to attempt to inspire the feeling of reverence in the minds of those subject to its jurisdiction.

I do not think that I have mentioned that the annual salary of an agrégé is 400 francs, and that from their body professors are chosen by the Minister of Instruction to carry on the education of the country.

Went to-day to the Frères Gaume, the publishers, in Rue Cassette. Messrs. Gaume have deserved well of all Christendom by their recent publications of St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom, St. Basil and St. Bernard; and the more so because the outlay necessary for these works was very great, and the prospect of reimbursement uncertain. I was very sorry to hear from M. Gaume, that the result of these undertakings had not been such as to encourage them to proceed further; they had, he told me, originally intended to publish St. Jerome, but had been obliged to abandon the project. It was very gratifying to hear from his mouth, for the theological and literary honour of England, that the principal market for these Patristic works had been in that country. This fact ought to have some weight, and probably will have, in favour of England, in this and other Roman Catholic countries, where the Church of England is commonly regarded as fearing, or contemning, the authority of Christian antiquity.

I asked M. Gaume for a book lately published by

his brother, the Abbé Gaume, Histoire de la Société Domestique, to which is prefixed a long and interesting discourse concerning the signs of the times, especially as seen in France, which, in his opinion, indicate the manifestation of the Antichristian sway, and the presence of the Latter Days. In this work the Abbé has collected the principal passages bearing upon this subject, from Holy Scripture and the works of the Fathers, as far as they relate to chronological data, and moral and religious phenomena, with the exception, however, of those particular places of Scripture which appear to many biblical scholars to refer to corruptions and usurpations of a power existing in the Church herself, and appertaining to a spiritual form of Antichristianism, which, no less than a secular one, that of infidelity and impiety, will, in their opinion, be permitted by Almighty God to try the faith and patience of the Church in the last ages of the world.

The Abbé's exhibition of the Antichristian phenomena of France, now fearfully apparent and distinct, is very interesting and awful. He places the national renunciation of Christianity in France among the works of the Antichristian principle, and supplies abundant reason, by an exhibition in detail of its practical consequences, for serious reflection and apprehension to all who are so rash and shortsighted as to imagine that religion will gain in efficiency, and the Church in liberty, by the complete separation of

the spiritual from the secular power of a nation. He shows that the result of this separation in France has been the disorganization of the State, and so far from being the emancipation of the Church, has been, in fact, its subjection to the most abject and galling bondage; and this too, it must be observed, in the case of a church which has a very powerful extrinsic support in its favour, that of the Roman See, to which the State of France is compelled by circumstances to pay a political reverence.

Here again, while on this important subject of the present relations of Church and State in France, it is worthy of remark that the Charte of 1830, the consummation of the last Revolution, and founded on principles purely secular and irreligious, has proved, in its working, the most favourable act to the Papacy that has ever been done in France!

The sixth article of this Charte declares that the "Ministers of the Roman Catholic Religion, professed by the majority of the French nation, and also those of other Christian denominations, shall receive salaries from the national exchequer."

France then ceased to have a Religious Establishment. The Roman Catholic priesthood was detached from the Monarchy and the State. Their State salary is no bond of union between them and the civil power, because a similar State salary is given to ministers of other denominations of Christians, by the article of the Charte just cited; and not a year

elapsed after the ratification of the Charte, before this salary was extended even to the Jewish Rabbis : (Ministres du culte Israelite,) who, by the law of February 8, 1831, began to receive an annual salary from the national treasury (du trésor public), dating from the 1st January, 1831.

Thus, then, all religions (I speak of the theory, for Jews being endowed, there is no ground for objection to the endowment of any religion) are endowed by the State in France. But the practical result of this universal endowment is (as might have been anticipated), that by endowing all religions, the State virtually endows none. By supporting all alike, it supports none; and it receives no support from any: it is indifferent to all Creeds, and all Creeds in return are indifferent to it. Indeed, they are more than indifferent to it; for, being Creeds, and therefore having certain positive principles of religion, they look with religious antipathy on that very power which pays them, because, while it pays them, it shows that it has no religious regard for any one of them, by paying all other religions alike.

This feeling of religious hostility to the State has from various causes been brought out more powerfully in the Roman Catholic clergy than in any other religious body. Their position was changed by the Charte of 1830. Under the Government of the Restoration, they were the Ministers of la Religion de 'Etat, according to the language of the Charte of

1814; and even under the Empire their condition was very different from what it is now. The Emperor

was the State. He was a Roman Catholic: and a special provision was made in the Concordat of 1801 (art. 17), that, "in the event of the Head of the Nation not being a Catholic, then a new Convention should be made, putting the regulations for nomination to Bishoprics, &c. on a different footing." But now, since 1830, the Monarch, as such, is of no religion; and, besides this, his responsibility is resolved into that of his Ministers, who, as such, are of no religion also; and thus Religion is severed from the State. It therefore looks on the State as an alien and-I fear we must add-as an apostate; and especially that peculiar form of religion,-Roman Catholicism-which had been hitherto allied with the State, now feels no sympathy with it, either on religious or on personal grounds, but is opposed to it on both.

It must be remembered also, that in addition to this repulsion from the national Monarchical centre, the religion of Roman Catholicism is in all times acted on by a strong attractive force to a foreign and anti-monarchical one. The Church of France had floated for many centuries in a sort of intermediate moorage, like a sacred Delos bound by chains between the Myconos of the Monarchy on the one side, and the Gyaros of the Papacy on the other. But the Charte came in in 1830, and, in an evil hour, it cut