usurpation, "that opposeth and exalteth itself, above all that is called God or that is worshiped," until "the Lord shall consume it with the breath of his mouth, and destroy it by the brightness of his coming!" "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints!" Out of the crude and germinating errors of the apostolic age, by a gradual and natural course of development, through the succeeding centuries-THE PAPACY AROSE! In its conflicts with the dominant Paganism, the defective Christiantity of those times imbibed much of the spirit, and adopted many of the notions and observances, of its corrupt and powerful foe. By the influences thus introduced, the process of deterioration was accelerated, and the downward tendency increased. Each succeeding degree of corruption necessitated and facilitated another, until a whole code of idolatrous superstition became incorporated with nominal Christianity; and the compound exhibited refinements in iniquity, and a hideous growth of moral deformity, which primitive Paganism never knew.

When imperial policy adopted "Christianity" as a war-cry in the strife of factions, and afterwards used it as an instrument of government, the corrupting influence of this alliance united to increase the impurity and degradation of the church. An ambitious priesthood strove and scrambled for political power. The profession of the gospel was associated with intrigue and imposture-with violence, intolerance, and carnal strife; until the way was prepared for setting up a clerical dominion upon the throne of the Cæsars, and, ultimately, for making the kingdoms of modern Europe so many feoffs and vassalages of the empire of the Popes. We do not now call attention to the political events through which the Papal system attained its completion; although it were easy and instructive to mark this progress from Constantine to Charlemagne, and from Charlemagne to the Council of Trent. Our object is to study the beginnings of this astonishing system, and to derive instruction for ourselves from a serious investigation of the germinant principles-the seeds of evil-out of which such desolating mischief arose.

A departure from the simplicity of the gospel, a defection from spiritual Christianity, a usurpation against Christian liberty-PRODUCED THE PAPACY. Religious zeal, associated with worldly policy, clerical ambition, and popular ignorance, issued in the great apostacy, which paganised Christianity and imperilled the salvation of the world! These things are assuredly calculated to suggest to us salutary warnings and instructions. They are "for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world have come." They most impressively teach us to guard against the beginnings of evil. They admonish us, as with the united voices of God's revelation in the gospel, and his awful and glorious providence, not to cherish any of those elements of corruption, that contributed to the formation of the great "mystery of iniquity."

This subject sometimes calls up in my mind a sad, but suitable analogy. Some years ago, the people of these countries thought of the cholera as a disease peculiar to foreign climes. It was imagined that some natural laws connected with the atmosphere, or the soil, or the intervening ocean, effectually confined it to those distant lands; and though we might pity the inhabitants of those ill-fated and far-off regions, yet, for ourselves, it was supposed we need not be alarmed: OUR POSITION MADE US SAFE! That delusion was effectually, but painfully removed. A bitter experience taught us that we were wrong. Several times has our land mourned, as if a destroying angel were spreading his wings over our dwellings, and smiting their inmates with the blast of death. It has been found that the state of things among ourselves supplied the destroyer with the aliment of his life and the means of our destruction. In the habits of our people-in the dwellings of our poor-in the streets of our cities-in the purlieus around our cathedrals and our palaceswere found the predisposing causes of disease, the squalor and pollution, by which the pestilence was fed. Now, it is understood that our safety depends upon our purity. To cleanse our cities, is to save our people. Every sanitary board is an anti-cholera institution: and, by God's blessing upon such means, we expect the plague to be stayed. Every one can apply this illustration.

The indifference and false security, which formerly prevailed regard ing the spread of Popery among us, have been, in some measure, dispelled by its recent advances. The plague has entered our dwellings: "the pestilence that walketh in darkness," and "the destruction that wasteth at noon-day," are in our midst. Our carnal dreams of Protestant infallibility have been disturbed; and now the voice of duty calls us all to vigilant and holy efforts to purify our churches and to save the land. Our brethren in the Established Church are most exposed to this evil. They most demand our sympathy and our prayers. The post of danger is the post of honor; and if they be "valiant for the truth," and meet the motley legions of Rome, equipped with "the whole armor of God," and "quit themselves like men, as good soldiers of Jesus Christ," then a double glory will rest upon them as the victorious vanguard in the great Reformation-battle of this age. If they falter and fail in the hour of conflict, their children's children may howl around their graves, muttering execrations upon their memory, as arch-traitors to their country and their God. May all holy influences descend upon them, and heavenly power sustain them, that their hearts may not quail in the day of trial.

It is high time that all our Protestant people were brought to understand the true idea of a Christian church, as a voluntary society of Christian people, and not a close corporation of clerical interpreters. As the Article in the English Prayer Book beautifully expresses it: "a church is a congregation of faithful men." Let these congregations

recognize and assert their rights and privileges in allegiance to Christ; and take into their own hands the administration of their own affairs; and they will soon find the way to get rid of Anglican Romanism, and to worship God without the mediation of priests.

Let the united voice of all our Protestant churches meet, and answer all the Romish assumptions on this head, by the glorious Scripture testimony, that there is no proper and literal priesthood in Christianity, but that of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, “who, by the one offering of himself, has brought in everlasting righteousness, and obtained eternal redemption for us ;" and that the only other priesthood in Christianity, is the common privilege of all true believers of ministers and people alike—and of ministers, not as ministers, but as believers-who are God's "spiritual priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." All bodies of Protestant Dissenters are vitally interested in this question. It is a , humiliating fact, that the spirit of Popery is natural to us all; and all ecclesiastical systems are more or less calculated to foster it. Our sectarian differences, and the rivalries and antipathies which they occasion, have inflicted much mischief upon the cause of truth; and among the evils existing in connection with nonconformity, it is deeply to be deplored that a culpable indifference has prevailed, in some instances, regarding the baleful influence and threatening progress of Romanism; while a pitiful imitation of the Papacy and its priestism has grown up in some of our churches.

