the walls, pillars, and arches: just as our reformers wisely retained a national church establishment and many rites and usages which modern innovators wish they had utterly subverted. The result of the bishop's labours was, that he converted a Saxon cathedral into a Gothic, with a skill which has been admired for ages by all beholders; and, though the fabric, with its previous and subsequent alterations, is a prodigious pile of various styles and orders, such as no man would build de novo; yet its antiquity, its massiness, its picturesque beauty, its variety, and its convenience and utility, would forbid that any man of taste or feeling would wish to raze it, and build it anew. Now I would say the same of our church: I take it as a whole, with all the dilapidations and repairs of ages: a new one might be less exposed to minute criticims, but would it, as a vast edifice, combine more of solidity and utility? Let us cleanse it; let us repair its breaches; let us remove whatever is inconsistent with its intended object; but let us retain its massy strength, its scriptural sanction, and its beauty of holiness. Sure I am, that Christianity would not gain any thing by subverting it, and giving us in its stead some flimsy modern structure, destitute of every thing of grace, ornament, or solidity.

But our church, repeat our opponents, is Popish. As well may they say that Wyckham's Gothic arches are Saxon, because they were Saxon before he re-modelled them. I remember I was one day musing among the antiquities of Winchester upon this objection of our church being Popish, when my attention was arrested, and my reverie broken, by a beautiful ancient arch which had been placed with much good taste at the entrance to a modern Gothic edifice, which proved to be the Roman-Catholic chapel, erected under the fostering care of Bishop Milner. I pass over the usual blasphemous emblem of the Divine Trinity and other Papal symbols, just to copy the

following inscription: "A. D. 1790, I, John, bishop of Centuriæ consecrated this chapel and this altar, in honour of the blessed Virgin Mary, St. Peter the Apostle, and St. Birinus and St. Swithun, confessors and bishops; and I enclosed in the altars the relics of St. Pius and St. Constantius, martyrs, and of St. Severa and St. Victoria, virgins and martyrs, &c. &c." Well, thought I, though all is not right or scriptural or enlightened among us Protestants; very far from it, and the greater our guilt and shame; yet we have no incongruities or superstitions like this. If a learned prelate, in the very heart of England, can collocate in a solemn dedication, the Virgin Mary, St. Peter the Apostle, and Birinus and Swithun bishops of Winchester, and can gravely and religiously affirm that the shreds, patches, hairs, bones, or beads, which he placed in the year 1792, in a Popish altar in that city, are genuine relics and remains of the individuals known in the legends under the names of Pius, Constantius, Severa, and Victoria, I can readily credit the most extraordinary stories which I hear of the superstitions of uneducated Papists, and the mummery of Irish stations, and Holy Wells. I must presume that the bishop of Centuriæ, (better known as Dr. Milner, the zealous antiquary and historian of Winchester,) believed what he inscribed; but then what obliquity of intellect must the Church of Rome superinduce upon its votaries, before a man of learning and acute investigation could credit such fables ?

But still, it is rejoined, you are popish; not, indeed, in this particular matter of saints and relics, but in your whole system of discipline and worship. Is not your cathedral service, for example, popish; a direct relic of gorgeous barbarism, and a direful offence against Christian simplicity? Now the simplest answer is, to shew what a Protestant cathedral would be if converted into a Papal edifice. There would be shrines, and sainted relics, and sacrificial priests, and an alleged real sacrifice, and mortuary

prayers, s, and penance*, and I know not how many other forms of superstition. For this is the very character of Popery, which is like its own miserere seats in the stalls of our cathedrals, which Protestantism turns down and cushions, seeing no merit in being kept awake in the service of God by no better motive than that if you sleep you will fall and lacerate your nose. No, I will not admit that there is any thing really popish in our most splendid Protestant worship, though a popish heart can make any thing so. Choral singing does not convert vernacular Christian prayers and praises into unintelligible Latin formularies fraught with superstition and false doctrine; nor do a few maces and vestments forbid the utmost simplicity of Christian truth in a Protestant pulpit, be it the

• A volume might be written on penance. Popery was a religion alternately of lax indulgence and unrelenting severity. Her first aim was to secure implicit blind obedience to her dictates; and to this her clergy were trained from their infancy, so as to lose all volition before they arrived at man's estate. In early times, the discipline of the cloister was very severe, and corporal punishment was freely inflicted for slight deviations from the strictest rules. In the eleventh century an abbot complained to Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, that with all his severity the boys under his care still made very indifferent men. • You are continually correcting the boys,' replied Anselm, and what sort of men do they make when they grow up?' 'O, very stupid, beastly men,' answered the abbot.

