learned member for Sheffield has made, from the one House of Parliament to the other. There is a further appeal from this House of Parliament to the people of England. But, lastly, there is also an appeal from the people of England to the general sentiment of the civilized world; and I, for my part, am of opinion that England will stand shorn of a chief part of her glory and her pride, if she shall be found to have separated herself, through the policy she pursues abroad, from the moral supports which the general and fixed convictions of mankind afford-if the day shall come in which she may continue to excite the wonder and the fear of other nations, but in which she shall have no part in their affection and their regard.

No, sir, let it not be so: let us recognise, and recognise with frankness, the equality of the weak with the strong; the principles of brotherhood among nations, and of their sacred independence. When we are asking for the maintenance of the rights which belong to our fellow-subjects resident in Greece, let us do as we would be done by, and let us pay all the respect to a feeble state, and to the infancy of free institutions, which we should desire and should exact from others towards their maturity and their strength. Let us refrain from all gratuitous and arbitrary meddling in the internal concerns of other states, even as we should resent the same interference if it were attempted to be practised towards ourselves.

XIV.-MAN BEFORE THE FALL.
(DR. R. SOUTH.)

Dr. Robert South, one of the ablest of the clergy of his own day, was the son of a London merchant. He was born at Hackney in 1653, and died in 1716. He was a keen supporter of the "divine right of kings."

THE understanding, the noblest faculty of the mind, was then sublime, clear, and aspiring, and as it were the soul's upper region,-lofty and serene, free from the vapours and disturbances of the inferior affections. It was the leading, controlling faculty; all the passions wore the colours of reason. It did not so much persuade as command; it was

not consul, but dictator. Discourse was then almost as quick as intuition; it was nimble in proposing, firm in concluding; it could sooner determine than now it can dispute. Like the sun, it had both light and agility: it knew no rest, but in motion; no quiet, but in activity. It did not so properly apprehend as irradiate the object; not so much find as make things intelligible. It arbitrated upon the several reports of sense, and all the varieties of imagination; not like a drowsy judge, only hearing, but also directing their verdict. In short, it was vegete, quick, and lively; open as the day, untainted as the morning, full of the innocence and sprightliness of youth: it gave the soul a bright and full view into all things; and was not only a window, but itself the prospect, Adam came into the world a philosopher; which sufficiently appeared by his writing the nature of things upon their names. He could view essences in themselves, and read forms without the comment of their respective properties; he could see consequents yet dormant in their principles, and effects yet unborn in the womb of their causes; his understanding could almost pierce into future contingents, his conjectures improving even to prophecy, or the certainties of prediction. Till his fall, he was ignorant of nothing but sin; or at least it rested in the notion, without the smart of the experiment. Could any difficulty have been proposed, the resolution would have been as early as the proposal; it could not have had time to settle into doubt. Like a better Archimedes, the issue of all his inquiries was an ευρηκα, an ευρηκα, the offspring of his brain, without the sweat of his brow. Study was not then a duty, nightwatchings were needless; the light of reason wanted not the assistance of a candle. This is the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire, to see truth in profundo,—to exhaust his time, and to impair his health, and perhaps to spin out his days, and himself, into one pitiful, controverted conclusion. There was then no poring, no struggling with memory, no straining for invention; his faculties were quick and expedite; they answered without knocking, they were ready upon the first summons; there was freedom and firmness in all their operations. I confess, it is as difficult for us, who date our ignorance from our first being, and were still bred

up with the same infirmities about us with which we were born, to raise our thoughts and imaginations to those intellectual perfections that attended our nature in the time of innocence, as it is for a peasant bred up in the obscurities of a cottage to fancy in his mind the unseen splendours of a court. But by rating positives by their privatives, and other arts of reason, by which discourse supplies the want of the reports of sense, we may collect the excellency of the understanding then by the glorious remainders of it now, and guess at the stateliness of the building by the magnificence of its ruins. All those arts, rarities, and inventions, which vulgar minds gaze at, the ingenious pursue, and all admire, are but the relics of an intellect defaced with sin and time. We admire it now only as antiquaries do a piece of old coin, for the stamp it once bore, and not for those vanishing lineaments and disappearing draughts that remain upon it at present. And certainly that must needs have been very glorious, the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely when old and decrepit, surely was very beautiful when he was young. An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

XV.-MAJESTY OF CHRIST.

