in slavery-with a people which have so long enjoyed the blessings of a true religion, that it may almost be said that it is their hereditary privilege to know their God-with an established church, amply endowed and provided with a pious and learned ministry, inferior to none upon earth, we at once perceive the immense national facilities which we have for advancing the cause of religion, and we learn to estimate the immeasurably increased responsibilities of duties which are common to us with all men.

And is not the conclusion irresistibly forced upon our mind, that this position and these blessings have not been given us without an object-but that it is the design of the all-wise Disposer of events that England should signalise herself by efforts in his cause.

Certain it is, that the obligation to become the guardian of religion upon earth is one as naturally arising from the peculiar circumstances of England as any relative duty arises from the peculiar circumstances of the individual.

The church and the country owe an obligation to Dr. Croly for this discourse. Our clergy have too long and too systematically neglected to instruct their people on their political duties; and truths which our ancestors would have never dreamed for an instant of forgetting, are now left out of sight as the mere visions of the enthusiast. National responsibilities are unthought of. Men exercise the franchises of the state without any remembrance that they are thus exercising a power which is more or less to influence the destinies of mankind, and for which they are responsible to their God. The neglect of the pulpit is to blame for this. Our clergy have not taught the people the national responsibilities which entail with their individual obligations. They have practically told them that they did not need the guidance of revelation in that act which, of all others, most needs an humble reliance on teaching from above the exercise of political power. Men talked of the separation of politics and religion, until, while religion has not become, in men's minds, less political,politics have become irreligious. This must be remedied. The watchmen of the nation must warn the people of all their duties-not merely their duties to each other in the common and ordinary transactions of life, but of their higher and more

solemn duties to each other-to all society-to generations yet to cometo mankind-and to their Creator, as members of the great compact of the state. Let this be done by our clergy, and it is not in the power of the hollowness of all her statesmen-no matter by what party name they disguise their forgetfulness of the principle of truthto destroy or even impair the Christian Constitution of Britain.

But we need this from the pulpit to infuse a better and more righteous spirit into our politics. What a contrast is it to turn from the grand principles put forward by Dr. Croly to the policy pursued in the senate, even by those who are the advocates of the constitution? Where is the boldness, the manliness, the uncompromising opposition to evil which should belong to men who feel that when they resist the demolition of our ancient institutions they maintain the cause of God? The Conservatism that is based on any other foundation than this must fall. The reformed religion of Britain is the rock against which the defenders of her institutions must plant the bayonets of their resistance, or they will be as they have been, driven back from post to post-and just so long as they shrink from the broad and plain principle, that England must act as a nation for the advancement of true religion, just so long will they be defeated, because just so long will they deserve it.

The real struggle that is now going on is, whether England shall continue the guardian of true religion or fall a prey herself to the powers of evil, which it needs no prophetic eye to discern are gathering their strength from all quarters of the earth. Influences are abroad among mankind that seek the overthrow of religion in the world; and if England's church and institutions were destroyed, there would then be but little in the frail and decaying fabrics of popery on the continent to preserve even the semblance of opposition to infidelity-if popery itself be not the form in which irreligion would establish its gloomy and terrible ascendancy over mankind.

Such are the interests that are involved in the present struggle. We need scarcely stop to observe that such are the interests that are intrusted to the keeping of the Protestants of Ireland. Ireland is now the scene of this momentous conflict. If popery once established a supremacy here, the great

THIS is an interesting work, and one respecting which our readers should have had an earlier notice, were it not for the pressure of other important avocations. We must, however, at the outset, protest against the book-making peculiarities by which it is distinguished, as discreditable alike to the publisher whose name appears in the title-page, and the eminent individual who is its subject. Murray, it is understood, outbid his brother booksellers in competing for the copyright, by a sum which would have left him a serious loser by the transaction, if the work were not swelled into five volumes, by the wholesale insertion of a most rambling, desultory, and almost unintelligible journal, and a scattered and multifarious correspondence; and hence the heterogeneous character of the compilation before us, which may be characterised as the "rudis, indigestaque moles" of the biography of Wilberforce, and which so far resembles the present ministry as that it also may be said to consist of "squeezable materials," from which, however, by judicious compression, (and herein it differs from them,) something good might be extracted.

It is much to be lamented that Murray did not induce the young men, the sons of Wilberforce, to put their papers into the hands of some one who really knew how to write, and by whom something like justice might be done to the memory of their respected father. As to the young men themselves, they should no more have undertaken to write his life, than to paint his likeness. It is true, no one ought to know him better than his own children; but it does not, therefore, follow that his own children were the best qualified to render a faithful account of him to the world. To do that effectually it would be necessary to deal with matters of general interest, upon a comprehensive scale, in a manner that would require no mean share of the sagacity of the politician, the wisdom of the statesman, the elevation of the Christian philosopher, and the knowledge of the historian; and of these requisites no one can pretend that the sons of Wilber

force were possessed. It is, indeed, to be lamented that they did not possess even so much of them as would have taught them to distrust themselves in dealing with matters so clearly above their comprehension, as were many of the subjects which necessarily came under review in the biography of their father; and that filial piety, as well as historical justice would be best consulted, by consigning the task to some man of eminence, (were we asked to name, we would say, above all others, to Robert Southey), by whom we have little doubt, something worthy of the great Christian philanthropist of his age would, ere this, have been given to the world.

