have been contrary, but not contradictory; they form in history a beautiful contrast It is a striking contrast-and the two things are perfectly contrary-but it is not contradictory, that the pope should be worshipped at Rome, and burnt at London, on the same day; that while he was called God's vicegerent in Italy, he should be represented in the streets of Moscow as a hog, for the amusement of Peter the Great. culous power, by resuscitating nine dead persons at one time-resolved, in order to counteract the credit of the Jansenists, to engrave a print of Jesus Christ dressed as a Jesuit. The Jansenists, on the other hand, in order to give a satisfactory proof that Jesus Christ had not assumed the habit of a Jesuit, filled Paris with convulsions, and attracted great crowds of people to witness them. The counsellor of parliament, Carré de Montgeron, went to present to the king a quarto collection of all these miracles, attested by a thousand witnesses. He was very properly shut up in a chateau, where attempts were made to restore his senses by regimen ; but truth always prevails over persecuThe white man who first saw a negro tion, and the miracles lasted for thirty was much astonished; but the first who years together, without interruption. said that the negro was the offspring of a Sister Rose, Sister Illuminée, and the siswhite pair astonishes me much more; Iters Promise and Comfitte, were scourged do not agree with him. A painter who with great energy, without, however, exrepresents white men, negroes, and olive-hibiting any appearance of the whipping coloured people, may display fine coǹ Mahomet, stationed at the right hand of God over half the globe, and damned over the other half, is the greatest of con trasts. Travel far from your own country, and everything will be contrast for you. trasts. CONVULSIONARIES. ABOUT the year 1724, the cemetery of St. Medard abounded in amusement, and many miracles were performed there. The following epigram by the Duchess of Maine gives a tolerable account of the character of most of them : Une decroteur á la Royale, A Port-Royal shoe-black, who had one lame leg, De par le roi, défense à Dieu De faire miracles en ce lieu. Louis to God:-To keep the peace, ilere miracles must henceforth cease. next day. They were bastinadoed on their stomachs without injury, and placed before a large fire; but, being defended by certain pomades and preparations, were not burnt. At length, as every art is constantly advancing towards perfection, their persecutors concluded with actually thrusting swords through their chairs, and with crucifying them. A famous schoolmaster had also the benefit of crucifixion; all which was done to convince the world that a certain bull was ridiculous, a fact that might have been easily proved without so much trouble. However, Jesuits and Jansenists, all united against the "Spirit of Laws," and against.... and against.... and against....and.. And after all this, we dare to ridicule Laplanders, Samoiedes, and Negroes! CORN. THEY must be sceptics indeed, who doubt that pain comes from panis. But Ito make bread we must have corn. The It is also well known that the Jesuits- Gauls had corn in the time of Cæsar: being no longer able to perform similar but whence did they take the word blé? miracles, in consequence of Xavier having It is pretended that it is from bladum, a exhausted their stock of grace and mira-word employed in the barbarous Latin of the middle age by the Chancellor Des-out cultivation in Mesopotamia, as ap vignes, or De Erneis, whose eyes, it is said, were torn out by order of the Emperor Frederick II. ples, wild pears, chesnuts, and medlars, in the west. It is as well to believe him, until we are sure of the contrary; for it is necessary that corn should grow sponIt has become the ordinary and indispensable nourishment in the finest climates, and in all the north. But the Latin words of these barbarous ages, were only ancient Celtic or Teuto-taneously somewhere. nic words Latinised. Bladum then comes from our blead, and not our blead from bladum. The Italians call it bioda, and the countries in which the ancient Roman language is preserved, still say blia. The great philosophers whose talents we estimate so highly, and whose systems we do not follow, have pretended, in the natural history of the dog (page 195), that men created corn; and that our an This knowledge is not infinitely useful; but we are curious to know where the Gauls and Teutones found corn to Sow? We are told that the Tyrianscestors, by means of sowing tares and brought it into Spain, the Spaniards into Gaul, and the Gauls into Germany. And where did the Tyrians get this corn?Probably from the Greeks, in exchange for their alphabet. Who made this present to the Greeks? It was the goddess Ceres, without doubt; and having ascended to Ceres, we can scarcely go any higher. Ceres must have descended from heaven expressly to give us wheat, rye, and barley. However, as the credit of Ceres, who gave corn to the Greeks, and that of Ishet or Isis, who gratified the Egyptians with it, are at present very much decayed, we may still be said to remain in uncertainty as to the origin of corn. Sanchoniathon tells us that Dagon or Dagan, one of the grandsons of Thaut, had the superintendence of the corn in Phoenicia. Now his Thaut was near the time of our Jared; from which it appears that corn is very ancient, and that it is of the same antiquity as grass. Perhaps this Dagon was the first who made bread; but that is not demonstrated. What a strange thing that we should know positively that we are obliged to Noah for wine, and that we do not know to whom we owe the invention of bread. § And what is still more strange, we are still so ungrateful to Noah, that while we have more than two thousand songs in honour of Bacchus, we scarcely sing one in honour of our benefactor Noah. A Jew assured me that corn came with cow-grass together, changed them into wheat. As these philosophers are not of our opinion on shells, they will permit us to differ from them on corn. We do not think that tulips could ever have been produced from jasmine. We find that the germ of corn is quite different from that of tares, and we do not believe in any transmutation. When it shall