"My

more suitable to the eternal deity of Jesus, as this: Father and I are the same thing;" words which their adversaries make to mean no more than, "My Father and I have the same design, the same will: I have no other desires than those of my Father." Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and after him Athanasius, headed the orthodox. In the opposite party were, Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, seventeen other bishops, the priest Arius, and many other priests. The quarrel immediately became inflamed, St. Alexander calling his adversaries Anti-Christs.

At length, after much disputing and wrangling, the Holy Ghost, by the mouths of two hundred and ninety-nine bishops against eighteen, gave the following decision: "Jesus is the only Son of God, begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, of one substance with the Father; we likewise believe in the Holy Ghost, &c." Such was the form of words in that council; and this instance shows the great superiority of the bishops over mere priests; for, according to two patriarchs of Alexandria, who have written the Chronicle of Alex andria in Arabic, two thousand persons of the second order sided with Arius. He was exiled by Constantine, but soon after the like punishment fell on Athanasius, and Arius was recalled to Constantinople: with such fervour, however, did St. Macarius pray to God that he would deprive Arius of life, before he came into the cathedral, that God heard his prayer, and Arius died in 330, in his way to the church. The emperor Constantine departed this life in 337, delivering his will into the hands of an Arian priest, and expiring in the arms of the chief of the Arians, Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia. He was not baptized till on his death-bed; but he left the church triumphant, though divided.

The Athanasians and Eusebians made war on each other with the most implacable animosity; and what is now called Arianism was, for a long time, the established doctrine in all parts of the empire.

Julian the philosopher, nicknamed the Apostate, was for accomodating these divisions, but failed in his good endeavours.

The second general council was held in 381, at Constantinople. In it was explained what the council of Nice had not thought fit to say, concerning the Holy Ghost, adding to the Nicean form, "That the Holy Spirit is the vivifying Lord, proceeding from the Father, and that he is worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son."

It was not till towards the ninth century that the Latin church gradually enacted, "That the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son."

In 431, the third general council, held at Ephesus, determined that Mary was really the mother of God, and that Jesus had two natures and one person. Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, for moving that the Blessed Virgin should be called the mother of Christ, was declared by the council to be a second Judas, and the two natures were further confirmed by the council of Chalcedonia.

I shall slightly pass over the following ages, as pretty well known. Unfortunately every one of these disputes occasioned wars, and the church was obliged to be continually in arms. God further permitted, to exercise the patience of the faithful, that, in the ninth century, the Greeks and Latins should come to an irreconcilable rupture. He further permitted, that the West should be distracted with twenty-nine bloody schisms for the see of Rome.

In the mean time, almost the whole Grecian church, and the whole of the African church, were enslaved by the Arabs, and afterwards fell under the Turks, who erected Mahometanism on the ruins of Christianity. The Roman church subsisted, but was always defiled with blood, for the space of above six hundred years of discord between the western empire and the priesthood: but these very quarrels increased her power; for the German bishops and abbots made themselves princes, and the popes, by degrees, acquired an absolute dominion in Rome and a country of a hundred leagues in extent. Thus God tried his church by humiliations, disturbances, by prosperity and magnificence.

The Latin church, in the sixteenth century, lost half Germany, Denmark, Sweden, England, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, and Holland. It has, indeed, by the Spanish conquest, gained more ground in America than it has lost in Europe; but, if its territories are enlarged, its subjects are much decreased.

Divine Providence seemed to design that Japan, Siam, India, and China, should be brought to acknowledge the Pope's supremacy, as an equivalent for the loss of Asia Minor, Syria, Greece, Egypt, Africa, Russia, and the countries above mentioned. St. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit, who carried the holy gospel to the East Indies and Japan, when the Portuguese went thither for costly merchandize, performed miracles in plenty, all attested by his reverend brethren. Some say that he raised nine persons from the dead; but father Ribadeneira

in his Flower of Saints, reduces the number to four, and that is full enough. Providence so eminently prospered this enterprize, that in less than a hundred years there were thousands of Roman catholics within the Japanese islands. But the devil was not wanting to sow his tares among the good. seed. The Christians formed a destructive plot, which being followed by a cruel war, they were all exterminated in the year 1638. Hereupon the natives denied all strangers admittance into their harbours, except the Dutch, accounting them to be mere merchants, and not Christians: they were obliged to tread on the cross before they were allowed to dispose of their goods; and this was done in a prison where they were confined immediately on their arrival at Nangazaki.

The Roman Catholic and apostolic religion was not proscribed in China till of late, and with less cruelty. The Jesuits, indeed, had not displayed their supernatural power at the court of Pekin, by raising the dead to life: they had humbly limited themselves to the teaching of astronomy, the casting of cannon, and being mandarins. Their unhappy disputes with some Dominicans and others, gave such offence to the great emperor Yontchin, that this prince, though all equity and goodness, was so blind as to put a stop to the teaching of our holy religion, because our missionaries did not agree among themselves. He ordered them to depart the empire, but it was with all the tenderness of a father, supplying them with carriages, and every convenience, as far as the confines of his dominions.

