divisions, her party jealousies; upon the various and conflicting interests which are enclosed within her bosom; upon the strange and anomalous divisions, sub-divisions, and minor sub-divisions of her interminable and contending religious denominations; and with greater apprehension still upon the varieties of national character and feeling which are daily becoming more strongly marked in feature, and which require more urgently every hour some amalgamating influence of higher origin, of more harmonizing tendency than the civil or the legal code. The equality enjoyed, and the freedom exercised by every individual of the United States in the choice of their religion, moral views, commercial enterprises, habits, manners, and society, is their birthright;—and were men angels, or still lived in the blessed ignorance of evil that was the lot of our first parents in Paradise; then, then indeed this freedom would be as heavenly in its effects as in its origin. But Man, Alas! is still apparelled in his coil of clay ;he is born in sin, and a child of wrath, and his very virtues themselves are embued with a taint of the earth from which his mortal body was

compounded; his ardour becomes ambition, his hope grows into confidence, his repentance sinks into despair, his wisdom is folly, his liberty licentiousness; and since the commission of that pristine sin which "first brought death into the world, and all our woe," he who was created in the similitude of God, pursues his weary footsteps begirt with woe, deformed with vice, a frail and darkened image.

The Gospel of Christ indeed sheds on us all its hallowed rays;-but the experience of all ages has shown that even the Gospel, the inspired word of God himself, must be moulded into a tangible form to be available in its effects on our degraded nature; that believers must practise certain pre-concerted external modes of worship extracted from its promulgations, and must unite in one universally acknowledged Confession of Faith; in order to establish and perpetuate religious observances among men. The primitive Christians, guided by that light from Heaven, which like the Star in the East upon the path of the expectant Shepherds, shone upon their fond inquiries, elicited from the NEW TESTAMENT,

the precious Legacy which they had received from Christ and his Apostles, those forms and habitudes of prayer which in after and happier years were ratified by the Fathers, and confirmed by the Councils of the Church.

THESE ARE THE FORMS AND HABITUDES WHICH CONSTITUTE THE CREED AND WORSHIP; OR, IN OTHER WORDS, THE RITUAL OF THE CATHOLIC RELIGION.

Modified in after ages by accidental causes, sometimes in honour, sometimes in dishonour, sometimes in wisdom, sometimes in folly, these forms have, notwithstanding, been the true, essential, and unchangeable canons on which all other denominations have reared their faith; and it is somewhat curious that the nearer these recusant denominations approach to the Roman Catholic ordinances, whether of Creed or form, the more exalted are the claims they put forth to Orthodoxy. But vain is the assumption, and false the claim; there is no stronger, more impregnable point in Orthodoxy, than UNITY-and it is precisely this Unity which is the brightest jewel in the diadem of the Catholic Church ;-it is this Unity, in all

her attributes, that has not only enabled her to be the mightiest, most extended, and most apostolic of Christian Communities, but it has carried her through centuries of sorrow with unrepining patience and submission. Her ministers have endured the Cross, despising the shame;-it is this Unity which creates the attachment of her disciples to her Faith ;-her Priests teach as men having authority; they preach the Gospel assisted by the light of tradition; they study and they know; it is, moreover, her Unity, that quickening spirit which has at length enabled her to cast off her sackcloth and ashes, to put on the whole Armour of Light, and in a new hemisphere the gift of her disciples to the elder world, to arise in Glory and in Majesty ;-universal, spiritual, and incorruptible.

But of all the consequences which result from the UNITY of the Church, the most important, the most needful in the existing state of society, is the DISCIPLINE of the heart of man; the reduction of his nature to the laws of Heaven and of Humanity. It is of this Discipline and its Effects that I would briefly speak.

I have alluded above to the apprehensions entertained by many of the best and wisest citizens of America with regard to the various intersectional causes which may estrange her people from each other, springing, as they do, in countless multitudes from North, and South, and East, and West. The impending result is alienation or disruption. Where then is the Union? I have also remarked upon the privileges exercised alike in common by the young and by the aged, by the learned and by the ignorant, by the high and by the low; by the master and his servant, by the teacher and the pupil-by the parent and the child; equal terms exist between all these unequal relations of life; and the natural consequence is insubordination. Where then is prosperity; where is peace, or the rational liberty and protection of the citizen? And I have commented upon the extraordinary spectacle presented by the religious denominations in America, and the dramatic aspects they present in their zealous efforts, each to emblazon majority upon their banner. They are separated into invisible fractions. "As a house divided against itself must fall," so these various creeds must be