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government, succeeded immediately by military despotism, and crowned by the election of Louis Buonaparte: those who worship king mob after these recent proofs (among others) of his justice and sagacity, are not to be dealt with by reason. No, not though President Polk tells the world that a slave-owning democracy, reeking with the blood of an unjust war, repudiating its just debts, and keeping millions under the iron yoke of personal slavery, be "a sublime moral spectacle;" though the government of America is, in truth, an aristocracy, as compared to that of which M. De Lamartine held, we were about to would be more correct to say, dropped-the reins.

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So much for the error of the political doctrines of M. De Lamartine: the religious theory which he is desirous of propagating cannot be sufficiently condemned. In an early part of his work he announces the following proposition :

"Quand la Providence veut qu'une idée embrase le monde, elle l'allume dans l'âme d'un Français."-1. 1. c. 13. p. 21.

The smile which this extraordinary piece of coxcombry at first excites is exchanged for the expression of a graver emotion as we perceive the terrible consequences which vanity, when it becomes the main-spring of thought and action, is capable of producing both upon an individual and a nation. We see the old received faith and doctrine of Christianity vanish before the "idea which Providence has kindled in the mind of a Frenchman ;" while the error of the believing portion of mankind is corrected in the following language:

"Il y a des objets dans la nature dont on ne distingue bien la forme qu'en s'en éloignant. La proximité empêche de voir comme la distance. Il en est ainsi des grands événements. La main de Dieu est visible sur les choses humaines, mais cette main même a une ombre, qui nous cache ce qu'elle accomplit. Ce qu'on pourvait entrevoir alors de la Révolution Française, annonçait ce qu'il y a de plus grand au monde; l'avènement d'une idée nouvelle dans le genre humain, l'idée démocratique, et plus tard le gouvernement démocratique.

"Cette idée était un écoulement du christianisme. Le christianisme, trouvant les hommes asservis et dégradés sur toute la terre, s'était levé à la chute de l'empire romaine comme une vengeance, mais sous la forme d'une résignation.

"Il avait proclamé les trois mots que répétait à deux mille ans de distance la philosophie Française,-liberté, égalité, fraternité des hommes. Mais il avait enfoui pour un temps ce dogme au fond de l'âme des chrétiens. Trop faible alors pour s'attaquer aux lois civiles, il avait dit aux puissances: Je vous laisse encore un peu de temps le monde politique, je me confine dans le monde moral. Continuez, si vous pouvez,

d'enchaîner, de classer, d'asservir, de profaner les peuples. Je vais émanciper les âmes. Je mettrai deux mille ans peut-être à renouveler les esprits, avant d'éclore dans les institutions. Mais un jour viendra où ma doctrine s'échappera du temple, et entrera dans le conseil des peuples. Ce jour-là le monde social sera renouvelé.' Ce jour était arrivé, Il avait été préparé par un siècle de philosophie, sceptique en apparence, croyant en reálité. Le scepticisme du xviii siècle ne s'attachait qu'aux formes extérieures et aux dogmes surnaturels du christianisme: il en adoptait avec passion la morale et le sens social. Ce que le christianisme appelait révélation, la philosophie l'appelait raison. Les mots étaient différents, le sens était le même. L'émancipation des individus, des castes, des peuples, en dérivait également. Seulement, le monde antique s'était affranchi au nom du Christ, le monde moderne s'affranchissait au nom des droits que toute créature a reçus de Dieu. Mais tous les deux faisaient découler cet affranchissement de Dieu ou de la nature."-1. 1. c. 6. p. 13.

Our blessed Saviour then came on earth in order to prepare the way, by his example of love, obedience, and humility, by his doctrine of repentance and faith, for the carnage, fury, rebellion, pride, madness, unutterable crimes, and blasphemy of the French Revolution; upon that day, and not before, his mission was fully accomplished-having at length been assisted, we are told, by the philosophy "apparently sceptical, but really believing," of Voltaire and Rousseau !

This wretched blasphemy, though it be founded upon arguments which a thinking child beginning to reason would despise, is gravely published to the world as one of the discoveries of our age. But so it is; men who in all secular concerns are in the habit of using themselves, and exacting from others, the strictest logic, and of demanding the most rigid rules of evidence for every fact, are so eager to throw off the yoke of the Christian religion, to set themselves free from the restraints which the revealed word of God imposes upon their passions, that even such contemptible sophistry as this finds a ready admission into their hearts. This is the enlightened view of Christianity which discards dogmatic faith; that is to say, sets aside as it pleases the inspired word of God, wherever it does not appear to them sufficiently liberal for their enlarged philosophy. This is the creed which as yet our narrow and contracted minds in England have rejected, but which has filled France, Germany, and Italy not only with Deism-this belongs to the more fastidious and refined-but with Pantheism, Atheism, and all the innumerable social evils which follow in their train. Though fifty years have scarcely passed away since those who began by worshipping their reason, in the place of the God who gave it, ended by doing

That any

homage to a prostitute as the emblem of that reason. notion of a conscientious obligation to obey authority should exist in minds of this description, it would be idle to expect; and that the terror of the armed hand of power should be the only cement which holds society together was only to be expected as the natural result, and it is the result which at this moment we see every where around us.

