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before the Great Council, by Rev. Leonard W. Bacon, of Baltimore, appeared recently in the Boston Congregationalist. This speech is considered by many as the boldest and ablest ever made against the extraordinary claims of popery. The Bishop draws his arguments against these claims from both Scripture and history. During its delivery, he was frequently interrupted by cries of, "Silence, heretic!" "It is false, it is false!" "Down with him from the platform!" "Put him out, the Protestant, the Calvinist, the traitor to the Church !" But, undisturbed by these violent outcries, he calmly and resolutely continued his argument, only occasionally pausing a moment to make a brief reply to some charge; as, when called a Protestant, he exclaimed: "I a Protestant! No! a thousand times no!" At another time 66 Keep calm, venerable brethren; I have not got through yet. By hindering me from going on, you will show the world that you are in the wrong, and that you have gagged the humblest member of this body." When speaking of papal infallibility and the contradictions of Popes in their teach

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"If you decree the dogma of papal infallibility, our antagonists, the Protestants, will leap into the breach with all the more boldness, for the fact that they will have history on their side and against us, while we shall have, to oppose to them, nothing but our negations. What can we say to them, when they begin to march out before the public the line of the bishops of Rome from Lucas down to His Holiness Pius IX. ?

“O, if they all had but been such as Pius IX., we could beat them all along the line! But, alas, alas! it is very different from this! (Cries of 'Silence, silence! Enough, enough!')

"Don't cry out so, my right-reverend brethren! To show such alarm at the facts of history is tantamount to giving up all for lost. For if you were to pour over it all the waters of the Tiber, you could not wash out a single page."

And, at the conclusion of his historical argument, he says:

"Setting our feet firmly on the solid and changeless rock of the holy Scriptures inspired of God, we will go boldly forth against the world, and, like the Apostle Paul, in the presence of the free-thinkers, we will know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified. We will conquer by the preaching of the foolishness of the cross, as Paul conquered the orators of Greece and Rome, and the Church of Rome will have its own glorious '89! (Clamorous outcries of Down with him! Put him out! the Protestant! the Calvinist! the traitor to the Church!')

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"These outcries of yours, right-reverend sirs, do not frighten me at all. If my words are warm, my head is cool. I am neither of Luther nor of Calvin, neither of Paul nor of Apollos, but of Christ."

The Bishop claims to have proved five important points, of which the fourth is this: "That the Councils of the first four centuries, while acknowledging the high dignity of the Bishop of Rome, conceded to him only a preeminence of honor, never of power or jurisdiction."

The preceding remarks and extracts show the feeling and opinion of at least one eminent Roman Catholic Bishop. In our own country there is also, just now, considerable excitement in the Protestant Episcopal Church. We allude to the movements of the Rev. Mr. Cheney and the Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, jr. The history of what these gentlemen have been saying and doing is too recent, and has been too fully discussed in the daily and weekly journals to need further explanation.

The question naturally arises, What has all this to do with the New Church? Why should we feel any special interest in the open and determined opposition of these individuals to claims which have for so long a period been tacitly submitted to? We certainly do not suppose that Dr. Döllinger, Père Hyacinthe, and Bishop Strossmayer, have the least idea of renouncing Catholicism and becoming Protestants; or that Cheney and Tyng intend to leave the Episcopal Church, and adopt the forms and faith of orthodoxy; much less do we expect that any of them will accept as truth the writings of Swedenborg. These men, as far as can be learned from their lives and writings, cling, if possible, more firmly than ever to what they believe to be the essential doctrines of their respective churches.

They are not assaulting Catholicism and Episcopalianism, but are directing all their efforts against the fearful corruptions which have, for a long period, been working their way into the Church, the most dangerous and fatal of them all being the assumption of spiritual power over the minds and souls of men. These Reformers know not, indeed, from what source comes the influence which is directing and urging them on in their great work. But to New Churchmen the secret has been revealed. We know that it is, the Divine Truth, the New Jerusalem, which is now coming down from God out of heaven into the receptive minds of men in all the religious denominations in Christendom; teaching them to hold fast to and perfect all that is good in the Church, and to reject whatever is seen clearly to be in opposition to it; and opening their understandings, so that they are at least beginning to see, although very obscurely, that there is but one Church, and that the Head of that is the Lord Jesus Christ; and that all who believe in Him, and live in charity with the neigh

bor, must belong to that Church, by whatever name they may be called, while living in the natural world.

And it is this full belief-that such men as we have mentioned, with thousands of others like them, are all working together, in different ways, indeed, but under the same Divine influence, to remove evil and false principles from the minds of men, and thus open the way for the fuller reception of the doctrines of the New Jerusalem-that gladdens the hearts, and gives new encouragement to the hopes, of New Church

men.

CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND NONCONFORMISTS.-The Bishop of Gloucester attended for the first time a meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society, in his diocese the other day. He had, he said, felt for years a difficulty, which many others had felt, as to the close coöperation the society implied between the Church of England and Nonconformists. He felt at the time, that those who differed from him must work in their sphere, and he must work in his. But, he said, he prayed that Providence would bring a time when matters would be otherwise, and all might work in a common sphere. "And," he exclaimed - amid loud applause from many of his clergy and laity "I think I may say that that time has come."

