now, to the last of the classes of fanaticism, that called, The Fanaticism of the Symbol, which embraces a great variety of observations on the present state of the religious community of England, which, he says, is unhappily influenced by the fanaticism of dogmas and creeds. To such an extent is this the case, that the Christian community of this country is cast as it were into a factious condition, and factious religionism. Which ever it may be tamed and subdued, will not fail to produce, by an example of division, wide-spread impiety and infidelity. So far, then, as we are religious at all in England, we constitute a nation of sects, our theology being necessarily the theology of faction, not, indeed, that it is false, but that it is, in the language of the author, "confused, entangled, imperfect, and gloomy, abundantly breeding infidelity among the educated classes, at the same time fails to spread itself through the body of the population, or but does so only dimly, and only as a flickering candle." The recent consolidations of religious liberty ought to have the effect of doing away with these factious divisions; but, unfortunately, in its immediate consequence, it has done much to establish the angry animosities which existed before. The triumphant party exulting, and the defeated party depressed, it is not likely that harmony should be much cultivated between them: on the contrary, there is infused a fresh energy into the virulence of both, and the writer calculates that half a century will not obliterate the dissensions to which the settlement of this question has given rise.

The two last sections are devoted to the illustration of the position that "the religion of the Bible is not fanatical;" and from the elaborate nature of the remarks on the Old and New Testaments, we should certainly be inclined to recommend these sections as containing, in a comparatively narrow compass, one of the most luminous expositions ever written, of the grounds on which the confidence due to a divine revelation should be given to these books. A portion of the summary in which his principal conclusions are recapitulated, well deserve the attention of the reader.

Christianity then, such as we find it in the Scriptures, is benign— it is from Heaven; and even had it utterly vanished or ceased to affect mankind in the same age that saw it appear, the documentary proof of its divine origin would have remained not the less complete and irresistible. In that case-convinced as we must have been that the True Light had once, though but for a moment, glanced upon the earth, we should have

looked wishfully upward in hope that the great revolutions of the heavens would at length bring round a second dawn, and a lasting day.

But it is far otherwise; and in coming to the close of a course that has presented the perversions, not the excellences of Christianity, we should seek relief from the impression made by a long continued contemplation of a single order of objects-and those the most dire.-The Gospel has had multitudes of genuine adherents-Christ a host of followers, in the worst times; or if the first three centuries, or the last three of Christian history, are looked to, it would indicate affectation, or a melancholy and malignant temper, to estimate at a low rate the extent of the true Church.

Yet the terrible fact which, though predicted by the apostles, would have astounded themselves had it stood before them in distinct perspective, remains to sadden our meditations-That an apostacy, dating its commencements from a very early age, spread over the whole area of Christendom, affecting every article of belief, and every rule of duty; and that it held itself entire through much more than a thousand years.

But what is our own position? what stage on the highway of truth has the Protestant community reached? are the reformed churches calmly looking back, as from an elevation, and under the beams of day, upon a dark landscape, far remote, and hardly distinguishable? or should it not rather be confessed that our reformations though real and immensely important, are initiative only? This is certain that the evolutions of the Divine Providence exhibit seldom or never to the eye of man, any hurried transition; but that it renovates and restores by sudden impulses, and these at distant intervals. We only follow then the established order of things when we hope that there is yet in reserve for the world the boon of an unsullied Christianity."-pp. 510-512.

ART. IX.-Olympia Morata, her Times, Life and Writings, arranged from Contemporary and other Authorities. By the Author of "Selwyn," "Mornings with Mamma," &c. 1 vol. 12mo. London: Smith and Co. 1834.

THIS work is only an example of the vast benefits which may be bestowed on our literature in all its branches, by researches undertaken with judgment, pursued with perseverance, and guided by sound discretion. In this volume we see the fruits of those combined qualifications, and remembering by whose hands they have been laboriously reaped, we regard them as a monument of female industry and talent.

The heroine, whose story is found in this volume, acted and suffered in the stirring times which characterize the early part of the sixteenth century. She was born at Ferrara, in Italy, in the year 1526, and having had the advantage of parents who knew how to train her mind, she discovered at a very premature age, an intelligence which was quite surprising. Celio Calcagnini, a celebrated instructor of Italy, had the care of the promising young lady for some time, and it was by his advice that the parents were VOL. I. (1834) NO. I.

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