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vately acted for the benefit of Robespierre, in the last days of terror, was condemned, in order to wound his feelings, to the guillotine!

"Robespierre en écoutant les noms de Madame de Sainte-Amaranthe et de sa famille s'était tu. Il craignait de paraître protéger des contrerévolutionnaires. Il savait bien que c'était son nom qu'on frappait, mais il retirait timidement ce nom pour ne pas paraître frappé luimême : situation déplorable des hommes qui prennent la popularité au lieu de la conscience pour arbitre de leur politique! Ils se couvrent du corps des victimes innocentes, au lieu de se couvrir de leur intrépidité." -tom. viii. c. xi. l. 59.

Here we leave this hero of many now alive in France, with the admission that he was not a man constitutionally inclined, like Danton, to gross sensuality, or guilty of avarice: tyranny over his fellow-creature was the devouring lust of his heart.

Here we leave him to his admirers, expressing our cordial concurrence in the opinion of a French writer, not our author,

"Robespierre n'a jamais voulu anéantir la République, mais il la couvrait de crimes et de sang, et il croyait en préparer la force et les prospérités : ce n'était pas un ambitieux tyran, c'était un monstre.”Garat, Buchez et R. 18. 335.

In conclusion, we will briefly express our opinion upon the two cardinal faults in the work before us; passing by the obvious blemishes of the absence of all marginal notes, of all references to authorities (not covered, in our estimation, by the excuse given in the preface, that the author is in possession of them, and can produce them if attacked); passing by also the graver errors of the novelist tone and character which is too often substituted for the gravity and sobriety of history, and many minor inaccuracies; passing by these, we must lift up our voice against the religious and the political doctrines insinuated throughout its pages. Both are as shallow and as false as ever were promulgated, and as ever were greedily imbibed by people whose aggregate character is that of extreme and unthinking susceptibility of any new impression which appears before them in an attractive shape. The basis of the political doctrine is, that government is matter of will, and not of reason and convention; that the mob told by the head, not citizens selected for worth and the presumptions of worth, are intended by nature, that is, by God, to choose their governors and their form of government; that democracy and liberty are synonymous terms. The gross logical fallacy of such a doctrine it would be an insult to our readers to expose: the practical effects of it cannot receive a more luminous commentary than they have already obtained from M. De Lamartine's own

government, succeeded immediately by military despotism, and crowned by the election of Louis Buonaparte: those who worship king mob after these recent proofs (among others) of his justice and sagacity, are not to be dealt with by reason. No, not though President Polk tells the world that a slave-owning democracy, reeking with the blood of an unjust war, repudiating its just debts, and keeping millions under the iron yoke of personal slavery, be "a sublime moral spectacle;" though the government of America is, in truth, an aristocracy, as compared to that of which M. De Lamartine held, we were about to say, but it would be more correct to say, dropped-the reins.

So much for the error of the political doctrines of M. De Lamartine: the religious theory which he is desirous of propagating cannot be sufficiently condemned. In an early part of his work he announces the following proposition :

"Quand la Providence veut qu'une idée embrase le monde, elle l'allume dans l'âme d'un Français."-l. 1. c. 13. p. 21.

The smile which this extraordinary piece of coxcombry at first excites is exchanged for the expression of a graver emotion as we perceive the terrible consequences which vanity, when it becomes the main-spring of thought and action, is capable of producing both upon an individual and a nation. We see the old received faith and doctrine of Christianity vanish before the "idea which Providence has kindled in the mind of a Frenchman;" while the error of the believing portion of mankind is corrected in the following language:

"Il y a des objets dans la nature dont on ne distingue bien la forme qu'en s'en éloignant. La proximité empêche de voir comme la distance. 11 en est ainsi des grands événements. La main de Dieu est visible sur les choses humaines, mais cette main même a une ombre, qui nous cache ce qu'elle accomplit. Ce qu'on pourvait entrevoir alors de la Révolution Française, annonçait ce qu'il y a de plus grand au monde; l'avénement d'une idée nouvelle dans le genre humain, l'idée démocratique, et plus tard le gouvernement démocratique.

"Cette idée était un écoulement du christianisme. Le christianisme, trouvant les hommes asservis et dégradés sur toute la terre, s'était levé à la chute de l'empire romaine comme une vengeance, mais sous la forme d'une résignation.

