yea, they are rather found to be feignedly wrought of them which are but false Christians. Whence then shall we know it, but only by the Scriptures?"

Sir Henry Wotton made an excellent answer, when asked by a Romanist the usual question, "Where was your religion before the time of Luther?" and he replied, “Where your religion never was in the Bible." It would seem better policy in Popish priests not so obviously to withhold God's written message from man, as it appears like Ahab's feeling against Micaiah, the prophet of God, "I hate him, for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.”

Leo XII., in 1824, renewed the Papal anathema against the Holy Scriptures, "those poisoned pastures," and the present Pope has strictly prohibited Bible reading; yet any Christian who professes to guide his life by the rule of God's word, without ever reading it, acts as unaccountably as if he put a sun-dial in the shade, and professed to measure his time according to its dictates.

Men seem no more intended to read the Bible by proxy, than to eat or to drink by proxy. It would i requite the kindness of any deceased benefactor, for a legatee to relinquish the privilege of reading the events recorded for his special instruction of a life devoted to his benefit, and of studying the last injunctions left him on a death

bed, even though an obliging friend might offer to examine the purport of what had been said, and to report the conditions on which an important legacy was bequeathed for the survivor's advantage. Protestants prefer examining for themselves, "lest the light that is in them be darkness," and do not incline to treat their Bible as the people of Thibet treat the Grand Llama, which is locked up by the priests, that no ordinary votaries may have access to the object of their veneration.

In exacting by the generality of Christians a total divorce from Scripture in their own language, the Roman decretal claims for the Pope an infallible right of deciding in opposition to the Bible, of superseding law, being himself above all law, and of setting aside the Gospel by determining its meaning as seemeth him good. There can be no such despotic interpreter necessary, however, to explain all that is essential to salvation, for truly, as St. Chrysostom says, "Who is there to whom all is not manifest which is written in the Gospel? Who that shall hear Blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart,' would require a teacher to learn any of these things which are here spoken? As also the signs, miracles, histories, are they not known and manifest to every man?"

Chrys. Hom. 3.

Here we find this primitive Father a Protestant! but as Erasmus observes in his epistle to the Bishop and Cardinal of Mentz, "It is plainly found that many things in Luther's books are condemned for heretical, which in the books of Bernard and Austin are read for holy and orthodox." In fact, the most important truths of the Bible are as distinct to the eye of an earnest Christian as the flowers that shine through a solid ball of crystal.

The universal heart of human nature is weighed down by the solemn consciousness that all, without exception, are helpless sinners, deservedly under the wrath of an offended God. It is singular that every religion, Pagan, Hindoo, or Mahometan, the worshippers of Moloch, or the worshippers of the Sun, are every one seeking, by austerities, to propitiate an angry Deity; but the Christian alone is taught that his only selfinflicted suffering should be the avoiding those sins which brought pain and death into the world, but not to attempt atoning for that which is already atoned for by his one only Mediator. The Holy Bible stands as a rock, high and conspicuous in the boundless ocean of existence, and he who obtains a firm footing there, is safe for all eternity. Let him not seek elsewhere any untried floating plank in the stormy passage of life; but, tossed as he may be by fears, sorrows,

doubts, and perplexities, still, if his soul be but anchored on the written promises of God, he shall "never be confounded." In Scripture man finds all necessary to be known respecting the enigma of his own existence, and the divinely appointed remedy for his ruined state. There he reads that many shall be rejected as utter strangers, who have no better plea for mercy than that they have done mighty works in the name of our Lord, unless they have lived "as becometh saints." The mere titles Christian, Orthodox, Catholic, or Churchman, will no more avail those who, like Jews and Pagans, blindly yield to authority rather than exercise private judgment, than the claim of the Jews when they pleaded, "Are we not Abraham's children ?"

The Papal remedy for sin is to buy an absolution, the cost of which not being known in Protestant England, where Christians hope to be pardoned without money and without price," the following list is copied from a folio published at Paris in 1520. "For a layman murdering a layman, 7s. 6d. For him that killeth his father, mother, or wife, 10s. 6d. For him that has committed perjury, 9s." These would be considered very reasonable terms in Bow-street! Such bargains, however, are not obsolete even now, as many travellers have returned from Rome lately bringing a purchased absolution sold by Pius IX.

himself, for all their sins and for the sins of all those friends whose names they chose to insert in a blank left for the purpose, thus making each purchaser his own Pope. The author had a kind offer that her name should be inserted in one such extensive absolution which she saw some years ago, bought by the late Sir Adam Fergusson. Dr. Thomas Secker mentions, that in his time similar indulgences were sold to any number of strangers, for any number of crimes, price ten shillings! Surely this is a very clumsy cheat, which to educated Englishmen indicates a strange contempt for the human understanding!

When the jailor at Philippi came to the Apostles, asking, "What must I do to be saved?" these disciples in no degree referred the enquirer to their own authority,- they did not say, "Come to us as priests, and confess,"—they did not sell him an indulgence nor produce any old bones to be worshipped, nor desire him to pray at random to all the Saints, nor to trust in the Virgin Mary, but they simply replied, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." The object of every false superstition always is to interpose a barrier between the sinner and that Saviour, who is "waiting to be gracious," and who says, "Before you call I will answer, and while you are yet speaking I will hear." No language could be plainer than that of Christ on that occasion, when "the common people heard

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