it reverts with pain similar to what it felt when they had an actual existence. I have sketched an outline of the human passions. Narrow are the bounds which separate them from each other. If the views thus presented of this important part of our mental frame incite any one individual to adore more habitually Him by whom we are fearfully and wonderfully made," and to keep the heart with all diligence, I shall be humbly grateful. 66 N. THE WATCHMAN. "Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The Watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night." Isaiah xxi. 11, 12. SALAM! Peace and prosperity, saith the Watchman to all his readers, as he enters within the precincts of a new year. Peace on earth, and goodwill among men, and glory to God, may the ensuing year conduce largely to advance. Could we place ourselves at the end of it, and review the scenes which are to mark its progress, how different in many respects would be our apprehensions! Alas! who knows if he who now guides the pen will then be in the land of the living or the land of darkness; who of his readers can with certainty anticipate the prolongation of their existence through twelve more months? And, trifle as we do with the things of eternity, could our destiny within that period be foretold with the same certainty as it is determined; could the name of each to be summoned hence before another year has completed its course be uttered, how awfully fixed would be the eye of every one, how eager the countenance to catch the sentence of life or death! No prophetic voice can be uttered. No individual can be named. Doubt is left over all, that all may stand in awe and sin not. All are in danger, that all may be prepared. But life and death are not the only issues to be determined in the ensuing period of time. Great events are manifestly about to come. To say this, requires not the tongue of a prophet nor of the son of a prophet. The elements of society are all in agitation. The sounds of war have died away. Men have ceased to be amused with the empty accents of glory. Victory is no longer to them an object of desire, for they know its price. The hand of necessity is pressing hard upon thousands. Fearful realities have succeeded to idle sounds, and in all classes men are beginning to form correct estimates of their actual condition, and to search wherever they may for the remedies of their privations and sufferings. Time they have, and motives they have, to think, to learn, and inwardly to digest, what things are for their weal or woe. Change must come. The power of man cannot prevent it. A nation's wants may not be neglected; a nation's will cannot be withstood. The planet cannot be arrested in its orbit; the hand of God is upon it. A people cannot be stayed in its career of improvement; the spirit of the Divinity urges it on. The roar of the sea, the thunder of heaven, are sounds as mighty as terrible. But more mighty, and to the foes of man more terrible, the voice of a whole nation rising to the skies, demanding the restitution of lost rights, and the enjoyment of that full and fair liberty of mind and soul which the Creator intended to be the portion of each of his intelligent creatures. The faint and incipient accents of such an outcry are to be heard in almost every part of our land, and unless its demands be complied with, they will grow and swell till the fear of Belshazzar be struck into the hearts of all those whose interests are hostile to the interests of the many. But it will not, we hope, we believe it will not come to this. The few are gradually yielding, ignorance and prejudice deCreasing, oppression narrows the sphere of its domination, antiquated absurdities are beginning to be disused by the lips as well as banished from the mind. One after another, links of that chain have fallen by which the human mind has so long been bound. And the day is coming, and if the friends of humanity are true to their duties, the day must speedily come, when freedom of mind will be restricted neither by court or church patronage, nor by the laws of fashion, nor the circumvallation of creeds, nor by peaal enactments, nor by private and petty persecutions. Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire quæ velis et quæ sentias dicere. Happy and rare period, to use the words of the great Roman historian, when each may think what he judges true, and utter what he thinks! The word of prophecy will then have its fulfilment, and every man sit under his own vine and his own fig-tree, none daring to make him afraid. We live in hopes such as these, because of the history of the past few months, as well as of the signs of the times. Contrary to the expectation of every friend of Christian liberty, the question which opponents, where it suited their turn, chose to make a religious as well as, what it really was, a political one,-the great and all-absorbing question of Catholic Emancipation has, during the past year, been set at rest in a way which, if not entirely unexceptionable, was yet most gratifying. After this we despair no longer. Our hopes have arisen, and become firm expectations in relation to the great questions which involve the moral and religious welfare of this nation. We had before heard and said, "No good effort can be lost." We believed so; but we had reason also to join in the prayer of the apostles, that our unbelief might be aided. The mind assented to the general principle-the heart needed a splendid instance of illustration. That has been supplied. All our feelings relative to human improvement have received a reality and a vital power. What our eyes have seen, and our hands handled, we now testify. Success has inspired confidence, and confidence renewed strength. And the way in which strength should be employed has been indicated-the way to victory; so that we at length judge it to approach to certainty that a good cause will not fail, except by the bad faith of its