sent, and first glance at the outline of the panorama before you. You see how cheerfully in past days of hostile attack, and how safely, this antique city lay on the eastern declivity of yonder hill, sloping down to the river that fleetly gurgles through its streets, dispensing life and health to its inhabitants. I can fancy I hear at this distance the constant babbling of those pellucid streams; and see darting along them the finny inhabitants, who seem nothing scared by the neighbourhood of man, though dwelling in waters so imperturbably translucent, that their every movement is visible. Our good monks were always happy when they could select a site for their dwelling upon the margin of a trout stream; for their meagre Fridays and Lenten fasts were thus readily supplied, and they enjoyed the credit and the merit of austerity without its privations. I never could satisfactorily account to myself, for the superstitious credulity of even well-informed members of the Church of Rome in this matter. To this moment there is stuck up in their chapels, in the very centre of London itself, a catalogue of what may, and what may not, be lawfully eaten in Lent and on other days of mortification, with minute specifications relative to eggs and herrings, and indulgencies and dispensations. I suppose that the feeling of the intelligent part of the laity is, 'We must not reason on the matter; the priests say it is so, and our duty is to believe: carp and plover's eggs are within the limits of salvation, mutton and beef are without it; why it is so, we cannot tell, and dare not ask: we will therefore mortify ourselves in due form, as prescribed, always happy in the conviction, that if we really wish any change, there are reasons enough for claiming indulgence, which the priest is always able and willing to afford for a suitable pecuniary consideration.' What, my friend, do we owe to Protestantism, that is, to restored Christianity, were it only in rescuing us from absurdities like

this; from such a prostration of reason to superstition, that no monstrosity becomes too great to be believed, and we worship a piece of bread, verily conceiving it to be an incarnate God!-By the way, your friend honest Isaac Walton used to fish in these very streams of the Itchin, as well he might; for, if he could get over the humanity of torturing two races of beings, the one to ensnare the other, where could he find better? That remarkable man lies buried in your cathedral. Do you remember shewing me the slab that covers his remains, on the east side of the south transcept?

But I must not detain you by the river's side, numerous, and rapid, and clear, and ever varied as are the streams of this vicinity, but just beg you to ascend yonder hill. It is round, and soft, and verdant as you now survey it: but the peeping out of the chalk here and there tells you that its other side is perhaps a precipitous cliff; and such it is. This is a remarkable feature of our southern chalky downs by the sea side. Have you never walked-I have often-on a smooth turfy path, little suspecting danger, and almost ready with boyish spirits to run down the tempting slope at full speed; and shuddered to find at the next turn of the road that you had been within a yard of the edge of a perpendicular cliff, of several hundred feet elevation, whose white steepy crags contrasted strangely with the level and verdant surface above. I am not geologist sufficient perfectly to understand how this effect should have occurred; though I suppose that the character of a chalky hill disposes it to crack perpendicularly when severed by a stream or undermined by the sea, leaving half the hill up to its summit a smooth grassy slope, and the other being gradually washed away and lost in the adjoining valley. But I am philosopher enough to moralize as often as I witness it; for what a picture does it exhibit of human life, as seen from different points of observation! Look back at the time

when you ran over the slippery paths of youth; how calm, how green, how full of goodly sights and sounds on every side did they appear! but did you see the gulph before you, and can you now sufficiently admire the grace and mercy, which preserved you amidst so many dangers then unknown and unsuspected? However, my friend, let us take a just and not a partial view: all is not cliff and crag, as all is not smoothness and verdure: we were deceived when, in our buoyant hours, we thought the latter; let us beware lest as we approach less sanguine years, we begin to suspect the former. Our God is not a tyrant, but a merciful Father in Christ Jesus. Read the twenty-third Psalm: did the happy man who indited it see nothing but desolation and barrenness? I honour even Paley for his glowing sketches of the goodness of God; but in describing the actual state of events and the blood joyfully flowing in the veins of the young and the prosperous, and even of the beasts that perish, he seems as though he had always trodden the serene altitude, and basked in sunshine, and beheld verdure, and breathed balminess; and had never descended to the valley, and shuddered at the precipices which frown beneath the fairest human prospects. The Christian must survey both; the young, that he may learn to fear; the aged, to hope; and the song and the resolution of both should be, "Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever."

For many hundred years one of the lofty eminences before you-that one, St. Catherine's, (why did the monks dedicate so many of our hills to St. Catherine ?) has been the daily prescribed and favourite haunt of the successive generations of college youth, who have trodden with elastic step its verdant sod. When one looks at their well-known track, and hears their glad voices, and casts a glance at those venerable walls where for

