Farr mistakes the meaning of it; for instead of receiving "a double share of his father's wealth," Jacob became a wanderer from his father's house, and all his wealth and power went to enrich his son Esau. No, the blessing was the conveyance of the sacerdotal character to Jacob, and the patriarchate of the faithful. Mr. Farr forgets also that the history of the world came down to Moses, by hereditary tradition as well as by revelation, for which the great age of the patriarchs was especially favourable. He brings down the history to the end of the Acts, and with some blemishes, such as above noted, the book is well calculated to assist in fixing sacred history on the minds of children.

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REWARD PICTURES ILLUSTRATING THE BOOK OF PROVERBS, (Wertheim and Macintosh), are remarkably neat small-colored pictures in packets, illustrative of some text in the Book of Proverbs; they are intended to be rewards to children for good conduct. One is an Ornament of Grace," which is represented by the outside of a cottage, with the father seated at the door, with a child of different ages on each knee; and the mother seated near him with her arm round the waste of a fine chubby boy, who is leaning against her knee. The texts are Proverbs i. 89, and vi. 20-22; and on the back there are short verses to correspond, of very pretty poetry. They will answer very well as rewards to children at school, and they are only one shilling the packet.

There are

THE EMBROIDERY AND ALPHABET SAMPLER BOOK (Groombridge and Sons), whose use is sufficiently indicated by its name. names in coloured and ornamental writing, beasts, birds, fish, and fowls, ships, flags, coats of arms, alphabets in all sorts of fanciful letters, and in short whatsoever is requisite for forming a girl's elegant sampler, folded up, map fashion, in squares about the size of a crown piece, which when drawn out is rather more than a yard in length; and all for the low price of sixpence. Ladies who are training the little fingers how to use the needle, cannot do better than to possess themselves of this treasure in remarkably little bulk.

The

PHYSIC AND ITS PHASES, OR THE RULE OF RIGHT AND THE REIGN OF WRONG, (Simpkin and Marshall), is a very severe and cutting satire in verse upon the practice of medicine; in which the anonymous author lays bare the whole trickery and fallacies of the medical faculty; to which are added notes explanatory of ambiguities or allusions in the text. The poetry is by Alcephron, the Modern Athenian;" but the prose notes are by Dr. Moore. practice which by implication is recommended is that adopted and practised by Dr. Dickson, of Bolton Street, Piccadilly, which is grounded on the law of periodicity and intermittency which regulates the whole body in health, and alike manifests itself as a rule in the cyclical changes of disease. The profession most cordially hate Dr. Dickson and chrono-thermalism; but they are nevertheless silently adopting his system, to the manifest reduction of the apothecaries' bills, and the guinea trade. The public should read this short work; it would open their eyes to the tricks that are played off on travellers.

A BRIEF HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF THE
CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.

Ar the period when John Knox undertook to reform the Papal Church of Scotland, no church in Europe stood more in need of reformation. Many of those who were called bishops, were merely laymen; the abbots and friars of monasteries were in the same condition. But although they were not in holy orders, yet they were bound by the rules of the Papal church to nominal celibacy; yet they lived in the most embrutalised debauchery, and were lost to all sense of shame or decency. The custom then was for the sons of the nobility, or of the royal family, or their illegitimate offspring, to be appointed in infancy, even in the cradle or boyhood, to bishopricks or abbacies as they fell vacant; and these were never ordained to any holy function, but when of age, the lay prelates sat in Parliament as legal bishops and abbots; and the former laid hands on others, as if they could confer orders and ordain priests. In consequence of the Papal doctrine (which we are told is a doctrine of Devils) of forbidding to marry, these lay prelates indulged in much greater immorality than the papal prelates of any other country; and their voluptuousness and immorality disgusted the whole body of the people, and prepared their minds for a complete ecclesiastical revolution.

About the year 1407, an English priest, named Resby, a disciple of Wicliff's, attempted to preach the doctrines which were taught by the "Morning Star" of the reformation; but he was soon silenced by being burnt alive. About thirty

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years afterwards Paul Craw, a Bohemian, came into Scotland to promulgate the doctrines of Huss; he also was burnt alive. In the year 1494, several persons of distinction in Ayrshire, were tried by the Archbishop of Glasgow; but as the King was present, they escaped with an admonition. In 1528, Patrick Hamilton, of noble birth, had gone to Germany, and received the teaching of Melancthon; and on his return home he openly preached the reformed doctrines, under the protection of his noble relatives. Hamilton was the Abbot of Ferme, who had also been appointed in the manner beforementioned, and it was thought necessary to make an example of him to deter others. On specious pretences he was invited to St. Andrews, where he was treacherously arraigned before the archbishop, and burnt alive at the stake, at the age of twenty-two; and his then patience and constancy in the midst of the flames, on that occasion were so remarkable, that many Papists even, scrupled not to say, that he died a true martyr of Christ.

