Bourdaloue? Echo answers, Where? The greatest preacher of the present day, M. Lacordaire, is little more than a distinguished petit maître in the pulpit. Greatness is gone with the cause and source of greatness. The flattery which has always dishonoured the highest efforts of French pulpit oratory, when the great had to be addressed, adapting itself in his mouth to republican tastes, has gone so far as to declare that in Paris M. Lacordaire saw a new Zion. Take as a specimen of his Christian truth and pure eloquence (!) the following:

'Jesus Christ well said There are few that be saved; but this was a speech made for his own time, for there are many classes of humanity that are in the condition of safety. Thus, 1. infants who in great numbers die at the age of innocence: 2. Women; God gave two gifts to women, the gift of faith and the gift of charity. Every woman without exception when going down to the tomb hears in her right ear, "I salute you, full of grace, the Lord is with you!" or in her left ear, "Many sins will be pardoned because she has loved much!" And how many of that sex are there that are saved? The half of the human race: 3. the poor in a mass: 4. nearly all the rich.'

Unmeaning talk like this may well be terminated by bathos such as the following:

'Tares of despair, separate yourselves from God's wheat! O thou demon, where are thy elect, and what remains as thy share?'

Not better is the condition of the Ultramontane controversial theology. We give as an instance the Table of Contents' of a book approved by a bishop, and distributed among the young of his diocese:

First Question;- What ought you to think of a religion which had its origin in libertinism?'

Second Question ;- 'What ought you to think of a religion which has spread and strengthened itself by plunder and violence?'

Third Question ;-'What ought you to think of a religion which still supports itself by the aid of violence?'

Fourth Question ;— What ought you to think of a religion which depends on falsehood and calumny?'

Fifth Question;-'What ought you to think of a religion which allows its professors to believe and do whatever they like ?"h

Such barefaced misrepresentations, such gross caricatures, could not be offered as a picture of Protestantism unless to a people already prepared by a series of falsehoods and even burlesques to believe the most outrageous untruths. This state of the popular mind has been produced by the popular religious (irreligious) lite

h 'La Bonne Année, 1848, Catéchisme Protestant, à l'usage des hommes de bonne foi, par L.B., avec approbation de l'Evêque.'

rature of Romanism in France. The general tendency of that literature is to befool its readers, and prepare them for any statements the priests may make. Chiefly does it consist of the Lives of Saints crammed with prodigies. These books seem no less fitted than intended to occupy in the people's imagination the histories of enchanters current in the middle ages. "The Life of Sainte Rose de Lima' is a specimen. The author shows how in her infancy Sainte Rose of Lima endeavoured to imitate Catherine of Sienna, that seraphic lover of the Saviour;' by what series of miracles she healed a tumour in her head; how with a view to self-mortification she stuck and fixed a needle in the sore; how celestial fire came forth from the gloves which she was forced to wear in spite of God; how she disfigured her face in order that she might not inspire any one with the sentiment of love; and how all that caused her to receive the gift of prophecy, and the power of controlling angels as she pleased; so that she sent her guardian spirit to do her errands. Those who may wish to study a history of the same sort from the pen of an eminent writer, may procure 'Sainte Elizabeth de Hongrie,' by M. de Montalembert.

Devotional books, or books intended for religious edification, are overrun with the prevalent Marian superstition. The Rosary of Mary,' or The Garland of Mary,' by A. Constant, is a kind of Prayer-book for Mary's month,' that is, the month of May. For every day in the month there is a prayer and a legend in honour of the Virgin Mother of God.' In one instance we have two little children who, every time they recite the Ave Maria, feel a rose bud forth on their lips. In another, a lily suddenly grows up out of the sand to prove to a learned man the spotless purity of Mary. In another, a Madonna is exhibited as weeping before the whole church.

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"The pretended wise men,' says the author, will not believe these things. Over this infidelity God mourns. The heaven is pictured to the reader, and in heaven the angels are heard to cry, "There is no longer any faith on earth.” Then God covered himself with darkness; but in that night Mary still shone like the moon when the sun is gone down. great cry arose in heaven; God withdrew his hand; the earth sank; then Mary rushed from her seat, stretched out her arms and saved the world a second time.' (p. 5.)

A

Did not these books bear evidence of being meant as manuals of devotion, some of them might be taken to have a very different

i A biographical work of similar tendency may be found in Les Mémoires d'un Ange Gardien.'

For religious Novels read the following: Eloi l'Organiste;' Elise, ou les Suites d'un mariage d'inclination,' by d'Exauvillez; also 'Les deux Athées,' by Mademoiselle E. Brun.

VOL. III.-NO. V.

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object; nor are we sure that their tendency is not impure. In reading passages in the work entitled 'A Marie, Gloire et Amour' (To Mary, Glory and Love,' by Couvelaire), the uninitiated might doubt whether some passages were not an offering to Venus :

'Mary-how sweet is that name! my charmed ear delights to hear it; my eager mouth takes pleasure in uttering it, and my heart-it swoons at thy name, O Mary! Sweet is honey to the parched lips; sweeter is thy name, O Mary! Sweet is the murmur of the brook;

sweeter is thy name, O Mary!'

