letter and the receiving of an answer, there might be more intercommunications in one hour than can now be obtained in the progress of a year. When that extended ramification of telegraphic wires shall have been accomplished, as there seems every reason to suppose it will some day be, the influence on society will be incalculable. Then, if the transmitting wire can be extended under water from England to France, why not to America? It is in shallow seas and on rocky shores that the difficulty of protecting the wire exists. Under the deep waters of the Atlantic it would rest undisturbed by anchors, or shifting currents, and out of danger from the attacks of living creatures. In depths where light and life cannot penetrate, it might in darkness and in safety carry on intercourse between the remotest parts of the world.

There seems nothing really impracticable in such an undertaking. We have been assured that the same two gentlemen who first suggested and commenced this enterprise have expressed to some of our eminent engineers and capitalists their conviction of the feasibility of establishing a single line of communication between this country and America for a less sum than was paid for making a single mile of the expensive portion of the Great Western Railway. It was proposed in this instance to have only a single wire covered with gutta percha, similar to that used last year to prove the practicability of passing an electric current across the Channel from England to France; to which it was proposed to add an additional protection of hempen plat, the hemp having been passed through a chemical solution, to render it indestructible in salt water. Such a line, it was said, of gutta percha and prepared hemp would, although only about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, be of nearly double the strength of the experimental line laid down between England and France last year, in a strong sea and running tide. The proposition was, first, to extend it to Ireland; thence to the south-west coast, the nearest point for the American continent, and where the bold rocky coast offers depths that secure its safety from anchors; and thence to the nearest point on the American coast, considerably under two thousand miles. Choosing the months of summer, and an experienced American and English

Captain accustomed to the track, such a line, it was averred, might with very simple machinery be paid out night and day with perfect safety at the ordinary speed of the steamer. The vast importance of such an object is not to be weighed against a sum of £100,000, which, we are assured, would more than accomplish it, if a single wire only were employed. The successful completion of one line would of course be speedily followed by that of others. This once accomplished, the extension of the line across the American continent to the Pacific would follow certainly; and we should have the astounding fact of a communication from the shores of the Pacific, crossing America and the Atlantic, and touching our shores in an instant of time!-Athenæum.

KING CHARLES I.

(BEHEADED JANUARY 30TH, 1649.)

ONE party extols Charles I. as a martyr," and another lauds Cromwell as a saint. But the intemperance of party spirit is incompatible with that fair estimation of character which ought to be attempted by the Christian student. And, after all, it matters little to us who was the martyr, or who the saint. We would rather understand the events than graduate the merits or the demerits of the men.

That is a sad passage in the History of England which relates the execution of the King on a scaffold in the street opposite Whitehall, and shows us a headsman holding up his "discrowned head" to the multitude, and proclaiming, "This is the head of a traitor." There must have been something very wrong behind such a scene; something worse than a mere dispute for power. What was it?

The answer to this question is variously given, as one or another of the great questions that were then discussed is brought into prominence again, and as he is Whig or Tory, Protestant or Papist, who undertakes to answer. But, after all, whoever would answer for himself must review the affairs of a reign of nearly a quarter of a century, over a country very unlike the England that now is. We can only point to

a few leading facts of that memorable period, which will show, if we mistake not, that if England had been free from foreign influence, it is most unlikely that the Whitehall tragedy could have taken place, but highly probable that the benefits attributed to the Revolution might have been attained without the sufferings and the dishonour.

When a young man, Charles had fallen under the influence of a dissolute Minister of State, the Duke of Buckingham; and his adherence was earnestly coveted by the Papacy. Wild with the idea of marrying the Infanta of Spain, he had gone secretly to Madrid, to pay his addresses; where the King, surprised at the unexpected visit, and no less delighted than surprised on finding the future Sovereign of England at his Court, a suitor to his sister, paid him every possible honour, asked and obtained from the Pope a dispensation for the marriage, but obtained it under conditions that would have established Romanism in the English Court, and educated the Royal family, at least during the first ten years of each member's life, in the doctrine and worship of the Romish Church, so as eventually to place it on the throne. At the same time that Charles, his companions, and an Envoy extraordinary, were labouring to make themselves agreeable at Madrid, and while the Priests were sparing no diligence to convert him to the religion of his expected consort, so that he became a Papist in all but name, James I., his father, sacrificed his kingly dignity, and his conscience too, by entering into a surreptitious negotiation with Gregory XV., through a secret agent whom he had sent to Rome. By the good providence of God, the treaty of marriage then made was broken, so that England was not perverted; but the Prince was made a victim to Popery, and England was revolutionised.

