house of correction, they would have had five times 2s. 10d., or 14s. 4d. worth of food alone; and would have been provided with dry and warm lodging, clothes, and all other casualties beside. The celebrated Mr. Elman said to the Committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into the price of labourers' wages, that "forty years ago every labouring man in the parish where he lived brewed his own beer at his own house, and that now not a single labourer of the parish did the same thing.' Our author thus proceeds: "The condition to which the agricultural labourers are reduced is most striking, when contrasted with what it was even within our own memory. The taste of butcher's meat is unknown. They used to make the barley which they grew in their large gardens, or which their wives and children gleaned, into malt: now they are prohibited by the farmers from gleaning in the barley stubbles, and by law from making malt; and, consequently, they have wholly ceased to brew. When they brewed at home, the wife and children partook of it now, if a labourer requires any thing but water, he must go to the public-house, to which he resorts more for the sake of a good fire when he is wet and cold, and there imbibe a draught of molasses and tobacco, manufactured by some neighbouring monopolizer, and facetiously vended under the name of Beer. The sufferings of the poor from want of fuel in wet weather, with its train of rheumatism, ague, and typhus, is very severe the enclosure of waste lands has much tended to increase it, by enhancing the price of fire-wood. Their clocks have disappeared; the pewter plates are gone; the warm clothing of woollen, made at home, has been exchanged for the flimsy cold cotton of the manufactory. These things, the nothings of the philosopher, the all of the labourer's comforts, have been sponged away by taxation, without raising the voice of one tax-eater in Parliament; while a clamour, as loud as it was senseless, has been raised by them all, whenever a reduction of the debt has been declared to be inevitable if we would prevent an explosion of the whole system for if any one fancies that an English labourer, in time of famine, will lie down, eat dung, be content with extreme unction, and die quietly, as the poor Papists in Ireland have done, he is as ignorant of the character of the people about whom he dreams as he is of that of the inhabitants of the moon."

This concluding sentence is prophetic of the scenes which have since been realized. As it is by the acts of man that the oppression on the labourers has been induced, so may it by other acts of man be removed. But we are confident that the wisdom rightly to direct a nation's affairs will never be given to those who despise the only Source of Wisdom; and that the wisest plans would be abortive which were not dictated and directed by the Spirit of God. It was very discreet in the rulers of Jeru

salem during the siege to "gather together the waters of the lower pool:"it was the part of a prudent general to "beat down the houses to fortify the wall:" it was also very proper" to make a ditch between the two walls for the water of the old pool :" but, says God, to these valiant defenders of their town, "But ye have not looked unto the Maker thereof, neither had respect unto Him that fashioned it long ago. And in that day did the Lord God of hosts call," as he does also in this day, " to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth; and behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die. And it was revealed in mine ears by the Lord of hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord of hosts" (Isa. xxii. 9-14).

A strange infatuation has seized some persons now, by which they allege, that, because this is a judgment of God throughout Christendom on Popery, and on various other national delinquencies, it is therefore a thing with which Protestants, and all who hate iniquity, ought to be greatly delighted. These persons will not study the Apocalypse, to be instructed by it; but have no objection to refer to it, as an armoury from whence to draw texts with which to support opinions derived elsewhere; and, accordingly, they justify themselves in their unholy delight by the passage where, speaking of the destruction of Babylon, it is said, "Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her" (xviii. 20);-words which are clearly addressed to the risen saints, who are with the Lord in the air at the time that judgment takes place. And what does the Holy Ghost intimate as the right disposition with which one sinner should witness the vengeance of God upon a fellow-sinner?-of exultation? of complacency? No! for such would arise only from unfeeling pride and hardness of heart. "Babylon is suddenly fallen and destroyed: howl for her; take balm for her pain, if so be she may be healed: we would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed." (Jer. li. 8, 9.) Another prophet, at hearing of the judgment of Babylon, though it was the oppressor of his own nation, says, "Therefore are my loins filled with pain; pangs have taken hold of me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth: I was bowed down at the hearing of it, I was dismayed at the seeing of it: my heart panted; fearfulness affrighted me; the night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me" (Isa. xxi. 3, 4): and on seeing a vision of what was to befal his own country, he says, "I will weep bitterly; labour not to comfort me; because of the spoiling of the daughter of my people: for it is a day of trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity by the Lord God of hosts, breaking down the walls, and of crying to the mountain" (Isa. xxii. 4, 5.) Whoever, therefore,

exults in the distress which is brought upon nations, rejoices with an unholy joy, and has not his feelings in unison with those which the Holy Ghost implanted in the breasts of the prophets of old: while, on the contrary, he may rest assured that he has become deeply imbued with the spirit of Radicalism, and love of lawless rapine, and disrelish for all submission to God's ordinances, which is the form in which Satan most prevails in these days. Let every one try himself on this subject by the standard of the word, and remember that our Lord wept over the anticipation of the judgment on Jerusalem, although he did not witness its horrors.

Every malady that afflicts mankind is a judgment from God; yet by this argument, instead of praying against " battle, murder, and sudden death," we ought to be glad of them. Men have been so long persuading themselves, in defiance of the word of God, that no judgments were to come upon them, that they have hardened their hearts, and are incapable of discerning them now they are arrived! Thus they will go on buying and selling, building and planting, as if all things were to continue as they are for ever. We have serious doubts whether the majority of the professors of Evangelical religion have ever realized to themselves the idea of such things as "last days," or whether they believe that such days are ever to arrive. It is certain that nothing can give them satisfactory information upon the nature of those days but the study of that prophetic word which they despise. To those who have studied it, we offer the following remarks for their consideration.

