saints, she has her festival-days for her great benefactors; discarding a crowd of pantomimic gestures, she marks the sprinkled infant with the sign of the cross; condemning the idolatrous adoration of the bread and wine, she requires them to be received in a meekly kneeling posture; rejecting many rich vestments, she yet keeps the robe of white; without the gloomy monotony of the middle-age litany, the organ-led music now thunders forth glory to God, now whispers to the broken in spirit;-in short, a flourishing branch, shooting forth in the open air, amid satin doublets and stage attitudes, amid youthful bluster and fashionable prodigality; friendly to the beautiful, which it does not proscribe, and to fancy, which it does not attempt to fetter.

Only by a very slow process does the human mind emerge from a system of error. The excesses of vice had been repressed without attacking its source. Many persons, with a severer ideal, thought that the interests of pure religion required a reform far more searching and extensive. They would have a service without shred or fragment of Rome. One protests: 'I can't consent to wear the surplice, it is against my conscience; I trust by the help of God, I shall never put on that sleeve, which is a mark of the beast.' And another: 'God by Isaiah commandeth not to pollute ourselves with the garments of the image.' As they could not be convinced, they were persecuted— imprisoned, fined, pilloried, their noses slit, their ears cut off. From being a sect, they consequently became a faction. To hatred of the authorized church was added hatred of the royal authority. So, underneath the established Protestantism is propagated an interdicted Protestantism,-Puritanism, whose intermingled sentiments, each embittering the other, will produce the English Revolution.

If now we inquire what were the ultimate results of the Reformation, it can hardly escape observation:

1. That it banished, or nearly so, religion from politics, and secularized government.

2. That, leaving the mind subject to the variable influence of political institutions, it yet procured, by disarming the spiritual power, a great increase of liberty-a liberty which redounded to the advantage of morality and of science.

3. That rejecting much of the polity and ritual of the mystical Babylon, it rendered possible that steady movement by which theology has since been gravitating towards the moral faculty.

4. That it introduced religion into the midst of the laity, which till then had been the exclusive domain of the ecclesiastical order.

5. That, begetting a war of tracts and disputations, whether conqueror or conquered, it effected an immense progress in mental activity.

6. That, by arousing Rome to impose upon herself an instant counter-reform, it gave an improved tone to all ecclesiastical grades.

Inestimable as are these blessings, it were idle to deny that the Reformation aggravated, for a time, unavoidably, some of the evils it was intended to correct. It was the culminating fact in a train of circumstances that had diffused through Christendom an intense and vivid sense of Satanic agency. When the mind, without power of sound judgment, is fallen upon times in which tendencies and passions rage with tempestuous violence, it turns readily to the miraculous as the solution of all phenomena, and phantoms are transfigured into realities through the mists of hope and fear. Men, superstitious and terror-stricken, listen then with wide ears and fantastic foreshadowings, momentarily expecting the thunderbolts of God, and feeling upon them the claw of the devil. Cranmer, in one of his articles of visitation, directs his clergy to seek for any that use charms, sorcery, enchantments, witchcraft, soothsaying, or any like craft invented by the Devil.' Under Henry VIII, there were a few executions for supposed dealings with the Evil One; but the law on the subject in the following reign was repealed, nor again renewed till the accession of Elizabeth, when other laws were made, and executed with severity. A preacher before the queen, adverting to the increase of witches, expressed a hope that the penalties might be rigidly enforced:

May it please your grace to understand that witches and sorcerers within these few years are marvellously increased within your grace's realm. Your grace's subjects pine away even unto the death; their color fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft; . . . I pray God they never practice further than upon the subject.'

It must have made the teeth chatter with fright to hear the ministers assert:

That they have had in their parish at one instant, XVII or XVIII witches; meaning such as could worke miracles supernaturallie; . . . that instructed by the devil, they make ointments of the bowels and members of children, whereby they ride in the aire, and accomplish all their desires. When a child is not baptized, or defended by the sign of the cross, then the witches catch them from their mothers sides in the night ... kill them . . . or after buriall steale them out of their graves, and seeth them in a caldron, untill their flesh be made potable. . . . It is an infallible rule, that everie fortnight, or at the least everie moneth, each witch must kill one child at the least for hir part.'

