of liberty—a fugitive Queen, who can find no to support by reason, rather than enforce by retreat in her three kingdoms, and was forced authority. With what prudence did she conto seek in her native country a melancholy duct herself in circumstances the most ar exile. Nine sea voyages undertaken against duous; if a skilful hand could have saved the her will by a Queen, in spite of wintry tem- state, hers was the one to have done it. Her pests a throne unworthily overturned, and magnanimity can never be sufficiently extolled. miraculously re-established. Behold the les- Fortune had no power over her; neither the son which God has given to kings! thus does evils which she foresaw, nor those by which He manifest to the world the nothingness of she was surprised, could lower her courage. its pomps and its grandeur! If our words What shall I say to her immovable fidelity to fail, if language sinks beneath the grandeur the religion of her ancestors? She knew well of such a subject, the simple narrative is more that that attachment constituted the glory of touching than aught that words can convey. her house, as well as of the whole of France, The heart of a great Queen, formerly elevated sole nation in the world which, during the by so long a course of prosperity, then steeped twelve centuries of its existence, has never in all the bitterness of affliction, will speak in seen on the throne but the faithful children of sufficiently touching language; and if it is not the church. Uniformly she declared that nogiven to a private individual to teach the thing should detach her from the faith of St. proper lessons from so mournful a catastrophe, Louis. The King, her husband, has prothe King of Israel has supplied the words-nounced upon her the noblest of all eulogiums, 'Hear! Oh ye Great of the Earth!-Take lessons, ye Rulers of the World!' that their hearts were in union in all but the matter of religion; and confirming by his testimony the piety of the Queen, that enlightened Prince has made known to all the world at once his tenderness, his conjugal attachment, and the sacred, inviolable fidelity of his incomparable spouse." All the world must admire the sustained dignity of this noble eulogium; but touching as were the misfortunes, heroic the character, of the unfortunate Henrietta, it more nearly concerns us to attend to the opinion of Bossuet on the great theological convulsion, in the throes of which she was swallowed up. "But the wise and devout Princess, whose obsequies we celebrate, has not merely been a spectacle exhibited to the world in order that men might learn the counsels of Divine Providence, and the fatal revolutions of monarchies. She took counsel herself from the calamities in which she was involved, while God was instructing kings by her example. It is by giving and withdrawing power that God communicates his lessons to kings. The Queen we mourn has equally listened to the voice of these two opposite monitors. She has made use, like a Christian, alike of pros- "When God permits the smoke to arise from perous and adverse fortune. In the first she the pits of the abyss which darkens the face was beneficent, in the last invincible; as long of Heaven-that is, when he suffers heresy to as she was fortunate, she let her power be felt arise-when, to punish the scandals of the only by her unbounded deeds of goodness; church, or awaken the piety of the people and when wrapt in misery, she enriched herself their pastors, He permits the darkness of error more than ever by the heroic virtues befitting to deceive the most elevated minds, and to misfortune. For her own good, she has lost spread abroad throughout the world a haughty that sovereign power which she formerly ex- chagrin, a disquieted curiosity, a spirit of reercised only for the blessings of her subjects; | volt, He determines, in his infinite wisdom, and if her friends-if the universal church the limits which are to be imposed to the prohave profited by her prosperities, she herself |gress of error, the stay which is to be put to has profited more from her calamities than from all her previous grandeur. That is the great lesson to be drawn from the ever-memorable life of Henrietta Maria of France, Queen of Great Britain. the sufferings of the church. I do not pretend to announce to you, Christians, the destiny of the heresies of our times, nor to be able to assign the fatal boundary by which God has restrained their course. But if my judgment does not deceive me; if, recurring to the history of past ages, I rightly apply their experi and the wisest of men concur in the sentiment, that the days of blindness are past, and that the time is approaching when the true light will return. "I need not dwell on the illustrious birth of that Princess; no rank on earth equals it in lustre. Her virtues have been not less re-ence to the present, I am led to the opinion, markable than her descent. She was endowed with a generosity truly royal; of a truth, it might be said, that she deemed every thing lost which was not given away. Nor were her other virtues less admirable. The faithful depositary of many important complaints and secrets-it was her favourite maxim that princes should observe the same silence as confessors, and exercise the same discretion. In the utmost fury of the Civil Wars never was her word doubted, or her clemency called in question. Who has so nobly exercised that winning art which humbles without lowering *tself, and confers so graciously liberty, while it commands respect? At once mild yet firmcondescending, yet dignified-she knew at the same time how to convince and persuade, and "When Henry VIII., a prince in other respects so accomplished, was seduced by the passions which blinded Solomon and so many other kings, and began to shake the authority of the Church, the wise warned him, that if he stirred that one point, he