the sin of a national desecration of the Lord's-day. The people spoke on Sir J. Walmsley's infidel attempt to open the national institutions on the Lord's-day; and the House of Commons, by a noble majority of eight to one, scouted the measure from its presence. We have suffered a terrible disaster, in the destruction of an army, and the dimness which has come over the halo of our national glory in the Crimea. The soldiers of Britain have lost much of their prestige, and are no longer considered the first in the world. France has the preeminence now. Is this all man's doing? Is not God judge in the whole earth? Trace and see who were the instruments of these disasters, and you will find that they are the fosterers of Romanism.-A fitting rebuke for the people tolerating them. Danger looms in a thousand forms before us. The Greek and the Latin Papists are rapidly coalescing.-Who but Britain is the object they will assail? Let us, then, each in his sphere and vocation, be up and doing, and who knows how God may bless the effort to destroy the power and the influence of Popery in our land.

B. C.

THE PEACE.

EXTRACT FROM A SERMON PREACHED IN THE CHURCH OF ST. STEPHEN'S, WALBROOK, BY THE RECTOR, DR. CROLY, ON SUNDAY, APRIL 6.

'He maketh wars to cease in all the world. He breaketh the bow and knappeth the spear in sunder, and burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still then and know that I am God.' (Psalm xlvi. 9, &c.)

AT the beginning of the war, her Majesty's government issued a wise and pious command for a National Supplication. The empire crowded to its temples, bent down in homage, and thus with one voice acknowledged the Almighty, as the only giver of good, the only strength of nations, and the merciful protector of England! The great event which occurred in the last week, at the moment when all England was assembled in the house of prayer, the renewal of Peace, now demands our thanksgiving. Whether her Majesty's government may be only waiting for the more formal declaration of this event, we know not, but I am convinced that the pulpit, in at once acknowledging its gratitude, only echoes the feeling of the people.

In the inspired Ode from which the text is taken, the Psalmist seems to contemplate the state of a nation surrounded by universal danger. All the powers of nature and of man are arrayed against her. With that profusion of imagery which marks the unrivalled grandeur of Hebrew inspiration, he brings the earthquake and the torrent, the falling mountain, and the sudden tempest with all its thunders, against Judæa. But she has a protection, against which their fury is in vain. 'God is in the midst of her,'

He then supposes the rage of man to assail her. 'The Heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are moved.' But the Lord of Hosts guards Jerusalem. Their multitudes are dust, their armour is air, their valour is in the grave. 'The God of Jacob is her refuge.' The Psalmist then exults in the Providential mercy, which makes the violence of man folly, silences the roar of war, and restores to earth the enjoyments, the labours, and the duties of humanity.

'He maketh wars to cease in all the world.' The moral of this beneficent interposition is then drawn, in the acknowledgment of the Divine rule over nations, not only those which have already known God, but those who have lived in 'darkness and the shadow of death.'

'Be still, then, and know that I am God! I will be exalted among the Heathen, and I will be exalted in the earth.'

It is in the spirit of the Psalmist that we should read history. The statesman and the soldier are but instruments in the hand of the Great Disposer; fleets and armies are but parts of that mighty machinery which an invisible power sustains in movement; national calamities and national successes; the confusion of public council and its restoration to vigour; the sudden prostration of the public mind, and its sudden strength, may be but the surges of that great tide, whose flowings obey no power beneath the skies. If human eyes could penetrate those clouds in which the Almighty, perhaps in compassion to our nature, invests the dazzling agencies of His will, we might see those beings whom He makes as the wind and the flame of fire' sweeping perpetually on the wing, and effecting those catastrophes of kingdoms, which, to the human understanding, must always remain only splendid perplexities.

By the mercy of God, we are now relieved from war. But, the nation may still undervalue peace. Against that error the pulpit is bound to contend. The national daring of England was never wound to a higher pitch than that at this moment. But, we should recollect that war is the very element of casualty; that the struggle might have been prolonged. The last war continued its havoc for a quarter of a century. That war cost England five hundred millions of treasure; that war cost Europe, perhaps, ten millions of lives! And who shall calculate the checks to national progress, inevitable in the collision of nations? or what register is there for the broken hearts that purchase victory?

It is true, that it is better to meet war than slavery; better to summon the national strength to the sword than to sink under the shackle; better to trust our souls to God's mercy, and die in arms, than to trust to the caprice of man, and drag his chariot wheels. God avert the reality from England! But, when history points to the ruins of all ancient empire; when we ourselves have seen the shaking of every continental throne; when the last half century has shown us the prostration of all power; armies, once thought invincible, swept like chaff before the wind; diadems, once thought inaccessible to chance, snatched from their wearers' brows; nations torn up and flung in fragments to strangers, like a rent garment; we may well rejoice at the Providence, which in mercy has said to war, as in power, it said of old to the ocean, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.'