After this cruel exhibition of Papal zeal, the reaction became general; and some, even of the monks themselves, began to declaim against the lewdness and immorality of the priests and friars. Many fled into England to escape the fiery trial; but two were burnt alive in the year 1534; and the following year, six priests and monks were burnt alive in one fire on the Castle-hill of Edinburgh; and upon that occasion, the Archdeacon of Lothian called the Bible a book of heresy; and that having it in possession was sufficient to condemn a man as a heretic. Two Protestants, Kennedy, a youth of eighteen, and Russell, formerly a friar, were burnt alive at the same stake in Glasgow. In 1536, Parliament ratified and confirmed a previous act of Parliament, "against them that hold, dispute, or rehearse, the damnable opinions of the great heretic Luther."

Overwhelmed with grief and passion for the defeat of his army at Solway Moss, James V. died in the year 1542, leaving the unfortunate and greatly abused Mary, as his successor, who was not a week old. The Earl of Arran was made regent. The noblemen who had been taken prisoners at the battle of Solway, were lodged in the Tower of London; but afterwards were placed on their parole, under the charge of Archbishop Cranmer, who carefully instructed them in the

reformed doctrines, and in the knowledge of the holy Scriptures. To these, Henry VIII. proposed the marriage of his son Edward with their Sovereign Queen Mary, when the parties were of age; and he sent them home, where they greatly assisted in forwarding the reformation of religion. This marriage and alliance were strenuously opposed by Cardinal Beaton and the clergy, who were all engaged to a French alliance; and they laid the whole kingdom under an INTERDICT: the public services of religion were suspended, the priests refused to administer the sacraments, the churches were closed, and an universal gloom overspread the countenances of the people. The marriage treaty with England was ratified and solemnly agreed to; but the cardinal having been set at liberty, and the Popish interest prevailing over the English and Protestant, the young Queen was sent to France, and a persecution of the Protestants commenced under the influence of Cardinal Beaton and the Queen Dowager, who afterwards became regent of the kingdom.

In the year 1544, an act of Parliament authorised the use of the Bible in the vulgar tongue; but the regent, who had reverted back to Popery, declared his determination to punish heretics, and to root out their damnable opinions; and he resolved that whosoever, either read or possessed a Bible in the vulgar tongue, were to suffer condign punishment, that is death. At Perth, the cardinal condemned five men to be hanged and one woman to be drowned, because she refused in her confinement to address her prayers to the Virgin, and a great number of gentlemen and burgesses were banished; and Spottiswoode asserts, that the ignorance of the priests were so great, that they thought the New Testament was composed by Luther. The whole body of the priesthood were addicted to the fleshly lusts, and the kingdom was full of their illegitimate issue. In the year 1546, the cardinal tried and condemned George Wishart for heresy; and he was burnt alive in front of the cardinal's palace at St. Andrew's. By this barbarous execution, the cardinal thought to strike terror into the Protestants, but it had quite a contrary effect; for it effected a more fervent spirit of inquiry, and roused the resentment of the whole nation.

A body of evil-disposed men, under pretence of revenging Wishart's death, conspired to kill the cardinal, and they

effected their sacriligious purpose on the 29th of May, 1546, by surprising his castle and overpowering the garrison. The cardinal was the chief prop of the Papal power in Scotland, and his sacriligious murder opened the way to the avarice of the temporal peers, who seized upon the lands of the church and of the monastic establishments; as in their opinion the very best mode of reforming the church-by robbing of GOD.

On the murder of the cardinal, the regent promoted his own illegitimate brother, John Hamilton, Abbot of Paisley, to the primacy. In the meantime, the murderers of the cardinal maintained the castle of St. Andrews against the regent; and here, as their chaplain, JOHN KNOX made his first public appearance, and thus, as it were, consented to "the godly deed," as he calls it, of the cardinal's murder; and on the capture of the castle he, with the other conspirators, were transported to France.

In the year 1549, the Earl of Arran resigned the regency into the hands of the Queen Dowager who, from political motives, rather courted the reforming nobility; and the new archbishop held a provincial council at Edinburgh for the purpose of reforming the morals of the clergy, which, even by their own admission was most scandalous; but their chief and besetting sin must be laid at the door of the Papal system, which has enchained that church to "the doctrine of Devils-forbidding to marry." The new primate disgraced his primacy by burning alive a poor old man, named Adam Wallace, a schoolmaster, in his seventy-eighth year, for the crime of being a Protestant.

In the year 1552, Archbishop Hamilton held a provincial Synod at Linlithgow; in which, among other things, the decrees and canons of the Council of Trent were solemnly and nationally received, as binding and obligatory, in all time coming on the Church of Scotland. All who maintained doctrines contrary to those promulgated from Trent were denounced as heretics, and were formally cursed and declared excommunicated.

Here, in our opinion all the religious evils, all the schisms, and all the heresies with which Scotland has been agitated, from the year 1552 until this day, took their beginning. That Linlithgow Council bound all the sins, heresies, and antiChristianisms of the Council of Trent, which changed the