Let us, by the grace of God, avoid all this. If you do not desire to have the tragedy, do not, I pray you, have any thing to do with the farce.

It may be thought a little thing; but I solemnly believe that one of the highest duties to which earnest Christians are called in the present day, is to REPUDIATE ALL CONNECTION BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND SHAMS! The gospel of Christ has to teach the world, in a purer sense than the world has known it, that "an honest man is the noblest work of God!" Protestant ministers require to be pre-eminently honest men. In seeking to convince and persuade men for God, they should desire to be transparent media, through which God's truth shall reach the human soul. It behooves us to take good care that our piety shall not afford food to the infidelity that surrounds us. We should endeavor to make honest men of all classes and of all capacities understand and feel, that it is not our professional honor we are seeking; but the honor of God, and the salvation of their souls. We must therefore put away from us all the little artifices and pious frauds of semi-Protestant Jesuitism; "not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God."

Our subject, and the signs of the times, demand this of us. The

shrewd and practical worldly inen of this age, the hard-headed and sometimes hard-hearted race, which evangelical Protestantism has to sanctify and save, are not to be converted or convinced by oracular assumptions, or the platitudes of clerical pretense. Let us, then, renounce all claims to spiritual dictatorship, and all the mimicries of priestism; and stand erect before our fellow-men, in the moral dignity of downright upright Christian manhood. Be it our desire to testify to all men "the glorious gospel of the blessed God;" not to know any thing among men, "but Jesus Christ and him crucified;" not desiring "to have any dominion over faith, but to be helpers of their joy;" "seeking the profit of many, that they may be saved." Let us unite in hearty, holy, brotherly efforts, for the defense and triumph of Christian truth; ever remembering that our sufficiency is of God; and that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through him. Especially should it be the constant aim and earnest prayer of all true Protestant Christians that Roman Catholics may be brought to know and rejoice in “the truth as it is in Jesus ;" and that the masses of our people may be turned unto God.

O that the tide of popular sympathy, which is now, in many cases, fast ebbing away toward the dark dead sea of infidelity and ungodliness, were turned to mingle with the living waters which flow from the throne of God! Oh! that our churches and their ministers were all imbued with the spirit of the gospel; and that we were all so constrained by the love of Christ that the great purpose of our lives should be to make known his name, and manifest the glories of his wondrous grace! Come the day when these shall be the characteristics of all our Protestant churches! Then shall Britain be prepared for the crash of nations, when "God shall arise to shake terribly the earth;" then the pallor of detected conspirators shall not mantle our cheeks, nor the terror of a divine conscription paralyze our hearts, when God's own hand shall strike, at Rome, that death-knell of priestly imposture, which all the churches shall hear, and at whose echoes men and angels shall rejoice. That day is coming! Who can tell how soon its dawn may be upon us? Day of wrath and glory; day of terrible retributions and munificent mercy! May we be prepared for its appearing!

In the prospect of it, let all the churches of the Reformation unite in a penitential and revival hymn, that may become a choral anthem for the jubilee of the world:

"God be merciful unto us, and bless us;

And cause his face to shine upon us;

That thy way may be known upon earth,
Thy saving health among all nations!

Let the people praise thee, O God,

Let all the people praise thee!"

DISCOURSE LV.

ROBERT IRVINE, D.D.

THIS gentleman is a native of the province of Ulster. He received the early part of his professional education in the Royal College at Belfast, and finished his theological studies in Edinburg, being a pupil of the late Dr. Chalmers.

After the disruption in Scotland in 1843, the Irish Assembly set to work with great earnestness to furnish missionaries in co-operation with the Free Church of Scotland to the British colonies, and Dr. Irvine was loosed from an important charge in Ballynahinch, county Down (his native county) and sent as the first missionary of the Irish church to British America. His first field of labor was in the city of St. John, N. B., the great commercial metropolis of that province, where he labored with very great success for eight years, when he was removed to the charge of the second church in the city of Toronto, Canada West. This charge he held for two years, and during the time he occupied this post the Synod of Canada engaged his services as a lecturer on Church History in the Knox's College. On the "moval of Professor Young from Hamilton, to fill the chair of moral philosophy, vacated in Knox's College, Dr. Irvine received a unanimous call to his present charge of the Knox Church, Hamilton, Canada West, one of the most important and influential churches in the province.

Dr. Irvine is about forty years of age, middle size, with a slight inclination to corpulency. He is a man of high literary and moral qualifications, of gentlemanly bearing, of indefatigable zeal and energy of purpose; and in the pulpit and through the press, is doing perhaps as much as almost any other man for the moral elevation of the province favored with his immediate labors. Dr. Irvine always preaches without notes; even one of his longest sentences, filling an entire paragraph, will be uttered with ease and fluency, without a single scrap of a pen under his eye. His appearance in the pulpit is more than ordinarily commanding and attractive; his delivery distinct and impressive; his communications rich in thought and evangelical in sentiment; and his whole style formed after the best Scotch models.

The discourse which we give is one of a course of lectures delivered in 1854-56 on the Evidences of Christianity. Its great length obliges us to abridge some of its parts; but the luminous and effective train of reasoning is preserved entire.