Mr. Cuninghame has published his opinion that the vials began to be poured out at the French Revolution, and that the things represented by them were all in existence then, although the events of 1830 and onwards particularly belong to the action of the seventh. Mr. Frere agrees that the vials began to be poured out at the French Revolution, but that they are all consecutive. The Editor of The Record newspaper, who, like the rest of the Evangelicals, will sneer at the supposed disagreements of interpreters of prophecy, although he neither understands in what they agree nor in what they differ, nor has any intelligible interpretation of his own to propound, affects to look at these two statements of Mr. Cuninghame and Mr. Frere as greatly opposed. An anonymous writer in the same paper observed, that there was no more real difference between the two interpretations than there would be between two men, one of whom should say that a third person had received several blows, and the other should say that the same person had received a beating. It may be settled as an established point amongst the best and most accurate interpreters of the Apocalypse, that the events in which we are now living are those of the seventh vial; and that they

will never end, but proceed, increasing in awful destructiveness, until they have overthrown every form of government, whether in states or in churches, now existing in Christendom. The most experienced politician in Europe was lately asked how things were going on in France? "Oh," he replied, “as usual; through anarchy to despotism." Looking to the histories of past dynasties and empires, he is right; but we suspect that an intimate acquaintance with the word of God would teach us to expect no despot, but that most cruel of all despots, a lawless mob. If some autocrat, however, should arise, we shall have no difficulty in proclaiming him the personal Antichrist, which the primitive church always anticipated would appear. In the mean time, it seems more than probable that our next Number will be occupied in pointing the eye of our readers to events nearer home than either France or Belgium. The servile war which is now raging in England, and which has for its object of contention the revenues of the church, is not likely to be quelled for there are too many, in every class, to love the treason, though they hate the traitor; and applaud, though perhaps they will not yet openly join in, the sacrilegious spoliation.

ON MIRACULOUS POWERS IN THE CHURCH.

We are thoroughly persuaded that a more prominent and disproportionate importance has been attached to the question of miracles than is justified by the way in which they are spoken of in the word of God. No account is extant of the manner in which the miracles performed by the Lord's servants were treated and considered by the heathen who witnessed them, except what is contained in the Scriptures: Weston's "Inquiry into the Rejection of the Christian Miracles by the Heathen" affords us no light. From the Bible it will appear, that, so far from the facts being called in question, they were universally admitted, and a similar power assumed by the enemies of Jehovah. The earliest sturdy deniers of miracles, which were palpable to their senses, were the leaders of the religious world in the days of our Lord, who, from hatred to him, tried to persuade a person grown to man's estate, whose eyes had been opened for the first time since his birth, that he had not really been born blind: a case from that time without a parallel, until the leaders of the religious world in these days enact the same part with respect to Miss Fancourt. Passing by that case, however, for the present, we shall first direct the attention of our readers to the historical testimony for the existence of miracles in all ages of the world. And, first, what is a miracle? It is somewhat amusing, and

highly characteristic of the present state of the Religious World, to find the dogmatism and confidence with which the different writers pronounce upon what is and what is not a miraculous appearance; whilst not one of them has ever betrayed the remotest suspicion that they were ignorant of what constitutes a miracle, or that there was any difficulty in determining the point. On all subjects "fools walk firm where angels fear to tread." They who are truly learned have ever felt the great difficulty which surrounds the question. Locke, Dr. Clarke, Dr. Hutcheson, Dr. Sykes, and, at greater length than all, Farmer, in his Dissertation, have severally set themselves to define what is a miracle, in order that they might be sure of what they are talking about; whilst the fortunate ignorance of our theological babes enables them to cut a knot which they cannot untie, vastly to their own satisfaction, only to puzzle the simple and to excite the smile of the learned.

To call an event which is dissimilar to any that we have ever witnessed ourselves, or heard of from others, a miracle, is only to say miracles are effects which vary in frequency in proportion to man's ignorance. The same fact which is miraculous to a clown, might be of common occurrence to the travelled philosopher. And this same difficulty lies against all the popular definitions of miracles: for example, one person defines it “an extraordinary event which surprises by its novelty;" another, "an effect that is inconsistent with some known law of nature;" while Spinoza says it is "a rare event occurring in virtue of some law unknown to us: not the least extraordinary part of which definition is, that it is the best of all, though the production of an Infidel who professedly denies that any power can supersede or interrupt the order of nature: and we shall find, before we have done our examination, that the creed of the Religious World upon the subject of miracles is much nearer that of Spinoza and Hume than that of the Bible.

After all the accuracy, however, with which writers have endeavoured to define it, no definition can be given which is not too strait or too large. Contrariety, or conformity, to as much of the laws of nature as each individual is acquainted with, constitutes the whole of the idea that every one means to convey when he asserts of such and such a fact that it is miraculous or not. Hume declares, that he will more readily believe that any man may have his senses imposed upon, than that the ordinary operations of nature are disturbed. This, of course, not only sets aside any miraculous cure of Miss Fancourt, but the raising of Lazarus, and all the miracles recorded in the Bible; and this is just what Hume meant it should. Hume was consistent. "When any one tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more