Don. I know nothing of that; it may be just as you please.

Log. Ignorant wretch! Well; can he make what has been not to have been, or that a stick shall not have two ends? Is futurity to him as future, or as present? How does he do to bring nothing into existence, and to annihilate existence?

Don. I never bestow a thought on those things.

Log. What an oaf is this! Well, I must let myself down, I must suit myself to the meanness of his intellects. Tell me, friend! believest thou that matter can be eternal?

Don. What is it to me whether it exists from eternity or not? I did not exist from eternity. God is always my master and instructor. He has given me the knowledge of justice, and it is my duty to act accordingly. -I do not desire to be a philosopher; let me be a man.

Log. What a plague it is to have to do with such thick-headed creatures! I must proceed gradually with him. What is God?

Don. My sovereign, my judge, my father.

Log. That is not what I ask you; what is his nature?

Don. To be powerful and good.

Log. But whether is he corporeal or spiritual?

Don. How should I know.

Log. What! not know what a spirit is!

Don. Not I in the least: and what should I be the better for such knowledge? will it mend my morals, make me a better husband, a better father, a better master, a better member of society?

Log. A man must be absolutely taught what a spirit is, since it is-it is— it is-Well, we will let that alone till another time.

Don. I fancy instead of being able to tell me what it is, you will rather tell Ime what it is not. But after so much questioning, may I take the freedom to ask you a question? I was formerly in one of your temples, and why do you paint God with a long beard?

Log. That is a very abtruse question; the solution of which would be above your comprehension, without some preliminary instructions.

Don. Before you enter on your instructions, I must tell you a circumstance which I hope never to forget. I had just built a summer-house at the end of my garden: and one day sitting in it, I heard a mole and a chafer descanting on it: A superb edifice it certainly is, said the mole, and of very great parts must that mole have been who built it. A mole, forsooth! quoth the chafer; the architect of that pretty building could be no other than some chafer of an extraordinary genius. This colloquy put me on a resolution never to dispute.-Voltaire.

Councils. They talk (but blasphemously enough) that the Holy Ghost is President in their general Councils, when the truth is, the odd man is still the Holy Ghost.-Selden.

Close Shaving. The practice of shaving the beard, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator.-Gibbon.

Medical Orthodoxy.--Galen doth sometimes nibble at Moses.

Sir Thomas Browne.

CONFESSIONS OF A FALLING CHURCH.

FOUND IN THE STREETS; AND SUPPOSED TO HAVE FALLEN FROM THE POCKET OF A PROTESTANT CLERGYMAN.

"GROANING under the burthen of many and great infirmities, fast sinking beneath the torturing of complicated diseases, the consequence of an ill-spent life, fain would I ease my anguished heart by confessing (and surely I have not so far wandered from the ways of my fathers, that I should deem confession superstitious or unavailing) if it be but as a warning to others, my manifold transgressions. Fain would I atone my intolerable crimes by acknowledging my infamy. Listen to the detail of my misdeeds, and be taught therefrom to avoid the recurrence of the evil. There are those who speak of my youth as virtuous and beneficent, who describe me as an ardent enthusiast, mild and loving and self-denying. Woe is me! how have I been since changed. Can they have known my youth? My own recollections go not back to such conduct. I can recall no such feelings. The furthest stretch of my memory but reaches to a time when, indeed, I was weak and mild and courteously zealous; but I was not earnest or gentle. I knew my own weakness: I sought by craft and guile to blind those whose enmity I feared or whose assistance I needed. I recollect myself, in my nonage, only as a parasite and panderer to the rich, a state-tool in the hands of the more mighty. I fawned upon the powerful; and was admitted to favour. Then did my native arrogance break forth. There were some who spoke disdainfully of my origin, who called me the bastard of an Egyptian, who denounced me as a hypocrite: these men I punished with death. I took the name of one, who in his life had been like the sun for glory. I forged testimonials to prove my identity. I bribed the forgers; and slew, ay, with great torments, those who dared to dispute my assertions. I deceived the mightiest of the earth; I became greater than the mightiest; and set my foot upon the necks of princes. I now gave the rein to my natural malignity; I concealed no longer my lust of wealth and dominion. I sought out the benefactors of the world. I tortured them, and gladdened my fierce thought with their writhings. I shut up Knowledge in a gloomy cell: I would have destroyed her, had she not been immortal-but I buried her ever-flowing eloquence in the depth of monastic caverns, and set up barriers, to keep humanity from reach of her prison, as if it had been a home of the plague. How I laughed when I beheld neglected Hope wandering, half blind with grief, through the desolated earth, seeking in vain for the grave of Knowledge. Ha! ha! this was better than her death-a prolonging of torture. I said to man-This earth is mine, and the fulness thereof. Thou shalt worship none other Gods but me. The fools prostrated themselves in the dust before me. I bade them to murder each other-and they did so. I bade them maim and torment themselves they did that too. I cursed them--and yet they blessed me. mocked their agony; I was drunk with the pride of my ferocity. I tempted the patience of man yet further. I proclaimed virtue to be an evil thing; I consecrated vice to the service of the altar. I made a murderer a priest; a foul profligate I chose to be my high-priest. I forbade men to love one another. I denounced the love of woman as a deadly sin. I would have none born without my license; even the dead were not safe from my wrath.-Men, at length, were disgusted with my enormities; and, enervated by a debauched life, I began to fear their vengeance. I sold them liberty to sin even as I had sinned-hoping to weaken them, even as I was weakened : but it would not avail me. Then, in my terror, I assumed the long disused humility. I pretended to be reformed-and men believed me. Fools! how could my nature be altered?"—

