cannot be in his own defence, for he will scarcely find an enemy to combat. Mr. Butler's appeal to history has been accepted by Mr. Townsend; his theological information has fallen to nothing before the learning and acuteness of Dr. Phillpotts; and what answer can he give to the affecting personal experience of Mr. Blanco White? It forms no part of our present intention to enter into the detail of this splendid and interesting controversy; but before we part with Mr. Butler, he must allow us to add, that his work bears evident testimony to his having lived not only among members of the legal profession, but among protestants. When was a volume on such a subject equally liberal and courteous, written in a country in which his own religion was dominant? Would even Fenelon have composed such a treatise against heretics? Mr. Butler will ascribe this alteration in the tone of controversy to the spirit of the age; but we must take the liberty of ascribing that spirit to the progress of real, scriptural, vital christianity, by means of protestant writings and protestant preaching. It is the word of God which has said, Peace, be still!' and though its effect in allaying the tempest of human passion and violence may not have been instantaneous, it has not been the less

sure.

The next work is indeed of a totally opposite character, and we sincerely regret that we cannot leave the author's name in that obscurity which the anagrammatical title seems intended to throw over it; Mr. Butler tells us that Merlin is only the representative of Dr. Milner. We have here the two fountains of Ariosto: if we cannot approach that of Mr. Butler without sentiments of regard; it is difficult to repress emotions of abhorrence, when we touch the bitter, turbid, and rancorous waters of the other. In the first page we have a definition of religious fanaticism, which we entreat the author to adopt for his own use: It confuses the imagination, misleads the judgment, and hardens the heart.' The whole of the pamphlet is a perfect exemplification of this great truth.

Dr. Lingard's History of England (the third and fourth volumes of which are the great authority among the Roman Catholics on our present subject) is written with great care and skill. The author has studied the art of composition in the school of Hume and Gibbon, and has used the consummate artifice, which they employed against Christianity, to the disparagement of the Protestant religion of this country. His purpose is effected rather by the general tendency of the whole narrative, than by particular misstatements, which, as they are open to contradiction and unanswerable detection, are infinitely less dangerous, than the system, long and constantly pursued, of perceptible, yet scarcely definite, misrepresentation. He wears away the foundation rather by the per

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petual droppings of insinuation, than a bold and regular attack, which may be fairly met and repelled. Undue consideration, in one part, is attached to particular incidents; in another a partial shifting and delusive light is thrown upon important facts, so as to fling them back into obscurity. Here all is told, there a plausible excuse is given for compression or omission. The Marian persecutions are too horrible to detail, but the most dreadful circumstances in the fate of the missionary priests are studiously selected. The general leaning to the authority of Popish writers is occasionally qualified by a partial distrust, or even a total rejection of their testimony. Probabilities are weighed on each side with scrupulous exactness, but while all our attention is concentrated on the accuracy with which the weights are adjusted in the separate scales, we scarcely perceive that the author has given a latent inclination to the beam. But the greatest skill is shown, as by his able predecessors in this mode of historical writing, in managing the interest, and exciting the enthusiasm of the reader. While he is captivated with a specious appearance of fairness, the argument on the one side is completely neutralized by an insidious qualification, while on the other, the warmth of admiration or the emotion of pity is left unallayed, or cherished with new excitement. Thus the extreme youth of Edward the Sixth and of Lady Jane Gray is artfully introduced, in order to throw a doubt on the exquisite perfection of their characters; while every palliation which the most excessive charity can admit, every point which can turn to the praise of Mary the First, is paraded with anxious fidelity. Compare the account of Anne Boleyn with that of Mary Queen of Scots; observe the manner in which the more questionable guilt of the former is impressed upon the reader, that of the latter softened, doubted, obscured: look to the execution of each, equally unjust and barbarous; with what equity is the demand upon our commiseration advanced? with what fairness is the latter elevated into a heroine and martyr; the former degraded to a criminal, suffering indeed a cruel fate, but with little claim upon our sympathy? After all, the whole work is by no means so effective as might be expected; the overstrained pretension to candour excites distrust; the tone appears dispassionate, not because the mind of the author is naturally temperate, or is resolved to be impartial, but because it is full of suppressed rather than subdued passion: the very speciousness and elaborate plausibility have in them something suspicious; and while the author strains every nerve to convince us of his indifference to all but truth, it is impossible not to feel as we read, that we are occupied only with the artful statements of a very zealous partisan.

