birth. That subject he treats very much with the sharp and scorning wit with which Dickens treats it in the Pickwich papers. He evidently got through the Court of Triers by means of equivocations and double-entendres. Many an other as good an Episcopalian, and far better Christian than he, was admitted to the comprehensive church of the commonwealth. The court was not authorized to inquire into a man's views of church government. The conclusion is, therefore, irrefragable, that when Episcopalians were excluded it was not as Episcopalians, but as men of unsound tenets, incompetent qualifications, or scandalous lives. Surely, this was a very righteous sort of persecution with which old protector Great-Heart visited that dissolute body of men.

When Presbyterian ministers were ejected from their parishes in Scotland, in the times of Charles II., it was, as a general thing, for the unflinching strictness of their morality, and the deep conscientiousness of their piety. No contrast could be better established in point of fact than this. None could be more telling in its import. When one of the Covenanters was brought before a magistrate to be committed to prison, if he or she exhibited signs of piety by abstaining from the vices of the licentious speech of the age, the commitment was made out at once without waiting for forms of law. But if the accused threw out a profane oath, the court laughed, and at once discharged the prisoner, as not the game for which they were in search. In all their proceedings, in pursuance of the king's proclamation concerning church govern ment, piety led to conviction, open vice led to acquittal. Those who were put into the English church in the place of the ejected, were men of great piety and learning: as the names of Owen, Baxter, Howe, Flavel, Bates, Alleine and a host of kindred spirits abundantly testify. Those who were put into the Scottish church, in the place of the ejected, were-with the single exception of Leighton, the good-men whose names have never been on the records of learning, piety, or talent; and have perished from the memory of none. The outcry which the tory writers make about the drumming of these worthless curates out of Scotland, at the coming in of William III., must be a desperate resort. They had no right to the stipend by any just law, no personal merit,-no hold upon the affections of the people. Their blood was not spilled. They were simply laughed, drummed, or as it was called, rabbled away. Those who were ejected from the church of England, at the Restoration, were the best, purest, holiest, mostlearned men of the land. The act of uniformity, and the fivemile act were intended to hunt them from the face of the earth.

It was a wide and unfortunate mistake of the civil government, during the times of the English commonwealth, that they undertook to produce sanctity of manners by legislation. They had taken the English idea of the oneness of Church and State,

and had puritanized it, and spiritualized it. Many more of them, besides the mad Fifth-Monarchy men, dreamed of the reign of king Jesus upon earth, and a code of laws drawn directly from the pure wells of Gospel truth; and of the administration of laws by the hands of the saints. Civil laws, however, can never safely or properly go farther than the promotion of public decency and social morality. Men can not be made either moral, or religious, or holy, by legislation of any kind. The error of the reign of the saints, was that they thought they could promote sanctity by law. This gave rise to the hypocrisy with which they have been charged. Unholy and profane men, who thought all holiness was but hypocrisy and pretence, as unholy and profane men often do think, and who, therefore, did not scruple to pretend it, when they did not possess it, seeing that sanctity of manners was the passport to civil emolument, crept in among the puritans, and brought reproach upon them. But it seems very clear and easy reasoning, that it was not the puritan himself who was justly entitled to bear this reproach of hypocrisy. The real puritan had no need to pretend to be a puritan. The real Christian has no need for the cloak of christianity. But it was the man of loose morals, and of low ideas of the sacredness of holy things, from the antipuritan ranks, who practiced this hypocrisy; who alone had need of it; and whose civil promotion depended on it. Puritans may be fanatics. They sometimes have been. They often are in modern times. But it is an impossible thought that men were hypocrites who dared, and suffered, and were brave, and denied. themselves, and raised the dignity of the State, and spread the reign of morals, thrift and industry around, as did Cromwell and his saints. If so, then hypocrisy made the deepest impression for good, which has ever been made by any one else's sincerity, on the destinies of England;-which is a contradiction.

But the wider and more unfortunate mistake of the civil government, in England and in Scotland, under Charles II. was, that it levelled all the artillery of the law against holiness, sanctity, conscience, religion, and against all strictness, and selfdenial of morals and of manners. Self-denial was the emblem and the watchword of the commonwealth. Joyous license to do as one would, was the prevailing principle of the restoration. The one was the reign of the saints and prophets. The other was the reign of the fiends and satyrs. The one attempted, erroneously and extravagantly, to legislate holiness into men's hearts. The other attempted, blasphemously, to legislate holiness and conscientiousness out of the land. Oliver Cromwell dictating to the "Latin Secretary," the epistle which was a shield of defence around the Protestants of Savoy, is an emblematic scene of the commonwealth. Charles II. hunting a moth, and writing letters of urgency to Claverhouse and Dalziell to hunt and slay the Pro

testants of Scotland, is a scene emblematic of the Restoration. Cromwell may have prayed too long: but was never drunk. Charles II. was drunk about as often, probably, and as long, as Cromwell prayed. And Charles never prayed at all that we know of.

The men who resisted presbytery in England were, as a general thing, the advocates of despotic government, the Buckinghams, the Lauds, the Straffords, and the Mainwarings. They were remarkable for their lofty views of kingly authority, and their low ideas of virtue, conscience, duty, and right. They saw the restoration of their king and church in 1660. But along with them came the lowest condition of religion, of morals, and of national standing abroad, which the nation has ever known. They saved their cherished dynasty of the house of Stuart; and their favourite doctrine of the divine right of kings, and the sacred obligation of the subject to passive obedience and non-resistance. But they saved them both for only twenty-eight years. The revolution of 1688 came; and the dogma was scattered to the winds, refuted by the very conduct of its authors; and the dynasty was dethroned forever. They saved also an established Episcopal church; but they lost two thousand of its brightest jewels who would not conform to its "crawling and footlicking" spirit. And the toleration which came has turned into other channels than those of the establishment, a majority by estimate, of the numbers and piety of Protestantism in that land.