[The remainder of the manuscript is too dirty to be transcribed.]

I

THE HISTORY OF AN ENGLISH PROTESTANT BISHOP. DEDICATED TO HIS GRACE, THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

"Holy! holy! holy!"-Old Song.

HE is the third son of a country squire, and devoted to the Church from his birth, not by the special inspiration of the Holy Ghost, but because the laws against simony allowed his father to purchase the presentation to a living. In his infancy he is alternately spoiled by ignorant nursemaids and a careless mother. At the age of eight years he is entrusted to the pedantry of a bigoted tutor, and permitted to recreate himself among grooms and stable-boys, who soon become his choice playmates. In due time he is sent to college, where he keeps a woman instead of a tutor, and admits a few stable-educated lords to his society. He soon becomes an adept in drinking, gaming, whoring and such like fashionable virtues; swears falsely on his entering the college, as a preparation for the priesthood; and is a liar when he comes out. Unable to pass his examination, he is plucked; and leaves the university with less morality than he left the nursery. He is now of age: family interest secures his ordination; as his vices are nothing more than the irregularities of youtha few seductions and one very slight adultery; no thefts heinous from their paltriness, nor poaching, nor murder-though he has handsomely rewarded his gamekeeper for shooting a poacher; he is ordained, and, if he does not lie this time, the Holy Ghost is delighted to inhabit the rotten carcase of a libertine. He takes his mistress to the opera, but having to preach a charity sermon before the Duke of, on the next morning, at some distance from London, he is obliged to leave even in the middle of the ballet, and reaches the church but just in time to enter the pulpit: his sermon is on purity of mind and the vanity of sensual delights; one portion of it is his own composition-an illustration of his subject drawn from the life of the Virgin Mary, occasioned by the confusion in his mind of the virgin in the service of the day with the Prima Donna of his last night's devotion: after the sermon he goes to the altar; consecrates the bread and wine-which have been paid for by money wrung from poor Dissenters, and the contributions of Infidels—and, being faint with fatigue, takes the holy sacrament to his great comfort; confesses himself a miserable sinner, and, thus qualified, absolves the congregation from their sins, that they may take in a new stock; administers the body and-blood of Christ in small portions to these professed offenders, lets them depart with the peace of God; finishes the remains of his divinity; and goes to dinner with his grace. He now obtains a second living, on condition that he shall never visit it but to receive his tithes : a poor widow is in arrear with her payments; the disciple of Jesus procures a distress-warrant, and murders the widow's son for resisting the attempted robbery :-this comes of promoting curs to be shepherds: they cannot help worrying the sheep. "These bishops trace their dignities in a right line from the Apostle Judas." After some time he marries, in order that he may beget scrofulous children to inherit his holy office, and partly that through his wife's interest he may get a third living and an archdeaconship. Having somehow picked up a little book-learning, he writes a volume to prove that a watch was made by hands, and that God must have been made by somebody. His performance is approved by the heads of the church, and ordered to be read, learned, and inwardly digested, by all aspirants for ecclesiastical honour. The author, if a borrower of other's thoughts may be called such, is promoted to a bishopric. He has long discarded his stable companions as too honest; his company is now more select, confined to well-born and titled prostitutes, and noblemen of the most distinguished depravity. He deprives a poor half-paid curate of his gown, and dooms him and his family to starvation, because he has profaned his church by preaching Christianity; and the following Sunday he thinks nothing of profaning the church by his own presence, though, in truth, he goes there to

no purpose. He drives through Woolwich, and beholds a brutal and cowardly officer torturing a private soldier who is in all respects a better man than himself he is horribly mangled and treated worse than a dog because he is of the blood of the unenfranchised: the worthy bishop takes home the officer to dine with him, and after dinner compliments him on his generosity and the kindliness of his disposition. The next Sunday he preaches, before royalty, a sermon on the duties of inferiors-that they should honour the civil magistrate, and pray for those who despitefully use them: their prayers will be heard, my Lord Bishop! On Monday he goes down to the House; makes a speech to prove that murder on a wholesale scale is christian and just, illustrating his argument by the preferment of Barabbas; and votes for war. He hears that the poor of his diocese are starving, and he promptly prescribes six hundred new churches to relieve their necessities, so that it may be said, In him this Scripture is fulfilled-What man is there of you, who, if his brother ask him for bread, will give unto him a stone? The poverty of the people, the consequence of church-exactions and legal robberies, having produced a pestilence, he obtains an order for a general fast, as a true specific for the general destitution; and composes a form of prayer, entreating of Almighty God that, as his visitation in the form of evil was to punish the impiety of his people, so he would be graciously pleased to withdraw his wrath, without visiting the pockets of his faithful clergy. On the fast-day he dines sumptuously with royalty, gets as near drunk as etiquette will allow, and cannot sleep for indigestion: the plague is stayed in consequence; and the holy man publishes a form of thanksgiving. A few days after he dies of apoplexy: and is not damned-for the devil will not have him.

