There is a truth-we had almost said a terrible truth-in the first of the two which we shall venture to quote: "Is there in all this woful world a woe In thine own heart the tenderness decay, The next is in a different vein, though not yielding to it in originality of thought; and affords a fair sample of our poet's treatment of religious subjects: MARY MAGDALEN. "It was a lovely yet unholy sight, To see thy tresses gather'd up within But when those locks, unbound and unadorn'd, And now we must take leave of our fair friend, for in that light we must regard a writer who has contributed so largely to our gratification. If we have put prominently forward the attractive features of her book, it is because we desire to draw the public attention to its high claims, of which we have an entire, and honest conviction in our own minds. But we beg to be understood as not putting it forth as "A faultless monster which the world ne'er saw." It abounds in beauties; but it yet has its blemishes, which, however, are marvellously few in a work that, by internal and unmistakeable evidences; we gather to be from the pen of a young and unpractised writer. There breathes in every page af enthusiasm which is especially characteristic of youth, and the fire of which soon-too soon, alas!-dies out in the human mind. There is throughout a keen perception of the true and the beautiful, which is a part of the heritage of genius, and is not to be won by study nor acquired by experience. The perception of the beautiful is one of the highest enjoyments of our intellectual nature; but, like other precious gifts, it is sparingly distributed. It has been said that, in order to the due appreciation of poetry, the mind must be itself imbued with the poetic feeling; but this is not the fact: if it were so, the works of our great bards, of ancient or modern days, would never have acquired the popularity they enjoy. Poems are bought, read, and relished by men who had never a poetical thought in their lives. It is the magic glass of the poet which reveals beauties impalpable to the naked intellectual eye. This glass is held up to the reader in every page of the volume before us; and, like a well-adjusted telescope, while it makes the object nearer and clearer, it does not exaggerate or distort. Simplicity is one of the great charms of the book, and simplicity of diction is the electric telegraph of thought. The language that comes most naturally from our own hearts is that which finds its way most directly to that of another; and thus it is that our simple writers have ever been the most popular-Goldsmith, for instance, as contradistinguished from Johnson, whose rounded periods, while they charm the ear, fatigue the thought. There is another feature which is pressed on our attention in the perusal of these poems-the absence of everything like labour in their composition. The author seems never to have proposed to herself a subject, and then set about mechanically to spin out her thoughts in order to weave them into verse. Her lyrics are the outpourings of a full heart yearning for expression: hence the power and the pathos with which she has written. The volume does not come before us with the pretence or exterior attractions of a Christmas book; and yet it is especially and essentially appropriate to the period, as illustrating and cherishing all those gentle, kindly, and affectionate feelings which the re-unions of the season are calculated to inspire; and, above all, as suggestive of those higher and holier thoughts that are, or ought to be, inseparable from a festival which commemorates the rising of the Sun of Righteousness upon a sinbenighted world. 196 ART IX.-The Papacy: its History, Dogmas, Genius, and Prospects: Being the Evangelical Alliance First Essay on Popery. By the Rev. J. A. WYLIE. Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter. ERROR is a perversion of truth, and not purely an original conception, either of human or angelic intellects. It is occasioned by a desire to attain certain ends, either independently of the divine arrangements, or manifestly opposed to the plan prescribed by infinite wisdom. The necessity of religious worship, if not universally admitted, is at least recognised whereever mankind have retained traces of that primæval faith which was possessed by the patriarchs of the postdiluvian world. A tribe of avowed atheists has never yet been discovered; nor is there any probability that such a singular race exists in any portion of our globe. Men have manifested their repugnance to the holiness of the Supreme Being, not by denying his existence, but by gradually introducing the worship of inferior agents, who were supposed to exercise a subordinate influence upon their condition and prospects. They sought to deify creatures without presuming to deny theoretically the existence of the Infinite One. In this respect the ferocious mythology of our rude northern ancestors agreed with the graceful superstitions of Greece and the erudite doctrines of the Egyptian priests. The throne of the Eternal was slowly obscured without being daringly and instantaneously assailed. The world gratified its depraved taste by multiplying the objects of worship, until the Creator of the universe became to the Gentiles an unknown God, except, perhaps, to acomparatively few, styled the Initiated." 