principles of a genuine Christian, is speech seasoned with salt. The truths of the gospel which he has received influencing his discourse, he becomes a sweet savour of Christ, and even his ordinary conversation has a beneficial this continually in 'view! TO A SON LEAVING HOME. Bless'd be the course of all thy life, May He lift up his smiling face, Which for the sake of Christ his Son, Shines full of love, of peace, and grace, Till thou the crown of life hast won. The Lord thy God watch over thee; Thy father's blessing take, and think of me. Israd Hartmann. THE VAUDOIS MISSIONARY. "O lady fair, these silks of mine Are beautiful and rare; The richest web of the Indian loom,' And these pearls are pure and mild to behold, I have brought them with me a weary way: And the lady smiled on the worn old man, And she placed their price in the old man's hand, But she paused at the wanderer's earnest call, "My gentle lady, stay!" "O lady fair! I have yet a gem Which a purer lustre flings, Than the diamond flash of the jewell'd crown, The lady glanced at the mirroring steel, Their clasping pearls between: "Bring forth thy pearl of exceeding worth, Thou traveller grey and old; And name the price of thy precious gem, The cloud went off from the pilgrim's brow, The hoary traveller went his way- On that high-born maiden's mind; And given her human heart to God, In its beautiful hour of youth. The Christian Treasury. REVIEW S. and The Mystery Solved: or, Ireland's Miseries; the Grand Cause and Cure. By the Rev. EDWARD MARCUS DILL, A.M.,M.D., Missionary Agent to the Irish Presbyterian Church. Edinburgh: Johnston Hunter, 1852. 16mo. pp. viii. 304. THERE is one thing, and perhaps only one, in which all writers and speakers respecting Ireland agree: they unanimously represent its condition as extremely wretched. If misery gives a claim to the attention of the compassionate; if helplessness calls for the interference of the benevolent; if destitution is a preparative for the re ception of the Saviour's message; then, by general consent, Ireland demands the prompt and determined exertions of every Christian philanthropist. Whole villages in ruins; two hundred and seventy thousand dwellings destroyed; one eighth part of the people having perished by famine, another eighth part having fled from their country in despair; the remainder, with few exceptions, anxiously desiring to escape from the scenes of disappointment and strife which surround them; the hereditary landowners left without revenue or resource; young men of high family becoming soldiers or police-men, their sisters begging to be made teachers in industrial schools; poor-law unions deeply in debt or actually insolvent; and poor-rates reducing to beggary the few who have anything to lose ;-such are the sights commonly presented to the observer in Munster, Connaught, and Leinster, three provinces out of the four into which the adjacent island is divided. To what cause or causes then is this unparalleled distress to be ascribed? This is the first and principal question which this volume is intended to answer. The author shows that it cannot be attributed to the soil, the climate, or the want of rivers, harbours, and other elements of wealth; and, that it can be no more traced to the natural qualities of the race than of the country, its origin being the same as that of the Highlanders of Scotland, and the mountaineers of Wales. He argues against the adequacy of the political evils under which Ireland has suffered to produce the result; the agitation which has done so much of late years to annoy and disorganize has neither been the original cause of the distress, nor without its uses; the "prince of agitators," he maintains, did much to emancipate the Irish mind; by inspiring the people with a love of civil liberty he awakened of necessity some longing for its twin sister, religious freedom; it was his own teaching which mainly enabled them, at length, to see through his schemes, provoked the revolt which cost him his life, destroyed Irish agitation as a trade, and sent him down to the grave so little regretted that you now seldom hear his name pronounced even by them who formerly worshipped him. On the other hand, Ireland is not insufficiently represented in Parliament, having one hundred and five members, while Scotland has only fifty-three; it is the object of the most pains-taking legislation, more time every session being spent on Irish affairs than on all our colonial affairs together, and more of the public treasure having been lavished on Ireland than on any other portion of the empire. Discussing its social state, the author shows that the habits of the people are such as must lead to want and to general disorganization, and that "the country must decline, in which all, classes, from the landlord to the peasant, so generally neglect the duties of their station; but that the social state must itself be derivative, flowing from higher causes. Entering then upon the moral state of the country, he cites documents to prove that according to the census of 1841, near 53 per cent. of the population of Ireland could neither read nor write; while only 26 per cent. could both read and write; and that for the four years ending in 1850, the