men styling themselves Whigs, and proclaiming, and no doubt believing, that they were contending, forsooth! for civil and religious liberty.

If parliamentary reform is now to be achieved, it will come as a branch of the question-Protestantism against Popery. The protestants must strengthen themselves by calling into action the voice of a larger mass of the population of the towns. To recover the Constitution, the Protestant Tories must consent to sacrifice the rotten burghs. Protestantism and freedom have always gone together. The modern Whigs have called themselves friends of freedom, while they disregarded religion. They have thereby betrayed the cause of freedom. But religion-the protestant religion is not to be so put down. In whatever form it may act, its success is certain. I only hope and trust that it may find means to act without a fatal convulsion, or final destruction of the constitution.

Much will depend on the conduct of the Catholics. If their priesthood proceed to intrigue, as usual, and, failing that, to agitate, and, more especially, if they should openly gain over any members of the

Royal Family, they will certainly bring on a convulsion in which they will perish. But, in the present age, the minds of men are in a train of change. If evil be abroad, so also is the pervading influence of a purer spirit competent to baffle its efforts. What if the Roman Catholic laity should see the propriety of insisting that the sacrament of matrimony shall no longer be denied to their priests? What if the marriage of priests should become popular among the Catholics of the British Isles? This change would effectually banish the monks, and would greatly alter the state of the question between Protestants and Catholics. I suspect I would then have little more to say, politically, against the Catholics than against other Christian sectaries. The pretensions of their priests to extraordinary spiritual powers, would still render that body formidable, and their superstitions would render them the least rational of all who bear the Christian name; but their anti-social character would be destroyed, or would gradually pass away; and to them and their flocks a multitude of beneficial results would follow. The point in which protestants have an interest, is this, that the Catholic

priesthood, taking an interest like other men in the welfare of their posterity, would cease to remain totally behind, and hostile to the character of the age in which they live. They would cease to be the remnant of a barbarous period of history,-the unchangeable apostles of superstition and ignorance, and enemies to that freedom and intellectual improvement, which it is the highest interest of our nature to cultivate.

But this will scarcely be. The probability is that popery will hold out to the last. Men must desert the infallible church, because it cannot-will not descend from its infallibility, down to the level of the laws of nature, and the common sentiments and interests of mankind.

Infallibility is a dangerous doctrine. It was invented as a fortress for the defence of the church, to silence all opposition to its doctrines or precepts. But the moment a single absurdity, or irrational or unnatural precept is seen to have received its sanction, down tumbles old Infallibility: Reason enters at the breach, and the work of ages is undone. Infallibility will ruin popery.

But I am forgetting the subject with which I set

out-Parliamentary Reform. Religion may effect it peaceably; and ought to do so, and to render it moderate and reasonable. But men rarely do what they ought. I fear we are hastening to a political convulsion. This fear I entertain, chiefly for this reason, that there exists no constituted authority for whom or for which the public, or at least conscientious men, entertain respect, or in which they repose confidence.

FOREIGN POLICY.

BRITISH statesmen have seldom been famous for their skill in foreign policy. Cromwell blundered in supporting the rising power of France against the declining power of Spain. The two last Stuarts grossly erred in supporting France, and making war against Holland; but Popery was the cause of this. Thereafter, in many questions about the balance of power, Britain kept intermeddling to little purpose. Our ministers have generally been outwitted by the French and other foreigners; but the free protestant constitution enjoyed at home, was an exhaustless source of energy and riches, which enabled the nation to redeem all the errors of its rulers in foreign transactions. Thus, about the middle of the late century, the French, commencing from their colony of Canada on the north, began to build a line of forts southward, along the