and full of all subtilty and mischief," his course will be this-boldly to deny all the jurisdiction which is claimed upon the process of common fame; and to trample with evangelical abhorrence upon all the antichristian doings of Tertullus and the craftsmen who employ him. If the victim is pronounced contumacious, he must persevere to the last resort; and if it shall be found, according to general custom, that he cannot realize equity in an Ecclesiastical Judicature upon earth, then let him copy the magnanimous example of that immortal protestant, the undaunted Martin Luther, publicly burn the unrighteous anathematizing decretal, and the contemptible bull of their infuriated malignity, and appeal from the curse of Babylon on earth, to the plaudit of "the Son of Man upon the throne of his glory."

A preacher whose whole life was devoted to the submission of antichristian lordship furnishes the ensuing paragraph as a peroration. "Churchcraft is a burden grievous to be borne. In your Courts, O Rabbis, you reign like lions in their dens, and tear to pieces all who have the misfortune to fall under your power. Your Church Courts resemble the fabled castles of the giants, where nothing is to be seen but the spoils of the victims devoured by your merciless hands. Wo to the man who enters within your priestly dominion! You know this;

for your consciences have told it you a thousand times; but dignity, power, and wealth render you callous to all conviction. May God pardon all your sins for Christ's sake!-Amen."

POSTSCRIPT.

The preceding discussion is so liable to misconstruction, that it is proper to anticipate the wrathful denunciations of the craftsmen, which have always followed every attempt to expose the corruption of "Ecclesiastical Judicatures."

The Jewish Sanhedrim and Council reviled Peter and John, and murdered Stephen. Demetrius and the shrine makers assailed Paul. Diotrephes "prated malicious words" against John. The Council of Constance burnt John Huss and Jerome of Prague, not because they rejected the idolatry of the mass, but because they would not submit to the Beast's "power, and seat, and great authority."

Luther, Zuingle, Calvin, Latimer, Ridley, Wishart, Cranmer, and Knox, with all the brilliant constellation of martyrs and confessors of the sixteenth century, and every other witness who has prophesied in sackcloth, were not "all the day long as sheep for the slaughter," racked, butchered, or burned, because they did not believe that a wooden image is "the High and Lofty One who inhabiteth eternity," but because they would not "crouch down as a strong ass, bow their shoulders to bear, and become servants to tribute.".

The Methodist brethren, Scott, Storrs, and Sunderland, with their associates are not vilified, because they preach the doctrines of their own articles; but because they are such "fanatics," that, like Peter and John, they think it

is "right in the sight of God to hearken unto God more than unto a Methodist General Conference propelled furiously by preaching slave-drivers; and, therefore, "they cannot but speak the things which they have seen and heard."

The four denounced Presbyterian Synods have not been "put out of the synagogue," as far as the Presbyterian "rulers, and elders, and scribes, and their kindred "can thrust them, because they do not acknowledge as infallible every jot and tittle of the "Act and Testimony," and of its various discordant expositions by the contradictory commentators, or because of their congregational predilections, or because of any alleged irregularities at protracted meetings. We all know that pretext is a mere sham! The real causes are these. Many of those churches transfer their donations to the American Board of Foreign Missions, and to the Home Missionary Society, because they have more confidence in the usefulness of those institutions than in Rabbis Demetrius and Turtullus, and do not "yield a present submission and due subordination to the authority of Church Courts." Others of them are "under sentence of guilt," as "incendiary fanatics" who pray for the conversion of Christian kidnappers, and for the abolition of manstealing. Some of them will not swallow "the whole hog" of churchcraft, which, like its ancient "brotherhood," the herd of two thousand swine in the country of the Gergesenes, they cannot catch, while it is running "violently down a steep place into the sea." And all of them "feel themselves aggrieved by the said sentence of guilt, and seek redress by such means as are in accordance"

L

with the gospel, and will doubtless obtain it, by divine aid, in spite of all those scribes and Pharisees who shut up the kingdom of heaven against men." Matt. xxiii. 13. Faithful Christians have ever been persecuted for their steadfastness, and for abounding in the work of the Lord : and whether we advert to the ancients or the moderns, fidelity in the service of their Lord and Master has always been stigmatized by some opprobrious epithet; and the indomitable “defenders of the faith" ever have been denounced as obstinate and fool-hardy wretches, who justly merited the anguish which they incurred, and the tortures or death to which they were doomed by the ungodly world, and by "false brethren."

Doubtless when "Nebuchadnezzar, full of rage and fury," from his imperial throne "commanded the most mighty men in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and to cast them into the burning fiery furnace," because they would not "serve his gods, nor worship the golden image which he had set up;" then "the princes, the governors, and the captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces," eulogized the wrathful, impious despot, and reviled those stubborn children of Judah. Realize that splendid scene! There sits the monarch exalted in pompous magnificence. There is the machinery to roast and consume the servants of God. And there are the three bound sons of the prophets. Once more, look! and there they walk unsinged in the spacious flames, accompanied by the Son of God, their Shepherd and their Shield! Immanuel thus assured his faithful servants in every after

age, that "when they walk through the fire they shall not be burned;" or in the spiritual meaning of the promise, as was often experienced by those who were roasted to death by the Beast and his servants, that they should not feel the conflagration.

"The presidents and princes" who "could find none occasion, nor error, nor fault in Daniel, except concerning the law of his God," when they had ensnared the thoughtless Darius, and his devout premier in their satanic trap, hypocritically pretended to bewail his rebellious temper towards the king's decree; and the dreadful catastrophe which his fanaticism and opposition to their brotherhood had naturally insured to him. Little did they anticipate the personal experience of the law of equal retribution. Less did they conceive. that he who had provided that "upon the bodies of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the fire should have no power," would also "shut the lions' mouths." Those immortalized "servants of the living God" were not devoured by the flames and the lions, but all that is fearful in anticipation, and repulsive to humanity, and agonizing to sense, must have been realized, except as it was eradicated by divine mercy.

The Apostle Paul compared the power of Nero to "the mouth of a lion." Nevertheless, he presents to us a spectacle of móral grandeur and religious magnanimity, which transcends all description. There sits the imperial buffoon, luxuriating and fiddling amid the living Christians besmeared with combustibles, who were suspended to burn as torches for the illumination of his garden of voluptuousness. Beside him stands his ruffian lictor, with