would throw the whole fabric of government into peril, and infuse, in opposition to his wishes, a frightful license into future àges. The wise forewarned him; but when is passion controlled by wisdom; when does not folly smile at its predictions? That, however, which a prudent foresight could not persuade to men, a ruder instructor, experience, has compelled them to believe. All that religion has that is most sa-] surgent reason, freed from its absurdities by cred has been sacrificed; England has changed the experience of the calamities with which so far that it no longer can recognise itself; and, more agitated in its bosom and on its own soil than even the ocean which surrounds it, it has been overwhelmed by a frightful inundation of innumerable absurd sects. Who can | predict but what, repenting of its enormous errors concerning Government, it may not extend its reflections still farther, and look back with fond regret to the tranquil condition of religious thought which preceded the convulsions?" with the progress of the Anglo-American race; it is spreading over the wilds of Australia; slowly but steadily it is invading the primeval deserts of Africa. It shares the destiny of the language of Milton, Shakspeare, and Scott; it must grow with the growth of a colonial empire which encircles the earth; the invention of printing, the discovery of steam navigation, are the vehicles of its mercies to mankind! they were attended, the fair form of Catholic Christianity has arisen in the British Isles; imbued with the spirit of the universal Church, but destitute of the rancour of its deluded sectaries; borrowing from the religion of Rome its charity, adopting from the Lutheran Church its morality; sharing with reason its intellectual triumphs, inheriting from faith its spiritual constancy, not disdaining the support of ages, and yet not excluding the light of time; glorying in the antiquity of its descent, and, Amidst all this pomp of language, and this at the same time, admitting the necessity of sagacious intermixture of political foresight recent reformation; it has approached as near with religious prepossession, there is one re- as the weakness of humanity, and the limited flection which necessarily forces itself upon extent of our present vision will permit, to the mind. Bossuet conceived, and conceived that model of ideal perfection which, veiled in justly, that the frightful atrocities into which the silver robes of innocence, the faithful trust religious dissension had precipitated the Eng- is one day to pervade the earth. And if prelish people would produce a general reaction sent appearances justify any presentiments as against the theological fervour from which to future events, the destinies of this church they had originated; and that the days of ex- are worthy of the mighty collision of antiquitravagant fervour were numbered, from the ty with revolution, of the independence of very extent of the general suffering which its thought with the reverence for authority, from aberrations had occasioned. In arriving at which it arose, and the vast part assigned to this conclusion, he correctly reasoned from it in human affairs. The glories of the Engthe past to the present; and foretold a decline lish nation, the triumphs of the English navy, in false opinion, from the woful consequences have been the pioneers of its progress; the inwhich Providence had attached to its continu- fidel triumphs of the French Revolution, the ance. Yet how widely did he err when he victorious career of Napoleon, have ministerimagined that the days of the Reformation | ed to its success; it is indissolubly wound up were numbered, or that England, relapsing into the quiet despotism of former days, was to fall back again into the arms of the Eternal Church! At that very moment the broad and deep foundations of British freedom were in the act of being laid, and that power was arising, destined in future ages to be the bulwark of the Protestant faith, the vehicle of pure undefiled religion to the remotest corners of the earth. The great theological convulsions of the sixteenth century were working out their appropriate fruits; a new world was peopling by its energy, and rising into existence from its spirit; and from the oppressed and distracted shores of England those hosts of emigrants were embarking for distant regions, who were destined, at no remote period, to spread the Church of England and the Protestant faith through the countless millions of the American race. The errors, indeed the passions, the absurdities of that unhappy period, as Bossuet rightly conjectured, have passed away; the Fifth Monarchy men no longer disturb the plains of England; the chants of the Covenanters are no longer heard on the mountains of Scotland; transferred to the faithful record of history or the classic pages of romance, these relics of the olden time only furnish a heart-stirring subject for the talents of the historian or the genius of the novelist. But the human mind never falls back, though it often halts in its course. Ves tigia nulla retrorsum is the law of social affairs not less than of the fabled descent to the shades below; the descendants of the Puritans and the Covenanters have abjured the absurdities of their fathers, but they have not relapsed into the chains of Popery. Purified of its corruptions by the indignant voice of in "I have spoken," says Bossuet, "of the license into which the human mind is thrown, when once the foundations of religion are shaken, and the ancient landmarks are removed. "But as the subject of the present discourse affords so unique and memorable an example for the instruction of all ages of the lengths to which such furious passions will lead the people, I must, in justice to my subject, recur to the original sources of error, and conduct you, step by step, from the first contempt and