they aid its weakness, and supply its deficiencies by information beyond its reach. If "to know the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent," be, as our Saviour assures us, "eternal life," to adopt effectual measures for imparting that knowledge, must be allowed to be the most genuine exercise of benevolence. It is to be lamented that Protestant nations have been too long inattentive to this object: We rejoice to find that they are now convinced of their error, and that, touched with commiseration for the unhappy condition of mankind, they are anxious to impart those riches which may be shared without being diminished, and communicated without being lost to the possessor. Such is the felicity of religion; such the unbounded liberality of its principles. Though we should be sorry to administer fuel to national vanity, we can not conceal the satisfaction it gives us to reflect, that while the fairest portion of the globe has fallen a prey to that guilty and restless ambition which by the inscrutable wisdom of Providence is permitted, for a time to take peace from the earth; this favoured country is employed in spreading the triumphs of truth, multiplying the means of instruction, and opening sources of consolation to an afflicted world. In these eventful times, so pregnant with difficulty and danger, we consider this as affording a most favourable omen of the ultimate intentions of Providence respecting this nation."

NAVAL AND MILITARY BIBLE SOCIETY,

It is with satisfaction we are informed, that the applications for Bibles from the sailors and soldiers of the British Army and Navy, have of late greatly increased. It' appeared at the last audit, that the great desire of our valiant defenders to read the ' word of God had nearly exhausted the funds of the Society. On this account, several clergymen made collections at their churches on the late Fast-day; and we have the plea sure to state, that the following sumis have been received for the benevolent purpose:

St. Anne's, Blackfriars, (Rev. L. s. d. W. Goode), -36 0 0

St. Swithin's, (Rev. H. G.Wat kins),.

Long Acre, (Rev. J. Mann),..

Bentinck Chapel, (Rev. B.
Woodd),

Scotch Church, (Rev. Dr. Ni

37 8 22 16

1

Mr. Desgranges, the missionary at Vizagspatam, in a letter dated April last, states, that Ananderayer-once a Brahmin, but now, he trusts, a genuine disciple of Christ—is constantly employed in the affairs of the mis

sion. He conducts the devotional exercises of the natives, "who are inquiring the way to Zion." He prays in public, and preaches, with fervency and zeal. He labours assiduously in aiding the translation of the four Gospels into the Telinga language, and in examining manuscript tracts containing state has also been baptized, and is stated to be ments of the way of salvation. His wife an ornament to her profession. Many hun dreds have heard the Gospel in the Telinga language. St. Matthew's Gospel has bee translated, and a copy of it sent to Calcutta. The other Gospels are nearly complete. The number of scholars in the missionary schools increases, and some of them advance in the knowledge of the English language and of Christianity.

CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.

Dr. Vanderkemp states, that the mis sionary settlement of Bethelsdorp now (September 1809) contains 979 souls, and that a blessing continues to attend the preaching of the word of God; although, on the other hand, he has to lament the lukewarminers of several.

THE POPEDOM.

75 4 0

their reign, be crowned in the church of St. Peter at Rome. Palaces, it is further or dained, shall be prepared for the Pope at Paris, at Rome, and in different parts of the empire; and he shall have rural property assigned to him to the amount of two millions of livres in different parts of the em pire: but the expenses of the sacred college, and of the Propaganda, are declared to be imperial. The most remarkable part of the decree is that which, after affirming that all foreign sovereignty is incompatible with the exercise of any spiritual authority within the empire, ordains, that "the popes shall at their elevation take an oath never to act contrary to the four propositions of the Gallican Church, adopted at an assembly of the clergy in 1682; and that these four propositions shall be cominon to all the catholic churches of the empire."

In order rightly to understand the import of this decree, it will be necessary to state what the four propositions are, which are thus revived and confirmed by the fiat of Bonaparte. They are as follows:

1. That neither St. Peter nor his successors have received from God any power to interfere, directly or indirectly, in what concerns the temporal interests of princes and soveeign states that kings and princes cannot

be deposed by ecclesiastical authority; nor their subjects freed from the sacred obligation of fidelity and allegiance, by the power of the church and the bulls of the Roman pontiff.

2. That the decrees of the Council of Constance, which maintain the authority of general councils as superior to that of the popes in spiritual matters, are approved and adopted by the Gallican Church.

3. That the rules, customs, institutions, and observances, which have been received in the Gallican Church, are to be preserved inviolable.

4. That the decisions of the pope in points of faith are not infallible, unless they be attended with the consent of the church.