average annual proportion of prisoners in Ireland who could read and write was not 18 per cent. He says that it is quite notorious that thousands in Ireland never saw a Bible, and know nothing of the Saviour, but the name; that to the question, "Who made you?" the missionaries often receive the answer, "It was my mother, sir," and to the question, "Are you a sinner?" the reply is frequently, "No, indeed, sir;" and that, in 1850, there were 17,108 prisoners convicted of crimes, for which 1,858 were sentenced to transportation. reply is, Popery is the enemy of knowledge, virtue, and love; and thus entails on its victims degradation and ruin; it labours to eclipse the mind, corrupt the conscience, destroy the heart, debase the whole nature, and thus it ruins man's temporal state, and blights his eternal prospects. These are heavy charges; but Dr. Dill establishes them one by one, as he proceeds. The whole tendency of Popery, he shows, is to paralyze the energies and blight the better qualities of man. Not only does Rome intercept the revelation of God, and substitute a human system in its place, but it makes its victims social cripples, and their life a prolonged childhood. "From their cradles to their graves they are dependent on their priest; he thinks for them, prays for them, shrives them, anoints them, manages all their eternal concerns, and interferes pretty freely with their temporal also. They must not even use their senses but as he directs; for when he tells them bread is no longer bread they must believe In every thing pertaining to social him. And thus their whole training and moral condition the author shows, makes them helpless creatures; they step by step, the immense superiority acquire of necessity the habit of of Ulster over the southern and western dependence; and accustomed to confide portions of the island. He naturally to other hands their eternal all, the concludes, therefore, that the difference greater interest, they come but too between Romanism and Protestantism | naturally to confide their temporal all, explains all the other differences; the less. How sadly exemplified in the "why the 'Black North' is a garden, and the Sunny South' a wilderness; why southern jails are crowded, and northern ones half empty." He appeals to statistics to demonstrate that in all the four provinces of Ireland, "as is the Protestantism, so are the knowledge, virtue, and prosperity." The chief cause of Ireland's wretchedness, he maintains, is her Moral Degradation, and the chief cause of her Moral Degradation is Popery. How then does Popery operate to produce these dire effects? Our author's case of our countrymen! If they want their rivers deepened, their harbours improved, their very land drained, they look elsewhere for assistance. Hospitals are established—they look to Parliament to support them; trade is decayingthey look to parliament to relieve them; the potato fails-they look to parliament to feed them; they want a Galway Packet Station, and look first to England, then to America. Nay, they cannot even get up a rebellion without seeking Foreign aid: in 1798, Wolfe Tone presents himself before the French Directory; in 1848, Smith the landlord being often a protestant, O'Brien waits on Lamartine. And is frequently opposed by the priest; and thus," adds the author, "our poor then, imagine if you can the dilemma country lies a paralytic on the world's of the people! Still the Scylla of highway, crying to all nations to come beggary is nothing to the Charybdis of and help her along!" p. 150. perdition; the terrors of the con The evils arising from the Celibacy of fessional far exceed even those of the the Priests, and the effects of the Con-crowbar brigade;' and so the priests fessional upon both men and women, pass under review; with the abject dependence produced by the doctrine of intention, whereby the efficacy of any rite is made to hinge on the intention of the administrator; the impoverishing tendency of the many holidays by which business is interrupted, and of the system of merchandise in which gold is the currency, grace the commodity, the altar the shop, and the priest the salesman; the utter extinction of political liberty, arising from the predominant operation of priestly influence. After referring to the manner in which the institution of trial by jury is perverted, the author proceeds to say :— generally carry it over the landlords, have frequently boasted that they could return cow-boys to parliament,' and have often led their dupes to the hustings. when they scarce even knew the candidate's name! Thus one of the dearest rights of freemen is by Popery transformed into not only a yoke of bondage, but such an instrument of ruin, that thousands of the people would deem its withdrawal the greatest mercy that England could extend them. Yet these priests are the champions of popular liberty !