parts of religion; that the Scriptures were intended to teach him his own duty rather than the duties of the clergy; and that he believed he would yet be a good boy, as he seemed desirous of telling the truth.

"The defendant was then requested to retire, and allow the meeting to consider the evidence before them. Mr. Easyman rather unceremoniously excluded our reporters also, so that we are not able to tell what passed or what arguments were used on each side. He proposed that Mr. Muggs and Mr. Puddingbag should retire also; but, after a short argument and a reference to Mr. Noel's book, they proved their right to remain as members of the congregation, and, therefore, having a voice in all matters connected with the discipline of the Church. After about an hour's angry discussion we were again admitted, and the chairman addressed Mr. Noncontent as follows:

"Our dear Christian brother, the charges of immorality against you are, I am happy to say, unfounded; but I regret, at the same time, to find that your services are no longer required for the united parishes in which you have so long laboured. This decision of the Court is grounded on Mr. Noel's book, which we have all subscribed, and which has, therefore, become our statute-law.' The chairman then opened a large volume which lay before him, and read the following passage from the 449th page of the ninetyninth edition :-

"There is a remarkable contrast between the simplicity of the scriptural system and the complexity of the Anglican. According to Scripture, the Church itself expels its offending members; and this is better than the Anglican system. The members of the Church best know the transactions which take place among themselves. It is better that a matter should be settled on the spot, among those who were witnesses of it, than that it should be transferred to a distance for adjudication. A Church, composed of spiritual men, can understand spiritual questions far better than the lawyers who practise in the Court of Arches, or those who compose the Committee of Council. And since the Church is composed of brethren, among whom the pastor ought to be as a brother, it is a great evil that they should receive back to them, by sentence of a court of law, a pastor who has lost their confidence. To execute the pastoral office usefully, a minister ought to be esteemed and loved by the Church to which he ministers. As his office exists solely for their welfare, and as, without their esteem, he cannot do them good, upon losing that esteem he ought to retire. The Court of Arches has, therefore, inflicted a mischief and a wrong upon any Church when it fastens upon them a minister who has lost their esteem, because he has not been legally guilty of an offence which may occasion his degradation.'

"I grieve,' continued the chairman, that our Spiritual Court has so interpreted this clause, by a large majority, as to require your

immediate resignation. I feel that it is a hardship thus to deprive a minister, after more than thirty years' services, merely on a vote of non-confidence; at the same time, I am happy to say, that the law of the land does not leave you entirely without provision, as by an Act passed in the reign of his late Majesty King Albert I., the succeeding incumbent is obliged to pay the late minister 107. a-year, for his life, where no case of immorality has been made out; and also by an act of his present Majesty King Alfred II. (for the better provision for destitute ministers) you are entitled to receive the sum of 107. 8s. a-year, to be paid you in weekly sums of 4s. each by the relieving officer of the Union.'

"Mr. Noncontent, who is about sixty-five years of age, then bowed to the chairman and retired. He seemed much affected, but merely made some remark upon the loss of the Court of Arches, and that he wished the Bishop of Exeter were back again in his palace.

"We congratulate our Liberal friends on the triumph of AntiState-Church principles; but, we fear, there is still a leaning to them in the government, which, by passing the acts to which the chairman alluded, has rendered the minister still, in a certain degree, independent of his congregation.

"We understand, as the parish of Laputa and Free Church are now declared vacant by the resignation of the Rev. Noel Noncontent, the Rev. Boanerges Thunderstorm and Mr. Probationer Plianttongue are candidates for the vacant office. The election will take place as soon as possible after the trial sermons; in the mean time an active canvass is carried on by the friends of the parties, and the parish school is closed to prepare the polling booths. As there are in the parish about a thousand male heads of families, the election may not be over for a fortnight from the day of nomination.

"It is not our purpose at present to discuss the comparative merits of the excellent and able young men whose addresses appear among our advertisements. Our columns, however, are open to letters from their friends; and we hope, by carefully summing up the evidence brought before us in a future leading article, to put the congregation in a fair way of finding the most efficient and suitable pastor, and exercising their undoubted right of free choice and self-government."

We hope we have not overdrawn the picture in considering to what point the system of Mr. Noel tends; and we would refer our readers to the works of the Rev. J. Angell James of Birmingham, the most distinguished among the independents of England, in confirmation of what we have here brought forward.

But to return: Mr. Noel must pardon us, as he has been the first to lead us away from the paths of plain sense into the re

gions of speculation. Like M. Lamartine, he has formed an idea; and to this idea every thing social and religious must bend. Mr. Noel's idea is of a perfect church formed of as large as possible a body of imperfect members. M. Lamartine sums up all his theoretic visions in the simple word Fraternity, by which some practical men understand the brotherly kindness which Cain felt for Abel. Our two theorists are something like; and we extract a chapter from Lamartine's History of the Girondists, in which he is describing the Revolution of 1789. We hope our readers may understand it better than we do.

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"Human thought, like God, makes the world in its own image. Thought was revived in a philosophical age, it had to transform the social world.

"The French Revolution was in its essence a sublime and impassioned spirituality. It had a divine and universal ideal. This is the reason why its passion spread beyond the precincts of France. Those who limit it mutilate it. It was the accession of three moral sovereignties:

"The sovereignty of right over force.

"The sovereignty of intelligence over prejudices.

"The sovereignty of the people over governments.

"Revolution in rights, equality.

"Revolution in ideas, reasoning substituted for authority.

"Revolution in facts, the reign of the people.

"A gospel of social rights.

