prostrate in the midst of a large assembly of persons of coarse and ungoverned souls. Around the patient are some dozen hierophants, praying either singly or in pairs, or in a body, with all their might to God that he would break the heart of the hardened sinner before him, using the greatest and most offensive familiarity with the Creator, prescribing to him both the time and the way of the patient's conversion, at times calling on the prostrate man himself to yield his stubborn soul, and threatening him in awful language with the Divine vengeance to everlasting woe; while during the whole scene, often of considerable duration, voices either of supplication or threat, groanings, ejaculations, and sobs, are arising from every part of the building, and aiding in the general effect. At last, perhaps, the man is prepared to acknowledge the "good work." The spirit of God, he says, has descended on him. Straightway he is questioned as to the nature of his convictions, and it has happened that the interrogators, not being satisfied with the replies, have ordered him again to prostrate himself, and to "tell God he would have all or none." We remember on one occasion to have seen a woman who had, as the parties said, been converted, led down the streets of a country town, and then first we formed what we deemed a somewhat adequate idea of the state of the Pythoness immediately after retiring from the tripod, to which she had been forced, and where amidst the furies to which she was stimulated she delivered her broken oracular accents. Nor must our readers imagine that, once converted, a person is converted for life. The work in some instances requires to be frequently repeated, and is to some people what a course of medicine is to others after a debauch. Let not our readers be sceptical (they must be pained) at these representations. The following quotation might have served as the basis of the foregoing description. It is taken from the Protestant Methodist Magazine for July last. "The mercy of God displayed. At a public Methodist prayer-meeting held in Yorkshire, about the middle of the service a number of thoughtless young men entered the meeting, when two of them kneeled down, apparently desirous of salvation; the friends spoke to and prayed for them; shortly afterwards a man present stated that those young men had agreed in their mirth, before they came to the meeting, that they would kneel down to be prayed with; on receiving this information, the friends were deeply concerned for them, and prayed that the Lord would awaken them to a sense of their danger. The agonizing prayers of the brethren for them at length prevailed; they appeared greatly moved, and began to pray for themselves! On one of them attempting to rise from his knees, he found his legs so singularly affected that he could not stand upright. They wept and prayed, assisted by the powerful intercession of the friends, and on retiring from the meeting they seemed to be in great distress. The one whose limbs were so seized, afterwards became truly serious, (what became of the others?) and joined the society. The writer was an eye-witness of the facts stated, which took place during a revival of religion among the Methodists." It is no longer than last summer that we saw a scene more revolting even than that we have described a few sentences before, but we abstain. There is no room for doubt that the form of religion, in some of the more retired parts of England, is to the man of sound mind most offensive and painful. The schoolmaster, they say, is abroad; but the present generation must pass off the stage before the good which he is fitted to effect will be seen in the villages of the more uncultivated parts of our country.

We have now alluded to the capital error of the present day. From this

flows, as a necessary consequence, a score of others. Unitarian polemics are often accused of misrepresenting the tenets of the self-styled orthodox. The determination of this question depends on what standard of orthodoxy is fixed on as the criterion. To say the least, there are two-the orthodoxy of books, and the few who philosophize on the subject; and the orthodoxy of the people, with which is closely connected the orthodoxy of the pulpit. Now, if the actual sentiments of the people be taken as the test of orthodoxy, we are prepared to maintain that Unitarians rather under than overstate the dogmas they oppose. We have heard, and that too by a clergyman in a most respectable town, and preaching to a large audience-we have heard the certainty which, irrespectively of good or bad conduct, the doctrine of preordination gives to the elect, illustrated to this import, though not in these words: When once the relation between father and child has been formed, it cannot in its nature be broken. However rebelliously the child may act, he can never cease to be a child. So with the child of God. He may act the part of a prodigal (and here the preacher entered into a long enumeration of enormous sins); still is he safe; once a child of God, he is so for ever; "once elected, he is never rejected." The same clergyman spoke of “the eternal three" without explanation. The following words, no less offensive for the sentiment they imply than for the doggrel in which it is conveyed, occur at the end of some lines inserted in the Protestant Methodist Magazine for July last :"

Shout, Chorus, together;

To the Trinity, glory, for ever!

And in the number of the same work for September, these, among others, "On the Agony and Death of the Saviour :"

Let all creation blush at her Creator's anguish :
I ask no more! a voice from yonder skies
Reveals the cause divine why great Jehovah dies!

Again, from the Gospel Magazine for October :

A little after :

At the close:

"The incarnate God."

