spirited and able daily contemporary shows that the most pressing of the Custom House duties (those which bear most arbitrarily and unequally on the poor man), might with ease be abolished, if we would consent to retain what we may denominate the 'middle-class tax.' The duties on sugar, tea, wine, paper, and wheat, might be wholly done away with in such a case. We should then save the cost of collection, and cheapen the price of wines by more than one-half; materially advance the cause of education, by taking the oppressive excise duty off paper; most probably induce foreign countries to throw open the ports to us more liberally; and certainly, as has been suggested to us, put an impediment in the way of Government at any time increasing the ordinary expenditure of the country, whether for warlike or other purposes. We believe that ultimately we should all be the gainers by such a step, and therefore, as a sober 'monthly,' less open to the exciting influences that act upon our daily and weekly contemporaries, we ask our readers to think before they press their representatives to vote against the conditional reimposition of the Income-tax.

We look forward to the ecclesiastical legislation of the session with some degree of hope. The Liberation Society is, we believe, to preface its valuable sessional work with a public dinner at the Milton Club on the 18th of February. We conjecture that the great work of the session, so far as it is concerned, will be the support of Mr. Miall's renewal of the Irish Church question. We hope, and have reason to believe, that this will be done efficiently. If we may judge from the tone of Irish literary organs, the result promises to be still more encouraging than on the occasion of the previous motion. We are glad to observe that Mr. Miall does not purpose to turn aside from the course he has marked out for himself, to secure any hypothetical support. It may be quite true that the House cares very little for principles, but both it and the country easily detect a practical inconsistency. Nothing, in the long run, answers so well as an inflexible adherence to righteousness.

We have already almost turned our Retrospect into a 'Prospect,' but we must allude to one more matter likely to come under the early notice of Parliament, and that is the Education Question. Our readers will have noticed that Sir John Pakington has contrived to homologate the Manchester and Secular schemes. Presuming upon the support of both sections of State Educationists, he intends-early in the ensuing sessionto introduce a bill which shall meet all their views. A private draft of the proposed bill has been obtained for us by a friend. Its chief features are a permissive local rate, gratuitous education, and separate permissive, but not compulsory, religious instruction. If the Voluntaries do not meet Sir John on the platform, in the press, and in the House, in full strength, we are afraid there is a possibility of this embryo bill becoming a law.

Some half dozen topics of general interest demand brief notice. First, is the meeting of the Congregational Union. It passed as we could have wished it to pass. At the largest meeting, we believe, that has been held, an effective stop has been put to the bureaucracy of Blomfield-street and Bolt-court. The expression of opinion regarding the real points in dispute,

during the late Controversy,' was as open, manly, and unequivocal as ever Christian men, claiming protection of the 'perfect law of liberty,' gave utterance to. The conduct of the editor of the Banner' and his supporters was denounced on all sides, and even at last by the secretary of the Union. By formal resolution the Union give the lie to the aspersions and slanders of their literary representative, and appointed a committee, whose painful business it will be to relieve them of their troublesome incubus; that done, and a firm front sustained against any presbyterial encroachers on congregational liberty, and the Union may. possibly go on in peace.

The violent death of the Archbishop of Paris, by the hand of a priest, whom theological intolerance bad driven mad, offers a curious illustration of ecclesiastical morals. Query, if it be right in an inquisitor to kill for misbelief, why is it not right in a priest? Verger proceeded on a well-known law of his Church, which has been sanctioned by popes and inquisitors without number, in murdering the archbishop. The archbishop was propagating error, down with him! England-only they use slow poison instead of the dagger. The Smithfield meeting of unemployed workmen brings back to our memories the days of the Char'er agitation. But how have the working classes grown since then! Their moderation and their calmness in suffering might teach men of higher grade.

So cry the Vergers of

The cheers which greet Kossuth wherever he goes, the cheers for Mr. Roebuck and Mr. Kinglake, the cheers that wait Mr. Thackeray's withering satires on the vices of the fashionable world, indicate a rise in the level of public morality. Denunciation of tyranny and of diplomatic cunning, sarcastic exposures of the state of the public service, and vice and fashion made ridiculous--are not these public services? So, Thackeray, grown silver-grey with satire, deserves the heartiest thanks of his generation; for if you cannot make men leave the practice of evil by a frown, you may by a laugh. Nothing has so great an influence on folly as ridicule from the wise,

THE MONTHLY

CHRISTIAN SPECTATOR.

MARCH, 1857.

Jephson; or, Midnight and Dawn.

A TALE OF INNER LIFE.

CHAP. II.-THE PICTURE.

THE morning after Jephson left us, the house seemed to me to have lost an old friend, and yet the world, I suppose, would not sanction any epithet closer or warmer than that of acquaintance;' scarcely so much even, unless with a qualification, as 'chance acquaintance,' or the like. I learned afterwards that Jephson's retiring to his bedroom for the night could have been but a form, as the undisturbed condition of everything in the room excited the surprise of the servants in the morning. They wondered, and their thoughts were busy with the possible causes; I did not wonder, and my thoughts reverted to Goethe's lines

'Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,

Wer nicht die Kummervollen Nächte

Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,

Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte!"*

And while he went on his way, with the train tearing and screeching through the country, my thoughts very naturally went with him. But as the reader is not likely to offer me the customary penny' for them, I shall keep them to myself, and pass on at once to inform him that I went in the course of the day to Mr. Jephson's lodgings, to obtain the

VOL. VII.