From amorous ecstacies the writer passes to blasphemy, applying to a dead woman language used in Holy Scripture of the Creator of the universe :

'Mary so loved the world that she gave her only begotten Son. (John iii. 16.) What can separate me from the love of my mother? Nothing, neither persecution, nor raillery, nor seduction, nor any other creature.' (Rom. viii. 38.)

Enough has been said to exhibit the poverty of the French Catholic literature. It is poor in theology; it is poor in the pulpit; it is feeble in controversy, if only by its violence; and in its practical works it is superstitious, nay, grossly idolatrous. A church whose foundations are so weak cannot stand. Sustained for a time by the political adventurer into whose arms she has thrown herself, and enabled out of his spoils to make a show and a parade which win the hearts of the French populace by dazzling their eyes and gratifying their vanity, this branch of the Jesuitism which is now labouring to become universal, possesses no vital power, has none of the guarantees of life; but having shot up like a gourd, will perish at the very dawn of day. OP

HADES AND HEAVEN.

1. The Many Mansions of the House of my Father. By G. S. FABER, B.D., Master of Sherburne Hospital, and Prebendary of Salisbury. London. Royston and Brown. 1851.a

2. The Future Human Kingdom of Christ, or Man's Heaven to be this Earth. By D. J. HEATH, M.A., Vicar of Brading, and late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London. J. W. Parker.

1852.

3. The State of the Departed, and the Time of the Reward of Glory. By ALEX. YOUNG, M.A., Mochrum, Wigtownshire. Glasgow. Maurice Ogle and Son. 1851.

BISHOP BUTLER remarks that the full meaning of the Bible may yet have to be learned; that the inspired documents intrusted to men are such that their whole purport can only appear by continuous study; and that, therefore, as we advance in ability to interpret the book, so we may arrive at better knowledge of God's ways, perhaps even at different views of our present position and future destiny.

We imagine that a feeling of this kind has originated, among Roman Catholics, what is called the doctrine of development, or a belief that the Scriptures do not give us a finished revelation; but that the church is privileged to repeat and extend that revelation from time to time. We say that this doctrine arose-like the other falsehoods of the Latin Church-upon a veritable basis; when men experienced how faulty was the popular apprehension of Christianity, and desired the presence of a power that might (without pronouncing popular Christianity to be wrong) supply what would adapt it to the growing wants of society.

The feeling of deficiency was a very genuine one; but the fault lay not in the book of God's revelation. Man's faculties were, at a season of much darkness, unequal to the task of investigation, and were to be improved and strengthened, so as to read anew the already uttered manifestation of God's will.

The latter position is that of Bishop Butler, and, in the present day, there is an increasing desire on the part of many Protestant Christians to prove the correctness of his opinion, by teaching lessons from the Bible which oppose our traditionally received theology.

a There was a short notice of this work in the January number of this Journal but not such as to anticipate or interfere with the further investigation contained in this article, from the pen of another writer, whose views, as here set forth, will, it is hoped, excite à discussion of the whole subject in these pages.ED. J. S. L.

It is, indeed, a thing to be expected that, during the long period of ignorance when the original language of the Scriptures was almost forgotten-when the science of interpretation was erroneous—when the current philosophy was absurd-and when many social rules, now abhorred, were embraced as certainly true -much of the sense of the book lay hidden; and even when it began to be studied with more extensive knowledge and upon sounder principles, its complete meaning would not, perhaps, immediately appear.

Hence, many writers among ourselves affirm that the first generations of the reformed church had not sufficiently advanced in Biblical acquirements to escape from all the traditional doctrines in which they had been educated.

It is moreover asserted that there were some opinions, universally received in the apostolical times, which have faded altogether from modern theology, or have been handed down, only in a distorted form, with the dogmas of the Roman see, and that Protestants fell into error, because, while shrinking from the exposed falsehoods of the church they had abandoned, they oftentimes neglected what that church had partially and confusedly preserved from primitive ages.

These observations will prepare us for considering the opinions, now extensively prevailing, that at death the immaterial part of man is reserved in Hades, while his judgment and final position are postponed until the body is resuscitated on the great day; and we may have to wonder whence arose the customary phraseology that the soul, when it quits the body, goes at once either to heaven or to hell.

Such phraseology seems to be modern and unscriptural. The disciples of Paul and of John were taught to believe, not that their material bodies were essentially vicious, and that the deliverance effected by Christ was to be a separation from the body, and an immaterial existence in some fancied heaven, but that the corruption of their bodies would be removed by their passing through the condition of death, (which the Lord's work had rendered sanative,) and by their resurrection, in the body, to meet Christ, and be with him on this earth. They looked upon the present life, therefore, with feelings very different from those either of the Epicurean or the Gnostic. They acknowledged, equally with the former, how good and desirable was the material creation; but they saw, as the latter had seen, that much evil had been allowed to stain it. They did not shut their eyes to this corruption, but were glad to learn that the event of death, regarded by the world as an unmitigated curse, was really the wholesome, though bitter, medicine presented to them by God for the destruction of the evil which