To the rich fountain of thy blood,
Thou great incarnate, precious God,
My soul desires to fly.

Stern Justice with his vengeance came,
And wrung the heart of that dear Lamb
Who gave himself for me.

By thy sweet influence, cov'nant God,
O plunge me in that purple flood
Whose virtues are so great;
Then though as vile and black as hell,
Constrained by love this truth I'll tell,
Salvation is complete.

In plain prose of the same magazine :

"The Son in the fulness of time assumed their nature, and came into this world to do and suffer all that was necessary to satisfy the justice and holiness of God for them."

"It pleased the Lord to bruise him. Is it just? Is it reasonable that the innocent should suffer for the guilty? Ah! reason, thou canst rise no

higher than thy source; revelation is beyond thy authority, and whoever trusts to thy insufficient aid, is awfully deceived."

Passing over the delectable subject of " A Cucumber-bed spiritualized," we come to the following: "My fellow-Magdalenes, all hail! Forget not our Christ is both able and willing to save unto the uttermost'; thy daily sins, yea, thy heart sins shall be all in all put away by the sacrifice of himself; thou art annoyed with them, but he is charged with them; they are within thee, but they were upon him: the royal gems which decorate his crown are the Magdalenes which he has gathered from the four quarters of the earth, and in the company we discover the murderous David, the wicked Manasseh, a backsliding Peter, a persecuting Paul, a ferocious gaoler, a gibbeted thief, a tender-hearted Lydia, with thousands and tens of thousands of others, who, like Magdalene, were as vile as hell could make them. "Ye ruffians may come, though your hands reek with blood, There's nothing too hard for the grace of our God;

Ye Magdalene harlots are welcome to-day

With Jesus to banquet-he'll ne'er cast away."

The following specimen of the reductio ad absurdum is amusing: "As to the question, what consistency can there be in a believer's praying for forgiveness, whilst, at the same time, he professes to believe that all his iniquities, past, present, and to come, are already forgiven?—it is, as I said before, not a whit better than carnal reason. Let J. H. but establish such a course of proceeding as a general rule with him, in his decisions upon the word of God, and he will soon put an end, as far as concerns himself, to the mystery of godliness, and plunge into Socinianism at once. We need all the a, a, the alases of a Greek chorus, to express our grief at the terrible dilemma to which the use of carnal reason leads. 'Tis pitiful, 'tis wondrous pitiful.""

We now quote from a recent number of the Spiritual Magazine, the motto of which, even at this time of day, is the exploded text, 1 John v. 7!

"The march of intellect is the march of infidelity; and religious liberalism the compromising of the truth. In a word, they are the daughters of the mother of harlots, alias the Anti-Christ." "You cannot even go on in wickedness without God's permission; and if God permit you to persist in sin, it is in order to punish you for it, and that your punishment may be the more signally displayed."

The following makes one's blood to curdle :-" Respecting which I stated, that the saints or the righteous would rejoice over the final punishment and destruction of the ungodly. And I believe I went so far as to say, that I rejoiced there was such a place as hell. And what is hell but the place where Jehovah will display with inconceivable brightness the splendours of his justice? Justice, the basis of his throne, an attribute as dear to Jehovah, in his glorious Trinity of Persons, as those of his mercy, grace, and love! Ah, Sir! do angels and glorified spirits express any sorrow because there is such a place as hell? Do they, can they weep to see Jehovah glorified in the destruction of his adversaries? Sir! their sight and their feelings are not like ours; they do not partake of our amiable weaknesses; they are not clothed with cumbrous and sinful bodies like ours; they do not view things through such false media as we do; but, immersed in the splendours of Deity, they see, they feel, they act like him." What horrible sentiments! converting the Deity into a Moloch-the Deity, the Father of his creatures, the God of love and of all consolation, the Father of mercies! Such, however, is a

specimen of the food with which no insignificant portion of the religious community is fed. The instances given are but a small part of those we have noticed in no very extensive a looking over of the periodical literature of the orthodox body.

But there prevail amongst them sins not merely against sound doctrine and human feelings, but also against that liberty of thought and speech which both Christianity and reason permit and sanction.