professed friends. Let us but be good men and true, found at our posts, sturdy in their maintenance, earnest to advance, and faithful to hold, and the enemy must retire till the land is ours, and mental and moral liberty is enjoyed in all its borders. Meanwhile, let us avail ourselves of the stop which the beginning of a new period of time seems to afford, in order to pass in review some of the features of the religious world, which we have not been able to dwell upon in our former communications. "The religious world"-a strange and motley mass, composed of elements the most dissimilar, some of them the most revolting. Perhaps of all the worlds into which the rational creatures that cover this globe of ours are divided, not one of them is so replete with features so diversified and hostile. The sporting world, the gay world, the jovial world, : (Mundus Jovialis, to misunderstand the title of a treatise on astronomy,) the high world, and the learned world, are all curious medleys; but the religious world surpasses them all in incongruities. There are found features of the rarest loveliness, infantine innocence and simplicity, moral energies, such as an angel might not blush to acknowledge; and mental power, which a Bacon and a Milton might without dishonour call their own; and there also are found the low, the grotesque, the sordid, the selfish, the drivelling. It contains subjects for the pencil both of Martin and of Cruickshank, and might furnish out to another Dante both a heaven and a hell. At the same time we believe, and firmly, that the great and lovely prevail beyond all comparison over the offensive and the low and often when an offensive feature is beheld, the discerning finds a diamond, though in the rough. Certainly it surpasses the power of human calculation to sum up the happiness which religion, even with all the actual drawbacks, confers upon the inhabitants of this kingdom; upon fathers, and mothers, and children, and houses; upon the under current of society, which, as often the under currents of the ocean, has the greatest force; upon myriads, whose happiness is seen by none, and chronicled no where except in heaven. While, however, the bad is mingled with the good-while the exterior is repulsive to the welldisciplined mind—and while, therefore, there exist serious obstructions to the efficacy of pure religion, the remedial power of the press must be had recourse to. When the sun of righteousness has arisen with healing in his rays, and not till then, is the Watchman at liberty to retire from his beat. Amidst the anticipations in which we indulged respecting the coming year, we did not include the end of the world. And yet, according to some authorities, this is at hand. The personal reign of Christ is, we are assured, about to commence. A Millenium at hand!-I'm delighted to hear it, And come it will and shortly, says one, who has the happy faculty, by a twist of his vision, of casting at the same time a glance into two opposite worlds, seeing, and hence declaring in strains of rhapsody and proud defiance, what hell is receiving and what heaven is preparing. Nor can the prophet complain as one of old-"I only am left." Mr. Irving is surrounded by a small but intrepid band, who already see Millenial glories, and are preparing to commence their princely functions. A few clergymen, we are informed by the Rev. G. C. Smith, of the English and Scotch National churches, and some few Dissenting ministers, (their organ is the Morning Watch,) entertain strong opinions concerning the personal reign of Christ on earth, and that it will shortly take place, and that England will be destroyed with tremendous judgments; these views are connected with a profession and demand for the most extraordinary and even apostolic faiththat is, assurance of supernatural enlightenment and assistance. Captain Gambier, son of Lord Gambier, seems to have imbibed more than an equal share of this intoxicating draught. In discourse with Mr. Smith his general tenour was, while they were friends, " My dear Smith, the Lord is coming -dreadful things will take place;" and then he would pursue a strain of terrible denunciation against this kingdom for its hypocrisy and wickedness. Poor Smith, naturally alarmed for himself, sought of the prophet what was The 1 to become of him. “As for you,” replied the seer, Smithfield." 66 you will be burnt in No wonder the Rev. G. C. Smith, who might pass for a descendant of Daniel Lambert, should dislike the doctrine and expose the reveries of his quondam friend. On the subject of money, Captain Gambier's incessant cry was, "I have a few hundreds, Smith, in the Bank; Elliot" (another captain, and of the Millenarian heresy)" and I cannot make up our minds to beg or ask one penny while we have any thing left ourselves. A man does not serve God as he ought unless he makes up his mind to give all that he has. I shall give all until I get to my half-pay, and then I must stop, and Elliot will do the same." At a later period he said, "I am done, Smith, and now Elliot must go on till he comes to his half-pay, and then we must go on with the Asylum and Sailor's home, by faith" that is, we are informed, to erect a building to cost £15,000, with scarcely any means, and without estimates, contracts, or securities. The same strain of fanaticism is pursued in the periodical of the prophets, "the Morning Watch." Christ is at hand, we are told, to destroy the world. A spirit of Pharisaism pervades the work. The vials of the Scotch orator's wrath are poured forth in its pages. All the world but the chosen few, and few they are, dismay and destruction await. We are not sorry that these modern Millenarians have gone to extremes. The shorter in consequence will be their day-the less their influence on the public mind. We are not sorry they have appeared. They burlesque the extravagance of the religious world, shew its natural tendency, and prepare the way for a return to