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questions, that religion exhibits this increased influence; it evidently takes deeper hold of men personally. We do not mean scriptural, evangelical religion merely, but all forms,-the false as well as the true. Men may be led astray for a while by bad guides, and by their own predisposition to yield to the attraction of a false road; but they are more serious than many preceding generations, more disposed to put to the test the consolations of their several modes of faith and worship. The frequent changes of religion which take place all over Europe, form one of the many symptoms of this greater earnestness. For more than two hundred years, there has been nothing of the kind: the several populations inherited a stereotyped faith, which they as little thought of changing as they would of abandoning the language of their ancestors. From time to time, indeed, an Irish gentleman became a Protestant, in order to escape political disabilities and social humiliations, or a Hungarian nobleman became a Roman Catholic, in order to bask in the sunshine of imperial favour; but these were proofs of the weakness of religious principle, not of its power. Now, on the contrary, changes take place, which are evidently the result of real conviction, whether erroneous or well directed. Many members of the English, the German, and the Swedish aristocracy embrace Roman Catholicism, because it is the religion of authority, of time-honoured tradition, and apparent material unity. Thousands in Belgium, in France, in Italy, in the United States, tens of thousands in Ireland, embrace Protestantism, because it leads them directly to the Saviour. Numbers of Livonian and Esthonian Lutherans have attached themselves to the most considerable of the degenerate Churches of the East; and among the Armenians, on the contrary, evangelical truth is spreading to an extent and with a rapidity which may almost be compared to the times of the Reformation.

Another characteristic of the day is the altered tone of infidelity. Doubtless, among multitudes of the lower classes, enmity to Christianity appears in forms as coarse as ever, and the real tendencies of unbelief, as well as of superstition, are to be judged by their manifestations in their less cultivated adherents; but whatever is new in the higher walks of infidelity, whatever is original in its writers, and properly belongs to our age, has certainly taken its stand upon higher ground than heretofore. While the most respectable of their predecessors endeavoured to borrow the morals of Christianity apart from its faith, some of those writers have actually attempted to borrow its spirituality. The last attempt is indeed the more preposterous of the two: the new sentimental varieties of Deism and Atheism are essentially false and hollow; yet they do not the less offer indirect and unwilling homage to the moral powers of Christianity. Shall we be accused of extravagant optimism when we add, that the

very spread of avowed unbelief is a sign that men have become more cognizant of their own feelings on this subject? Those who in a former age would have remained in a state of indifference to religion, are now constrained to express their hostility, because they feel, some of them at least, that if the claims of Christianity are admitted at all, it must become permanent in all their thoughts, and determine their whole life. In short, it is an age of transition, with all its troubles and contradictions: the reign of mere hereditary Christianity as a prejudice has passed away, and the reign of personal, living conviction is come as yet only for a minority.

The struggle with Popery is being renewed with an energy that promises success. All attentive observers of history have been struck by the contrast between the wonderful progress made by the Reformation during the first forty years after the Diet of Worms, and its subsequent weak resistance to the Romanist reaction, together with the state of absolute immobility which prevailed from the close of the seventeenth century until the last few years. It is as if the tide, advancing upon Rome with apparently resistless power, had been suddenly arrested, and its proud waves frozen in the attitude of menace. We believe there is now very little doubt among thinkers of any school, as to the agency that suspended the threatened deluge. Protestantism, in the hour of its first immense success, was essentially one strong religious impulse, absorbing into itself all rival motives. National and political interests, the personal views of Princes, the jealousies of hostile races, were all, in the minds of the prime actors, subordinate to the one great purpose of regenerating Christendom. Men, separated by language and hereditary prejudices, felt themselves to be one in the holiest aspiration that the heart can form. This glorious movement stopped short as soon as the world recovered from its surprise. Rome changed her tactics, and accomplished many partial reforms: the spirit of religious indifference, which had never been eradicated, resumed the upper hand over the Reformed populations: the civil power every where usurped entire control over the section of the Church within its reach, and governed it with a view to its own selfish interests. Protestantism lost, with all its unity and self-government, all aggressive and even much of its defensive power; while Rome, remaining the only representative of a spiritual principle that was not restrained by geographical limits and national distinctions, stood on this high vantage-ground, and dealt unresisted blows on the isolated and fettered Churches. Now, it is not too much to say, as the most cheering characteristic of our day, that Evangelical Protestantism has regained the consciousness of its unity, and that by its use of free associations it has regained its liberty of action. We are no longer divisions of an army acting without concert, and officered by chiefs indifferent to the cause:

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we are marching against Rome as our fathers did, in the strength of individual conviction, and with a feeling of holy brotherhood toward all evangelical Christians. The crusade is assuming the aspect which it wore during those memorable forty years when it advanced irresistible from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. We are beginning to recover the position which was lost when the jealous and selfish intervention of political power paralysed the arm of Protestantism.

