RULES.

I. That the Association be under the direction of a President, Vice-Presidents, a Treasurer, and a Committee, not exceeding twenty-five, who shall have the power of appointing Secretaries.

II. That Annual Subscribers of ten shillings and upwards, and Donors of five guineas and upwards, assenting to the Fundamental Resolutions, be Members of the Association.

III. That a General Meeting of the Association shall be held at least once in every year.

IV. That the Committee be chosen annually, out of the Members of the Association.

V. That the Office-bearers be, ex officio, Members of the Committee.

VI. That the Accounts of the Association be audited annually, by three Auditors, to be appointed at the Annual Meeting.

VII. That the Committee, of whom five shall be a quorum, shall have power to regulate all matters relating to their own Meetings, or those of the Association, to fill up vacancies in their body, and generally to conduct and manage the affairs and funds of the Association.

REPORT.

IN commencing the First Annual Report of the Protestant Association, it seems desirable to give such a brief sketch of the circumstances of its formation, of its principles, its views, its objects, and its plans, as may suffice to put the public in possession of all necessary information, and establish its claims upon their countenance and support.

The fearful advance of Popery, political and religious, is unhappily a fact which needs no laboured demonstration. Of its religious progress, masshouses, nunneries, seminaries, and colleges, with their attendant train of Romish ecclesiastics, multiplying over the face of this once Protestant island, afford a statistical evidence not to be disproved; whilst a body of Romanists holding in their hands the balance of contending parties, and so swaying the destinies of the nation, in a Legislature to which, a few short years ago, an oath of the idolatrous nature of the Popish superstition was an indispensable condition of admittance, testify no less irrefragably to its political advance. To this blaze of evidence some there are, doubtless, who can shut their eyes,

and who, while Popery is advancing round them, assure us that to believe in this advance is an enthusiastic fancy, the chimera of over-heated zeal. Reasoners of this class produce no conviction in our minds we must still continue to give credence to palpable and incontrovertible facts.

Nor is Popery, thus increasing in extent and power, an unaided assailant of our Protestant institutions; it has a zealous, although apparently incongruous, ally in the Infidelity, and so-called Liberalism of our times. Of an alliance which neither party is ashamed to avow, and which none are found to deny, it seems needless to offer any proof other than the observation of all may readily afford. But, in taking this view of the danger to which we stand exposed, it is not irrelevant or unnecessary to elucidate the nature of this union, which to some appears so anomalous, and even inexplicable. This anomaly is, in truth, rather apparent than real, the creeds of the Romanist and the unbeliever, though seemingly diametrically opposed, being, in reality, closely allied. One only doctrine separates the apparently opposite extremes of Popery and unbelief, and that doctrine is the infallibility of the Church renouncing this, the Romanist who assumes no other guidance is a ready-made Infidel; adopting this, the Infidel is a ready-made Romanist. To prove the necessity of an infallible authority in the Church, the Romanist denies that the truth of the Christian system can be established by its own evidences; and precisely the same arguments against the sufficiency of these proofs which have been urged

by Voltaire and Hume, have been advanced by zealous Papists, with this difference, and this alone, that from this supposed insufficiency the former deduce the falsehood of Christianity, the latter the necessity of infallibility in the Romish Church. Here, then, shall we find the secret of mutual forbearance and complacency between parties which should seem at first sight so entirely at variance ; and here, too, the secret of their common hatred to Protestant Christianity. The Infidel who regards all religion as a fable, believed by the credulous and asserted by the designing, and who desires to impress his unhappy sentiments upon general conviction, expects that this consummation will be brought about by the spread of intelligence, the march of intellect, and the growth of liberal ideas. Romanism and the belief in infallible authority, he considers as superstitious illusions, too gross to abide this increasing illumination; he regards them, therefore, as opposing no formidable barrier to the attainment of his ends; he views them, consequently, without apprehension and without acrimony. But the Protestant believer, whose faith is not dependent on the ignis fatuus of an infallible guide, but is established on the abiding basis of rational conviction, he regards as a more dangerous foe; and for the overthrow of Protestantism, as the capital enemy of his system, he sedulously toils. The Romanist, on the other hand, with a far deeper knowledge of human nature, is aware that the mind of man is not formed for unbelief, and that universal scepticism

can never be the permanent creed of any people: he views, therefore, with pleasure the triumph of Infidelity over Protestantism, in the expectation that from its ruins the Romish Church will ultimately reap a rich harvest of converts. Such are the views of these unholy confederates, and such are the enemies with which we have to deal.

Thus united by an easily explicable bond of alliance, but at all events united, these parties are jointly labouring for the overthrow of Protestantism, and of the institutions by which it is maintained.

Thus openly menaced by its avowed enemies, Protestantism is yet further endangered by the furtherance given to their unholy aims by the miscalled liberality of the rulers of the land,-by the notions, prevalent in high places, that those religious views and ends, which should with every Legislature be the objects of paramount importance, should be wholly lost sight of by the governors of mankind.

Such is, in general terms, a statement of the dangers to which the Protestantism of our country is now exposed,-dangers, the existence of which is not less incontrovertible than is the bounden duty of strenuous counteracting exertion. A conviction of this paramount obligation on the part of some zealous friends of Protestantism gave existence to the Protestant Association in the month of June, 1835. At that time the disclosure of the monstrosities of "Dens' Theology," at a public meeting at Exeter Hall, had let in the day-light of exposure on the unchanged enormities of Romanism; and a