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on invulnerable vessels and capable of silencing, in case of need, the fire of Mayence, Coblentz, and Ehrenbreitstein.'

"The same paper asserts that as soon as a battalion has received the Chassepot rifles and learnt how to use them, it is sent off to the eastern frontier. Another provincial journal, the Moselle Independent, says that the regiments of the artillery train are, in number of men, above their full strength.

"The Pesth paper, Magyar Orszag, referring to the interview of Salzburg, says:

"In case of a war with Prussia the Emperor Napoleon cannot reckon upon the active co-operation of Austria. It is only by neutrality that Austria is disposed to prove her friendship for France.'

"The Hungarian journal thinks, however, that Russia intends to act in the East next spring, and that then neither Austria nor the other European States can remain inactive, and it believes that Russia will find Austria and France combined against her. The fact is that the intentions and state of preparations of Russia are a puzzle to politicians, and the most diverse opinions are held concerning them. That Russia has fomented the insurrection in Candia, now apparently stamped out, and the rising in Bulgaria-which exists, although we hear little of it, and it has not yet taken a very active form-and that she is doing her best to get up a disturbance in Servia, nobody doubts."

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IN THE TIME OF TROUBLE.

FEW looking about them, and not steeled against the entrance of impressions from the outside world, fail to reach in the hours that rush past deeply startling and solemnly suggestive lessons. Ancient institutions we profoundly loved, and thought lasting as the days of our dispensation, are searched to the very core, and revolutionized, or swept off the earth as cumberers to the ground; institutions, also, which we looked up to as among the foremost guardians of truth—the safest guides of the wanderer—the teachers of the ignorant-depositaries of love and peace-under the shadows of which our forefathers rested and were refreshed-have at last perverted or betrayed the sacred trust with which they were honoured and freighted, and have turned aside to lies. Their enemies, long watching for their failure, appeal to the change we cannot deny, and now seek to gratify their passion for destruction by attempts to destroy not only the offending institutions, but all of the same kind, though not guilty in the same degree,

just as an indignant people in Scotland, at the Reformation, not only pulled down the monasteries and convents, which richly deserved their fate, but in their fury some of the cathedrals also. Church and State, parliament and constitution, laws and ancient usages, the rights of men and the crowns of sovereigns, are at length placed in the crucible to be tested as by fire.

The Bishop of Peterborough, in his charge of October 8, 1867, justly observes:-"There was a spirit of revolt against all authority, and a desire to reconstruct society. Institutions, laws, churches must all be cleared away if their site were needed. Could philosophy do without God? Could democracy subsist without God? These were questions to be solved over the whole civilized world, and it was by actual experiment that the issue must be tried. All former efforts to create systems of philosophy and ethics without the aid of the wisdom from on high had signally failed. A succession of men, endued with mighty powers, but voluntarily placing themselves 18 centuries after Christ in the intellectual condition of heathen sages, had, after all, only brought the thinking world to something worse than the helpless scepticism in which ended the wondrous wisdom. of Greece. System after system had proved the impotence of men to discover the highest truth without divine guidance, but each false system, though powerless to create, had been powerful to destroy. In the last and the beginning of the present century it was

material atheism which attracted men-an atheism which denied all existences but that of matter, and regarded thought as a mere secretion of the brain. To this blank materialism had succeeded a system which confounded the infinite and finite, and beheld God in all things. This in its superficial aspect was nobler than materialism, but it was not less fatal to all that was noble and good. It, indeed, made mannay, the very dust of the earth-God, but it made God human, animal, and material. It degraded what was high by exalting what was low, and, after all, it was better to deny God than to debase Him. Positivism now claimed exclusive possession of truth, and declared all that was not objective and material to be mere hypothesis. After quoting a passage from Spinoza, which described free-will as a chimera, justified the indulgence of animal appetites, and declared that a compact disappeared when its utility ceased, the bishop remarked that such systems might for a time prevail, but men would not for ever forego their Divine birthright, their glorious destiny, and their faith in the absolute, the true, the beautiful, and the good. The religious instinct, as imperative to the unsophisticated man as that which induced the bird to build its nest, the faith in Providence, in unselfishness, in justice, in all the principles on which morality, law, and religion were based, could not be permanently suppressed. The illusion in which men sometimes indulged that historical, philosophical, or scientific subjects could always remain in the confinement of

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books and schools had been dispelled; and, though religion had had and still possessed more power in England than on the Continent, the decay of faith was but too clearly indicated by the tone of our popular journals in speaking of the mysteries of religion, such as miracles and prayer, as well as by the tales which formed people's pastime and by the sensuous poetry of the day. Both at home and abroad there was a feeling in favour of a socialistic revolution. Were we to look for a socialist as well as a democratic revolution in England, or was it a fraction only of our working men that cast off all religious and moral restraints? If so, as he believed, there was hope that the democracy of England would hold the same place among democracies as our past Government had held among the Governments of the world, and that the judicial murders and the shameful corruption which had stained other revolutions would not stain ours. It was to God only and to His judgments that a democracy was accountable, for if it were not a law to itself no human power could restrain it. Even now a slight menace could paralyze government and legislation among us. Even now the law was impotent in our great towns against a terrorism which had leaders who combined boldness and hypocrisy, and which had relentless executioners, the sympathy of numbers, and the evil eloquence which extenuated or justified wickedness. A vast conspiracy could overspread the land; what if there should be a frantic lust of enjoyment, the fear of which only a few years ago cast France at

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