Those who resisted Episcopacy in Scotland were, as a general thing, advocates of law and legal liberty: Rutherford, Argyle, Guthrie, Baillie, Warriston, Brown, Cargill, Peden, Blackader, . Renwick, and Carstairs; men against whose morals nothing could be alleged; men who plead their consciences, and whose selfdenial proved them to be conscientious. They stood for religious liberty. Their loyalty was to the unseen and divine King to whom they had given themselves soul and spirit. They did save religious liberty, conquering by patient endurance. And they also saved civil liberty-Hume, himself, being witness, no friend, indeed, to them, to either of their liberties, or to their religion. They delivered Scotland from what they thought an impure Protestantism; and gave to it a naked, clear, spiritual system, deeply fixed in the convictions and affections of the people. To this day that grand little kingdom, though rife with dissent from established Presbyterianism, is still almost unanimously Presbyterian-all the dissenters claiming to stand in some respect or other, nearer to the pure and primitive model than the establishment.

Another fault from which the English commonwealth-men can be defended, but the Scottish Covenanters cannot, is intolerance. But there was no conception of the idea of toleration in those days any where except in the mind of Cromwell, of Milton, of

John Howe, and a few other such foremost men of all the world. The English Episcopalians regarded toleration as treason to the throne of the king and to the mitre of the bishop. The Scottish Presbyterians regarded it as treason to the Gospel of Christ, and to the souls of the people. The suppression of error by force was the principle of both parties in Scotland. The only advantage the Presbyterians have in the estimate is that they spilt little or none of the blood of others, and shed much of their own; while the Episcopalians spilt much of the blood of others and shed but very little of their own in the religious persecutions. The suppression of error by force-says the Pictorial History-"was still the popular and national feeling; for, after all, nothing is more incontestible than that all the severe laws which were passed. against non-conformists, between the restoration and the revolution, were in accordance with the sentiments of the great majority of all classes of the English people."

At the very time when the English Parliament had become. alarmed at the prospect of having a papist upon the throne; and were busily discussing and insisting upon the bill for the exclusion of the Duke of York from the right of succession, at that very time it was treason in Scotland to maintain the principle of the bill of exclusion. Penalties for opinion were run mad. No party is perfectly clear from the just reproach. The world had not yet been lifted high enough to see the light of religious liberty, and the wrong and inexpediency of laying edicts concerning spiritual truths upon the conscience of man by human authority.

. We have a concluding word to say, in the way of protest, against the odium now attempted to be cast upon the Scottish and English puritanism of the seventeenth century, in consequence of the sorry and abortive fruits of puritanism in New England in the nineteenth century. It is like casting a reproach upon the Geneva of Calvin, which is taken from the modern Geneva of the Unitarians. It is reasoning from names, but not identities, or resemblances. Never were two things of the same name much less identical in spirit and intrinsic character than the English puritanism of the seventeenth century and the Yankee puritanism of the nineteenth. They seem alike only in the erroneous practice of inquisitorial and intolerant legislation concerning moral questions. Like all imitators, the modern spirit has copied the mere defects, but few or none of the greatnesses of the ancient. Never was there a more deep, earnest, inward, mental, spiritual, and real civilization than that which sprung up with such mighty radiance in Great Britain, in the seventeenth century, under the influence of the old puritans. Seldom has there been seen among the nations, a more shallow, outward, physical, mechanical, and materialistic civilization, than that which has sprung up with such

mighty bruit, under the puritan influences in New England, in the nineteenth century. The one is all physical. It subjugates matter. It excels in the mechanic arts. It makes constant and important contributions to the material comforts of outward life. It glories in the wide diffusion and the shallow depth of educaIt is envious of all but itself. It is devoted to pecuniary profit. It has learning enough to receive ideas-not logic enough to sift them, so as to discern between the superficial and the profound, the plausible and the true, the sham and the real.

The other was all spiritual. The moral, intellectual and spiritual grandeur which its writers spread over religious life, yet lies on it like golden sunshine, still uneclipsed by any brighter radiance. It had its trophies on battle-fields. It had its Marstons, and Nasebys, and Worcesters. But it had more trophies in the realms of genius and learning. It was full of great ideas and generous impulses. It gloried in all depths of learning, of thought, of piety; and strove to diffuse learning without rendering it shallow. It had no inordinate thirst for the peculium. Mammon was never its God.

It was its highest glory to be able to know truth from plausibilities; fleeting shams, and unveracities, and empty forms, from eternal realities. Never was the same name borne by two more intrinsically different things, than the English puritanism of the seventeenth and the New England puritanism of the nineteenth century.

ART. IV. THE TESTIMONY OF THE ANCIENT JEWS TO THE PLURALITY AND TRINITY OF THE GODHEAD.

On this point we have already adduced a number of very strong passages from the most authoritative books of Jewish learning.* We will, however, give an outline of the sources from which testimony may be drawn to prove that the ancient Jews did not believe in the present Jewish dogma of an absolute personal, metaphysical unity of God. These views are sustained by other learned men from an examination of the same writings. The ten Sephiroth have been represented in three different forms, all of which may be seen in H. Moore's Opera Philos., I., 423. The

* See especially the Article on the Unity of God as an objection. So. Pres. Rev., Vol. VIII., p. 305.

Kitto's Bib. Cyclop. Art. Kabbalah, vol. 2., p. 190. English Edition.