Laud, Bishop of London, the Pusey of his day, but so much the more dangerous as he occupied a more exalted station than this modern pioneer, cordially followed up the labours of the Spanish Priests in his intercourse with Charles. Laud was the man who placed the crown upon his head, and, treating him at that moment as a ward and soldier of the Church, borrowed a sentence from the Roman form, to enjoin

on him the exercise of his prerogative for the defence and elevation of the Clergy, even by the sword. And on his accession to the throne, although he did not marry a Spanish Infanta, he took a French Princess, under dispensation from the Pope, and, whether observed or not, under an engagement that their children should be educated as Papists until the tenth year of their age. And when the chief of the French Protestants were besieged in Rochelle, and the utmost vengeance of their enemies was falling on them all, Charles L furnished the King of France with a squadron that was ostensibly to assist him on other service, but was really intended to help the Cardinal Richlieu in his operations against Rochelle. When this was discovered at Dieppe, the officers and crews refused to proceed, returned to England, and, by that honourable disobedience, encouraged the nation, already dissatisfied, to make a clamorous remonstrance. They demanded an execution of the laws against Popery, laws which then, like a gentler enactment at this present time, lay dormant in the statute-book; but none other than the King's Chaplains came forward to preach and write in opposition to the law, while Popish recusants crowded the Court, and were entrusted with offices of state. His theory of government entirely harmonised with his notions of religion. Those around him encouraged him to treat both Houses of Parliament with contempt; to make the regal prerogative everything,—and this he was persuaded to do for conscience' sake,—but the rights, the petitions, and the demands of the people nothing. Parliament withheld supplies; but he dissolved the Parliament, and imposed taxes on the country by his single authority. At the same time he appointed a Commission, to treat with the Papists, and openly to make friends of them, while he made enemies of nearly all besides. High Churchmen went off to Romanism by droves; and Laud, at the same time, promoted their secession by his practices, and urged the King onward in his wretched contest with the nation.

In England, the Star-Chamber and Court of High Commission made his very name hateful by their inquisitorial severities; and his coercive measures for the establishment of a prelacy like that of Exeter in our day, provoked an oppo

sition to Episcopacy under the odious title of Prelacy; a movement which would never have come to pass, but for such an incentive; and he thus aroused the Scotch to a war which might have been internecine but for an early defeat which they suffered in the north of England, and his own inability to raise forces enough for its continuance. Then came simultaneously the covenant in Scotland and the rebellion in England. The flames of civil war raged from Cornwall to the Tweed. The King made concessions, indeed; but they were too late to be effectual, and too evidently the consequence of necessity to be thought sincere. Throughout the struggle he maintained his lofty ideas of prerogative; and his enemies, justly aroused at first, became implacable. Insolence and justice, lawlessness and patriotism, strangely confounded, went hand in hand. King and Parliament were in open war; and, after ages of legislative uncertainty, and while the constitution of England was imperfect, and neither the previous conduct of King nor subjects would have borne the test of those principles which are now established as axioms of government, the sudden but necessary application of those principles to the case of a Sovereign ruling without law, and in open violation even of the letter of Magna Charta, made it easy to convict him of treason. How far it may be lawful to lay a crowned head upon the block, or how far those infuriated revolutionists were justified in their deed, is not now the question which Englishmen are much concerned to argue. The lesson to be drawn from that event is not so much political as religious, and may be stated very briefly.

A fixed purpose in the Court of Rome to subdue the constancy of a Protestant country, if it does not so far succeed as to destroy religion there, because the gates of hell cannot prevail against the church of Christ, is manifested in the foreign influence which is put forth with the utmost effort, and certainly spreads mischief in the State. And this mischief will be greater in proportion as the Protestantism of the country is less evangelical, and in so far as a Laudean or Tractarian sect can be found willing to take a half-way station between Christ and Antichrist. To impart an exact knowledge of the doctrines and of the policy of this apostasy