66 By a species of intuition we seek, not only for a divinity to adore, but also for a system of mediation, through the instrumentality of which our worship may be rendered acceptable. A consciousness of guilt is nearly, if not entirely, universal. In all ages the majority of human beings have been persuaded that they were wrong, without discerning how that which is amiss might be rectified, or understanding the means by which that which is ominous might be removed from their path. The gods of Olympus had their messenger, and the priests of superstition have universally been regarded as performing, to a certain extent, the part of mediators between the divinities at whose altars they ministered and the deluded multitudes who frequented their temples. The doctrine of man's immortality has likewise been gene rally admitted; and this, in connection with a sense of imperfection, has led to intense and constant solicitude concerning preparation for a higher state of existence. The stern war riors of Scandinavia attempted to attain this by acts of violence, and the libidinous worshippers of the Cyprian Venus and Phoenician Astarte through the practice of obscene rites; while others, ascetically inclined, have sought to realise it by vain efforts to ignore the existence of nature, and by ingeniously subjecting themselves to mortifying and excruciating tortures. To prevent all risk and mistake in a matter felt to be so momentous, many hoped for safety from a purifying process after death. By this convenient hypothesis, conscience was soothed when it could not be altogether silenced: sinners gave themselves up with tolerable composure to the gratification of their appetites in the present life; and reconciled themselves to the prospect of remedial torments in a future state proportionable to the enormity of their transgressions and to the foulness of their pollutions. Catholic Christians were for ages unanimous not only in believing the unity of God, but also in regarding the mediation of Christ as the only way of an acceptable approach to the Most High. To them there was but one God, the Father, of whom are all things; and one anointed Saviour, constituted mediatorially Lord of all. They recognised no distinction between a propitiatory and intercessary Mediator. They believed that he who gave himself as a ransom intercedes, to the exclusion of all other advocates, for those who come unto God by him. According to their creed, Christ not only officiated upon earth as the sole sacrificing priest, but likewise interposes in heaven on our behalf without any assistant or subordinate agent. Noah and his early descendants were acquainted with, what, for want of a better phrase, we must call the personality, or rather individuality, of God. They were Theists, and not Polytheists nor Pantheists. This original creed was at first obscured, and at last all but entirely concealed by the introduction of a multitude of divinities, each of whom was honoured by the observance of certain peculiar rites. The primitive inhabitants of the postdiluvian world also expected the appearance of one who, under the designation of the woman's seed, was announced to them as the subverter of Satan's power. Christianity has explicitly identified this divine and long expected person. The pious, who lived antecedently to the incarnation of the Eternal Word, were like Jacob waiting for the salvation of God. But after his manifestation a belief in the identical person of the Saviour was necessary to salvation. To his Jewish contemporaries he said, "If ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins." The Theism of Noah and his family had for ages previous to the mission of Christ been succeeded by the idolatrous mythologies of the pagan world. Christianity not only reclaimed its recipients from the worship of fictitious gods; it also taught them that Christ was the way, and that by him only they could come to the Father. There could be no essential perversion of Christianity as long as this vital truth was allowed to remain intact. The heresies that preceded the first Council of Nice derived the venom of their sting from their tendency either to conceal or deny the efficacy of the Redeemer's mediation. It was clearly understood that a denial of the divinity or humanity of Christ virtually tended to deprive men of salvation. For this reason the Ante-Nicene fathers took so much trouble to oppose the the ridiculous notions of the Gnostics, and Athanasius and his orthodox contemporaries were so careful in their expositions of Trinitarian doctrine. Those men were instrumental in preserving the Church from perverted views of the person of Christ. A belief of his divinity and humanity became through their means too firmly fixed in the Church to be entirely removed, and another method of perverting Christianity was seen to be necesif the hopes of the wicked one were to be realized. He was constrained to leave the Catholic Church in possession of her creed concerning the person of Christ, and sought compensation for his disappointment in the gradual and almost imperceptible concealment of the oneness and efficacy of his mediation, by means of Hagiolatry; as, not long after the deluge, he perverted the Theism of most of Noah's descendants by prevailing with them to worship the celestial bodies, the elements of nature, and deceased men. sary, Satan has never succeeded in seriously injuring the faith and morals of Christians without inducing men, eminent for their talents and esteemed for their piety, to become unintentional abettors of his designs. The history of Popery furnishes us with many painful illustrations of the evils that may be originated or promoted through the mistakes of men in most respects deserving the admiration of the universal Church. If some of the more eminent fathers in the fourth and fifth centuries could have foreseen the length to which succeeding ages have gone, they would have thrust their right hands into the fire, as Cranmer did, rather than have penned paragraphs so outrageously eulogistic on celibacy and relics that in modern times none but the most thorough devotees of superstition would like to affix their signatures to them as vouchers for their correctness. If Popery had owed its origin and support entirely to |