-and one of the standing themes of their platform harangues is the deficiency of the suffrage, and the necessity for its extension !" While in these diversified ways "Take one other bulwark of British Rome blights the poor Irishman's temliberty, the elective franchise.' Be- poral interests, it is ruining his soul. tween the landlord and the priest, this In her system," says Mr. Dill, "all is has also been little better than a pardon-regeneration is unknown— mockery, for the people must generally salvation in sin, never salvation from vote for whatever candidate these sin. The very term holiness is bereft masters direct. If they disobey the of its meaning, and made a mystic former they are ejected; if they rebel sign-so we have holy water, salt, oil, against the latter, they are 'damned.' clay, wells, boughs, trees, everything 'Whoever,' exlaimed Father John but a holy heart. All is externalO'Sullivan from the altar, on the eve of penance of the body for sorrow of soul: an election for Kerry-whoever will confession to the priest for contrition vote for that renegade, the Knight of before God, corporeal sufferings on Kerry, I won't prepare him for death, earth, and material fires in purgatory." but will let him die like a beast, neither will I baptize his children.' Fancy, then, these people between those two tyrants-the one threatening temporal ruin, and the other eternal! It is all very well when both support the same candidate; and right thankful are the poor creatures to escape by being simply robbed of their rights as freemen. But In treating of the cure for Ireland's woes we are happy to find the author avowing his opinion that legislation can do but little. Almost the only ground which remains for it to occupy, he says, is "the land question." He thinks that some more sweeping measure for the transfer of land is needed than even the Encumbered Estates Bill; with " a that unprincipled measure was before the country; yet the vigour infused into it by funds drawn from protestant and dissenting pockets is even greater than its English opponents generally sup thorough reform of those ruinous chancery laws by which so many proprietors have doubtless been beggared; and, above all, a new and equitable adjustment, of the relation of landlord and tenant." It is indisputable, in his judg-pose. "There you see an extensive pile ment that the want of such an adjustment has been fraught with evil, and that it has been, in a secondary sense, the cause of many agrarian crimes. "It has done much, he affirms, to train our peasantry to insubordination, and beget that chronic discontent which now glooms on the brows of thousands of them. It has caused many of our bloodiest murders. It has furnished priests and demagogues with their best text against the 'Sassenach,' proved a screen for Rome to hide her own desolations behind, and thus served to break the force of the demonstration that she is Ireland's grand curse. It is desolating the only fair, because the only protestant province in Ireland, provoking even its peaceful inhabitants to outrage, and thus destroying that moral tone which its gospel ministers have so carefully cultivated, and how much more serious those outrages would be but for those gospel ministers, on whom some are disposed to father them all, is pretty evident from the fact that they are almost exclusively the work of Ribbonmen." But if there is not much that he would call upon the legislature to do, there are things which he maintains, as we think very justly which it ought to undo. Above all, it is bound by both justice and expediency to withdraw the aid which it affords to the dissemination of moral poison throughout the land, and the training of men to teach the people to renounce personal responsibility and transfer themselves to the guidance of a foreign board of ecclesiastics. The endowment of Maynooth, has proved itself to be as mischievous as we predicted that it would be when of buildings," says Mr. Dill, "enclosed in a park of 100 acres, with gardens, walks, playgrounds, containing numberless apartments for professors and students, besides dining-hall, chapel, and library of 10,000 volumes; with a staff consisting of a president, vice-president, bursar, two deans, librarian, Dunboyne prefect, and ten professors, not to mention a train of servants, including a butcher, baker, and brewer and ALL maintained at the public cost! And there you find 500 students, generally of the lowest class; their cabin costume exchanged for a black suit, with long black gaiters: and themselves, from having in their humble houses, "cultivated letters on a little oatmeal," now amply supplied with smoking joints and potations of ale, and receiving besides £20 a year of pocket money!! Why, if the strength and glory of the British empire were bound up in these 500, if they were destined to be her shield and stay, instead of her tormentors, they could not be the objects of more bountiful regard. And while these embryo pests of society are thus dandled on the lap of royal favour, how many of its future ornaments are left to ply the trowel or the shuttle one half of the year in order to support themselves at college the remainder! Can the history of folly present anything like this? The world's most protestant nation supporting Popery, and the very worst kind of it, Irish Popery, and in the very worst form, A COLLEGE, not the hornets, but the nest to hatch them in! This nation, continuing the grant despite the utter failure of all the ends for which it was given, increasing it too as the mischief increases, and, in 1845, permanently |