Nor has the long interval been altogether lost. We believe that the populations of Protestant countries are, on the whole, much more decided and more nearly unanimous in their rejection of the Church of Rome than they were in the generation which succeeded the Reformation. The burning zeal of the Reformers themselves, and of their immediate disciples, must not deceive us as to the state of the popular mind, or allow us to forget that behind the energetic few there lay a vast fluctuating mass, generally, indeed, at the disposal of their leaders, but devoid of solid religious conviction, and open, when the occasion presented itself, to all sorts of reactionary influences: witness the complaints of Calvin in his Commentaries and Letters. Mr. Macaulay's Essay on Burleigh and his Times has convinced us that the really zealous Protestant party under Queen Elizabeth was small, though that of really zealous Romanists was smaller still. This deeply read and sagacious historian actually accepts, as very near the truth, the supposition that four-fifths of the nation, though on the whole professing Protestantism, would, without the least scruple, have become Roman Catholics, if the religion of the latter had been finally established by law. When we see the wholesale conversions and re-conversions of the Anglican Clergy under three successive Tudors, and the immense defection that took place among French Protestants at the close of the sixteenth century, not then so much the result of persecution as a fluctuation of opinion provoked by doctrinal Calvinism; when we see a whole district of Savoy won back by the efforts of St. Francis de Sales, and the total re-Catholicizing of Bohemia within fifteen years after the fatal battle of Weissenberg, and the gradual change of the Protestant majority in Southern Germany into an insignificant minority, under the double influence of Jesuit missions, and of the systematic intolerance of the houses of Austria and Bavaria; it is impossible not to feel that, for a century after the Reformation, nominally Protestant populations were accessible to Roman Catholic proselytism to a degree which is now hardly conceivable. The cruelties, the treacheries, the wholesale massacres, perpetrated in that age, did not provoke the horror and repulsion that their recital produces in us, because the rights of conscience were not understood.

Never did the Church of Rome rely upon civil despotism for support more than at the present moment, After affecting

Liberalism for a little while in 1848, she has fairly thrown her fortunes in with those of rulers under whose sway the people of Europe fret. And it is by the exaggeration of all her own evil tendencies that she tries to meet the Protestant revival,—by false miracles, by resuscitating discredited legends, by increasing the worship of idols, and by proclaiming the immaculate conception of Mary. This recourse to violent stimulants, this attempt to galvanize the limbs of the paralytic, is a confession of weakness and of utter absence of moral power, calling to mind the extreme superstitious excitements with which moribund Paganism tried to make head against Christianity, when the more moderate and official idolatries had lost their hold upon the old Roman world.

An anxious feature of present circumstances, suggestive at once of the brightest hopes and of overwhelming responsibility, is the fact, that the most important spheres of religious labour at home and abroad are in a state of transition and spiritual travail, of which we know neither the duration nor the issue, appealing, therefore, to our Christian sympathies and to our conscience, for extraordinary efforts to turn to lasting account occasions that may not so soon recur. This is true of China, of the Turkish provinces, of Ireland. It has already been shown in these pages that the educational measure of July, 1854, for India, is a similar challenge to the Church: India is at her feet, if she has only self-denial and faith enough to claim the prize for God. And the religious needs of our own country make themselves felt more imperiously than ever, at a time when we are under the pressure of those urgent calls from the East, the South, and the West. It would seem as if, in many provinces of Christian effort, the determinate counsel of God had brought matters to a crisis, at which, if the Church would not fail in the hour of trial, her energies must be taxed not only beyond what they have hitherto borne, but beyond what they are apparently able to bear.

Passing from these general considerations to the state of particular countries, as far as they attract notice in a religious point of view, let us begin our survey by one of which little is generally heard. There is a great deal of good being silently accomplished in Norway. A revival was begun in that country about forty-five years ago through the instrumentality of a peasant, Hans Hauge, whose earnestness, intrepidity, perseverance, together with the character of his doctrine, and the success with which he was favoured in the conversion of thousands, all strikingly recall the ministry of John Wesley. Evangelical religion has ever since made uninterrupted progress, and taken deep root among the people; moreover, since 1843, religious liberty is established by law. Norway has a democratical constitution, and this great measure was carried in the Storthing, we believe, somewhat against the will of the Swedish Court.

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In Sweden, the reader is aware, a similar revival has encountered the impassioned hostility of the Clergy. Adherence to Popery or to Dissent is punished by confiscation and exile; simple Bible-reading, by imprisonment, with a diet of bread and water; old laws against Sabbath-breakers are enforced against those who attend religious meetings; and a new law of intolerance was voted by the last Diet. Country Clergymen refuse to give communion to couples who wish to be married, when they are suspected of Pietism, and then refuse to marry them because they have not received it. Notwithstanding these vexations the work of God goes on.

In the Russian provinces of the Baltic great numbers of the Lutheran peasantry have been, during the last twelve or fifteen years, seduced into the Greek Church, by all sorts of means, addressed at once to their superstition and to their temporal interests, especially the latter. But this movement has altogether stopped, and, according to the latest information, a sort of reaction has set in: the misguided peasants regret the step which the Czar will not allow them to recall; and it is even said that a certain amount of evangelical truth has actually been communicated over the border to the native Russian peasantry.

The mighty events which are taking place in the East will, we trust, prove to be for the furtherance of the Gospel. The Crescent must, in any case, wane. The Turkish power, which will have owed its continued existence to the interference of England and France, can no longer visit apostasy from Islamism with death: there will be ere long a free field for Christian Missions in the East, and that among populations far more disposed to receive Protestantism than the effete superstitions of Rome. Let us hail the wonderful success obtained by our American brethren among the degenerate Oriental Churches as the pledge and future instrument of a more general blessing in those regions, which were the cradle of mankind, and the seat of the earliest civilization.

Germany has probably changed more during the last eight years than during the previous half-century. Since it escaped an atheistic Reign of Terror in 1848, or at least supposes that it had a narrow escape from such, scientific schemes of infidelity have fallen into utter discredit. Even the free school of orthodox theology, to which the illustrious Neander, for instance, belonged, is under a cloud of comparative neglect. Attention to home and foreign Missions, to works of practical piety and Christian beneficence, has prodigiously increased, and vital religion is regaining its influence, especially among the upper classes. On the other hand, this improved religious spirit is too often accompanied by narrowness and intolerance. The orthodox Lutheran is disposed to look with hostility and contempt on all the other sections of Protestantism; and the present revival