disregard of the church to the final atrocities in which it has plunged mankind. "The fountain of the whole evil is to be found in those in the last century, who attempted reformation by means of schism; finding the church an invincible barrier against all their innovations, they felt themselves under the necessity of overturning it. Thus the decrees of the Councils, the doctrines of the fathers, the traditions of the Holy See, and of the Catholic Church, have been no longer considered as sacred and inviolable. Every one has made for himself a tribunal, where he rendered himself the arbiter of his own belief; and yet the innovators did impose some limits to the changes of thought by restraining them within the bounds of holy writ, as if the mo ment that the principle is once admitted tha every believer may put what interpretations | have sprung the Independents, to whose ex upon its passages he pleases, and buoy him- travagances it was thought no parallel could self up with the belief that the Holy Spirit has be found till there emerged out of their bosom dictated to him his own peculiar explanation, a still more fanatic race, the Tremblers, who there is no individual who may not at once believe that all their reveries are Divine inconceive himself authorized to worship his spiration; and the Seekers, who, seventeen own inventions, to consecrate his thoughts, hundred years after Christ, still look for the and call the wanderings of his imagination Saviour, whom they have never yet been able divine inspiration. From the moment this to find. It is thus, that when the earth was fatal doctrine was introduced, it was distinctly once stirred, ruins fell on ruins; when opinion foreseen by the wise that license of thought was once shaken, sect multiplied upon sect. being now emancipated from all control, sects In vain the kings of England flattered themwould multiply ad infinitum; obstinacy become selves that they would be able to arrest the invincible; disputes interminable; and that, human mind on this perilous declivity by prewhile some would give to their reveries the serving the Episcopacy; for what could the name of inspiration, others, disgusted with bishops do, when they had themselves undersuch extravagant visions, and not being able mined their own authority, and all the reveto reconcile the majesty of religion with a rence due to the power which they derived by faith torn by so many divisions, would seek a succession from the apostolic ages, by openly fatal repose in the indifference of irreligion, or condemning their predecessors, even as far the hardihood of atheism. back as the origin of their spiritual authority, in the person of St. Gregory and his disciple St. Augustin, the first apostle of the English nation? What is Episcopacy, when it is severed from the Church, which is its main stay, to attach itself, contrary to its divine nature, to royalty as its supreme head? Thus two powers, of a character so essentially different, can never properly unite; their functions are so different that they mutually impede each; and the majesty of the kings of England would have remained inviolable, if, content with its sacred rights, it had not endeavoured to draw to itself the privileges and prerogatives of the Church. Thus nothing has arrested the violence of the spirit, so fruitful is error; and God, to punish the irreligious irritability of his people, has delivered them over to the intemperance of their own vain curiosity, so that the ardour of their insensate disputes has become the most dangerous of their maladies. "Such, and more fatal still, have been the natural effects of the new doctrine. But, in like manner, as a stream which has burst its banks does not everywhere produce the same ravages, because its rapidity does not find everywhere the same inclinations and openings, thus, although that spirit of indocility and independence was generally diffused through all the heresies of latter times, it has not produced universally the same effects; it has in many quarters been restrained by fear, worldly interests, and the particular humour of nations, or by the Supreme Power, which can impose, where it seems good, effectual limits even to the utmost extravagance of human passion. If it has appeared in undisguised malignity in England-if its malignity has declared itself without reserve-if its kings have perished under its fury, it is because its kings have been the primary causes of the catastrophe. They have yielded too much to the popular delusion that the ancient religion was susceptible of improvement. Their subjects have in consequence ceased to revere its maxims; they could have no respect for it when they saw them daily giving place to the passions and caprices of princes. The earth, too frequently moved, has become incapable of consistence; the mountains, once so stable, have fallen on all sides, and ghastly precipices have started forth from their bared sides. I apply these remarks to all the frightful aberrations which we daily see rising up around us. Be not deluded with the idea that they are only a quarrel of the Episcopacy, or some disputes of the English Church, which have so profoundly moved the Commons. These disputes were nothing but the feeble commencement, slight essays by which the turbulent spirits made trial of their liberty. Something much more violent was stirring their hearts; a secret disgust at all authority -an insatiable craving after innovation, after they had once tasted its delicious sweets. : "Thus the Calvinists, more bold than the Lutherans, have paved the way for the Socinians, whose numbers increase every day. From the same source have sprung the infinite sects of the Anabaptists, and from their opinions, mingled with the tenets of Calvinism, "Can we be surprised if they lost all respect for majesty and the laws, if they became factious, rebellious, and