surprised at any thing that followed. This same army, promised Charles a refuge from his traitorous English subjects, and when they had got him in their power, fixed the price of his betrayal, and were thus the direct and willing means of his murder. they could not but contemplate the fatal result.

For

Partial good resulted, it is true, from this worse than Popish tyranny. Men found to their sorrow, that they had exchanged, the comparatively gentle constraint of episcopal discipline, for such it was, notwithstanding individual acts of tyranny, for the iron fetters of a presbyterian inquisition; which punished with ruinous fines, imprisonment, and death, a word, a look, or a speculation, which could be tortured into disaffection with their oppressors. The reign of terror could not be perpetuated beyond the short despotism of Cromwell; who, with all his faults, and tyrant and usurper as he was, had some noble qualites about him; and the nation with a revulsion of feeling, commensurate with their former sufferings, rushed to the church, as the truest friend under Providence, to their souls, bodies, and estates.

But there was a revulsion of another kind, limited at first to a few; but which, afterwards, became as fatal to the doctrinal soundness of the teachers and members of the church, as the former might seem to be eminently conducive to its political reestablishment. It was impossible for intelligent men, not to be disgusted with the enormous crimes, which had been perpetrated under the sacred name of religion. The sovereign himself (Charles II,) could not but look with feelings of aversion, upon the fanaticism, to which his father had fallen a martyr; and he himself had barely escaped a similar fate, from the same inauspicious motives of action. The step in some minds averse, either through a faulty education or indolence, to the trouble of distinguishing between error and truth, is but a short one from disgust at the abuse of serious things, to a rejection of their proper use. It was Charles' misfortune, to suffer under the influence of both these obstacles to a sound judgment. Hobbes, of Malmesbury, a name destined to infamous repute, as the industrious opponent of religion, natural as well as revealed, was the tutor of Charles, when Prince of Wales. Lord Herbert, of Cherbury, had been, a few years before the time of Hobbes, silently preparing the way for infidelity, by forming deism into a system. After the Restoration, several powerful writers began to inculcate tenets, which in a happier age of the church, would have been noticed, only to be universally

condemned. But any tenets, however subversive of the truth, which promised men liberty from the oppressive tyranny of the sectaries, was welcomed by the unreflecting, and they are always a very large class in society,-without inquiry into their real nature and tendency. Hobbes was followed by Blount, Toland, and Lord Shaftsbury; the latter, at one time, a favourite minister of Charles; Anthony Collins, to whom Locke was so enthusias tically attached, that in his correspondence with him, he calls him, "a man whom he values in the first rank," Then followed Woolston, in his attempt "to allegorize away the miracles of scripture, as Collins had done the prophecies:" Tindal, Morgan, Lord Bolingbroke, Chubb, and Hume, continued, though with unequal ability and success, to wage their anti-christian war.

It was impossible for churchmen to breathe long in so tainted an atmosphere, and not suffer in common, with all others, from its effects. And the church is only now being partially purified from its malign influence. We have, therefore, little reason to look back with satisfaction, upon a period so disastrous to the church and state; though some good, as is ever the case, has resulted from extensive evil.