be proved to us, we will retract. We have seen, in the article BREADTREE, that in three-quarters of the earth bread is not eaten. It is pretended that the Ethiopians laughed at the Egyptians, who lived on bread. But since corn is our chief nourishment, it has become one of the greatest objects of commerce and politics. So much has been written on this subject, that if a labourer sowed as many pounds of wheat as we have volumes on this commodity, he might expect a more ample harvest, and become richer than those who, in their painted and gilded saloons, are ignorant of the } excess of his oppression and misery. Egypt became the best country in the world for wheat, when, after several ages, which it is difficult to reckon exactly, the inhabitants found the secret of rendering a destructive river-which had always inundated the country, and was only useful to the rats, insects, reptiles, and crocodiles of Egypt-serviceable to the fecundity of the soil. Its waters, mixed with a black mud, were neither useful to quench the thirst of the inhabitants, nor for ablution. It must have taken im- Neapolitan Abbé Gagliana amused the mense time and a prodigious labour to French nation on the exportation of corn, subdue the river, to divide it into canals, by finding out the secret of making, even to found towns on lands formerly move-in French, dialogues as amusing as our able, and to change the caverns of the rocks into vast buildings. best romances, and as instructive as our good serious books. If this work did not diminish the price of bread, it gave great pleasure to the nation, which was what it valued most. The partisans of All this is more astonishing than the pyramids; for being accomplished, behold a people sure of the best corn in the world, without the necessity of labour! } unlimited_exportation answered him It is the inhabitant of this country who raises and fattens poultry superior to that of Caux, who is habited in the finest linen in the most temperate climate, and who have none of the real wants of other people. smartly. The result was, that the readers no longer knew where they were, and the greater part took to reading romances, expecting that the three or four following years of abundance would enable them to judge. The ladies were no longer able to distinguish wheat from rye, while honest devotees continued to believe, that grain must lie and rot in the ground, in order to spring up again. COUNCILS. Meetings of Ecclesiastics, called together to resolve Doubts or Questions on Points of Faith or Discipline. Towards the year 1750, the French nation, surfeited with tragedies, comedies, operas, romances, and romantic histories with moral reflections still more romantic, and with theological disputes on grace and on convulsionaries, began to reason upon corn. The even forgot the vine, in treating of wheat and rye. Useful things were written on agriculture, and every body read them except the la- THE Use of Councils was not unknown bourers. The good people imagined, as to the followers of the ancient religion of they walked out of the comic opera, that { Zerdusht, whom we call Zoroaster. France had a prodigious quantity of corn About the year 200 of our era, Ardeshir to sell, and the cry of the nation at last Babecan, King of Persia, called together obtained of the government, in 1764, the forty thousand priests, to consult them liberty of exportation. touching some of his doubts about paraAccordingly they exported. The re-dise and hell, which they call the gehen-sult was exactly what it had been in the a term adopted by the Jews during their time of Henry IV., they sold a little too captivity at Babylon, as they did the much, and a barren year succeeding, Ma- names of the angels and of the months. demoiselle Bernard was obliged, for the Erdoviraph, the most celebrated of the second time, to sell her necklace to get magi, having drunk three glasses of a linen and chemises. Now the complain-soporific wine, had an extasy which ants passed from one extreme to the lasted seven days and seven nights, durother, and complained against the ex-ing which his soul was transported to portation that they had so recently demanded, which shows how difficult it is to please all the world and his wife. Able and well-meaning people, without interest, have written with as much sagacity as courage, in favour of the unlimited liberty of the commerce in grain. Others, of as much mind, and with equally pure views, have written in the idea of limiting this liberty; and the God. When the paroxysm was over, he re-assured the faith of the king, by relating to him the great many wonderful things he had seen in the other world, and having them written down. We know that Jesus was called Christ, a Greek word signifying anointed; and his doctrine Christianity, or gospel, i. e., good news, because having, as was his custom, entered one sabbath day the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter, kill, and eat." synagogue of Nazareth, where he was brought up, he applied to himself this passage of Isaiah, which he had just read: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor," They of the synagogue, did, to be sure, drive him out of their town, and carry him to a point of the hill, on which it was built, in order to throw him headlong from it; and his relatives" went out to lay hold on him," for they were told, and they said, "that he was beside himself." Nor is it less certain that Jesus constantly de-order that all might know that what they clared, he was come not to destroy the law or the prophecies, but to fulfil them. But, as he left nothing written, his first disciples were divided on the famous question, whether the Gentiles were to be circumcised and ordered to keep the Mosaic law. The apostles and the priests, therefore, assembled at Jerusalem to examine this point; and, after many conferences, they wrote to the brethren among the Gentiles, at Antioch, in Syria, and in Cilicia, a letter of which we give the substance:- "It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, not to impose upon you any obligations but those which are necessary, viz., to abstain from meats offered up to idols, from blood, from the flesh of choked animals, and from fornication." The decision