obstinate, when such principles were instilled into their minds? Religion is fatally enervated when it is changed; the weight is taken away which can alone restrain mankind. There is in the bottom of every heart a rebellious spirit, which never fails to escape if the necessary restraint is taken away; no curb is left when men are once taught that they may dispose at pleasure of religion. Thence has sprung that pretended reign of Christ, heretofore unknown to Christendom, which was destined to annihilate royalty, and render all men equal, under the name of Independents; a seditious dream, an impious and sacrilegious chimera; but valu able as a proof of the eternal truth, that every thing turns to sedition and treason, when once the authority of religion is destroyed. But why seek for proofs of a truth, while the Divine Spirit has pronounced upon the subject an unalterable sentence? God has himself declared that he will withdraw from the people who alter the religion which he has established, and deliver them over to the scourge of civil war. Hear the prophet Zacharias! Their souls, saith the Lord, have swerved from me, and I have said I will no longer be ་ The character and the career of the triumph of Cromwell are thus sketched out by the same master-hand: . . your shepherd; let him who is to die prepare | gress of the human mind from one age to for death; let he who is to be cut off perish, another, to observe the large intermixture of and the remainder shall prey on each other's error with truth that pervades this remarkable flesh.'"*-BOSSUET's Orais. Funeb. de la Reine passage. It is clear that the powerful and d'Angleterre. sagacious mind of the Bishop of Meaux had penetrated the real nature of the revolutionary spirit, whether in religion or politics; and, accordingly, there is a great deal of truth in his Contempt of the unity of the Church was observations on the English Revolution. But doubtless the cause of the divisions of Eng-he narrows too much the view which he took land. If it is asked how it happened that so many opposite and irreconcilable sects should have united themselves to overthrow the royal authority? the answer is plain-a man arose of an incredible depth of thought; as profound a hypocrite as he was a skilful politician; capable alike of undertaking and concealing every thing; active and indefatigable equally in peace as war; so vigilant and active, that he has never proved awanting to any opportunity which presented itself to his elevation; in fine, one of those stirring and audacious spirits which seem born to overturn the world. How hazardous the fate of such persons is, sufficiently appears from the history of all ages. But also what can they not accomplish when it pleases God to make use of them for his purposes? 'It was given to him to deceive the people, and to prevail against kings.'t Perceiving that in that infinite assembly of sects, who were destitute of all certain rules, the pleasure of indulging in their own dogmas | was the secret charm which fascinated all minds, he contrived to play upon that monstrous propensity so as to render that monstrous assembly a most formidable body. When once the secret is discovered of leading the multitude by the attractions of liberty, it follows blindly, because it hears only that name. The people, occupied with the first object which had transported them, go blindfold on, without perceiving that they are on the high road to servitude; and their subtle conductor, at once a soldier, a preacher, a combatant, and a dogmatizer, so enchanted the world, that he came to be regarded as a chief sent by God to work out the triumph of the cause of independence. . He was so; but it was for its punishment. The design of the Almighty was to instruct kings, by this great example, in the danger of leaving his church: He wished to unfold to men to what lengths, both in temporal and spiritual matters, the rebellious spirit of schism can lead; and when, in order to accomplish this end, he has made choice of an instrument, nothing can arrest his course. I am the Lord,' said he, by the mouth of his prophet Jeremiah; I made the earth, and all that therein is: I place it in the hands of whom I will.""Ibid. of it. He ascribes more than its due to the secession from the Church of Rome. No one can doubt, indeed, that religious fervour was the great lever which then moved mankind; and that Bossuet was correct in holding that it was the fervour of the Reformation running into fanaticism, which, spreading from spiritual to temporal concerns, produced the horrors of the Great Rebellion. But, on the other hand, the event has proved that it was no part of the design of Providence to compel the English, by the experience of suffering, to fall again into the arms of the Church of Rome. An hundred and seventy years have elapsed since Bossuet composed these splendid passages, and the Church of England is not only still undecayed, but it is flourishing now in renovated youth, and has spread its colonial descendants through every part of the earth. The Church of Rome still holds its ground in more than half of old Europe; but Protestantism has spread with the efforts of colonial enterprise, and the Bible and the hatchet have gone hand in hand in exploring the wilds of the New World. And the hand of Providence is equally clear in both. Catholicism is suited to the stately monarchies, antiquated civilization, and slavish habits of Southern Europe; but it is totally unfit to animate the exertions and inspire the spirit of the dauntless emigrants who are to spread the seeds of civilization through the wilderness of nature. And one thing is very remarkable, and affords a striking illustration of that subjection of human affairs to an overruling Providence which Bossuet has so eloquently asserted in all parts of his writings. Mr. Hume has observed that the marriage of Queen Henrietta to Charles I., by the partiality for the Catholic faith which it infused into his descendants, is the principal reason of their being at this moment exiles from the British throne! It was deemed at the time a masterpiece of the Court of Rome to place a Catholic Queen on the throne of England; and the conversion of that bright jewel to the tiara of St. Peter was confidently anticipated from its effects; and its ultimate results have been not only to confirm the Protestant faith in the British isles, but diffuse its seed, by the distraction and suffering of the Civil Wars, through the boundless colonial empire of Great Britain. POLAND.