No very good recommendation of your mode of education,' answered Anselm, if out of men you make them beasts.' 'But, now, is that our fault?' inquired the abbot. We try by all means to force them to become better; yet we cannot do it.' •You force them!' said Anselm. • Tell me now, my dear abbot, if you should plant a tree in your garden, and close it up tight on all sides, so that it could not put forth its branches in any direction; and then, after some years, should take away the enclosure; what sort of a tree do you suppose it would be? certainly, a very useless tree, with little crooked branches twisted into each other. And whose fault would it be excepting your own, who had put such an unnatural force upon the young plant?' The good abbot, it is said, took the hint and profited by

it.

pulpit of a cathedral or a village church. For the benefit of these objectors, you might describe what this very cathedral of Winchester was in the days of Popery. I will try to sketch the picture, faintly indeed, but not inaccurately. Think of the magic of tracery vaulting, spreading columns, shelving buttresses, tapering pinnacles, canopied niches, statuary friezes and corbels, ramified mullions, and historical windows. Think of the shrines and tombs, many beautiful even now amidst their dilapidations. There lies, if old chroniclers say true, Lucius, the first Christian king of Britain; there repose Saxon and Norman kings, queens, and princes in multitudes; Edgars, Emmas, Ethelreds, Ethelwolphs, Egberts, Edreds, Edmunds, Canutes, and Hardicanutes, many of whose bones tossed abroad in promiscuous heaps by self-styled Reformers*, who made

*I do not mean political reformers, but so-called religious reformers, who followed in the wake of better men, as false reformers ever do, for the love of mischief and plunder. If I had not restricted myself to conclude my remarks in the present letter, I should perhaps have inflicted upon you a few pages about Reformers and Reformation in church and state, as illustrated by the annals of your cathedral. We would have seated ourselves on the tombs of Bishop Morley and Bishop Hoadly, who sleep very quietly side by side in the nave, and I doubt not we should have learned some useful lessons by the retrospect. The name of Hoadly is itself a volume. There he lies, with the mitre and the cap of liberty sculptured upon his tomb; the republican wand and the pastoral crozier in saltire, and Magna Charta and the New Testament reclining on each other. But in justice to those who placed them there, we ought to remember that Bishop Hoadly lived, died, and was entombed long before the French Revolution, which has rendered the cap and wand of liberty the emblems of all that is unjust, cruel, bloodthirsty, and anarchical. I shall never forget the shudder of horror which I saw thrill through the spectators in the Guildhall of Bristol, nearly twenty years ago, when at a contested election the present notorious member for Preston caused those revolutionary symbols to be elevated in the midst of the assembly. I marked his looks, I heard his speeches, and noted him down in the tablet of my

a form of worship, simple, solid, edifying, and spiritual, administered by a man like ourselves, in a language which all understand, and with direct reference to the standard of the inspired word, which all may read and judge of, without penalty or reproach. Away, then, with the absurd charge of Popery.

And thus, my dear friend, I must hastily and abruptly cut short my "visit to a cathedral." I have written with a rapid pen, touching upon various subjects as they happened to occur to my thoughts, or were noticed in my scrap-book; and I had not time to be shorter. I have given you, as they arose, the sort of reflections which occurred to me in visit. ing an ancient, royal, and ecclesiastical city; and though some of them may be slight and cursory, yet I would hope that others may have awakened in your mind and my own trains of meditation of solid value. There are three stages in which it is interesting to visit any remarkable spot. There is, first, its aspect in the unbroken solitude of nature before man and his works have visibly impressed their glaring stamp upon its features.

Pleasant were many scenes, but most to

cares, and toils; its sins, and restlessness; its arts, and its literature; its trade, its manufactures, and its politics; its pleasures and pains; its churches and charities; its prisons and its palaces; and, above all, that which gives solemnity to all these, its dense masses of human beings who are to live to all eternity. There is still a third condition; the scene of decay and desolation; the site where kings and warriors, statesmen and philosophers, once were, but are not now; where the arch is broken, and the battlement decayed, and the revelry silenced, and the wail forgotten. America furnishes the first two of these conditions, but not the last. You may tread, to-day, the unbroken forest, or climb the primæval mountain, or listen to the murmurs of the vast unnavigated wave; tomorrow villages and towns are thickly clustered; the woods are felled, the teeming soil is upturned, the lake and river yield their bosom to the rapid keel, and their shores are clustered with the varied products of human industry and commerce. But America has not reached the last stage; her oldest cities, like the dwellers in them, are but of yesterday. Europe has lost the first condition, but possesses amply the other two; Asia, still older in her human progeny, often possesses the third, while she is reverting to the first; she offers the melancholy reminiscences of a Persepolis or Palmyra, a Tadmor or a Balbec, while the once busy scene around has relapsed into the solitude of nature, before the hand of man disturbed her domain.

Which of these three is the most interesting to contemplate? Surely all are interesting, though for different reasons. I should pity the wight who could not enjoy, to the very letter, such a scene as that described in the lines above cited; who cannot rejoice to forget man, and all his boasted works, and to hold commerce with earth, air, and skies, with many holy musings, known only to the Christian, which carry him above