of this council did not prevent Peter, when at Antioch, from continuing to eat with the Gentiles, before some of the circumcised, who came from James, had arrived. But Paul, seeing that he did not walk straight in the path of gospel truth, resisted him to the face, saying to him before them all, "If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?" Indeed Peter had lived liked the Gentiles ever since he had seen, in a trance, "heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet, knit at the four corners, and let down to the Paul, who so loudly reproved Peter for using this dissimulation to make them believe that he still observed the law, had himself recourse to a similar feint at Jerusalem. Being accused of teaching the Jews who were among the Gentiles to renounce Moses, he went and purified himself in the temple for seven days, in had heard of him was false, and that he continued to observe the law: this, too, was done by the advice of all the priests, assembled at the house of James,which priests were the same who had decided, with the Holy Ghost, that these observations were unnecessary. Councils were afterwards distinguished into general and particular. Particular councils are of three kinds-national, convoked by the prince, the patriarch, or the primate; provincial, assembled by the metropolitan or archbishop; and diocesan, or synods held by each bishop. The following is a decree of one of the councils held at Macon: "Whenever a layman met a priest or a deacon on the road, he shall offer him his arm if the priest and the layman are both on horseback, the layman shall stop and salute the priest reverently; and if the priest be on foot, and the layman on horseback, the layman shall dismount, and shall not mount again until the ecclesiastic be at a certain distance :-all on pain of interdiction for as long a time as it shall please the metropolitan." The list of the councils, in Moréri's Dictionary, occupies more than sixteen pages: but as authors are not agreed concerning the number of general councils, we shall here confine ourselves to the results of the first eight that were assembled by order of the emperors. Two priests of Alexandria, seeking to know whether Jesus was God or creature, not only did the bishops and priests dis pute, but the whole people were divided, and the disorder arrived at such a pitch, that the Pagans ridiculed Christianity on the stage. The Emperor Constantine first wrote in these terms to Bishop Alexander and the priest Arius, the authors of the dissension :-"These questions, which are unnecessary, and spring only from unprofitable idleness, may be discussed in order to exercise the intellect; but they should not be repeated in the hearing of the people. Being divided on so small a matter, it is not just that you should govern according to your thoughts so great a multitude of God's people. Such conduct is mean and puerile, unworthy of the priestly office, and of men of sense. I do not say this to compel you entirely to agree on this frivolous question, whatever it is. You may, with a private difference, preserve unity, provided these subtleties and different opinions remain secret in your inmost thoughts." the cabal of Arius's party. In it was said, amongst other things, that if Jesus were acknowledged to be the son of God uncreated, he must also be acknowledged to be consubstantial with the Father. Therefore it was that Athanasius, a deacon of Alexandria, persuaded the fathers to dwell on the word consubstantial, which had been rejected as improper by the council of Antioch, held against Paul of Samosata; but he took it in a gross sense, marking division; as we say, that several pieces of money are of the same metal : whereas the orthodox explained the term consubstantial so well, that the emperor himself comprehended that it involved no corporeal idea-signified no division of the absolutely immaterial and spiritual substance of the Father-but was to be understood in a divine and ineffable sense. They moreover showed the injustice of the Arians in rejecting this word on pretence that it was not in the scripturesthey who employ so many words which are not there to be found: and who say that the Son of God was brought out of nothing, and had not existed from all eternity. The emperor, having learned that his letter was without effect, resolved, by the advice of the bishops, to convoke an cecumenical council-i. e. a council of the whole habitable earth, and chose for the place of meeting the town of Nicea, in Constantine then wrote two letters at Bithynia. There came thither two thou-the same time, to give publicity to the sand and forty-eight bishops, who, as ordinances of the council, and make them Eutychius relates, were all of different known to such as had not attended it. sentiments and opinions. This prince, The first, addressed to the churches in having had the patience to hear them dis- general, says, in so many words, that the pute on this point, was much surprised question of the faith has been examined, at finding among them so little unanimity; and so well cleared up, that no difficulty and the author of the Arabic preface to remains. In the second, amongst others, this council says, that the records of these the church of Alexandria is thus addisputes amounted to forty volumes. dressed :-"What three hundred bishops have ordained is no other than the seed of the only Son of God; the Holy Ghost has declared the will of God through these great men whom he inspired. Now, then, let none doubt-let none dispute, but each one return with all his heart into the way of truth." This prodigious number of bishops will not appear incredible, when it is recollected that Usher, quoted by Selden, relates that St. Patrick, who lived in the fifth century, founded three hundred aud sixty-five churches, and ordained the like number of bishops; which proves that then each church had its bishop, that is, its over-looker. In the council of Nice there was read a letter from Eusebius of Nicomedia, containing manifest heresy, and discovering The ecclesiastical writers are not agreed as to the number of bishops who subscribed to the ordinances of this council. Eusebius reckons only two hundred and fifty; Eustatius of Antioch, cited by |