"A gospel of duties, a charter of humanity.

"France declared itself the apostle of this creed.

In this war of

ideas France had allies every where, and even on thrones themselves." (Girondists, b. 1. ch. vii.)

We give this specimen of French Radicalism as a counterpart to our English reformer, not only as a warning against republicanism, but because (making allowance for the Frenchman's infidelity) there is a wonderful similarity between the two minds. Like the dog with the shadow, both pursue a phantom to the destruction of a real good. It may be said of Mr. Noel, as M. Lamartine says of his "Angel of Assassination," Charlotte Corday, when meditating the destruction of Marat, “Who can measure the force of her thought and the resistance of nature? The thought prevailed." To gratify this "thought," Mr. Noel would overwhelm England in a social revolution. He would close hundreds of churches; he would reduce thousands of respectable men, not to say, brethren in the ministry, to comparative poverty, and annihilate the noble fabric of the Established Church, to the ruin of generations yet unborn.

We confess, from late events, we think we have been able to decide a very celebrated question of the schoolmen which for

ages was supposed to be incapable of solution: "Whether a chimæra buzzing in a vacuum can produce any physical effect." Our answer is, Nothing good, but much evil. Some ladies are said to carry a bee in their bonnet; and we suspect that when a real sound and efficient chimæra lights upon the proud emptiness of a conceited brain, some fearful results have followed. Lamartine has described with terrible truth the horrors of the first revolution, yet with all the evil and bloodshed before his eyes he wilfully involved his country in a third. Liberty, fraternity, and hatred of tyrants occupied such a portion of his vacuum, that by his writings he drove Louis Philippe from the throne; and the enthusiast found his reward: he enjoyed the excitement of the Provisional Government for three months; embracing his wife each morning, and telling her that probably before night he should attain to the inestimable privilege of dying for his country. He is now cast off and forgotten; and will probably suffer from the poverty which he has brought upon himself, unless some English aristocrat should take compassion upon him. So it is with Mr. Noel. His chimæra is a Free Church, and the fear of a lawn sleeve; and if Englishmen were as frivolous and excitable as Frenchmen, we might fear an equally fatal result. The greatest difference between our authors is this, that M. Lamartine from his provisional throne in the midst of barricades, explosions, and slaughter, proclaims in transports of ideal ecstasy, "Frenchmen! the Republic is one and indivisible;" while Mr. Noel, calmly contemplating the evil of schisms, revolutions, and infinite disputes, cries out from the peaceable recesses of his study, "Christian brethren! the Church is one, but infinitely divisible."

Mr. Noel's advice to ministers is excellent. Nothing can be better than his exhortations to each as to the zealous exercise of his own talent in his own sphere; but when Mr. Noel leaves the position in which God had placed him as a minister of the Gospel, and sets himself up as a politician and a universal rectifier of abuses, we feel that he has grievously mistaken his calling. He calls himself a Christian pastor, yet we suppose he must preach Radicalism; we feel curious to hear a sermon from him on the thirteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, or the text, "Fear God. Honour the King."

Having thus convicted our author of inconsistency, and exposed several fallacies in his book; having also given our verdict, that he would fast hurry our country into practical infidelity, it is only right that we should proceed to pass upon him the sentence of the court. We neither intend to transport him, though he is an invader of property; nor, in any sense of the word, to suspend him as a traitor to the cause which he has promised to uphold: we should merely apply the old Roman law-we should punish

him "per legem talionis," we should reward him as he would serve us, indeed in the very line he has chalked out for himself. He cannot object to our sentence, as it seems to be the beauideal of the ministry after which his imagination is straining. We should first take hold of his property (we believe he is not a poor man; if he were he would think more of the value of money). This should be invested with trustees for the benefit of his family, on the strict condition that he should not have a shilling of it until he recants his errors. We should then compel him to labour for his subsistence, as the free and independent minister of a large congregation in a manufacturing town. Though he would allow his brethren but 130%., we should allow him double or even treble that sum; but we should strictly stipulate that the congregation should be the true spiritual rulers, having full power to call or dismiss the minister, to pay his salary or to withhold it. He should in this sense be in the position of his own imaginary Levites, and involved in the actual difficulties by which every American pastor is surrounded.

We should look out for a couple of churchwardens or lay deacons, to superintend the secular interests of our Free Church. The senior should be an anti-corn-law-leaguer, with as much Radicalism as Mr. Noel, with religion enough to produce spiritual pride, and as much divinity as should enable him to distinguish between a laboured sermon and a careless one. The other should be a man totally ignorant of all the common usages of life, except the art of making money. In fact, we should select a gentleman who had realized a fortune of 100,000l., by retailing sixpenny loaves at sevenpence halfpenny. He should withal be a man who was willing to pay largely for the most conspicuous seat in the church, provided he might exclude all others from the occupation of it. As he had only turned his mind to religion at a late period of life, he should pursue the subject with the restless inquisitiveness of an elderly amateur. These men should be perfectly blameless in their outward conduct, regular in their attendance on all the ordinances of religion, punctilious in enforcing the duties of the minister, and strictly correct in all the social relations of life, except in the determination to disobey their spiritual ruler. When he had thus laboured for seven, ten, or fourteen years, on the recantation of his errors and a promise of amendment, we should recommend him for a stall at the top of the steeple of some very High Church cathedral, or appoint him a major-canon of the whispering gallery of St. Paul's. We only fear that the force of reaction would be rather too strong for a sensitive mind, and that we should find him either editing a new version of "Tract 90," or going boldly forward and professing his adhesion to the pope.