* THE recent events in Poland have awakened | datory life disdained the restraints of regular the old and but half-extinguished interest of the government. When we read the accounts of British people in the fate of that unhappy the terrible struggles they maintained with the country. The French may regard the Polish great insurrection of these formidable hordes legions as the vanguard only of revolutionary under Bogdan, in the 17th century, we are movement: the Radicals may hail their strug-transported to the days of Scythian warfare, gle as the first fruits of political regeneration: and recognise the features of that dreadful the great majority of observers in this country invasion of the Sarmatian tribes, which the think of them only as a gallant people, bravely genius of Marius averted from the Roman combating for their independence, and forget republic. the shades of political difference in the great cause of national freedom. The sympathy with the Poles, accordingly, is universal. It is as strong with the Tories as the Whigs, with the supporters of antiquated abuse as the aspirants after modern improvement. Political considerations combine with generous feeling in this general interest. And numbers who regard with aversion any approach towards revolutionary warfare, yet view it with complacency when it seems destined to interpose Sarmatian valour between European independence and Muscovite ambition. Nor has the military spirit of the people declined in modern times. The victories of Sobieski, the deliverance of Vienna, seem rather the fiction of romance than the records of real achievement. No victory so glorious as that of Kotzim had been gained by Christendom over the Saracens since the triumphs of Richard on the field of Ascalon: And the tide of Mahommedan conquest would have rolled resistlessly over the plains of Germany, even in the reign of Louis XIV., if it had not been arrested by the Polish hero under the walls of Vienna. Napoleon said it was the The history of Poland, however, contains peculiar quality of the Polanders to form solmore subjects of interest than this. It is fraught diers more rapidly than any other people. with political instruction as well as romantic And their exploits in the Italian and Spanish adventure, and exhibits on a great scale the campaigns justified the high eulogium and consequences of that democratic equality avowed partiality of that great commander. which, with uninformed politicians, is so much No swords cut deeper than theirs in the Rusthe object of eulogium. The French revolusian ranks during the campaign of 1812, and tionists, who sympathize so vehemently with alone, amidst universal defection, they mainthe Poles in their contest with Russian despot-tained their faith inviolate in the rout at Leipism, little imagine that the misfortunes of that country are the result of that very equality which they have made such sacrifices to attain; and that in the weakness of Poland may be discerned the consequences of the political system which they consider as the perfection of society. sic. But for the hesitation of the French em- "From Fate's dark book one leaf been torn, Poland, in ancient, possessed very much the extent and dominion of Russia in Europe in modern times. It stretched from the Baltic to the Euxine; from Smolensko to Bohemia; and How, then, has it happened that a country embraced within its bosom the whole Scythia of such immense extent, inhabited by so martial of antiquity-the storehouse of nations, from a people, whose strength on great occasions whence the hordes issued who so long pressed was equal to such achievements, should in upon and at last overthrew the Roman empire. every age have been so unfortunate, that their Its inhabitants have in every age been cele- victories should have led to no result, and brated for their heroic valour: they twice, in their valour so often proved inadequate to conjunction with the Tartars, captured the save their country from dismemberment? The ancient capital of Russia, and the conflagration plaintive motto, Quomodo Lapsus; Quid feci, of Moscow, and retreat of Napoleon, were but may with still more justice be applied to the the repetition of what had resulted five centu- fortunes of Poland than the fall of the Courtries before from the appearance of the Polish enays. Always combating," says Salvandy, eagles on the banks of the Moskwa. Placed" frequently victorious, they never gained an on the frontiers of European civilization, they long formed its barrier against barbarian invasion: and the most desperate wars they ever maintained were those which they had to carry on with their own subjects, the Cossacks of the Ukraine, whose roving habits and pre * Salvandy's Histoire de la Pologne, 3 vols. Paris, 1830. Reviewed in Blackwood's Magazine, Aug. 1831. Writ'en during the Polish war. accession of territory, and were generally glad to terminate a glorious contest by a cession of the ancient provinces of the republic." Superficial observers will answer, that it was the elective form of government; their unfortunate situation in the midst of military Powers, and the absence of any chain of moun tains to form the refuge of unfortunate patriot |