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ORTHODOX AND UNITARIANS.- Rev. Rufus Ellis, of Boston, (Unitarian), occupied the chapel pulpit at Yale College last Sunday by invitation of President Woolsey, "who desired in this way to recognize Mr. Ellis's devotion at a critical time to essential Christian truths." There is no reason why Unitarians like Mr. Ellis should not have the cordial fellowship of the churches called Evangelical.

BOOK NOTICES.

Emanuel Swedenborg; a Lecture Delivered Before the Sacramento Literary Institute, by NEWTON BOOTH, April 4, 1871. 8vo. pp. 22.

THE author of this pamphlet is a gentleman of much distinction on our Western coast, and is now the Republican candidate for Governor of California. The lecture exhibits evidence of unusual culture and ability. We may add of fairness; for it is evident that he has studied his subject with the honest purpose of understanding it, and that he honestly says just what he thinks. His perception

of some of the parts of Swedenborg's system of religious philosophy is singularly clear, and he presents them with great force and accuracy. In other parts he fails. We should say that his study of Swedenborg was recent, and his knowledge necessarily imperfect. And that he was unfortunate in some of the guides whom he has followed. For example, he says:

"When he was about fifty years old, having made the circuit of the physical sciences of his day, he directed his studies to the nature of the soul, and to those religious problems which sooner or later present themselves to every man of thought. Two or three years afterwards his great intellectual labors began to tell upon his faculties; his mind became obscured, and when he was fifty-six he had a short attack of violent insanity. For the two years preceding his unmistakable madness, his spiritual diary' is little else than a record of his dreams; and while it contains flashes of his genius and startling guesses at truth, as a whole it is scarcely superior to the literature of a fortune-teller's dream-book.

"His attack of mania occurred in London."

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He takes this from White's Life of Swedenborg, and is not aware that the perfect falsehood of this statement has been established by investigations which have traced it to its origin, and shown not only that it is utterly without foundation, but is wholly irreconcilable with unquestionable facts in his history. But it is easy to see how any one who believes in this alleged mania of Swedenborg, might be led to attribute, almost unconsciously, to some remaining aberration of intellect, statements which he could not reconcile with probability; although the whole difficulty arose from his incomplete knowledge of the system of which they form a part.

It might be inferred from some parts of this Lecture that the author was not only an earnest admirer of Swedenborg, but a receiver of his doctrines. Judging from the whole, however, we should infer that he had not yet made up his mind; or rather, that there mingled in his mind a strong grasp and a clear view of some of the most important doctrines of Swedenborg, with a clouded and sometimes a distinctly erroneous view of others. Perhaps we could cite no passage which would exhibit his state of mind more clearly than the following, which, we would premise, is preceded by an able and eloquent presentation of difficult questions which meet the inquirer into the nature and workings of the human understanding:

"Now, imagine a man whose unconscious mental secretions have been drawn for fifty years of study from a circuit of inquiry wide as the knowledge of his day; who in the love of scientific truth had followed every path of nature open to him into new fields and undiscovered regions; who had

sounded the deeps of philosophical speculation; who had tracked the sou to its fastness; who had endeavored to purge the film from his spiritual sight by gazing on the undimmed brightness of the Creator, and who had been dazzled, dazed, perhaps, by the Divine effulgence; invest him with the creative power of the poet which works only in the dark; give him this state of dual consciousness we have all experienced, but in a degree far more vivid and intense than we have known-so real that while he stands on earth, in form of clay, with mortal breath, senses, presence, his thoughts are projected from him, and compass him about as objective realities become his continent and horizon, his earth and sea, and air and light, his morning, noon, and night, and star-crowned sky, and you will have, I think, the conditions under which Swedenborg believed the veil of mortality was lifted, and he saw the scenes of other worlds, heard the voices of angels, and received a revelation from God.

"His own theory and explanation were quite different from this. He taught that there is a spiritual creation, the type of and corresponding to the material creation; that there is a spiritual sun, the immediate source of spiritual life, as the material sun is of physical life; that interpenetrating the earth, from its central fires to its tenderest blade of grass, is a spiritual earth; that permeating our natural body is a spiritual body, with spiritual senses capable of taking cognizance of spiritual things. Thus we are in the natural and spiritual worlds at the same time, drawing light and life from both; and only the grossness of the clay tenement that we wear as outside covering and shell prevents us from realizing the spiritual world of which we are unconscious inhabitants. He claimed that by the special gift of his peculiar organization he could husk himself from this physical shell, take off his carnal 'overcoat,' and bring himself into direct relations with spiritual things and intelligences."

We cannot but hope, confidently, that one who brings to the study of Swedenborg so much ability, love of truth, honesty of purpose, and independence of thought, will gradually acquire a more complete, as well as a juster view of the Doctrines and the philosophy of the New Church.

One Year; or, a Story of Three Homes. By FRANCES MARY PEARD. First American edition. Boston: Henry H. & T. W. Carter, 13 Beacon Street. 1871. pp. 418.

THE novel of which the above is the title-page seems to us one of the best we have read for a long time. We have not noticed anything exceptionable in it. A calm and elevated religious spirit pervades it. The story is interesting, but not sensational, or exciting. The author's delineations of character are good; and her treatment of them is calculated, in an unusual degree, to aid in the cultivation

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