We deeply regret that we have but too much evidence to substantiate this remark, and in particular that a most remarkable proof has lately been furnished by the report of an Institution supported by Christians of various denominations and of great respectability—we allude to the Stockport Sunday-school. Before we read the Report we did not deem it possible for a passage such as the following to proceed in this day from any body of Christians, certainly not from men so well-informed as are many of the supporters of the above-named institution. These are the words, and they appear to have been called forth by the recent visit of Taylor and Carlile to Stockport: "We do not precisely understand the principle upon which a man is condemned to death without the hope of mercy for killing the body, whilst the murderers of the human soul are allowed to brave the laws of the country, and escape with perfect impunity." If language has meaning, these words contain as truculent a proposal as history with its ensanguined page presents. It is proposed to treat Unbelievers-nay, all those who come under the assumed predicament of murdering the human soul, and therefore Unitarians, whose doctrines are often styled "soul-destroying"- yes, it is proposed to regard and to treat not only the infatuated and the mistaken, but also the enlightened, the upright, the benevolent, as murderers! The writers know not what spirit they are of. Certainly they are not of the spirit of Christ, and we have little doubt they are behind the spirit of the day. Our mind, in thinking over the barbarous language quoted, is forcibly carried back to the sitting of that Parliament which in mercy (so they stated) spared the life of Naylor, accused of blasphemy, and condemned him to be set twice in the pillory, to be whipped three times by the common hangman, to have his tongue bored through with a hot iron, to be branded in the forehead with the letter B, to be kept in prison and to hard labour at the pleasure of the Parliament, to be debarred from the use of pen, ink, and paper, and have no relief but what he earned by his daily labour. And the dreadful proposals which were in turn made by the members for the punishment of the offender, lead one to imagine what may have passed in the committee of the Stockport Sunday-school ere they were brought to identify the unbeliever and the alleged heretic with the murderer. We certainly do not charge the atrocious sentiment on which we are animadverting on each and all the respectable persons who support that institution. Where the blame lies we know not. We hope, for the honour of the Society and for the honour of Christianity, and in justice to themselves, that those who have neither part nor lot in the matter will come forward publicly to disclaim and to denounce the proposal implied in the above quotation.

From the above premises our conclusion is, that much yet remains for the friends of pure religion and Christian liberty to effect. A better spirit and

* See the Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq., edited by J. T. Rutt, Vol. I. pp. 153 -155.

a better faith-alas! how much need is there of both in but too many parts of our country! We therefore invite those who have both, not to hide their talent under a bushel. The sentiments they entertain are given them in trust to use for others' benefit. And solemn is the trust with which they are charged, and solemn will be the account of their stewardship to which they will be called. It is almost too clear to require a remark, that Unitarians possess the remedy to the various disorders we have described. Will they keep as well as possess it? Will they limit the efficacy of that truth which God wills should be as pervasive and salutary as the light of day? Surely they will be prompt to afford moral and spiritual soundness, to unseal the eye of the mind, to disenthral the shackled soul, to afford peace to the harassed heart, to lead men from the worship of a Tyrant to the worship of a Father-from warring against each other for diversities of belief, to feel the ties of a common Christianity and a common brotherhood-from the thraldom of systems to the liberty, the generous, humane, and unrestricted liberty, of the Scriptures.

We have heard it said, that the work of controversy, in relation to the principles of Unitarianism, is now ended. On the contrary, we hardly think it begun. It is true that here and there a David and a Goliah have met: but the tug of war is yet to come. The prevalent system and the system of Unitarian Christianity have yet to come into conflict, and this can take place only by our views being presented in the village, in the cottage, in the country, as well as in a few large towns-in tracts as well as volumes-by the voice of the missionary as well as of the minister. Something has been effected; infinitely more remains to be done ere we can be said to have discharged our duty. In fact, the great bulk of the community know nothing of our principles. This is true even of the more enlightened part, much rather of the uninstructed. How can our work be done, how can we prove true to the sentiments we hold, till every one has a real, and not a contingent, opportunity of knowing the truths of pure Christianity?

It is quite clear to our mind that the religious world are not characterized for exercising their powers of thought. Feeling, not thinking, is the peculiarity of the age. Even the leaders of the people yield themselves to the dominion rather of the heart than the head. And the whole history of the recent exertions and revivals is the history, not of intellectual activity, but of religious feeling. In the nature of things, a change may be expected. A re-action will come. In such a condition of society it is plainly the duty of Unitarian Christians, who have during the whole of the excitement been engaged with the intellectual bearings of religion, to come forward in order to hasten and direct the change, that, from the well-balanced action of thought and feeling, true religion, which is now less an affair of the heart than the head, may come forth in somewhat of its fair and harmonious proportions, as well as of its primeval energy.

This is our duty. Even now we are called to discharge it. While we delay, the opportunity passes.