that if the daughter of any parent in this assembly should fancy that she has what is called 'a religious inclination,' a 'mission,' and were to go into a nunnery, and were her parent to try to rescue her, the following curse would be pronounced upon him, and also upon any one who should take the property of the monasteries or of the nunneries-and many in our country actually hold such property in their possession just now

Such is the cursing subscribed to by Cardinal Wiseman, as pronounced in his own document, and which, when he has the pro posse, according to his oath, he will pronounce with all the proper accompaniments."

We have left ourselves little space to notice Mr. Knowles' volume. As the contribution of a layman, and especially as written by a man of genius, it is well worthy of perusal. It abounds with vigorous statement and manly reasoning; and the name it bears will render it not unlikely to find admission into quarters where a work on the topic by a regular theologian would not have found entrance. While the main

subject of the treatise is the doctrine of transubstantiation, the author sometimes diverges to deal most formidable strokes at other dogmas of Popery, fastening on his antagonist with formidable tenacity, driving him from every refuge, and routing him completely from the field.

We give the following passage as a specimen of the method in which Mr. Knowles handles the Cardinal, and the dogmas of that Church to which Dr. Wiseman belongs. He is speaking of the Romish practice of Communion in one kind.

"But why does your church withhold the cup? Because the cup denounces her dogma. If the water, as well as the cup, be changed into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ, what need of the cup? It is superfluous!-though Christ thought otherwise. And why did Christ think otherwise? Because his view of the cup bore no affinity, whatsoever, to that which your church inculcates. But this is not all. If twenty laymen communicate at your Supper, each receives into himself an entire Christ: whereas, were the same number to partake of the cup, a twentieth part of Christ is all that would fall to the lot of each! Thus does your dogma perish by the outrageous contradiction and absurdity which it manifestly involves; and hence it is, and not from any apprehension that the contents might be spilled, or that 'profanation and other evils' might attend the exhibiting of them; that the church of the twelfth century withheld the cup from the laity; and that the Council of Constance, after the lapse of three hundred years, discovered the expediency of establishing the practice by a formal confirmation. But the Supper of your church is, in every respect, a departure from that of the Lord. He took bread and brake it; your church breaks no bread in administring to the laity!--A whole wafer is not broken bread, any more than a whole loaf. Christ blessed the bread before he broke it, and then handed the fragments to his disciples; your church blesses the wafers, which correspond with the fragments; and not the lump of dough out of which she makes them. The apostles participated; your communicants receive entire. The apostles partook of bread and wine as types of the separated body and blood of the Lord; your communicants receive the body and blood of Christ united. In the Lord's Supper the Apostles contemplated a type of the Lord, extended upon the cross, when, the blood having streamed from His hands, and feet, and side, He gave up the ghost; your communicants recognise the re-union of His body and blood, together with His spirit. You teach your communicants to believe, that in celebrating the Lord's Supper they adopt the only means of enjoying eternal life; Christ taught His apostles to understand that His object in founding the rite, was, simply, to supply them with an occasion of remembering Him. Your church's Supper is no more the Lord's Supper than Mahomet is Christ, or than the god of the nether world, is the God of Heaven!"

We may likewise subjoin the following eloquent and nervous passage.

"To glance at certain adjuncts of your passive deity, permit me to inquire where it was that your church first lit up her altar and her priest, for no such priest or altar is to be met with in the records of the Second Dispensation? Where, I ask, did she light upon them? There, where she found her image,-in the temple of the heathen? Through lust she envied the heathen priest; and through lust she coveted the heathen altar. She saw that the latter was rich-the repository of various offerings, ranging from the most humble to the most sumptuous-not contributed for the