It is not a little remarkable, that at the moment when Bonaparteds thus circumscribing the power of the pope, already much abridged by the concordat, which conceded, among other things, the sole appointment of bishops; the Roman catholics of England and Ireland should refuse to their king a negative even on the pope's appointment of their bishops, although the pope can now be considered in no other light than as the metropolitan of France.

CONTINENTAL INTELLIGENCE. THE important question, who is to be the New Consort of Bonaparte, is at length decided. The destined victim is the Archduchess Maria Louisa, eldest daughter of the Emperor of Austria, now in her nineteenth year. The contract has been signed by the parties concerned; and Berthier has proceeded to Vienna, in order to conduct the bride to Patis. He arrived at Vienna on the 4th inst. and was to leave it on the 15th, with the new empress. The marriage, for which the most splendid preparations are making, it was expected, would be celebrated on the 29th instant. How poor Josephine is employed, while Paris resounds with the notes of festive preparation, is not said. She appears to be as much forgotten as if she had Dever existed. Her humiliation, however, is Not to be put in competition with that of the bouse of Austria, which may now be regard.

das complete.

An imperial decree, lately issued by Ba naparte, and which professes to be for the "Relief of certain State Prisoners un France," furnishes a most striking illustration of the horrid despotism which he has succeeded in establishing in that country. It exhibits one of those tremendous inflictions of misery, the very recital of which makes one tremble: it establishes eight bastiles, or state prisons, in France: most of them in retired situations at a distance from the capi tal. The unhappy tenants of these prisons are never to be brought to trial, or heard in their justification; the original cause of their detention only being to be reviewed once a year by persons named by Bonaparte. The objects of this decree are: 1. Men who have at different epochs made an attenipt on the safety of the state, whom state reasons prevent from being brought to trial. 2. Chiefs of bands in civil wars, who are similarly cir cumstanced. 3. Robbers of diligences, whom the courts cannot condemn, though certain

of their guilt. 4. Men acquainted with state secrets, employed by the police in foreign countries, and suspected of failing in fidelity, but whom it is unsafe to try. 5. Subjects of. federative' states, who cannot be tried be cause their crimes are either of a political nature, or were committed before the union with France. What a state must that of France be, when such a decree can be issued; and when to the ruthless oppression which marks it, mockery can be added—It is a decree, forsooth, for the relief of state prisoners! This decree, we presume, is one of the acts of grace which is to shed a lustre on Bonaparte's espousals!-O happy Britain! how does such a detail as this put to shame the discontent and disaffection of thy sons!

Bonaparte's expected journey to Spain has been put off in consequence of the arrange. ments for his nuptials. It does not, however, appear that his presence will be particularly wanted in that quarter. The present month, indeed, has announced no new occurrences in Spain, excepting that the French troops have seated themselves before Cadiz, and are evidently preparing to commence the siege. The garrison has been reinforced by some British and Portugueze troops, and it may possibly hold out for some months. There is, however, no reason to expect that any thing can arise to prevent its final fall.

The account in our last, that Ceuta had been taken possession of by our troops, was premature. The difficulties which prevent ed it, have, however, since been removed, and our troops are now reported to have been received within its walls.

The British army. in Portugal is said to have advanced to meet a large body of French troops which threatened the castern frontier of that country. Their policy, however, we apprehend, will be to retire as we advance, in the hope of drawing us to a distance from our resources, and of being able to operate on our flanks or rear. We cannot help looking with considerable apprehension to this quarter. We dread the sacrifice of any more of our gallant troops in a contest which must now be pronounced hopeless.

GREAT

GENERAL REFLECTIONS.

DURING the last month the House of Commons has been occupied chiefly in the investigation of the circumstances attending the Walcheren expedition; and the decision on that important question, on which may depend the fate of the present ministry, is now on the point of being made-though not, perhaps, after less than three or four

Hanover has been finally annexed to the kingdom of Westphalia. The delay of this measure was thought to indicate a hope on the part of Bonaparte that Hanover might prove useful to him in negociating a peace with this country. Now that, by his close union with Austria, he has delivered himself from all fear of hostility in that quarter, he probably thinks that any reserve on this subject is no longer necessary.

The war in the Tyrol appears to be nearly extinguished. Hofer, the gallant leader of the Tyrolese, has been taken, and executed as a criminal; and doubtless this is not the only instance of severity which the relent. less cruelty of their conqueror has led him to inflict.

