the Spaniards under ordinary circumstances, can never be determined. She was not allowed to incur the risk. The God of our fathers, who has the winds in his treasury, and whose are the mighty waves of the sea,-the Lord God of England fought for England, and the Armada, presumptuously called Invincible, was scattered like the leaves of a forest before an autumnal gale. From the day that force was found useless on the part of Rome, fraud and treachery were employed. Several attempts were made to assassinate the Queen. They all failed. For nearly half a century Elizabeth reigned, Protestantism was favoured, and England prospered. When Elizabeth slept with her fathers, the hopes of Rome revived. What would James I. turn out to be ? What would he do? Would he go on countenancing and consolidating the Reformation or would he retrograde, and give England back to be ruled by an Italian bishop? 6. We praise the God of England for deliverance upon deliverance deliverance from a Romanist conspiracy in its attempt to destroy our Protestant king; and deliverance from a Romanist king in his attempts to destroy our Protestant constitution from the one, by the seasonable discovery of the gunpowder treason; from the other, by the seasonable arrival and happy successes of William Prince of Orange. : My Lord, and my young friends, our Protestantism—so excellent in itself, so won to our country, and so kept-is well worth keeping still, and keeping pure. Our God works by means. And to Christian men we look, as to his instruments to you, my young friends, we look, and to such as you, the rising strength and intelligence of the middle classes of our society: to you, my lord, identified as your lordship already stands, with the practical mercy, the social humanity of Great Britain; to you we look as our leader, providentially ready for the crisis, in our approaching conflicts. for the defence of our Protestantism. It is worthy your noblest ambition. Not as a party question; we have a prize at stake far above all consideration of human parties not as a matter of bigotry or exclusion; we grieve over the necessity laid upon us by the insuperable instincts of self-preservation,--the painful necessity of wounding the feelings of any of our fellow-creatures or professing fellow-subjects: but as a question of truth, of the revealed truth of God, in comparison with which all secular considerations sink into insignificance. The favour of our fellow-men, the advancement of our party, the interests of our denomination, the worldly prosperity and prospects of our families, these are toys of childhood compared with the cause of true religion. Yet a little while, and the question will not be with any of us, Have you been Whig or Tory, Conservative or Liberal, Protectionist or Free-trader? But, Have you been a sound, consistent protester against the falsehoods of Satan by whomsoever maintained; and have you been a faithful soldier and servant of Jesus Christ? VOL. IV. |
