and heaven-born energies of the Church; but rather to stimulate and invigorate them! May it ever be her care to recognise and enjoin the independence of the Church, in developing, enforcing, and applying the great eternal truths, and spiritualities, and powers, committed to her by her divine Head Christ Jesus. Thus will she be able to extend and maintain the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus, through discipline, doctrines, precepts, and ministrations-primitive, Catholic, Apostolic, and Scriptural.-Let this, we say, be ever the object and the care of the State, and there cannot be a doubt that she will receive from the Church an augmentation of strength, far greater than could have been derived through any human-wrought channel. Instructed and guided by the example and influence of the Church, and sobered and sanctified by the infused spirit of the holy Catholic faith, the State will steadily grow in prosperity and in favour with both God and man! But, from the earliest ages of the world to the present time, at no period have there been wanting men ready and quick to attempt the overthrow of order and true religion; neither have our own Church and nation been free from the fierce assaults of unquiet and wicked men. "Many a time have they vexed me from my youth up: but they have not prevailed against me." Our deliverances from the many great dangers through which, as a Church and a Nation, we have passed, must be ascribed "not to our merit, but to God's mercy; not to our foresight, but to God's providence." It is the Almighty God, who has ever shewed His "power and might in the miraculous and gracious deliverances of His Church, and in the protection of righteous and religious Kings and States, professing His holy and eternal truth, from the wicked conspiracies and malicious practices of all the enemies thereof." To Him, therefore, let us lift our songs of gratitude and praise !

I shall not, on the present occasion, attempt to lay before you a particular enumeration of the many palpable deliverances which God has wrought for these realms, by saving us out of the hands of our enemies; but specially invite your attention to those which our Church this day calls upon us devoutly to commemorate; and having spoken awhile of these, I would also speak of the mercies and blessings which we owe to them.

My Brethren; perhaps not a few, if directly questioned on the matter, would be constrained to acknowledge that, year after year, has the Fifth of November passed over their heads without awakening in their hearts any due sense of the temporal perils and religious evils from which they and their children, as well as their forefathers, were as on this day rescued. Not that there is not enough in the events and results of the day to elicit the deepest emotions of gratitude to the Sovereign Disposer of all things-but because there is a want of apprehension-I should rather say of consideration-in these matters; and more especially a neglect, a culpable neglect, of the provisions of the Church. Nor, on this latter point, are the people alone in fault. I fear the Clergy must take to themselves some portion of blame, for having omitted, more generally to carry out the wishes and injunctions of the Church, by inviting and summoning their people to a due and grateful observance of this day-in form and manner and spirit presented to us in our Prayer-Books.

We have, this morning, my Brethren, been engaged, I trust, in spirit and in truth—in a manner that we may reasonably hope will benefit our

souls and bring glory to God's great name-in prayer, and thanksgiving for two signal deliverances, both effected, through the power and goodness and loving-pity of the Almighty, on the Fifth of November. The one, the happy deliverance of King James I., and the three estates of England from the most traitorous and bloody intended massacre by Gunpowder-usually designated as the Gunpowder Plot, or Papist's conspiracy :-the other, the happy arrival of his Majesty King William on this day, for the deliverance of our Church and nation, and the protection of our religion and laws. Now, what was the one or the other, but a gracious deliverance from the perils and evils of a severer than Egyptian-because spiritual-bondage, even the dominion, tyranny, and bondage of Popery.

Popery has been most unenviably distinguished as a persecuting and intolerant religion:-in its rise and progress, its course has been one of ambition, pride, and presumption. The sword of cruelty, oppression, and treachery, has been the pen, and the blood of the innocent, the martyred, and the murdered, has been the ink, with which too many pages of its history have been written. Popery is the bane of every country where it prevails. It is the curse, we verily believe, of Ireland, at this very day. Contrast as to morals, comforts, and the whole state of society, the northern parts of that kingdom, where the members of our holy reformed Catholic Church are the more numerous, with its southern parts, where the members of the Roman Catholic sect predominate; and then say whether this opinion is not fully borne out by indisputable facts! Circumstances and opportunities—as must necessarily have been the case-have not always equally favoured Popery in its aims and objects; and therefore, there may be, and are, periods of its history comparatively but slightly marked and disfigured by religious perversions and deformities; but the spirit of Popery has been the same in all times. Believe me, my Brethren, whatever you may hear or read to the contrary; and whatever opinion to the contrary you may be inclined to form from what you see, it is the untiring ambition of Popery to establish its own supremacy, and its own universality, by any means it may have the power to use-even means the most directly opposed and hostile to the spirit and precepts of the Holy Gospel. The Gunpowder Plot was one genuine fruit of the Popish religion. All true and faithful Papists believe in the infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church; and consequently they must believe that whatever she ordains and decrees is the express will of heaven. Now, the Roman Catholic Church has decreed more than once, in councils, the authority and legitimacy of which were recognized and confirmed by the council of Trent, that it is perfectly lawful and praiseworthy for her members to use their best endeavours to compass the extermination of all heretics;-by which name she is pleased to designate all those who do not assent to the truth of her creed.—True, the knowledge and practical influence of the truth as it is in Jesus (of which truth, not the Popish Church, but the one holy Catholic or Universal Church is the witness and keeper) so far prevail throughout the civilized world, that we do not think that we, Protestant Catholics, have any reason, in the present day, to fear the sword, and fire, or inquisition of Rome. But we know what the spirit of Rome is, and what she would do if she could; and what the faithful and resolute confessor of the pure and unadulterated faith once delivered to the saints would have to expect, were that mystic