ART. V.-1. Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education, with Appendices, 1847-8. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. London: printed for HER MAJESTY'S Stationery Office, 1848.

2. Monthly Paper issued by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the principles of the Established Church, 1847-1849. London: Depository of the Society. 3. The Church of England, and the Committee of Council on Education: for what are the National Society and all other Members of the Church of England to appeal to Parliament? A Letter addressed, by permission, to the Hon. and Right Rev. Richard, Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells. By GEORGE ANTHONY DENISON, M.A., Vicar of East Brent, Somerset. With an Appendix. London: Rivingtons. 1849.

4. National Warnings on National Education. A Sermon preached in aid of the Parochial Schools, at the Parish Church of South Hackney, on Sunday, the 12th of November, 1848. By the Rev. CHR. WORDSWORTH, D.D., Canon of Westminster. London: Rivingtons. 1848.

5. Popish Education in England, supported by the State. Address to the Protestants of the Empire. By the Committee of the National Club. Third Series, No. I.

WHEN in the latter part of the Session of 1839 the then recent appointment of a Committee of Privy Council on Education came under the consideration of Parliament, the unconstitutional character of this novel authority in the State, and the mischievous tendency of the undefined and unlimited powers with which it was invested, were clearly pointed out, and made the chief ground of opposition to the measure. Among others, Lord Stanley, in a speech in the House of Commons, which now, after the lapse of ten years, reads more like a prophecy of what has since come to pass, than like an argument upon a question then pending, thus expressed himself :

"He felt that so long as the Committee was irresponsible, so long as its object was undefined and uncertain, so long as its powers were unlimited, and while the exercise of those powers was not checked, not fettered, not restrained, not limited by Parliament, so long would it remain a fertile source of new plans-plans following each other in rapid

succession, springing up as fast as they were destroyed, and each as objectionable as the first, each as absurd and dangerous as another, yet each evading some of those details which had insured the condemnation of its predecessor. So long as that Board or Committee was allowed to exist, so long he felt persuaded they would find scheme after scheme produced for abstracting money from the public funds in furtherance of a system of education which a majority of the country condemned, and which was completely at variance with the constitutional principles which he and those on his side of the house supported and maintained, and which it was impossible they could abandon without the grossest dereliction of their public duty. He objected to the unlimited and irresponsible powers vested in the Committee of Privy Council; and from that irresponsible, unfettered, and consequently despotic Committee he appealed to the calm deliberation of the people, and to the constitutional authority of the British Parliament."-Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series. Vol. xlviii. col. 231.

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Still more pointed, and severely graphic of the future operations of the Committee of Council, with its Secretary and fac totum, Mr. Kay Shuttleworth, are the remarks which fell from the Bishop of London, in the debate which took place in the House of Lords, on the 5th of July, 1839, on the Archbishop of Canterbury's Resolutions for an address to the Crown, remonstrating against the appointment of the Committee. After establishing, in the course of a most triumphant argument, the position, that the duty of the State to make provision for the education of the people,-the ground taken by the advocates of the measures for a new system of State education,-had already been discharged by the State, by the adoption of the Church as the national establishment, and that therefore, if the existing appliances were found insufficient, all the State had to do, was to provide the Church with the means of extending that education which was part and parcel of her proper office, the Right Reverend Prelate is reported to have spoken to the following effect :—

"At least, my Lords, it is the duty of the Government, as I am sure it is its interest, not to do any thing which may lessen or impair,-much less destroy the Church's efficiency. But this I am persuaded it will do, if it does that to which its advisers are urging it; namely, take the whole business of popular education out of the Church's hands into its own; appoint inspectors, choose schoolmasters, select school-books, in short, do every thing but chastise the boys in person. My Lords, those are functions which the Government as such is not competent to undertake, in this country at least; it is not competent, either practically or constitutionally. It is not practically competent; for how is it possible that four or five political personages, holding office at the pleasure of the Crown, or, more properly speaking, of the House of Commons, whose time and thoughts are of necessity occupied with far

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