With signal success, the witch-finders pricked their victims all over to discover the insensible spot, threw them into the water to ascertain whether they would sink or swim, or deprived them of sleep during successive nights to compel confession. Under a milder judiciary than on the Continent, witches who had not destroyed others by their incantations, were, for the first conviction, punished only by the pillory and imprisonment, while those condemned to die, perished by the gallows instead of the stake. The cast of thought engendered by the Reformation is strikingly typified in Luther. Oppressed by a keen sense of unworthiness, distracted by intellectual doubt, Satan was the dominating conception of his life, the efficient cause in every critical event, in every mental perturbation. In the seclusion of his monastery at Wittenberg, he constantly heard the Devil making a noise in the cloisters, even cracking nuts on his bed-post. A stain on the wall of his chamber still marks the place where he flung an inkbottle at the Devil. He became so accustomed to the presence that, awakened on one occasion by the sound, he perceived it to be only the Devil, and accordingly went to sleep. 'Oh, what horrible spectres and figures I used to see!' None of the infirmities to which he was liable were natural; but his ear-ache was peculiarly diabolical. Physicians who attempted to explain disease by natural causes, were ignorant men, who did not know all the power of Satan. Indeed suicides, commonly supposed to have destroyed themselves, had in reality been seized and strangled by the Devil. In strict accordance with the spirit of his age, he emphatically proclaimed the duty of burning the witches. 'I would have no compassion on these witches,' he exclaimed. would burn them all!' The immense majority of the accused were women - a fact explained not by their nervous sensibility

'I

and their consequent liability to religious epidemics, but by their inherent wickedness. As long as celibacy was esteemed the highest of virtues, divines exhausted all the resources of their eloquence in describing the iniquity of the fair. By a natural process, all the 'phenomena of love' came to be regarded as most especially under the influence of the Devil. The tragedy of Macbeth faithfully reflects the popular superstition touching the powers of darkness. The air is lurid and thick with things weird Three witches meet in dark communion-kinless and fitly consult:

and fantastic.

-nameless

With wild utterance, all, of the moral confusion and murkiness of their demon's heart, they vanish:

'Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.'

Meeting again on the blasted heath, they recount to each other their exploits:

Distant and complex objects are rendered distorted and portentous in the morning mists which the rising sun has not yet dispelled.

The Renaissance.-In the moral, as in the physical world, every night brightens into a new day. Ages of sloth are succeeded by periods of energy. First the seed in the soil, then the harvest-in endless recurrence. Nature may sleep, but she will wake again-forever. It is with man as with the planet,―change is identified with existence, never by leaps, ever by steps; revolutionary, periodic; pulsating to the rhythmic law of the universe, that swings to and fro through the immeasurable agitations, like the shuttle of a loom, and weaves a definite and comprehensible pattern into the otherwise chaotic fabric of things. What the Reformation exhibits in the sphere of religion and politics, the Revival of Letters displays in the sphere of culture, art, and science, the recovered energy and freedom of humanity. Both are effects or phases, each by reaction a stimulant and a cause; the first ethical, the second intellectual; the one Christian, the other classical-in contrasted language, pagan; either, the acme of a gradual and instinctive process of becoming; neither, as we have seen, without many anticipations and foreshadowings. The Renaissance, however, is commonly understood to be the renovation of the intellect only-that outburst of human intelligence which, abroad in the fifteenth century and at home in the sixteenth, marks an epoch in human growth. What was it in its elements and its origin?-An expansion of natural existence, and a zeal for the civilizations of Greece and Rome, that till the fulness of time had lain essentially inoperative on the Dead-Sea shore of the middle-age. It was the resuscitation of the taste, the eloquence, and the song of antiquity; of the gods and heroes of Olympus, of the eternal art and thought of Athens. It was, after a long oblivion, the reappearance, with others high and luminous, of the 'divine Plato,' who alone among books is entitled to Omar's fanatical compliment to the Koran, — ‘Burn the libraries, for their value is in this volume.' All who went before