AMERICA.

Nothing new has transpired with respect to the state of our relations with America, though the hope of an accommodation of her ditter. ences with this country gathers strength daily. The capture of Guadaloupe, which took place on the fifth of February, removes a considerable part of those differences,-that which related to trading to the colonies of the enemy: France, has now no colony in the western world.

The conquest of Guadaloupe was effected without any considerable loss on our part. Four officers and forty-six men were killed; fifteen officers and two hundred and thirty. four men wounded. The black troops appear to have behaved most gallantly. The number of prisoners taken amounts to about three thousand.

INDIA.

The disturbances among the officers of the Madras establishment, which threatened ruin to our Indian possessions, may now be considered as at an end. A general amnesty has been proclaimed to the army, with the exception of three officers-viz. LieutenantColonels John Bell and John Doveton, and Major Joseph Storey, who are to be tried by a court martial; and seventeen others, who have the option given them of either being tried or dismissed the service,

nights' debate on this one measure of the executive government In the mean time many minor battles have been fought in parliament; and in these the ministry have been more than once discomfited. They were beaten, as we before noticed, in the question respecting the names of the members who should form the Committee of Public Expenditure: they yielded on the

subject of the reversion bill; they have been obliged to bend on many questions of econony which have been urged upon them; sad, above all, they have been worsted in the case both of an application to the King for papers erroneously supposed to have been laid before bis Majesty by the Earl of Chatham, and of a subsequent vote of animadversion on the same nobleman; in consequence of which they have been deprived of their colleagne, who has thought it his duty to tender his resignation The previous vote for inquiry into the causes of the expedition to the Scheldt, though it was carried against ministers, is by no means clearly indicative of a subsequent vote of condemnation, inasmuch as many who may have been eager to inquire, may nevertheless, after investigation, be disposed to acquit; especially if the proposed condemnation should be a severe ne. And some may incline to censure, who did not consent to inquire, at the time and in the manner first proposed, from an idea that inquiry would not fail to take place, though the particular motion then brought forward should be negativod.

The government have, on the other hand, been successful, and somewhat triumphant, on ■ few questions. The thanks proposed to Lord Wellington, and the pension allotted to him, have been consented to by a large ma jority; and the taking of thirty thousand Portuguese troops into English pay has also been agreed to. The subject of the campaign in Spain has been postponed, as has kewise that of the abolition of sinecures.

We believe that no ministry has been so frequently beaten as the present, and yet kept its place, since the memorable days when the late Mr. Pitt withstood the rage of his combined enemies in parliament, and dared to exhibit the new spectacle of a ininister raising up his head in spite of an opposition phalanx supported by successive majorities in the House of Commons. The cases, however, are widely different:-Mr. Pitt had both the King and the people with kim; and be meditated no very distant appeal of that king from his parliament to his people. In the present instance, a dissoluon would, we apprehend, be unfavourable to the administration; and yet, possibly, not very propitious to the more aristrocratic and embodied part of the opposition.

It may be useful here to touch on the Kate of parties. It has been of late the fashion, in many quarters, to run down the present government as a set of men at once incapable, corrupt, profuse, and arbitrary; bservient to the humours of the court, and bigotted in religion. Charges thus violent

and indiscriminate are obviously unjust, and in the eye of intelligent and dispassionate men, border on the ridiculous: but an orator at a Common Hall, or at a meeting of Westminster electors in the open street, in the same manner as in a Westminster forum, where a shilling paid at the door communicates a right both to hear, speak, and pronounce judgment, is not very measured in his philippics. A parliamentary opposi tionist occasionally rises to nearly the same measure of heat: and those who put forth periodical papers, for the amusement of the middling and lower order of politicians, find their account in adopting the utmost violence of language; the profit of their work depending on the pre-eminence of their power to interest by the satirical keenness and the surprising boldness of their publications. The ministers appear to us much like other men; except that, being ministers, and hav ing been long accustomed to office, they are more disposed to defend whatsoever is, and are less zealous for reform than almost any of their adversaries; that they are also somewhat deficient in their number of pecu liarly able individuals, and want the advan tage of an authoritative chief; that they have, moreover, been too sanguine in their estimate of our capabilities as a military power on the continent, and, in consequence of the scale of their operations, somewhat expensive; but, above all, that they have, unhappily, but ill understood the best manner of dealing with the feelings of a people wearied with taxation, prejudiced against their rulers by the ill success of a long war, liable to be inflamed and misled both by demagogues and oppositionists, and even to be alienated from the constitution under which they live by the disclosure of certain anomalies and faults in our political system. Who, that is acquainted with the present turn of sentiment of a large part of the community, would have believed, that, at a time when one outcry was raised against sinccures, another outcry against the measure of the expedition to Walcheren, and a third outcry against the shutting of the people out of the gallery of the House of Commons dur ing the examination of evidence respecting the expedition, the ministry would have advised the grant of a considerable sinecure to the man who was the instrument of excluding the public from hearing from the gallery the evidence against the expedition, and who had also been foremost in censuring those who presumed to call in question the conduct of the Duke of York, in the preceding session? Who would have thought, that, when he had become thus exposed to

