earnestly and fearlessly stated the result of my inquiriesleaving the arguments and observations to make their own impression. This mode, through the Divine permission and blessing, I shall continue to pursue, regardless of the censures and the frowns of man. Having the testimony of conscience, and acting under the solemn inspection of HIM to whose observation all hearts are open, it will be my strenuous endeavour, while life and health are continued, to extend the knowledge of pure Christian truth, and to inculcate and enforce the practice of virtue and piety.

con

May that which is sown in weakness be raised in power; may the Unitarian cause, which is the cause of God, of Christ, and of his Apostles, enlarge its boundaries in this town and its neighbourhood; and may it proceed quering and to conquer," until all shall believe and confess that there is only "ONE GOD, THE FATHER, and one Mediator between God and men, THE MAN CHRIST JESUS!" Amen.

LINES, (by Mr. Roscoe,)

On receiving from Dr. Rush, of Philadelphia, during the war, a piece of the tree under which William Penn made his treaty with the Indians, which was blown down in 1812, and the part sent converted to the purpose of an inkstand.

From clime to clime, from shore to shore,

The war-fiend raised his hateful yell;
And 'midst the storms that realms deplore,
Penn's honour'd Tree of Concord fell.
And of that Tree, that ne'er again

Shall Spring's reviving influence know,
A relic o'er the Atlantic main
Was sent the gift of foe to foe.
But though no more its ample shade
Wave green beneath Columbia's sky,
Though every branch be now decay'd,

And all its scatter'd leaves be dry;
Yet 'midst this relic's sainted space,
A health-restoring flood shall spring,

In which the angel-form of Peace
May stoop to dip her dove-like wing.

1

So once the staff the prophet bore,
By wondering eyes again was seen
To swell with life through every pore,
To bud afresh with foliage green.
The wither'd branch again shall grow,
Till o'er the earth its shades extend;
And this-the gift of foe to foe—

Become the gift of friend to friend.

Extract from the Second Volume of the Life of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, D. D., Lord Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore; with a critical Examination of his Writings, by Reginald Heber, D. D., Lord Bishop of Calcutta. (Published in 1824.)

PAGE 41. "It is, however, necessary to observe, that the power which is here claimed for each Christian church, of excluding from its public ministry the teachers of erroneous doctrines, is claimed for the Church only in its spiritual capacity, and that it has no reference to those who are without its pale, and involves in itself no civil pains or penalties whatever. Such penalties, it cannot be too constantly born in mind, the church of him, whose kingdom was not of this world, has no power or title to inflict; and for the civil ruler to inflict them on religious grounds, Taylor has clearly shewn to be at once an intrusion, a tyranny, and an absurdity.' If indeed, Taylor may be thought in his zeal for the Liberty of Prophesying, to have made it too completely independent of ecclesiastical controul, he may be said, on the other hand, to have been too bounded and cautious in his views of civil toleration, when he gives a general power to the civil ruler to repress or punish whatever he may be taught to consider as blasphemy or open idolatory. (Sect. xiii. 1, 2; Vol. VIII. p. 117.)

"The first of these crimes, if not very accurately defined, might involve in its net very many descriptions of persons whom Taylor would have been sorry to behold the victims of religious severities. The Deist and the Jew, who maintain Christ to be an impostor, unquestionably blaspheme the Divine Teacher of Christians; the modern Unitarian,. who maintains him to be a mere man of men, the son of Joseph, as surely detracts from the dignity of that person whom the majority of Christians adore, and by departing

from the apostles' creed, has completely excluded himself from its protection; and if known idolatory may be repressed by violence, or punished by the sword, we justify at once all the odious severities of the Spaniards and the Portuguese towards their heathen subjects, if we do not involve in the same snare our fellow-christians of the Greek and Roman communions.

"It is probable, indeed, as none of these persons were at that time in any immediate danger of persecution, (since for the case of the Roman Catholics he afterwards provided, and the Socinians had not as yet advanced to their modern pitch of free-thinking,) that Taylor was not anxious to pursue his own principles to an extent which might give offence to those whom he desired to conciliate. It is certain, that his arguments against punishing men for following the dictates of an erroneous conscience, as well as that which is taken from the dishonour done to Christianity, by supposing it to need any other defence than those weapons of argument and good life by which it subdued the world, are no less cogent against all persecution whatever, than against that which has for its subject the minor dissensions of Christendom.