ages they have congregated, surveys their halls, and refectories, and courts, and dormitories, and above all their gem of a chapel, and then thinks of times by-gone, and of times to come, and of one's own childhood, and one's little ones; what a tide of thoughts rushes across the spirit! But I will not paraphrase for you, in prose, Gray's Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College. The sentimentalities of such a prospect, I confess, are to me merged in thoughts of deeper tinge than sentimentalism. Think, my friend, of the tens of thousands of immortal spirits that have been trained within yonder walls, since the day when William of Wykeham, after finishing his neighbouring magnificent cathedral, and completing his splendid establishment of New College, Oxford, laid their foundation somewhere about the year 1390, dedicating them to the honour of the Virgin Mary, as a nursery for his higher seminary, and providing like a princely donor for a warden, and seventy scholars, and ten secular priests, with the complement of priests' chaplains, and clerks, and choristers, and masters who were thenceforth and for ever to grace his munificence. Call up all your enthusiastic recollections; not forgetting a name or a stone that honours or dishonours this venerable institution. Retrace its time-worn courts, and its groined gate-ways, and its mutilated busts and corbels of kings and bishops, and its niches adorned with gorgeous statues; one of which, in particular, that of the Virgin with her Infant, a Papist might say is itself a proof of her miraculous power in escaping the vandalism of the Reformation, and the Great Rebellion;-look at the hall where banquetted, and the school where studied, and the play ground where sported, and the chapel where knelt-shall I in every case say worshipped ?—prelates and scholars and divines and poets and statesmen, most of them long since forgotten, and whose deeds will never

be known till the last day shall reveal them; others remembered in the affections or the execrations of mankind. Call to mind, for example, the names of Archbishops Chicheley and Wareham; of Bishops Ken, and Bilson, and Sherburn, and Lowth; of Sir Henry Wotton; of the poets Coryatt, and Otway, and Philips, and Young (Young's birth-place lies a few miles yonder, at Upham), and Somerville, and Collins, and Joseph Warton, with his brother the antiquary. These are but a tithe, but they furnish matter for a week's meditation. Picture our present Protestant Wykamist Bishops, Burgess, and Mant, and Howley, scanning their syllables, and fagging and fagged, where Ken the nonjuror, and Chicheley the persecutor of Wickliffe and founder of All Souls, Oxford, scanned and fagged, and were fagged before them. Is there not in all this a homily? A less fertile mind than your's would find one: nay, it is a whole volume of homilies; and I pity the man who wants a better text for twenty sermons. I should like to see a few from your pen on the subject: one might be upon the real nature of Christianity; and another upon education; and another upon what has been gained or lost, spiritually speaking, by the Protestant Reformation. We have certainly gained nothing in point of church building, as you will see by contrasting either of Wykham's chapels with those pepper-box and extinguisher structures called new churches. I cannot put out of my mind the sublimely chaste forms of this chapel: I wish I could say my eye never wandered during the service I attended at it; or that its vaulted roof and magic tracery never stole a thought from something better: but I have no such sins to confess in respect of most of our new churches; they have rarely interrupted my devotions, except perhaps to make me angry with the artist; or caused a thought when I had left them, except, What a pity it was that so much

good money should have been so ill-expended! Better a plain barnlike chapel than none; and I find no fault with all due economy: but it is hard to spend much, and have nothing in return; and to see our most costly churches full of extravagant atrocities. A good barn is an excellent thing, if it pretend to be nothing more; but things paid for as ornament should be ornamental : but what mean the disfigurements which now-a-days we call turrets, and towers, and steeples, and cupolas? One is ashamed to shew a foreigner three-fourths of the recent ecclesiastical edifices that glare around London; and it is the more provoking, because the most economical structure may be simple, and in good taste of its kind. Nothing, I believe, is much cheaper for a church than a plain Gothic edifice without ornament; if something more costly can be allowed, the same style abundantly admits of it, up to the most gorgeous fashion of Our Lady's chapel-or as we Protestant's call it, for want of a better saint-Henry the Seventh's chapel at Westminster. But the mischief is, that we have decorations which are no decorations; and whose only merit is the money they consume. I wonder our print-shops do not collect portraits of some score of these edifices, under the title of New Caricatures. They would, of course, begin by excellence with All Soul's, Langham Place, Marylebone; the dedication of which is about as commendable as the architecture. When Archbishop Chicheley founded " All Soul's College," the title meant something; Popery then supplied in profusion, altars, and mortuaries, and chantries, and hospitals, and churches, and cathedrals, and colleges, for the benefit of the souls of private donors, or of the faithful in general. In yonder college and cathedral, you will find not a few relics of Orate pro anima," which have escaped the theological eyes of Puritans, and the iconoclast hands of Commonwealth soldiers; but what can be meant in

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church; and a new St. Dunstan's or, above all, a new St. Swithen's? Illustrious St. Swithen, bishop and patron of Winton, why discard thee and revive All Souls? We may, however, I own, put a good Protestant construction on the latter, viewing it as a church for the benefit of the souls of the living, and not of the dead; and thus settle the anomaly, and turn it to good account.

But all this about church-building is a slip of the pen; for when I asked for your homily on the benefits of the Reformation, I alluded to its religious benefits, and not its architectural declensions. Remember, however, in justice to the Reformation, what Popery built her churches for; whereas Protestantism holds no post-obiit bonds on men's consciences; she offers no masses and prayers to deliver souls from purgatory: if we build churches upon Protestant principles, it is not "to bribe the rage of unrequited heaven:" our altars are not sacrificial; nor is a priest's absolution an equivalent for endowed abbeys and mortuary domains. Still, if we do not spend as idly or superstitiously, there is no need that we should not spend as gracefully; and he who delineated the temple at Jerusalem by Divine inspiration will attribute no virtue to our doing all we can to make our churches grotesque and displeasing.