popular dislike, he would have been sent to encounter the perils of re-election for a county? The event has been exactly as might have been expected.

The offer of a peerage to Lord Melville, in professed compensation for their refusal to admit him into office (the ministry at least have not denied this to be the case, when questioned upon it), is another proof that they do not well understand the art of rendering the exercise of the prerogatives of the Crown agreeable to the minds of the people. The Edinburgh Review has lately represented our regular opposition party as possessing a very small share indeed of the public confidence; the more democratic body among us enjoying almost the whole affections of a large discontented part of our popula tion; and the Reviewer suggests a new de gree of condescension, on the part of the old oppositionists, to the feelings and wishes of the multitude. There appear to us to be some truth, and not a little error, in the las cubrations of these distinguished journalists. It is true that those who formed the late administration are not very popular; but their unpopularity arises, as we conceive, not so exclusively (as they represent it) from a want of sufficient condescension to the more extravagant wishes of our democratic body, but rather to a plain inconsistency between their professions before they came into office, and their subsequent conduct. They had pronounced the property tax to be unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional; but they continued, and enlarged, it. They had censured the military as well as other measures of their adversaries; but they were not happy in respect to their own military undertakings. They had talked much of the corruption of their predecessors, and of the necessity of greater purity in the administration of the finances; but the head of their administration held a sinecure, and one of their first bills was a bill to enable him to retain that sinecure together with the other emoluments of office. They compromised a question respecting our Governor General in India, against whom the strongest censure had been pronounced by one part of their body. They also compromised for a time the catholic question. They proceeded, so far as an ordinary observer could perceive, in mary respects very much after the manner of their predecessors. In truth, they had, when out of office, represented themselves as differing far more widely from their rivals than was consistent with the plain and simple truth. The moral character of our oppositionists (we use the word moral in reference to their political morality) has therefore, as we con

:

ceive, suffered: it has suffered by that trial of them which has been made.-Much, how ever, is to be said in apology for them. They had to conciliate the discordant mem bers of that administration which they formed and it would not have been easy to form it on a sufficiently broad basis without admitting into it some variety of sentiment. They had to prove to the more candid and persuadable part of the supporters of the an tecedent ministry, that they were not dans gerous innovators. They had to feel theit way. They had to prepare the minds of the community at large for any more boki refor which they might meditate, by establishing, in the first place, a character for prudence and moderation. They had to serve a King advanced in years, and naturally fearful of change. They had to sustain the income of the country, and even to augment it; and they had to carry on a war necessarily es pensive, and of which it was utterly impos sible to promise the termination. It should be added, that they undertook and executed many measures highly honourable to them: and among these, the abolition of the slave trade; an achievement which is of itself sufficient to disarm criticism, and which sheds over them a peculiar glory. In the event of their return to power they doubtless will shew that they have profited by their past experience. But, in our humble judgment, it will not be wise in them to follow very obsequiously that advice which is given them by their Mentor in the north; namely, to turn their back both on the favourers of the old administration, for so we understand him, and to walk down a considerable flight of steps, in order to place themselves on the same level with our more vulgar and clamorous reformers; by the aid of the great mass of whom they are to sustain theit power; leaving only the downright mad men among them to be unsatisfied. But rather, we would say, (and we mean that what we say should equally apply to the present ministers) let them try what the most unimpeachable integrity, the most wise and disinterested selection of their instruments, the most marked disinterestedness' en their own part, the most exact consistency between their professions and their practice, the most ingenuous frankness, the most pru dent (which, however, is not always the most severe) economy, as well as the most conciliating spirit to men who depart from them in each direction, will effect towards healing our unhappy dissensions, and mitigating the violence of our animosities.-As for ourselves, we by no means exclude politica! reform from our consideration-on which