nent respect, and an influence productive of good, can only be secured. by the exercise of the virtues belonging to our stations. This influence they have acquired by the exemplary discharge of all the duties of Christian ministers. They never shrink from the bed of sickness, or the abode of sorrow; their religion is that of Christendom, and their moral conduct has never been impeached. Accusations so devoid of truth warrant the suspicion, that there are not wanting those who fabricate charges for the purpose of maintaining a political system, and who represent the Catholic priesthood not as they are, but as they wish the public to believe them to be, and who would not be sorry by the virulence of their attacks, to drive them to desperation. In this hope they will be foiled: though goaded to the extreme of endurance, the precepts of their religion will always prevent them from giving, by their conduct, a triumph to the malignity of their accusers. I bear no enmity to the Protestant establishment, or to the professors of the Protestant faith, and it would be difficult to goad me into hostility against either; but I am free to confess that I see, with feelings approaching to disgust, the alliance that appears to have been formed between certain itinerant mountebanks and the respectable clergy of England. These persons, be they honest enthusiasts, fiery zealots, or political partizans, have been invited by the Protestant clergy to hold public meetings in some of our principal towns, for the purpose of exciting indignation against Christians of another communion. On these occasions, it is well known that the feelings of Catholics have been grossly outraged, their faith assailed with scurrility, their rites described as profanations, and themselves as idolaters. A scene of this sort was recently got up at Birmingham by the Protestant clergy, of whom more than eighty attended in person: the dramatis personæ were Messrs. M'Ghee and O'Sullivan, who reiterated all their accustomed, unprovoked, and insulting accusations against Catholics, and I say it with grief and pain that every falsehood uttered, every opprobrious epithet used, was received with loud plaudits by eighty ministers of the Reformed Church of England. It may be well were these reverend gentlemen to consider how far the course they are pursuing is likely to tend in these times to strengthen or to endanger their cause. Are they quite certain, that while searching for arms to attack others, in the councils of remote centuries, they have not forgotten the spirit of the century in which they live? The time was when men were moved by names, not things, and when a cry would be raised by invoking popular prejudices, and appealing to the passions of the multitude.

"That day is happily passed, and the clergy would do well to pause before they present themselves to the public as the instigators of men, whose frantic declamation has excited disgust in every well-regulated

mind. People will be tempted to inquire whether or not the benefits conferred by church establishments in these days are commensurate with the evil that would follow on their succeeding to raise the flame of religious discord and rancour through the land. In these times, when all subjects are freely discussed and tested by their public utility, establishments must consent to stand or fall on their merits; and if they cannot give up any of their rancour they must submit to moderate the expression of it, or they may depend upon it that their attempts to fire their neighbour's house will inevitably endanger their own. If they make common cause with the M'Ghees and O'Sullivans, they must risk the same fate; and strong must be the cause that can survive the infliction of such advocacy as theirs. I beg again to repeat that I have no enmity to the church by law, or to the professors of its doctrines. The religion I profess does not teach me to join the zealots and the bigots in bearing false witness against my neighbour. I believe that Protestantism is a mild system of benevolent Christianity, and I am convinced that no country on earth can show more active benevolence and more practical morality than Protestant England.

"I am, sir, your very obedient servant,

"E. BLOUNT.

Bryanstone-square, Jan. 23."

The writer of this letter was chairman of the Popish meeting held in the Town Hall, at Birmingham, on the 23rd November, 1835. He ought to have recollected that the priests who held that meeting were challenged to debate again the same resolutions, and to go through the same documents produced there on the 18th of October, of which he so complains, and that they did not dare to do it-nay, he ought to have recollected that his own meeting actually passed a resolution admitting Dr. Murray's letter to Lord Melbourne to be false by fastening Dens on him as the guide for his conferences.

But what does the gentleman prove by this attempt to vindicate the confessional on the ground of this restitution? He proves that it substitutes fear for honesty, and slavery for true religion-that while Popery cannot teach a poor sinner to abstain from robbery or theft through the knowledge and love of his God, it tempts him to disgorge the plunder from a slavish terror of his priest-that it leaves him in his conduct the servant of the devil, and tries to redeem its character by making him in his religion the slave of his confessor.

We now proceed to the meeting held at Edinburgh.

MEETING

OF THE

EDINBURGH PROTESTANT ASSOCIATION,

HELD IN

THE WEST CHURCH,

Monday, February 1st, 1836.

A meeting of this Association took place yesterday in the West Church, R. Wardlaw Ramsay, Esq. of Tillicoultry, one of the vicepresidents, in the chair. There were besides on the platform Counsellors Bruce and Johnston, Robert Haldane, Esq. Robert Haldane, jun. Esq. W. S., the Rev. Messrs. Bruce, Candlish, Cunningham, and Lewis of Leith, and several other gentlemen.