I thought I was right when I said just now, that there remain some of our ancestors' "orate pro animâ" tablets - very harmless now, and worthy to be preserved as monitory vestiges-in Winton college chapel, as well as in the cathedral; but in CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 355.

order to be sure that my memory did not deceive me, I turned to my note-book, and there find copies of several which are, or were some time since, legible. I pass for the present by the cathedral, as I may have again to allude to the subject, should we pause at William of Wykham's splendid monument and chantry; for no man had stronger faith in purgatory, and the value of prayers and masses to rescue souls out of it, than this munificent prelate. You remember how he stipulated in the title deeds of his magnificent donations to the monks who once occupied this majestic cathedral, that the prior and convent should engage, "in exchange for his temporal benefits, to give an equivalent in spiritual goods;" especially three masses daily in his chapel, themselves and their successors for ever. In like manner the objects of his charity were every night for ever," to sing the De Profundis, or Fidelium, or Inclina for his soul, and the souls of his father and mother. What means "for ever?" Did he never expect release. What a horrible thought! What a horrible religion! I need not say that in his college chapel was duly recorded the same admonition to all who should enjoy his bounty: Orate pro animâ Wilhelmi de Wykeham, fundatoris hujus collegii." I should not like to be the casuist who was obliged to define how much falsehood mixed up with truth constituted a heresy. It might even be difficult to ascertain what was the exact measure of repose which a Papist like Wykham placed in other sources of hope than the immediate merits of the only Saviour. Faith and merit strongly jostled together, of which there are some curious illustrations in the inscriptions in our old churches and chapels. There are other doctrinal and practical jumbles also. Look at St. Anne teaching her daughter the Virgin Mary, while a woman is praying in monkish rhyme, O mihi per natum, vitam precor Anna,

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beatum ;

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which, though it may admit of two constructions, is, I fear, a prayer to Anne, to grant life for her Son's sake. Here, then, Christ is mixed up with a sainted advocate in heaven; as at other times we find his merits joined to human intercessions upon earth. For instance, we have-I am keeping to the college chapel-" Ora pro animâ Magistri J. Wright, quondam socii hujus collegii," with a scroll from the supplicant's mouth, "Per tua quinque vulnera, succurrere mihi omni horâ." Mr. Wright's faith in the five wounds of Christ for salvation was not so implicit as not to need posthumous human intercession for the deliverance of his

soul. In the instance of the address to Anne, was involved a double superstition-namely, purgatory and prayer to a departed spirit. In the case of Wright, the request had been lawful, had the object of it been lawful, just as the Apostle says, "Pray for us." I do not think, therefore, that we ought of necessity to conclude that every Papist who sought for the prayers of his fellow-men for his soul after his death, meant to derogate from the merits of Christ, any more than a Protestant who asks for his friend's prayers while living. The delusion so far was only in the belief in purgatory: but this was bad enough, and it led to every thing else that was bad, till on it were grounded the gross heresies of supererogated merit, and the worship of saints and angels. Take the matter how we may, and give to it its best aspect, Christ was dishonoured: eternal life was not in fact, whatever it might be in word, and in the glosses of modern popish advocates, sought for wholly through him; the merit of works, our own or others, in life or posthumous, was to make up the aggregate of goodness requisite for salvation. I wish something like this were not the creed of too many who call themselves Protestants; but look at our church-yards, and see if you cannot find many things as bad Ora pro animâ," and as con

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trary to the doctrine of justification by faith as the most superstitious reliance upon the supererogated merits of departed saints. The nonsensical superstition of Michael Cleeve's punning epitaph, anno 1487, Satrapa cœlorum, Michael, custos paradisi, Sortem justorum costodi da Michaeli, is less dangerous than the sentimental self-righteousness of modern days. No man in his senses will believe that Michael the archangel is the "custos Cleeve was of Winchester College of heaven as Michael upon earth, or that the heavenly warder was able to award salvation to his terrestrial namesake; but many may be, and are, misled by the self-righteous tone of a large portion of our Protestant epitaphs.

But be this as it may, the style of our monumental inscriptions became greatly improved in consequence of the Reformation, till it was perverted by the tame frigid semi-pagan school, that so long dethe effects of which we are only now based our national pulpit, and from recovering. I could easily prove this by collating the epitaphs in our cathedrals; but even in this college chapel I see traces of it. For instance, in a punning epitaph on John Dolben, anno 1560, the third year of Elizabeth, we have these two lines:

Non malus ille fuit qui verba novissima dixit,

O bone Christe precor te miserere mei: which I construe, "He could not be among the ungodly, whose dying words were, Blessed Saviour, have mercy upon me." Here is no invocation of saints or angels, and no trust in human merit: and if such a prayer were sincere, this man went to heaven justified through the obedience unto death of that Divine Saviour whose name alone he invoked. Let us hope that he received from the hands of that Physician of souls that medicine which another fellow, who died a quarter of a century after, 1585, is stated to have discovered and valued above all