That our resources are undiminished, our national sinews unstrained, our national views unclouded, and that the national heart would disdain peace as the barter for honour, are all beyond question. But what could the most successful continuance of hostilities have added to our supremacy? The true dominion of England is in the character of England. Influence is her force; intellectual superiority, public honour, national benevolence-those are the armies with which she subjugates the world, brings willing nations to the foot of her throne, and exacts their tributes, in their admiration, confidence, and gratitude.

Of

She wants no territory, she solicits no triumph, she covets no spoils torn from the corpses of kingdoms. what value would the conquest of Europe, or of the Earth,

VOL. X.

L

be to this country of Christianity? What exultation could she feel, in being the sole survivor of the universal struggle; in erecting her supremacy on ruins, in overlooking a world turned into a wilderness, peopled but with the wolf and the tiger, and giving the only signs of its old habitancy, in the smoke of its fallen palaces and temples.

Of the terms of the peace we know little hitherto. We trust to the sense and spirit of our government. We fought only for peace. We have won it, and we will now hang up our armour in our halls, with the same good-will with which we took it down. Conquest never offered a nobler prize. With our allies, we have restored peace to the Globe!

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There never was a period which opened a nobler prospect to the world. War has some counterbalances to its evils. It awakes nations from their torpidity. Thrown into the element of strife, and forced to swim for their lives, the discovery that they possess muscles and nerves remains, even when they have reached the shore. We shall have even the most inactive nations making an effort to share in the general products of peace. The process of the last few years has been, to remove all impediments to national industry. That marvellous invention which is making one highway of Europe that not less marvellous invention which almost extinguishes distance, which carries thoughts with almost the speed of thought, and which speaks an universal language, are already preparing mankind for taking the shape of one family, and combining all their faculties in the victory of the human race. The elaborate ingenuity hitherto exerted in the destruction of man; the treasures flung into the air or buried in the deep by war; the population drained to meet the ravages of the camp and the field; the public spirit wasted in the excitement and the emergencies of war, will now all be turned into the service of man- -Commerce leading the way-Commerce, that great faculty of national progress, whose limits, in five thousand years of advance, have never yet been reached by man-Commerce, the grand civiliser-the great silent revolutionist, which changes the face of nations without a convulsion, and emancipates society without the penalties of struggle; the wonderworker, which, without a fable, equals

the marvels of Arabian fable, touches the sands into gold, and raises cities in the desert, with a wave of its wand.

For the last quarter of a century, the whole effort of science and enterprise had been exerted in removing the obstacles to geographical knowledge. Circumstances, seemingly the most casual, have assisted in that removal. Civil and foreign wars have rendered the remotest regions accessible. The old repulsiveness of China, half fear and half fanaticism, has already given way. The sullen barbarism of Africa, no longer startling us by the horrors of the slave trade, is soliciting our protection, with the offering of its oils and gums, its ivory and gold. The languid opulence of Asia is longing for the brilliant luxuries of our arts, and the exquisite tissues of our looms. The Western World is awaiting only the product of our mines and furnaces, to penetrate its morasses and mountains, and level new pathways for human progress; every shore a harbour, every kingdom a mart, and every continent a tributary-Australia, that most magnificent bequest to British Sovereignty, almost as large as Europe, teeming with the precious metals, and opening a field for industry and intelligence, more precious than them all.—The Indian Archipelago, one of the most luxuriant provinces of nature, casting the treasures of the tropics at our feet, and only asking the hand to gather them.-Even Continental jealousy beginning at last to discover the great fact, that all nations are important to each other, that national prejudice is national folly, and that no folly is more palpable than theirs, who stint themselves of the bounties of skill and nature at their doors, to pamper an artificial industry by the obsolete contrivances of prohibition and patronage! Thus boundless is the promise revealed to us by Peace. Who can

draw within the limits of calculation the sum of all the human energies, once directed to the arts of peace? Who can measure the strides of the human race, with endless possession in view? What can stop the ardour of adventure, the ambition of opulence, the vigour of industry, and the animation of intelligence, all combining in one great channel, one vast gulf stream, urging its impulse through the globe?

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Of the war I shall scarcely speak. We are now in the calm; I have no wish to look upon the wrecks that strew the shore. We suffered deeply, but we bore our suffering well.