After prayer by the Rev. Mr. Lewis of Leith, the Chairman apologised for the unavoidable absence of their noble president, the Marquis of Tweeddale; and repeated what had been said by that nobleman at a former meeting of the Association, that they disclaimed all feelings of a political nature. He would not trespass upon the meeting farther than to state that the object of the present meeting was to receive a distinguished stranger, who had long and ably supported the Protestant cause against Popish superstition, which was now sensibly spreading over the length and breadth of the land.

The Rev. Mr. BRUCE, of the New North Church, said he rose merely. in consequence of having been requested to introduce to their notice a Rev. Friend, who had favoured them by coming from a great distance to address them at this time. Several of the gentlemen now on the platform, recollecting that they had themselves come as strangers to the city at no very remote period of time, they would be wanting in gratitude if they did not bear testimony that it was not the custom of the inhabitants to receive strangers unkindly. There were some, and those among the best class of the people, who had an innate and inveterate detestation of controversy, and who shrunk from the

presence of an amateur controversialist, as from blood; but he pledged himself that before they had heard his Rev. Friend five minutes, they would be satisfied that there was only one thing he delighted in more than a quiet life, and that was the maintenance in its purity of the Gospel of our salvation. He did not wish to detain the meeting longer; but as he had been deprived of an opportunity on which he had counted at a former meeting of the Protestant Association to bear testimony on its behalf, he wished to notice the charges which were brought against it of entertaining purposes which it had a thousand times disclaimed. He had heard of a good man who, when told by his friends that his conduct was so much assailed and maligned that if he did not publish a reply his character would be gone for ever,—replied, “No, I will not attempt to silence foolish people by their own artillery; I will not throw out a denial which will provoke a counter denial-but I shall try to live so that nobody may believe them." In like manner, the Protestant Association, by holding numerous meetings, such as that to-day, would very soon get into such a position that no man would dare to assail them. He concluded by introducing the Rev. Mr. M'GHEE, who thus addressed the assembly:

Mr. Chairman, Next to the actual discovery of truth itself, that which is most grateful to the ingenuous and enlightened mind, is to see that truth submitted to the process of a close and sifting examination, and to behold it come forth, as truth must ever come forth like pure gold, unsullied and undimmed from the furnace. To such a scrutiny as this it is my earnest desire to submit the resolutions which it is my duty to lay before this meeting to-day.

It does not befit a minister of Christ to attempt to conciliate the attention of his auditory by any expressions of compliment as to any gifts or graces with which they may be supposed to be endowed. It is rather his part to call them to the solemn exercise of them all on an occasion such as this. But this I may be permitted to say, that were it my object to procure the sanction of a public meeting to unsound principles-to elicit from a vast assembly their approbation of resolutions which could be justly accused of illiberal, contracted, party motives, got up for some contemptible political purpose, which might justly be charged with having been adopted by a rash, precipitate, unsound, deluded judgment, I may be allowed to say in one comprehensive word, that it is not to the city of Edinburgh I should have come for such a purpose.

It is my desire that these resolutions should go forth throughout this empire stamped with the deep impression of your most grave, deliberate adoption, suited at once to the eminence of your city, the solemnity of the place where this meeting is convened, and the character of those who compose it. I believe that resolutions of a more grave, momentous import, have never passed at any similar public meeting in Scotland.

These resolutions affect the religion of an immense body of your fellow-subjects—a religion, recollect, which is spreading its influence most rapidly through this country, and which has established itself, if I am not much misinformed, by several institutions in the very midst of the city where you dwell.

They affect not only this religion, but the principles, the characters, the conduct of those men who rule over its votaries with unlimited control, and who maintain an absolute despotism in this world, by the powers of all the terrors of the next.

They involve by this very instrumentality the maintenance of your own civil and religious liberty-the rights of our conscience-the security of our properties and persons-yea, I believe in my soul, they involve the integrity and existence of this empire.

They involve, as it may please God to bless them, the temporal and eternal happiness of millions yet unborn; for I am firmly persuaded, that if the awful and portentous facts concerning the Church of Rome, which it has pleased God to bring to light, shall be blessed by Him to awaken the principle, the religion, the united Christian energy of the Protestant Churches into a determined maintenance of the truth of His eternal word-if they shall awaken the ministers of the Churches of England and Scotland, even at this eleventh hour, into something like a spirit of apostolic fidelity, for the instruction and reformation of our poor Roman Catholic countrymen--for the salvation of our fellow-men, and the glory of our God-then I hope, and I am sure, they shall be made a blessing to us; and I think God, in his good providence, will grant us yet a respite, and continuance of those many temporal blessings which we have so long and so signally enjoyed, and no less signally and ungratefully abused.

If, on the other hand, we still continue to persevere in our Ephesian apostacy from our first love, our criminal Ephesian neglect of our first works, our base Laodicean indifference to the truth and glory of God that lukewarm indifference, that halting between two opinions,