The foregoing history is strictly true: it may not be all applicable to a single individual; but even that is possible under the present discipline of the Established Church.-Veritas:-From the "Star in the East."

WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL.

WINCHESTER a city in Hampshire, containing eight churches besides the cathedral. In the cathedral is the marble coffin of William Rufus. Here also were interred several Saxon kings and queens, whose bones were collected by bishop Fox, put into six small gilded coffins, and placed on a wall on the south side of the choir. Winchester was of great note in the time of the Saxons; and here Egbert was crowned the first sole monarch of England.

In former days, when the Romish superstition possessed the land, and her rapacious priesthood rode paramount, magnificent cathedrals were erected to God's honour, wherein the church-supported pauper might worship at the noble's side. But we have altered all that. Our reformed clergy—the robbers of the aged and the destitute-cannot afford even to repair their churches without troubling the community. The very uses of our cathedrals are changed; they are not now for God's service, but for the "Church of England's" service: raree shows and places of exhibition. The Pilgrims to Westminster Abbey go there to see the wax-work rather than to kneel at its shrines, though kings have costly chapels therein, and poets-a corner. And our metropolitan temple, St. Paul's, may (thanks to the liberality of the reformed possessors!) be seen any day in the week for two-pence. God's house and its many monuments-not of saints, but of the honourable company of butchers-for only two-pence! Verily, our fathers' religion was a superstitious mummery, and the increase of dissent in our own day is a most uncalled for and impudent thing! What is wanted? Have we not bishops and murderers' monuments and royal wax-work? What better teachers want we than our reformed clergy? Christ is nothing to them.

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REVELATIONS OF TRUTH.

CHAP. XVIII.

THERE was a certain number of men who had amassed unto themselves immense wealth and power, and much respect.

They sought diligently after knowledge; they instructed the ignorant; they provided for the poor; they ministered unto the old, and infirm, the sick, the wanderer, and the destitute.

They built churches; they endowed schools; they founded hospitals: and did much good.

Yet therewith was great evil and many abuses: the nation decided that their funds were more than sufficient to perform all those offices; their goods were confiscated, and intrusted to a body of reformers, men pledged to remedy the evil and to increase the amount of good.

How have they redeemed their pledge?

They have retained the immense wealth: the tithe of the produce of the land, paying nothing for seed or labour; the glebe; much copyhold land; the churches; the very burial-ground of the people.

They neither build nor repair churches; they support not the poor and destitute; they relieve not the sick, or the aged, or the wayfaring man; they are neither the most learned, nor encouragers of learning; they maintain no schools nor hospitals.

Nevertheless they retain the wealth of their predecessors: and the people are taxed anew to provide for the poor and ignorant, to repair the churches, to supply vestments for the priest.

And the twice-paid priest will neither marry nor bury without an additional fee.

And again, the possessors of the seventh of the value of the land yet make a property of the common burial-ground, and sell to the people a place wherein alone they may bury their dead.

And yet again, a stone may not be raised to mark the grave thus purchased, without again paying for the leave of him who had sold the ground wherein in justice he had no property.

And yet again, the grave of your fathers, or that for which your own money has been paid, may not be re-opened without another fee for permission of the priest.

And, after all this, you may not even remove the weed or moss that defaceth the beloved name, you may not renew the fading memorial of your sorrow, without license of the still domineering and exacting priest.

Ye who love the priesthood! love ye to be so mulcted? Ye who love not the priesthood! how long will ye endure its injustice and rapacity?

There was a man who for a certain end used a particular machinery.

In process of time wheel after wheel was added unto it, till it became very cumbrous and was managed with extreme difficulty; and being much worn, by reason of its great age and the clumsiness of its make, it required often patching and constant attention.

And the man saw that this continual mending was very expensive, and, after all, that his work was but bunglingly and slowly executed: the cost of the labour exceeding the value of the produce.

And this was the more vexatious, for his neighbours, who employed a simpler and cheap engine, obtained a speedier and better result.

So, after much hesitation, he pulled down the cumbersome and intricate machine, and in its stead employed the simpler power: and he found that there was less noise, less waste, less trouble; his work was quicker and better done; his outlay was little, and his profit great.

And he acquired vast wealth.

Incumbents-rather incumbrances.-Milton.

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