teeth and buying a new constitution. Jesuit's-bark may indeed create a fictitious appetite, but a worn-out stomach will repent him of his youthful boldness. Digestion, appetite, muscle, eyesight, locomotive power-all must be natural; if not, galvanie spasm will never make a young man. And now, let it not be said that these cruelties were the effect of the barbarism of the age. What has Christianity to do but to civilize, for civilization follows inevitably on its track? Here was the very head and AUTOCRAT OF ALL THE CHRISTIANS-nay, more, a god upon earth, who could have done anything he pleased. Yet he it was who prompted these crimes, lighted these fires, and canonized these butchers. He and his courtiers urged on the subservient nobles and the subservient populations of Europe to commit such crimes, in cold blood and in the name of religion, that none of these nations would of themselves have been wicked enough to perpetrate. Talk of barbarous times! Who made them barbarous or rather, who, though with ample means, neglected to civilize and to Christianize Europe, for the sake of its own selfish Caste? Who, with the Bible in his power, locked up that holy Book from the world, because God's WORD was opposed to the word of the usurping Christ? Who was it that was allpowerful for evil and not all-powerful for good? Let us hear no more of “barbarous times," as an apology for barbarous men. man of sense, no man of feeling, will, out of maudlin complaisance to bigotry, consent to remove one blood-stained landmark from the field of history. No! he will not unjustly falsify the records of his race, to please those who in England would stifle truth by the cry of "intolerance," or bury it abroad by judicial murder. No! not to avoid the cry of "BIGOTRY" from those who are the greatest bigots, or to shun the outcry of "FIREBRANDS" from men who have made more bonfires than the rest of the world combined—not excepting the long-protracted Brahminical suttees! No! not to avoid the epithet of " UNCHARITABLE" from religious epicures, who have roasted, from Cobham downwards, myriads more Christians than the pagans of Otaheite and the Sandwich Isles have of their brother cannibals. No "Oh! but, my dear sir, you really do run on most dreadfully; you are so coarse, so intolerant, so unchristian, of such an illiberal spirit. Where is your charity ?"—" Nay, friend, it is because I am charitable that I speak out plainly. I show my charity by kindling the beacon on the deserted lighthouse, that the goodly ship of the state may not drive full on the surrounding rocks where stand a savage band of wreckers waiting for their prey." "Oh! but the age of cutting off noses, and cutting out tongues, and burnings and rackings, and 'all that sort of thing,' you know, is gone by for ever. Take it easy, my friend, and let things be as they are, and don't trouble your digestion.' 66 Agreed and welcome- -as soon as ever all the bloodthirsty laws and atrocious principles which produced these enormities are abolished with the same publicity and solemnity with which they were proclaimed as soon, in fine, as Christianity has secured Oro, the big idol, and his sacrificing priests; till then, let me take care of myself, and, if you will allow me, of you too. Now go, my friend, and have a little chit-chat with the Madiai, Cechetti, Miss Cuningham, Borczinsky, and the monk whom holy men have shut up with madmen. However, stay!-you will get nothing from him he too is become mad." 250 CHAPTER VI. THE RELIGION OF TASTE. "One would not sure be ugly when one's DEAD,- "Cœlum ipsum petimus stultitiâ.”—HOR. WE are now about to survey the Caste of the RELIGION of TASTE, one apparently having no connection with the horrors of the great Caste of the Inquisition; one as full of suavities as the other is of terrors. It is, however, one equally tremendous in its results. There is nothing so delightful to the thorough dealer as to drive a hard bargain, and yet obtain the credit of honourable liberality. Purse and character thrive together. "A little learning" is said to be a dangerous thing, but a little religion is not so considered. It is, it seems, an article so dangerous to society that, like powder, a very small quantity is enough to produce a terrible explosion, and the smaller its packets and the more securely enveloped, the better. Like powder, too, the more respectable people are, the more they are afraid of it. This is very prudential, for they have more to dread from a religious explosion than the poor; their Caste, too, would be endangered, while the Pariah of society could have nothing to lose by it. Nay, we may look at it in another point of view; may it not be more truly said that respectable people are so afraid of it that they take care, if obliged to carry any of it with them into society, to produce it well corked down, with the label POISON in large characters? In fact, with these people, a little goes a very great way; and they think that, like most poisons, it is medically beneficial just in proportion as it is duly diluted. COMPROMISE is the diluent advocated by the political pharmaceutist of the "Times;" so that the puritanical toxicum which would madden a whole people, and make them run a-muck in every village and city of our island, may by our modern physician be distilled into a very palatable and innocuous draught. It is most unfortunate for this theory that all history and all experience prove its fallacy. Humanity has been afflicted by a long-standing paralysis; a paralysis to be urged into healthy action by nothing less than the THE NINE COMMANDMENTS OF THE MUSEUM CHURCH. 