"Nor is there any real weight in the difficulty which appears to have perplexed him, in what manner to reconcile the duty incumbent on every magistrate to repress all open acts of sin and impiety, with the toleration which the same magistrate may be called on to grant to the worshipers of idols, or to the assailant of Christianity. That difficulty arises from a misapprehension of the magistrate's power, whose office, as it is purely civil and secular, has no direct concern with the souls of men, and who is neither bound nor authorized to interfere between man and his Maker, or to take on himself the punishment of offences against God, except where those offences disturb the temporal peace, or endanger the temporal property of the subject.

Thus, as idolatry, abstractedly considered, is a crime against God, and not against man, it is a crime the punishment of which God may be conceived to have reserved to himself, and which the secular prince is not called on to punish or to repress, any otherwise than by his own example, and by securing to his subjects the means of religious instruction. Nor can the precedent of the Jewish law avail to lead us to a different conclusion; since, that which

might be expedient and necessary under the peculiar circumstances of their theocracy, is no example for us who live under dispensations entirely different; and since, though God may be conceived, as He did in this instance, to delegate a part of his power to a particular magistrate, yet other magistrates, who have no such express commission or direct command, would be guilty of usurpation no less than cruelty, if they presumed to determine on the conduct of another man's servant.'

"But if the particular species of idolatry complained of, be attended with obscene or cruel rites, or if the public processions or ostentatious sacrifices of its votaries, have an evident tendency to shock the feelings of the majority of their fellow-citizens, and disturb the public tranquillity, the magistrate is not only permitted, but obliged in conscience to punish or restrain them according to his power, and in such measure as the interests of the community under his charge may require.

"Thus the Persians did ill under Xerxes, in destroying the Grecian temples, because not only has a foreign power no right to interfere in the national religion of any state, but because the idolatry of Greece involved no practices that we know of, inconsistent with the general peace of society. But the Roman Senate did well in repressing and punishing the Bacchanalians, because they had sufficient evidence of the debauchery and violence with which those infernal rites were celebrated. Nor is it useless to observe, that the picture which is handed down to us of the open whoredom and human sacrifices with which the gods of the Canaanites were worshiped, would be in itself, and without any divine injunction, a good reason why Moses should have prohibited, under the severest penalties, the practice among his own people of such forms of pollution and bloodshed.

"In like manner, though it would, indeed, be the height of wickedness and folly, to forbid the Hindoos, in their own country, to address their devotions to whatever idols, and in whatever form, they pleased; yet, if certain Hindoos resident in London, were to institute a public procession in honour of Juggernaut, it would be no persecution to command them to perform their acts of faith in private; while, if in the course of those acts any thing actually criminal took place, it would not be the less an offence against the laws, and punishable by the hand of justice,

however it might have arisen from the dictates of a real or pretended superstition. Nor, whatever religious prejudice might be pleaded, did our Indian government do wrong in forbidding the murder of female children, nor would it do wrong (however a real or mistaken policy may forbid the measure) in preventing the sacrifice of widows on the funeral piles of their husbands.

"The distinction which has been laid down as to actions, will apply with equal accuracy to doctrines. Those which are immediately, or in their evident and avowed consequences, injurious to civil society, and those only, are fit. subjects for suppression and punishment; and they are so, not because they are offences against God, but because they are dangerous to mankind. Thus if a man maintains in' argument the falsehood of the Apostles' Creed, he is, perhaps, a blasphemer, certainly an infidel or a heretic; but his crime is not one which it belongs to the magistrate to punish.

"But the man who persuades his neighbour to insurrection, murder, incest, a promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, or the invasion of private property; the preacher of Atheism, who lays the axe to the root of all moral obligation, and the impugner of a future state of retribution, who deprives morality of its only effectual sanction-such men as these, being common enemies to the peace of the world, are to be put down and repressed by whatever severities: are necessary to abate the nuisance. With these exceptions, I know no limit to the toleration of speculative opinions. It is true, indeed, that the teacher of any opinion, false or true, who seeks to inflame in his cause the bad passions of the multitude, who violates the decency due even to established error, and who assails not only the opinions, but the characters and motives of those opposed to him; will, under all circumstances, be deserving of general indignation, and, under particular circumstances, may be a proper subject of legal coercion. But this is as

a breaker of the public peace, not as an enemy to that religion which, as it is founded on argument alone, can, by argument alone, be legitimately or effectually defended. The length of this digression will, I trust, be pardoned, on account of the importance of the interests which its subject involves, and the necessity which appeared of defining more clearly what Taylor had left uncertain. Of the beauty of particular passages in the Liberty of Prophesying' on.