Babylon again permitted to lord it over Christendom. Agreeably, then, with what we have intimated to be the spirit and the moving principle of Rome; agreeably, may I not add, with what she actually teaches-" there can be no doubt but that the Roman Catholic nobility and gentry who conducted the Gunpowder plot, supposed that the enterprise, in which they jeoparded their fortunes and their lives, was one which entitled those engaged in it to the highest favour of heaven. Their whole proceedings were carried on most religiously." "When they enlisted any new conspirator, in order to bind him to secresy, they always, together with an oath, employed the Communion, the most sacred rite of their religion. And it is remarkable, that not one of those pious devotees ever entertained the least compunction, with regard to the cruel massacre which they projected of whatever was great and eminent in the nation. Some of them only were startled by the reflection, that of necesssity many" (Roman) "Catholics. must be present as spectators or attendants on the king, or as having seats in the House of Peers. Upon this, therefore, it was resolved to consult their confessors, how far such an act could, under any circumstances, be lawful, whereupon, Henry Garnet, the superior (of the English Jesuits) with Oswald Desmond and John Gerrard, two other Jesuits, were consulted; and gave it as their opinion, that the undertaking was not only lawful, but praiseworthy; in fact, as in itself meritorious, because it would be committed on excommunicated heretics, and might be the means of reestablishing the Popish supremacy. The case submitted was in the following terms:-Whether for the good and promotion of the" (Roman) "Catholic cause the necessity of the time and occasion so required-it be lawful or not among many nocents, to destroy or take away some innocent also! The reply was as follows: 'That if the advantage was greater on the side of the (Roman) Catholics, by the destruction of the innocent with the noeent, than by the preservation of both, it was doubtless lawful.' "And one of the conspirators, in a letter written to his wife, after his condemnation, declared, that if he had thought there had been the least sin in the plot, he would not have been of it for all the world; and that no other cause drew him to hazard his fortune and life but zeal to God's religion.

Now my brethren, I have adduced these historical facts, connected with the Gunpowder conspiracy, in order to illustrate to you (what perhaps you have never duly weighed) the true spirit of Popery. I would also ask you to bear in mind, that the conspirators who devised this "most traitorous and bloody intended massacre," were not ignorant, low-minded, debauched, and notoriously wicked men-men, whose hands had often been engaged in deeds of frightful atrocity and horror-whose hearts, by the frequency of their crimes, had become perfectly hardened and callous, and their " conscience seared with a hot iron." On the contrary, they were men of education, and, for the most part, of rank and family-to whose names no disgrace or ignoble fame had hitherto been attached! but who rather were distinguished by their devotion to the religion which they professed. The plain and undoubted truth, then, is, that the principle which influenced and led them to engage in this fearful conspiracy, was stern and devoted obedience to their Church.

Oh! who, that has indeed tasted the privileges, the blessings, the comforts, the liberty, of the undefiled religion of the lowly and merciful Jesus,