All Asia, all Africa, half of Europe, the Dutch and English possessions in America, with the several unconquered parts of that vast continent, all the austral countries, which make a fifth part of the globe, are left as a prey to the devil, in verification of that holy saying, "Many are called, but few are chosen." If, as some learned persons say, the number of the inhabitants of the several parts of the globe, is about sixteen hundred millions, the holy catholic universal Roman church has, within its pale, nearly sixty millions, which amounts to more than the twenty-sixth part of the inhabitants of the known world.

CIRCUMCISION...

HERODOTUS, in relating what he had heard from the barbarians, among whom he travelled, mentions some fooleries, and most of our modern travellers do the like. He, indeed, does

not require his readers to believe him, when he is giving an account of Gyges, and Candaule; of Arion's being saved by a dolphin; of the consultation of the oracle, to know what Croesus was doing, with its answer, that he was then boiling a tortoise in a covered pot: of Darius's horse neighing first, which gave his master the empire; and of a hundred other fables, which children are highly delighted with, and rhetoricians insert in their collections: but, when he speaks of what he has seen; of customs which he has inquired into; of antiquities which he has examined; he then speaks to men.

"The inhabitants of Colchis," says he, in his book Euterpe, 66 appear to have come originally from Egypt. This opinion I hold more from my own observation than from any hear-say; for I found, that in Colchis, the ancient Egyptians were remembered much more than the ancient customs of Colchis were in Egypt.

"Those people who dwell along the Pontus Euxinus, said they were a colony settled there by Sesostris; this I conjectured of myself, not only from their swarthy complexion and frizzled hair, but because the people of Colchis, Egypt, and Ethiopia, are the only people on earth who have practised circumcision from time immemorial; for the Phoenicians and the inhabitants of Palestine own, that they adopted circumcision from the Egyptians. The Syrians, now seated on the banks of the Thermodon and Pathenia, together with the Macrons, their neighbours, acknowledge that it is not long since they conformed to this Egyptian custom. It is chiefly by this; that they are perceived to be of Egyptian original.

As to Ethiopia and Egypt, this ceremony being of a very ancient date among both nations, I cannot say which was the original; however, it is probable that the Ethiopians took it from the Egyptians; as, on the other hand, the Phoenicians, by their traffic and intercourse with the Greeks, have abolished the custom of circumcising new-born children."

It is clear, from this passage of Herodotus, that several nations had taken circumcision from Egypt; but no nation has ever said that they derived it from the Jews. To which then, must the origin of this custom be attributed, to that nation, from whom five or six others acknowledge they hold it, or to another nation, much inferior in power, less commercial, less military, hidden in a nook of Arabia Petræa, and which has never been able to introduce the least of its customs into any nation?

The Jews say, that they were first received into Egypt, by way of compassion and charity; now, is it not very pro

bable, that the little people adopted a practice of the great people, and that the Jews joined in some of their masters' customs?

Clement of Alexandria relates, that Pythagoras, when travelling in Egypt, could not gain admittance to the mysteries, till he was circumcised; consequently, there was no being an Egyptian priest without circumcision. This priestly order subsisted when Joseph came into Egypt; the government was of great antiquity, and the old ceremonies of Egypt were observed with the most scrupulous precision.

The Jews acknowledge that they continued in Egypt two hundred and five years; they say, that in all that time they were not circumcised; this shows, that, during those two hundred and five years, the Egyptians did not borrow circumcision from the Jews is it, then, to be supposed, that they borrowed this custom, after the Jews, according to their own testimony, run away with all the vessels which they had so kindly lent them? Will a master adopt the principal mark of his slave's religion, after robbing him and running away! Human nature is not of such a make.

The book of Joshua says, that the Jews were circumcised in the desert: "I have delivered you from what was a reproach to you among the Egyptians." Now, what else could this reproach be, to people hemmed in between the Phoenicians, Arabians, and Egyptians, but that for which those three nations despised them? How is this reproach removed? by taking away from them a little of the foreskin. Is not this the natural import of that passage?

The book of Genesis says, that Abraham had been circumcised before: but Abraham, having travelled into Egypt, which had, for a long time, been a flourishing monarchy, governed by a powerful king, circumcision may not, improbably, be supposed to have been established in a kingdom of such antiquity, before the Jewish nation was formed. Further, the circumcision of Abraham terminated in himself; it was not till Joshua's time that his posterity underwent that ceremony.

Now, before Joshua, the Israelites, by their own confession, came into many of the Egyptian customs; they imitated that nation in several sacrifices and ceremonies, as in fasting on the eve of Isis's feasts, in ablutions, in shaving the priest's heads; likewise in the burning of incense, the branched chandelier, the sacrifice of the red heifer, the purifying with hyssop, the abstaining from pork, the abomination of the kitchen utensils of strangers: all these things bear witness, that the little Hebrew people, whatever aversion they might have to the great Egyptian nation, had retained a vast number of their old