We might have greatly multiplied the class of low and virulent writings

writings against the Protestant religion, of which the two last works on our list may be considered specimens. The vigilant Bishop of Chester has not allowed the inroad made by them on his diocese to remain unnoticed.

'Out of a great many controversial tracts in which the Protestant faith and ministry are ridiculed and reviled, I will only mention one by the Reverend T. Baddely, which is now distributed with great assiduity by the clergy of your communion, amongst the humbler classes of ours, in certain parts of the country, (Lancashire,) entitled, "A Sure Way to find out the true Religion." The author says that he has drawn up his book for the use of the poor of his own congregation, to help them to discover the falsehood of those deceitful and impious books, which the clergymen, of different persuasions, are so busily employed in spreading amongst us. He tells us, "that the Protestant parsons have no lawful mission whatever, and therefore they cannot act as priests in the Church of God;" and that "the Protestant church will infallibly lead men to hell;" that "Fox's Martyrs were nothing but a set of deluded, rebellious, impious and blasphemous wretches, put to death by the law of the land for their crimes;"" to call a man one of Fox's saints, is become the same as to call him a great rogue." The same gentleman* enumerates the different crimes for which offenders have been tried at the Old Bailey for the last twenty years, and then says, "These are the lamentable fruits of the Protestant religion. That it has always made men wicked from the first day it began, we can prove from the Protestant writers themselves." "There is nothing in the Protestant religion that can make a man more holy or more virtuous: no private instruction given to poor ignorant people the children are left to their own will;" but as to the Roman Catholics, "every one of their practices helps to make a man more holy and pleasing in the sight of God." If you wish for specimens of still more intemperate and virulent abuse, I refer you to the writings of Mr. William Eusebius Andrews, of whom you speak in terms which lead me to suspect that you have never read his productions.'-Bishop of Chester's Letter, p. 17.

This is no ungrounded suspicion. The liberality of Mr. Butler is offended because he possesses a picture book for children, published by an eminent Protestant clergyman now living, in which the fires of Smithfield are vividly represented.' Can he have seen even the frontispiece of Mr. Andrews's work, which he honours with his eulogy, and which represents John Fox writing, and the Devil behind prompting him? Can he write seriously in commendation of that man's learning, the extent of which is a tolerable acquaintance with the works of Father Persons, and some of the older martyrologists of his own church; but who when he commenced his publication was so profoundly ignorant of

His lordship is aware, we doubt not, that this notable argument is in constant use by the writers of Mr. Baddely's stamp.

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English Protestant literature, as actually to mistake Burnet's History of his own Times, for his History of the Reformation, (No. 1. 2.); or will he defend his honesty, who having given this convincing proof of his familiarity with the work, boldly accuses it of being a counterpart to Fox's, in lying and misrepresentation? In many respects no writer need be ashamed of being the counterpart of Fox; he is not, indeed, always a safe guide in the ecclesiastical antiquities of the Primitive Church. When he wrote, that branch of theology had not been critically studied. But we have the explicit testimony not merely of Burnet, but of the laborious Strype, to his fidelity with regard to our domestic transactions. Of whatever errors he may have been guilty in this department, we must have more solid evidence than the counterstatements of Father Persons. As for Mr. Andrews's arguments, they bear about the same relation to sound logical reasoning, as the scrawlings of a lunatic to the diagrams of the mathematician. Among other expedients to attract attention, he has had recourse to one, which afforded us some diversion, and lightened the painful duty of toiling through his Numbers. He has collected many of the monstrous tales for which the veracious chronicle of Sir Richard Baker is celebrated, and as far as we can comprehend his meaning, adduces them as instances of extraordinary Providence, declaring the wrath of Heaven against this ill-fated and reprobate land. We must amuse our readers with a speci

men.