"Il avait proclamé les trois mots que répétait à deux mille ans de distance la philosophie Française,-liberté, égalité, fraternité des hommes. Mais il avait enfoui pour un temps ce dogme au fond de l'âme des chrétiens. Trop faible alors pour s'attaquer aux lois civiles, il avait dit aux puissances: Je vous laisse encore un peu de temps le monde politique, je me confine dans le monde moral. Continuez, si vous pouvez,

d'enchaîner, de classer, d'asservir, de profaner les peuples. Je vais émanciper les âmes. Je mettrai deux mille ans peut-être à renouveler les esprits, avant d'éclore dans les institutions. Mais un jour viendra où ma doctrine s'échappera du temple, et entrera dans le conseil des peuples. Ce jour-là le monde social sera renouvelé.' Ce jour était arrivé. Il avait été préparé par un siècle de philosophie, sceptique en apparence, croyant en reálité. Le scepticisme du xviii siècle ne s'attachait qu'aux formes extérieures et aux dogmes surnaturels du christianisme: il en adoptait avec passion la morale et le sens social. Ce que le christianisme appelait révélation, la philosophie l'appelait raison. Les mots étaient différents, le sens était le même. L'émancipation des individus, des castes, des peuples, en dérivait également. Seulement, le monde antique s'était affranchi au nom du Christ, le monde moderne s'affranchissait au nom des droits que toute créature a reçus de Dieu. Mais tous les deux faisaient découler cet affranchissement de Dieu ou de la nature."-1. 1. c. 6. p. 13.

Our blessed Saviour then came on earth in order to prepare the way, by his example of love, obedience, and humility, by his doctrine of repentance and faith, for the carnage, fury, rebellion, pride, madness, unutterable crimes, and blasphemy of the French Revolution; upon that day, and not before, his mission was fully accomplished-having at length been assisted, we are told, by the philosophy "apparently sceptical, but really believing," of Voltaire and Rousseau !

This wretched blasphemy, though it be founded upon arguments which a thinking child beginning to reason would despise, is gravely published to the world as one of the discoveries of our age. But so it is; men who in all secular concerns are in the habit of using themselves, and exacting from others, the strictest logic, and of demanding the most rigid rules of evidence for every fact, are so eager to throw off the yoke of the Christian religion, to set themselves free from the restraints which the revealed word of God imposes upon their passions, that even such contemptible sophistry as this finds a ready admission into their hearts. This is the enlightened view of Christianity which discards dogmatic faith; that is to say, sets aside as it pleases the inspired word of God, wherever it does not appear to them sufficiently liberal for their enlarged philosophy. This is the creed which as yet our narrow and contracted minds in England have rejected, but which has filled France, Germany, and Italy not only with Deism-this belongs to the more fastidious and refined but with Pantheism, Atheism, and all the innumerable social evils which follow in their train. Though fifty years have scarcely passed away since those who began by worshipping their reason, in the place of the God who gave it, ended by doing

That any

homage to a prostitute as the emblem of that reason. notion of a conscientious obligation to obey authority should exist in minds of this description, it would be idle to expect; and that the terror of the armed hand of power should be the only cement which holds society together was only to be expected as the natural result, and it is the result which at this moment we see every where around us.

ART. V.-1. Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education, with Appendices, 1847-8. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. London: printed for HER MAJESTY'S Stationery Office, 1848.

2. Monthly Paper issued by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the principles of the Established Church, 1847-1849. London: Depository of the Society. 3. The Church of England, and the Committee of Council on Education: for what are the National Society and all other Members of the Church of England to appeal to Parliament? A Letter addressed, by permission, to the Hon. and Right Rev. Richard, Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells. By GEORGE ANTHONY DENISON, M.A., Vicar of East Brent, Somerset. With an Appendix. London: Rivingtons. 1849.

4. National Warnings on National Education. A Sermon preached in aid of the Parochial Schools, at the Parish Church of South Hackney, on Sunday, the 12th of November, 1848. By the Rev. CHR. WORDSWORTH, D.D., Canon of Westminster. London: Rivingtons. 1848.

5. Popish Education in England, supported by the State. Address to the Protestants of the Empire. By the Committee of the National Club. Third Series, No. I.

WHEN in the latter part of the Session of 1839 the then recent appointment of a Committee of Privy Council on Education came under the consideration of Parliament, the unconstitutional character of this novel authority in the State, and the mischievous tendency of the undefined and unlimited powers with which it was invested, were clearly pointed out, and made the chief ground of opposition to the measure. Among others, Lord Stanley, in a speech in the House of Commons, which now, after the lapse of ten years, reads more like a prophecy of what has since come to pass, than like an argument upon a question then pending, thus expressed himself:

"He felt that so long as the Committee was irresponsible, so long as its object was undefined and uncertain, so long as its powers were unlimited, and while the exercise of those powers was not checked, not fettered, not restrained, not limited by Parliament, so long would it remain a fertile source of new plans-plans following each other in rapid

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