relief of suffering flesh and blood, but lavished upon wood and stone; and she saw that the former stood like a god, with crowds of worshippers upon their knees before him. Nor did it content her to offer up the spiritual incense of supplication, thanksgiving and praise. Her fleshly eye and nostril longed for the censer and its cloud of perfume! She fondly persuaded herself that she might render good service to Christ, not by achieving a victory over Jupiter, but by robbing him; and accordingly, she made a compromise with heathenism, by grafting its worship on that of the Living God-seducing, not converting-giving, it is true, the outlines of a more rational belief, but filling them up with the lights and shadows, and colouring of superstition! And she prospered, after the imagination of her own carnal heart !—prospered, till she became a wonder to herself—till, in the intoxication of self-idolatry, she claimed equality with Christ-superseded Christ-cast almost wholly off the law of His Word, and stood irresponsible upon the code of her own! That was the day of her consummate glory, was it not, when she first proclaimed to her subjects, "The church declareth this and this"—not God, but the church! The Church decrees it!" No reference !-no appeal! The authority of the Trinity, a blank, in comparison with that of the church-the ground and pillar, not of faith, like the spiritual building which Christ and his apostles raised-but of falsehood, fraud, and infidelity! How paramount in magnificence of holy achievement stood then your church, when the sovereigns of the earth did brutish implicit homage to her; when Sigismund broke his pledge to quench her thirst for the blood of John Huss; and when a British king, at her mandate, descended from his throne to perform a slavish act of penance at the shrine of a pestilent priest!-when, in compelled or beguiled preference for her tender mercies,' mankind forewent 'the sure mercies of David;' and, instead of receiving into their hearts and minds the promised Spirit of God, threw them wide open, to the entrance of whatever spirit it pleased her to breathe into them; consenting, through her seductions or threats, to crawl, her abject slaves, instead of standing erect, at the proclamation of the apostle, the freemen of the Lord!'

"But Christendom is of your church's making! Ah what, through a lapse of centuries have we contemplated in Christendom? the fruit of Christianity, peace, forgiveness of injuries, brotherly love? Or war, revenge, and hatred? True, the Redeemer said, I came, not to send peace, but a sword;' but it ill befitted a church that calls itself His, to have become the instrument of fulfilling the prophecy. Do I, Sir, overstate the the case, to the amount of a jot, when I assert that your church has improved on the Jewish adage, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth ?' Professing to honour Christ, what has she taken up? Her cross, as He commanded? No, Sir, but an image of His! No, Sir, but the sword!— no image, but an unsightly, dread, adhorred, reality! "Touch me and perish is the compendium of the Gospel, which she has preached to mankind in the name of God! Measureless retribution!' has constituted her vital creed, inculcated by her own example. Yes, Sir; the hand that claims to hold the miraculous cup, has more than ouce flourished the sword; and the lips which have countless times received the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus, have more than once given the signal for slaughter; or proclaimed a Te Deum to celebrate its consummation! History, well authenticated history, gives your church credit for expertness and zeal in the use of the carnal weapon, and among its victims numbers the brethren and sisters-men, women and children-of churches which could boast, as well as she could, a direct apostolical descent; though they did not emulate, as she has done, the merit of departing from, or corrupting the apostolic faith-in whose unpretending houses of prayer neither altar nor image

was to be found; whose ceremony recognised no second mediator in Mary, no subordinate intercessors in the saints; whose ministers were pastors, not priests; whose creed gave no sanction to the dogma of transubstantiation, or of purgatory; whose discipline was a stranger to auricular confession-that instrument of reciprocal contamination; whose sole trust for salvation was that which Scripture told them it ought to be, 'The faith as it is in Jesus;' and who for such fidelity, in the sight of God-but heresy in the regards of your church-were committed, by her holy ordination or sanction, to the correction of the sword, and its concomitants-rapine, pollution, conflagration, and slaughter! Merciful God! what a heresy to call for extirpation! adhesion to thy sacred laws, and disregard of dogmas, rank with the craft and lusts of unregenerate, designing, truthless, and worthless men.

