at his death, upon the accession to the throne of his sister Mary, it received a violent check; and while she reigned, the flood of persecution was cast out of the mouth of the dragon in order to carry away the woman. At her death Elizabeth ascended the throne, and espoused the cause of the reformed church, and with all her defects, God made her the instrument of nourishing the woman in the wilderness. The pope's power being broken in England, and Satan having failed to destroy the woman by internal commotion and strife, raised up against her a foreign enemy, and the Spanish armada of 1588-9 was a new and last device of the great adversary. God interposed; the elements of nature were made to scatter to the winds the invincible armada of Philip, and thus God delivered his chosen people. The next important crisis was in the reign of Charles I. This unhappy monarch had set his mind upon subjecting the nation to his own will. In his attempts to overthrow the civil and religious liberty of the country, such as it then existed, he conducted himself in a manner which proved his incompetence for the arduous work he had undertaken; for he united an obstinate and untractable will with an unusual amount of perversity and dissimulation. The nation had been long and well trained by God to a jealous regard for liberty; the two leading features of the national character of Britain may be traced throughout all her history, but they are peculiarly visible in the time of the First Charles. The people of Britain submit willingly to the lawful exercise of constituted authority; they are a patient people, while they fail not to complain of any thing they feel grievous and oppressive; but there is not one act of their history to prove that they ever causelessly, from the mere hatred of government, rose in

rebellion against constituted authority. They have been, however, always excessively tenacious in holding by what they believed to be their rights; and while they have yielded obedience to all in authority, they have demanded that their own rights be respected: but it is only when remonstrance and negotiation have failed; it is only when their rulers, through an infatuation as blind as it was wicked, have by systematic deception attempted to beguile the people, which when discovered they have generally followed up by open acts of undisguised tyranny and oppression, that the nation has arisen, not to overthrow order and government by legalizing confusion and anarchy, but to defend the fortress of national liberty when assailed by rulers, who, knowing not how to command themselves, exhibited their incapacity to govern others. The encroachments always commenced upon the side of the rulers, and at every stage they were the aggressors, the people resisting in self-defence. There is a singular beauty in the moral laws established by God for the conservation of the order and happiness of society. The qualities that would have made Charles successful, would have prevented him from cherishing such designs; and the qualities that originated them, were the very occasion of his defeat. Had he possessed self-command, he would have endured the opposition of others without fretfulness; and had he been upright and straightforward, he never could have formed the designs at all. His obstinacy and self-will made him determined to stand upon what was called the divine right of kings, which, as then interpreted, signified a sovereign's right to do what he pleased, and yet be obeyed, the people having no right to call in question the sovereign's will and pleasure. His dissimulation caused him to seek the

furtherance of his designs in a way by no means creditable either to him or his advisers. His obstinacy and dissimulation conjoined, defeated his purpose and ruined himself. His death, in the year 1649, virtually put an end to those unreasonable and dangerous claims, which haughty and imperious monarchs were accustomed to put forth in this country; and with Charles may be said to have perished the possibility of the rule of a self-willed sovereign in these realms. The attempt to revive it by James II. resulted similarly, after a much shorter conflict. The execution of the king was an act highly censurable; it cannot even be palliated, far less justified; and it proves that those who gained the ascendancy in the councils of the nation, were as practically ignorant of the principles of toleration as their predecessors. The punishment of death is barbarous and inhuman under any circumstances; the atrocities of a criminal cannot justify a legalized and judicial system of cruelty. The treatment of offenders should seek first the ends of justice and the protection of society; but criminals have claims upon the commonwealth, and while we protect ourselves, it is not less our duty to care for the comfort, the welfare, and the happiness of those who transgress. In all corporeal punishments mercy should be equally remembered with justice; the reformation of offenders should be chiefly sought, and their punishment should be as mild as the interests of society will permit of. The punishment of death for any crime is cruel, and is not warranted but rather forbidden in Scripture. It defeats the great object for which man is intrusted with power in such matters, that being the reclaiming of a criminal. All power is given to save men if it be possible; there is no power intended to be used for destruc

tion. If in ordinary cases of great crime the punishment of death is unwarranted, how much more so in the case of political misdemeanour, and when the offender is a sovereign? The execution of Charles was undeserved by him, and he was undoubtedly the victim of a wrong principle; the motives of his judges may have been sincere and upright, but their moral perception was very dark. God overruled it to declare a great truth; for the public execution of king Charles, in the providence of God, proclaimed to the world the coming overthrow of monarchical oppression and tyranny, and from thence they became a lifeless and headless body in England; it has not been possible since to resuscitate them.

The times of the commonwealth was that period during which the body of unlimited sovereignty, lodged in the person of a reigning monarch inheriting his crown by natural descent, was buried; and when the time of the restoration of the monarchy came, from thence the English kings found it impossible to exercise authority but within the limits prescribed by the constitution. The true secret of all good government consists in the people being entirely submissive to the lawful authority of the sovereign, and the sovereign in turn being entirely submissive to the will of the people, as to the manner of governing the nation. Thus is there preserved an obedient people and a sovereign monarch, with a sovereign people and an obedient monarch. They who rule must first learn to obey; and all who obey, whether they be rulers or subjects, are truly sovereign. This is the manner in which Jehovah governs the whole universe. He learned obedience by the things which He suffered, and by so doing He has earned an indisputable title to universal sovereignty. His people learn obedience by

their sufferings, and they through obedience are likewise made kings and reign with Christ. Jesus seeks their happiness in all He does; they strive to obey His will in all their conduct, and thus harmony and love prevail between them, which begun on earth shall be perfected in heaven, and continue throughout eternity. Surely an earthly sovereign may profitably imitate the example of the King of kings, and Lord of lords, and learn through obedience the way to become a perfect, a happy, and a powerful monarch, reigning over a free, an intelligent, an obedient, and a sovereign people, the one made instrumental in promoting and increasing the joy and the glory of the other. This is the true character of the principles upon which the British constitution is founded; they are but partially developed, but the time is come when the nation must shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father, the glory and the joy of all the earth.

The nation is one body, divided into three parts; just as an individual man is three in one and one in three, so the national man is three in one and one in three. These are represented by the three nations: Ireland, the body; England, the intellect or mind and judgment; and Scotland, the moral nature or spirit. They were all disjoined and separate at first. England embraces Wales, and England originally was a heptarchy or seven kingdoms. These denote the many faculties of the national mind, and were all united into one great intellect in the year 827, under king Egbert. The union of the mind and spirit of a man must be a willing alliance, or he cannot be a perfect man. If the mind war against the spirit, or the spirit war against the mind, there cannot be peace or happiness; and if the mind enslave the spirit