as they are enjoyed in the Church of England through her full and unreserved exposition of the divine word, through her divinely ordained sacraments, her services and her ordinances, would throw himself into the ready and meretricious arms of the mother of abominations, the Church of Rome! Granted; she is a part of the one Catholic Church-(and hence her strength, and her decided superiority, when Protestant schismatics rashly defy her to the conflict of religious controversy)-granted, I say, she is a part of the one Catholic Church of Christ-once a pure and holy part. Alas! she is now, as she long has been, the most corrupt and fallen church on the face of the earth. And yet had the gunpowder conspiracy succeeded, or had not the second event which we this day commemorate, occurred-viz., "the happy arrival of his Majesty King William for the deliverance of our Church and Nation," we might at this very time have been the enslaved members of this wicked Church. My brethren. Let us most humbly praise and magnify God's most glorious name, for his unspeakable goodness towards us expressed in both these acts of His mercy! Oh! "Let them give thanks whom the Lord hath redeemed, and delivered from the hand of the enemy." "He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness." It is God who hath wrought for us these two deliverances from the hand of the enemy: but for these notable instances and marks of His loving-kindness, our Church, perhaps, had been--if not in ruins—in grovelling obscurity; our state in degradation; our country had been shrouded in the mists and darkness of gross spiritual ignorance and idolatrous superstition; and our consciences, now free to serve God acceptably, had been fast bound in the chains of Popish despotism. Yes; had the supremacy of Rome been established, and her God-insulting throne been unhappily set up in this kingdom, say, what would have been our position and circumstances as her vassals and as members of her religious community? Why; politically and civilly, our present well-earned national glory and independence, and individual happiness, had never been; and, spiritually, instead of being blessed and favoured above all people-holding and confessing a faith the most pure and scriptural, that has ever offered adoration and worship to the one living and true God, since the first ages of Christianity, we had been cursed with all the religious bigotry, idolatry, and error, that obtains in those countries which acknowledge the supremacy of Rome; and which, unquestionably, is the cause, under heaven's retribution, why their inhabitants are so vastly inferior to us as a nation in temporal prosperity, social comforts, and Christian morals. Indeed, my brethren, you have great cause to be thankful that you are members of a Church, in which you enjoy the free and unrestricted use of the unadulterated word of God-in which you are not called upon to receive for doctrines the commandments of men; to worship angels and the Virgin Mary; to invoke saints; to adore images and relics: to be satisfied with a halfcommunion-in which you are not commanded to profess your belief in transubstantiation, purgatory, the sacrifice of the mass, priestly intention, infallibility, entreme unction, and the many other erroneous tenets of the Church of Rome-tenets which have no support from Scripture or Catholic antiquity; and which, therefore, we cannot but think, expose her to the danger of incurring the awful anathema denounced against such as shall add unto the words of God's Holy Writ. Oh! I would fain hope that you

D

do really feel that it is a blessed privilege and a great mercy to be members of our Anglican Church ;- -a Church which, as a free branch of Christ's one universal Church, has been a faithful witness and keeper of the trust from the beginning, amidst difficulties, opposition, and persecutions the most trying and severe; neither adding to the revealed Word of God as does Popery, nor taking away from it as does Protestant dissent;- a Church which demands our veneration and love, as for its purity, scriptural fidelity, apostolicity, and catholicity, so also, in another degree, for its antiquity,a Church in which our forefathers gloried to live and die,—a Church which was in existence hundreds and hundreds of years before dissent, and many more hundreds before Romanism, even in its less corrupt form, was known in these realms;- —a Church which, when she purified and reformed herself from the corruptions which she had gradually contracted during the usurpation and temporary supremacy of Rome, mourned and wept, with exceeding bitterness, over the folly of those whom she saw, many years after the Reformation, dissent from her communion, and renew their allegiance to Rome and their adherence to Rome's creed. Yea; she mourned and wept over them as a tender and careful mother mourneth and weepeth over those her children whom she sees resolved to reject all parental authority and protection, and to leave a home of safety, of peace, plenty, and virtue, to go and spend their substance in a strange country where their "glory shall be made thin, and the fatness of" their "flesh shall wax lean."

At the same time, I would express my anxious and most fervent hope, that no one be led away by an erroneous notion that he may blamelessly and excusably entertain a feeling of harshness and bitterness towards any of those individuals who are members of the Pope's Church. No, it is our duty to do good to them; to love them; above all to pray for them ;-to pray that, being the members of a church which was once a goodly branch of Christ's Universal Church,-as the Reformed Church of England is at this day, they may again be brought, through God's mercy, with every generation of Christian sectarians, to an acknowledgement and a reception of the true Catholic faith, not violated by unauthorized human additions or subtractions, and thenceforth hold the same, in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life.

THE CONSECRATION OF SCIENCE. No. III.

By the Clergy, in Tracts, Parochial Libraries, and Schools.
(BY THE REV. C. A. HULBERT, M.A.)

Ir, in the preceding papers, we have at all succeeded in shewing, that there is scope and advantage in the Ministerial Work for cultivating human science and literature, in order to their CONSECRATION, we shall have little difficulty in proving the necessity of this.

Inquiry, scepticism, error are abroad. The holiest mind, if intelligent— and piety creates intelligence where it did not exist, and makes men of science

* Augustine and his monks who came over from Rome. A.D. 596 were the first Roman Catholics, but not the first Christians in this kingdom.