“But the sword did not content your church. Hell offered her the Inquisition, and she snatched at the gift of hell. Within, the dungeon, the rack, with every engine of torture which fertile, quick invention could suggest; and, without, the gibbet and the stake were placed at her acceptance and she blessed them! Tell me not, Sir, that the murders which ensued in thousands of thousands, were the work of the secular arm; when it is proved by documents, the truth of which defy all questioning, that the heart which animated that arm, and kept it in full employment, had its seat in the bosom of your Church! Then was the epoch of her most holy triumph, when the charities of our common nature stood nerveless upon the earth, and looked helplessly on!-when, from the palace to the cottage, the door was implicitly flung open at the summons of the HOLY OFFICE, and the hearth or the bed surrendered-without daring to offer expostulation or entreaty-the father or the mother, the daughter or the son, to abide the pleasure of the secret, ghostly tribunal, and the handling of its savage officials!-when the court of trial was the place of execution-'a hell upon earth!'--a hell, the consigners to which were the guilty, and the consigned the innocent!-a human hell, where fiends presided in the shapes of men, and urged the throe and the writhing of convulsive, maddening agony; feasting on the victim, and listening to his groans, as the glutton does to the music that accompanies a banquet, on which he gloats; and from which he never rises till he is gorged !"

In the paragraph which we subjoin, the present vicar of St. Peter is belaboured as roughly as his darling child the Cardinal.

"A masquerading sceptred priest, who, but the other day, as it were, fled, in a borrowed livery, from his own convulsed dominions!-fled to to the first arm, under which he could skulk for shelter; and squatted there, though it dripped with the blood of recent, merciless slaughter!-with Roman Catholic blood-the blood of a neighbouring portion of the beloved children '!--the blood of a groaning people, goaded and maddened into insurrection, by a tyrant, before whose whose gust the binding oaths of treaties had given way, like rotten packthread, in the knotting! It was a day of rejoicing to your Church, was it not—a day never to be forgotten by her-when, as we were told, the royal runaway priest, and the royal butcher, partook, in concert, of the blessed Eucharist "!a rite of which the former never once omitted to partake while the bombardment of the holy city was going on! And still he partakes of it, glanc

In spite of the most valid and numerous doctrines to the contrary, the church' is now so ashamed of the Inquisition, that she does not blush to characterise it as a purely political institution,

ing, with thankful eye, from the cup, which, as he says, contains his God, to the bayonets that allow him to lift it to his lips in safety! The fidelity of his immediate beloved children' is not to be trusted; the temples and shrines, with their images, in duplicates upon duplicates, of Mary and the saints, environing him, are not to be trusted; the Holy Spirit, with which he declares himself to be anointed, is not to be trusted; the God, by whose appointment he fills the apocryphal chair of Peter, is not to be trusted. He can put faith in nothing but the arm of flesh, and that a foreign one !"

ORCADIAN SKETCHES,

No. III.

Br DAVID VEDDER.

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy ;

but never one more resplendent than that of the 14th July, 18-, when the magnificent loch of Stennis was seen, for the first time, glowing with the reflected radiance of the newly risen sun, like a miniature ocean of molten gold, gently chaffing against an emerald margin, purling, and murmuring, and singing through the contracted channel at the bridge of Broigar, like the music of a fairy procession, and alive with countless aquatic birds, of all tribes and colours, skimming the surface in quest of prey, or disporting in ten thousand intricate evolutions on the wing. I am aware that certain captious and frivolous objections may be made to the unrivalled beauty of the scene by some matter-of-fact person, who, born and bred among forest scenery, rashly concludes that the landscape must be defective which is destitute of trees-tame, spiritless, unanimated; but dost thou not know, O, querulous caviller, that

"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,"

and that the sketcher, who looks to the land of his nativity through a retrospect of more years than I care to enumerate, is apt to invest it with all the beauties that truth will admit of; and if there is an approximation to exaggeration, he may, at least, hope for lenient censure. On the banks of this magnificent sheet of water are to be found the far-famed Druidical circles, known all over the insular province as the "standin' stanes o' Stennis," and, with the exception of Stonehenge, the largest in her Majesty's wide dominions. Regarding them history is silent, nor does the palsied tongue of tradition mutter aught in relation to them; conjecture itself is lost in the darkness of remote antiquity, or bewildered amidst conflicting opinions and antagonistic systems. The Norwegian Sagas, so minute in detailing the pagan rites