(W. ARCHER BUTLER.)

William Archer Butler, D.D., one of the most accomplished and profound scholars which the Church of England has in modern times possessed, was born near Clonmel, Ireland, in 1814, and died in 1848, at the early age of thirty-four.

ON such a subject as this, what can one say which is not unworthy? It is far vaster than our vastest conception, infinitely grander than our loftiest; yet, overpoweringly awful as it is, how familiarity reconciles us to hearing it without awe! Perhaps even the overpowering greatness of the subject makes us despair of conceiving it. All the wonders of God fall deadly on unfitted minds. And thus men learn listlessly to hear words, without even an effort to attach ideas to them; and this is not least the case with those who dispute the most bitterly about the lifeless words

themselves. In such a case all that can be done is, to endeavour to devise some mode of meeting this miserable influence of habit, by forcing the mind to make sɔme faint effort to realize the infinite magnificence of the subject. Let us endeavour, then, to approach it thus.

You are wandering (I will suppose) in some of the wretched retreats of poverty, upon some mission of business or charity. Perplexed and wearied amid its varieties of misery, you chance to come upon an individual whose conversation and mien attract and surprise you. Your attention enkindled by the gracious benevolence of the stranger's manner, you inquire; and the astounding fact reveals itself, that, in this lone and miserable scene, you have, by some strange conjuncture, met with one of the great lights of the age, one belonging to a different and distant sphere, one of the leaders of universal opinion; on whom your thoughts had long been busied, and whom you had for years desired to see. The singular accident of an interview so unexpected, fills and agitates your mind. You form a thousand theories as to what strange cause could have brought him there. You recall how he spoke and looked; you call it an epoch in your life to have witnessed so startling an occurrence-to have beheld one so distinguished, in a scene so much out of all possibility of anticipation; and this even though he were in no wise apparently connected with it, except as witnessing and compassionating its groups of misery.

Yet, again, something more wonderful than this is easily conceivable. Upon the same stage of wretchedness a loftier personage may be imagined. In the wild revolutions of fortune, even monarchs have been wanderers. Suppose this then,-improbable, indeed, but not impossible surely. And then, what feelings of respectful pity, of deep and earnest interest, would thrill your frame, as you contemplated such a one cast down from all that earth can minister of luxury and power, from the head of councils and of armies, to seek a home with the homeless, to share the bread of destitution, and feed on the charity of the scornful! How the depths of human nature are stirred by such events! how they find an echo in the recesses of our hearts,-these terrible espousals of majesty and misery!

But this will not suffice. There are beings within the mind's easy conception that far overpass the glories of the statesman and the monarch of our earth. Men of even no extreme ardour of fancy, when once instructed as to the vastness of our universe, have yearned to know of the life and intelligence that animate and that guide those distant regions of creation which science has so abundantly and so wonderfully revealed; and have dared to dream of the communications that might subsist—and that may yet in another state of existence subsist—with the beings of such spheres. Conceive, then, no longer the mighty of our world in this strange union with misery and degradation, but the presiding spirit of one of these orbs; or multiply his power, and make him the deputed governor, the vicegerent angel, of a million of those orbs that are spread in their myriads through infinity. Think what it would be to be permitted to hold high converse with such a delegate of Heaven as this; to find this lord of a million worlds the actual inhabitant of our own; to see him, and yet live; to learn the secrets of his immense administration, and hear of forms of being of which men can now have no more conception than the insect living on a leaf has of the forest that surrounds him. Still more, to find, in this being, an interest, a real interest in the affairs of our little corner of the universe,-of that earthly cell, which is absolutely invisible from the nearest fixed star that sparkles in the heavens above us; nay, to find him willing to throw aside his glorious toils of empire, in order to meditate our welfare, and dwell among us for a time. This surely would be wondrous, appalling, and yet transporting; such as that, when it had passed away, life would seem to have nothing more it could offer, compared to the being blessed with such an intercourse!

And now mark: behind all the visible scenery of nature— beyond all the systems of all the stars-around this whole universe, and through the infinity of infinite space itselffrom all eternity and to all eternity-there lives a Being, compared to whom that mighty spirit just described, with his empire of a million suns, is infinitely less than to you is the minutest mote that floats in the sunbeam. There is a Being in whose breath lives the whole immense of worlds;