In her (Elizabeth's) thirty-eighth year, Lord Hundson, being sick to death, saw six of his companions, already dead, come to him one after another. The first was Dudley, Earl of Leicester, all in fire; the second was Secretary Walsingham, also in fire and flame; the third, Pickering, so cold and frozen, that, touching Hundson's hand, he thought he should die of cold; the fourth, Hatton, Lord Chancellor; the fifth, Heneage; and the sixth, Knolles: these three last were also on fire. They told him that Sir William Cecil, one of their companions, yet living, was to prepare himself to come shortly to them. All this was affirmed upon oath by the said Lord Hundson, who a few days after died suddenly.—vol. i. p. 124.

We have also an engraving by some spiritual Cruikshanks of the Roman Catholics, in which (we quote the legend)

'the virgin Queen Elizabeth-whose notorious amours with her courtfavourites are acknowledged by both historians and novelists, and whose cruelties towards the Catholics are not excelled by Nero or Domitian—is seen, after a reign of forty-two years, lying in bed, and viewing the appearance of her own person, lean and fretful, in a flame of fire.'-No. 9.

With regard to the last writer on our list, the notorious Cobbett, it is the most melancholy instance of party-fanaticism in our memory, that an assembly of men, connected by bonds of reli

gious union, should accept the advocacy, and eulogize the character of the importer of Tom Paine's bones. It is some consolation, however, to find that such a writer, indefatigably supplied with information by his employers, has made at last so miserable a case; it is a still more favourable sign of the times, that by his own inconsistent and unprincipled conduct, the best mob-writer of this or any day, the man who, with strong powers of his own, has more successfully than any other person, studied how to address himself to the common intellect of the people, should so entirely have lost his hold on the public mind. A few bigots may ! read his work to gratify their rancour; a few of the irreligious may be delighted with his as with any coarse and unjust attack on the purest form of Christianity existing; many may have have felt an idle curiosity to see how such a writer would handle such a subject; but after the first Number, we believe, these motives ceased to operate very extensively; and the writer cannot enjoy the gratification of having effected any serious mischief.

We now proceed to our subject. The reformation has been charged with all the odium of Henry the Eighth's first divorce, and the cruel usage of that virtuous and noble-minded woman, whom Shakspeare has represented so affectingly, yet with so much historical truth, that many of her most noble speeches in the tragedy are merely versified with little alteration from the Chronicle of Holinshed. While the Protestants have thus been criminated, the Papists have been represented as the enthusiastic advocates of suffering virtue, and as animated with an independent and honest hatred of oppression and immorality. But, what, if this divorce was grounded on the arguments of Roman-Catholic divines, maintained by Roman-Catholic advocates, urged by a Roman-Catholic parliament, furthered by Roman-Catholic agents, vindicated by Roman-Catholic universities, encouraged by the college of Cardinals, and not disallowed, till a very late period, by the Pope himself? To the authority of what divine did Henry in the first instance appeal, to Luther or Melancthon? to Thomas Aquinas. Were Sir Thomas Boleyn and Cranmer employed in furthering the cause? Were not also Stephen Gardiner and Edmond Bonner, their more active associates? The readers, indeed, of Dr. Lingard will not suspect this, who has studiously suppressed or palliated the disproportionate share which these two prelates took in almost all the unprincipled transactions of this reign. To the petition of the parliament, persuading the Pope to grant the divorce, we find subscribed the names of the two archbishops, four bishops, and twenty-four abbots. We have the letter of Henry to the holy consistory, thanking them for the alacrity with which they supported his cause; we have a

countless