a sounder and more healthful spirit; the spirit, not of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Monstrosities of sentiment like those of the Irving school must of necessity be short-lived. For a time, now, as when the Millenarian notions began to prevail in the third century in Egypt, they may banish from the mind of some Christians the most important precepts of their religion; they may, as in the tenth century, aid forward a crusade, not as then against the Turks, but wise, and upright, and rational Christians; they may, as in the seventeenth century, and amongst the fifth-monarchy men, lead to "the proud turbulence of political interpretation;" but as these ebullitions of frenzy passed quickly away, so, especially in the present day, will the hallucinations of the prophetic school. They will also, we hope, serve to warn those who are treading on the heels of like absurdities, and clear the turbid atmosphere of the religious world. A striking instance of delusion like that of the present Millenarians is recorded by Robertson in his History of Charles the Fifth, which may serve to point a moral in the present day. A sect of the Anabaptists took possession of Munster, in Westphalia, expelling the constituted authorities, and assuming their places. Borcold, an obscure fanatic, having by visions and prophecies prepared the multitude for some extraordinary event, stripped himself naked, and marching through the streets, proclaimed with a loud voice, “That the kingdom of Sion was at hand; that whatever was highest on earth should be brought low, and whatever was lowest should be exalted." In order to fulfil this, he commanded the churches, as the most lofty buildings in the city, to be levelled with the ground; he degraded the municipal officers chosen by his own party, and made the highest magistrate in the city the common hangman, for whom he is said to have found abundance of employment. And "as," to use the words of Robertson, "the excesses of enthusiasm have been observed in every age to lead to sensual gratifications, the same constitution that is susceptible of the former being remarkably prone to the latter, he instructed the prophets and teachers to harangue the people for several days, concerning the lawfulness and even necessity of taking more wives than one, which he asserted to be one of the privileges granted by God to the saints." The historian adds, "Every excess was committed, of which the passions of men are capable, when restrained neither by the authority of the laws nor the sense of decency." A similar, but by no means equally flagrant, instance of the union of sensuality and religion has, we are informed, been exhibited among the Southcotians, and especially that branch of them who term themselves Israelites, and reside at Ashton, in Lancashire. For a long time, connected with the chief men of the Millenarian school, the Rev. G. C. Smith had pursued his labours for the benefit of sailors. It seems that our sailors, on coming into harbour and on shore after their voyages, are exposed to wholesale robbery at the hands of the most abandoned of men and women. Mr. Smith, who has himself been brought up on the seas, has for years been endeavouring to provide them with a refuge, and the means of spiritual instruction. The object has every appearance of being laudable; but how has it been prosecuted? Judging from certain statements which Mr. Smith himself has made, we have most pregnant suspicions. Of course, Mr. Smith proceeded in the usual way. He issued prospectuses, called public meetings, convoked his declaimers and mustered his own eloquence, resolved into existence institutions and committees, visited the country, travelling from town to town, and speechifying wherever he came. All the ordinary machinery, and more, we are disposed to think, than the common portion of clap-trap used on such occasions, was employed, and employed to good effect. In the last year above £3000 were collected from the bon homme, that easy creature John Bull, by Mr. Smith and his agents. Well, out of this money there are officials both small and great-secretaries, travelling orators, and the long list of et cetera-to be paid, so that no small portion of the collected money is consumed ere it can reach the object for which it is given. We are here reminded of the following anecdote:-"Notwithstanding the sufferings of his father, Charles the Second, it is well known, endeavoured to raise money by the unconstitutional means of a benevolence. The collectors of the same came to the house of an old lady, in the town of Pomfret, and having told their errand, "Alas! alas!" said she, "a poor king indeed, to go a begging the first year of his reign! But stay, I will bestow something on him ;" and telling them out ten broad pieces-" Here!" said she, "take these." The officers were going away very thankful for what they had got. "Hold!" says the lady, "here are ten more to bear the charges of the other, and then, perhaps, some of them may reach him." So with our sea-orator, the Rev. G. C. Smith and his gallant companions, the church maritime-they need no small sum to enable them to carry the gifts of the saints to the objects for whom they are intended. And so strongly impressed with the impropriety of the way pursued for levying contributions was he who, of all others, was the most likely to know-the treasurer, Captain Gambier, that he thus implored Mr. Smith-"Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God; but, O! as you love the salvation of your soul, do not attempt to bolster it (the Society) up by any more worldly methods." We fear that we cannot limit our disapprobation to the Society for the Sailors; we fear that religion is made by too many of our institutions to serve as a craft whereby the conductors get their bread and something to boot; we fear that there is too much truth in the following charge made by one who knows no little about the religious |