Who never ate his bread in sorrow,—
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping and watching for the morrow,-
He knows you not, ye unseen powers!'

K

Carlyle's Translation.

picture he had mentioned, and which his directions enabled me easily to find.

It was a dark picture, not quite finished; and, subsequently, one thought that the incompleteness might possibly be part of the design. The eye instantly rested on the only figure in it, a man sitting alone; and you at once said, forlorn; an image of no common wretchedness, and with a strange, gloomy fascination about it; indeed, it was no vulgar misery that sat there, on what you fancied might be a block of sandstone, slowly crumbling away beneath him. You gazed, and looked more closely, and came nearer, and the man grew into your imagination; and you saw, or thought you saw, a man of middle age, large of frame, but the whole form relaxed. You could fancy all the sinews unstrung, and that he would have fallen together in collapse, if the prone tendency had not been arrested, because it was a tendency. The arms hung down listlessly, and rested, if they could indeed be said to rest, on the knees. After a while, the eye adverted to the other parts of the picture, but still recurring again and again to the figure of hopeless gloom, that one now saw to be seated on a wide dark heath. A pool, black and stagnant; a few thin reeds on the margin; a stunted oak tree, scathed, as if by lightning; were the objects that then met the eye. From the ruin of a tree, one came back, however, to the human ruin; and looked, and looked, and sighed at the thoughts of blank desolateness that were suggested. And then you saw that he was sitting in the shade and gloom of a grove of dark pines, the foliage dense and gloomy, with infinite dreariness below; and it required but little imagination to hear the dismal moaning of the night wind above and around this poor human embodiment of hopelessness. The more you gazed on that form, the more you were disposed to. And when, after a while, you thought of the painter of the scene, you recognised that he had put forth great, though probably unconscious, power. Everything showed that he had wrought from his very soul. And, indeed, the soul of the painter seemed to have passed into his picture, for one almost seemed to discern his own form and features in that image of-DESPAIR ! I saw why he had charged me to secure the work, and keep it sacred from all idle eyes.

Poor, struggling, suffering soul! How often I thought of the question he had put to me, How many of your brethren would take an avowed Atheist to their house? And again I felt that I had spoken truly when I answered, Many.'

True, there are men in the Christian ranks, and possibly in the Christian ministry, whose religious experience has been so uniform, perhaps one might say monotonous, and their religious consciousness so circumscribed, and possibly dormant, that the idea of a really honest doubter is absolutely inconceivable. And possibly a secret though scarcely acknowledged and vague conviction or fear of inability to meet an acute and intelligent sceptic, lies at the bottom of a great deal of that easy, off-hand, wholesale denunciation of 'heretics, infidels, and

Atheists,' which in some quarters is unhappily substituted for the 'more excellent way.'

But, then, it must be confessed, also, that while we readily admit the possibility of honest doubting, even on points of highest moment, there is a large amount of utterly dishonest denial extant. The private habits of not a few make them more than willing to believe that no eye of infinite purity and righteousness ever watches them; and specious arguments, which promise to emancipate them from God and law, would naturally be welcome, and not be too honestly scrutinized before adoption and diffusion. Then, how large a proportion of the half-taught, unaware of the labours of the grandest thinkers, or selfcomplacently undervaluing them, proudly fancy they show superior independence of mind, and freedom, and manhood, by boldly walking in a path which others believe to be one of danger; and in which they are not kept in countenance by many names that are hallowed by the fond remembrance of the great and good-a path on which genius has so seldom shed a ray, that even the faintest spark is eagerly applauded and magnified-a path which, on the contrary, the highest genius has at least ignored and refused, even when it has not earnestly repudiated and reprobated it. Yes, since pride is so versatile a thing, it may to some minds be a proud thing to walk on a path where none of the greatest poets, as Shakespere and Milton, are found with their singing robes and garlands. No sages, like him of the inductive philosophy, or warrior patriots, like him who, in the name of the Lord of hosts, won the fields of Naseby and Marston Moor, and raised England higher than crowned king ever did. Then, how many others, unable to discriminate between the intellectual weight and stature of class and class, incompetent to hold the balance which has in one scale the intellect and genius that has revered the name of God, and in the other that which has scoffed at it, have deemed it a fine thing to be able to boast of a Hume and Gibbon, a Volney, and Voltaire, and Paine. 'I say with Hume,' may strike some listeners dumb. I agree with Voltaire,' has in some circles, no doubt, an imposing sound.

Yes, truly, if some men, for a time, have the understanding so far perplexed that the head, rather than the heart, says, There is no God, there are many, like the Hebrew fool, who say it with the heart. And the unscrupulousness, the bold, bad recklessness of many of this class, has justly excited the anger of those who well know what must ensue were such pernicious and perilous habits to spread exten sively. If the foundations' of a country's existence are threatened, ever so incipiently even, plain speaking must be borne with. Englishmen used to be proud of their straightforward out-spokenness; nor so long as it is agreed to call a spade a spade, must it be expected that Christians alone shall learn to express themselves more silkily; and while the leaders' of the 'Times' are admired on all hands for thorough-going directness and Saxon vigour, the devout believers in God and in Christ may well decline the use of a falsely-refined circumlocuitousness.