He was born at Hull, in the year 1759, and was the son of a respectable merchant, who could number amongst his ancestors some of the leading gentry of the county of York. From his earliest years his health was delicate, and his frame feeble, so much so as to be a source of perpetual anxiety to his watchful parents, who placed him, at the age of seven, at the grammar-school of Hull. His earliest religious impressions appear to have been derived from his aunt, a methodist of Whitfield's school, with whom he spent much time until he was thirteen years of age, when he was brought home by his mother, and "it became an object of his friends," his biographers tell us, "by the seductions of gaiety and self-indulgence, to charm away that serious spirit which had taken possession of his youthful bosom.

Et sanctos restinguere fontibus ignes.'" This was no easy task, although the expedients employed at length appear to have produced the desired effect, and Wilberforce was gradually weaned from many of the peculiarities which had separated him from the merely nominally Christian world. Nor was he himself without recognizing a peculiar providence in that temporary estrangement from the ways of holiness and peace, as a means of his being connected with public men, and useful to the promotion of public objects. Had he not been removed from his uncle's,

he tells us, he would probably have continued all his days a bigoted and despised methodist; as matters were ordered, a revival of piety took place after his introduction into public life, by which as a public man he continued to be actuated to the latest moment of his existence.

At Cambridge, he formed an acquaintance with Pitt, of whom we have many interesting notices in the progress of this memoir, and to whom, although Wilberforce never attached himself with the blindness of a mere partisan, he appears through life to have been affectionately devoted. He had been returned for the borough of Hull, (an honour which cost him between £8000 and £9000,) but a short time before Pitt had been returned for the borough of Appleby, and their old habits of acquaintance were resumed at the club of Goostree's, which was at that time frequented by some of the most distinguished men of the day. Of the future great prime minister, he writes, that though less formed for popularity than his great rival Fox, he was, when free from shyness, and amongst his intimate companions, the very soul of merriment and conversation.

"He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire control. Others appeared struck by the unwonted association of brilliant images; but every possible combination of ideas seemed always present to his mind, and he could at once produce whatever he desired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare, at the Boar's Head, East Cheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, and the readiest and most apt in the required allusions. He entered with the same energy into all our different amusements; we played a good deal at Goostree's, and I well remember the intense earnestness which he displayed when joining in those games of chance. He perceived their increasing fascination, and soon after suddenly abandoned them for ever."

We pass over that portion of his public life between his entrance into parliament, and the overthrow of the Coalition ministry, when Pitt succeeded to the helm of affairs. He had been the companion of this great man during a tour through France, which they visited previous to the outbreak

of the revolution, when Neckar made him an offer of the hand of his daughter, the afterwards celebrated Madame de Stael, which Pitt declined upon the ground that he was already married to his country. Upon their return, they found the king groaning under a ministry that had been imposed upon him, and anxiously desirous of any event which might enable him to rid himself of the odious burthen. They, on the other hand, felt the precariousness of their position, and were anxiously casting about for every expedient by which the tenure of their places might be rendered more secure. The India bill was the measure upon which they resolved, as best likely, by the prodigious patronage which it would afford, to accomplish for them their object. It was, in fact, intended by them to serve just the same purpose which was more successfully aimed at by Lord Grey in the reform bill. Pitt was still no more than a stripling, and although already one of some mark and likelihood, by no means important enough to excite much alarm in the minds of the experienced political combatants, who had been men of war from their youth up, and who brandished the weapons of wit and of eloquence, with a power and a skill that were almost unrivalled. But they were soon made to feel what the virtue and the energy of a single man could accomplish, when backed by the royal confidence, and sustained by the honesty and the intelligence of the people. This portion of British history will ever be read with intense interest, if it was only that it laid the foundation of that uncompromising boldness, and that heroic perseverance, by which Pitt was distinguished in after life, and to which, under Providence, England owed her preservation. We cannot afford to dwell upon it here, further than to say, that he was not driven from his post by frequent majorities, when his great antagonists seemed most to triumph in the certainty of his defeat, and that he waited, with an intrepid patience, for the gradual improvement of public opinion, which he left no means within his power unemployed for the purpose of enlightening, until, with almost a certainty of success, he might venture on an appeal to the people. This he did in due season— how triumphantly, history tells; but we can only afford to touch upon it at present so far as Mr. Wilberforce is concerned, who was enabled from his