251 most potent stimulant; but then the medical agent must be unadulterated-in fact, puritanic. Half measures will not shake off the coma of the stertorous patient, nor will the Jesuit's-bark prove an availing tonic. The ingenious men of "compromise" would have our Sunday mornings devoted to the free-trade cries of "Come buy my fine oranges," outside the church, and "What must I do to be saved?" within ;without, the holiness of the tobacconist's incense wafted by the peripatetic priest of the meerschaum; within, the fragrant sanctity of the Sabæan cloud of the True Church. Truly, the Oxford monk, who is great at cigars, finds no great difficulty in joining the paganized fraternity of the "Cloud-compeller" of the Vatican. He has but to transfer his sacerdotal ministrations from the secular to the spiritual narcotic. "Compromise" writes up TEN Commandments within the church, and without it tells us there are but NINE. Truly it were rational to carry out compromise with an even hand, alike in civil contracts as divine; then should we see the sage spectacle of our Stock Exchange cashing "I promise to pay TEN POUNDS," with nine sovereigns. Gentlemen of compromise, let us be consistent, if compromise can be consistent. Let our archbishops and bishops send round some few honest painters with their brushes to alter in our chancels the X. to IX.; and let Scotch Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Wesleyans, reverently yielding to the superior Christianity of our new "CHURCH OF THE MUSEUM," and respecting the closer walk of these holy men with a holy God, stand by and mark the regeneration of the British isles by that intellectual process which has worked, and is working, so admirably in ancient Rome and modern Italy. What Christianity wants now-a-days, it seems, is a decent assembly of safe men,-men of moderate principles; men of episcopal scholarship and apostolic mediocrity; men who know how to cull the flowers of sacred poesy, and judiciously eschew the acids of revelation, such, for instance, as "Ye must be born again." Such puritanical doctrines have always been held indecent for a dignified episcopacy. It is sad to reflect that this safe system never took the fancy of St. Paul. He was a terrible zealot, and, for a "Prince of the Church," one of the most unsafe for an episcopal legist : such a bishop in our Upper House would be the most uncompromising of men, a tremendous firebrand; sour, morose, bigoted-in fact, puritanical. His principles would have the effect of producing discord, and family and national quarrels, just as in the case of his MASTER," who came not to bring peace, but a sword." That is just what that stiff, stubborn, unyielding, uncompromising Christianity did in the thirty years' war of Germany, in the French wars of the League, in the wars of the Albigenses and the Piedmontese, in the wars of the Netherlands and Spain, and in the naval expedition of the Armada against England; all these, and many more, were the result of that terribly uncompromising, acidulated, bigoted, uncomplying thing, Christiainty. Why will not this stiff-necked creature be more accommodating? Surely a gentlemanly, polite, and urbane religion is a more satisfactory inmate in our houses than the coarse downright Christianity of the tinker Bunyan, the sourness of Baxter, the ill-bred zeal of Wesley, or the savage truthfulness of Knox. This Christianity is a most intolerant thing: it will not give way, it never has given way; it will not endure a rival ; it levels every throne but its own ; it makes brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, a household of bitter quarrellers. Who will make this intolerant creature a civil, obliging, complying, polite, accommodating, and gentlemanly acquaintance? Would you know, my friend? Go to Rome; and its dignified "Princes of the Church" will tell you how all this may be accomplished. There, no mean Christianity of Dissent disturbs her grandeur. The "holy mother" and her children are royally apparelled; warmed by the fires of Smithfield, she is not afraid of the cold, and "all her household are clothed in scarlet." Go to the continental courts and learn there. Nowhere will you see the peasant sturdiness of Christianity, with its boorish obstinacy and its rugged truth. No! it is gracefully blended with martial reviews-ay, on the favourite day, too, of the bigoted Bible publican. There the romance of the "Holy Warrior" is enacted in the sacred opera of the morning, and the elegant ballet of "Every Man his own Saviour," in the Comédie Royale of the evening. This is something like a religion: palatable, tasty, princely. Alas! but for that beggarly minority, that poor-house Christianity, that will, Lazarus-like, obtrude its sores at the gate of the rich man's temple, what a delightful, respectable, charming, and polite religion would Europe have had! The Soofee, though a Mohamedan sect of religion, is one of decidedly religious taste. What is more, it is in no way to be distinguished from that of the Caste of Religious Taste in England. It is a thoroughly safe one, and deals in elegant generalities, never committing any man to a declaration of Christian principles, and yet enabling one to be excessively religious. "The Soofee professes eager desire, but with no earthly affection; he circulates the cup, but no material goblet; since all things are spiritual in his sect, and all is mystery within mystery. So enrap |