by interest, to every species of national improvement. As a body, they possessed great revenues, and immense influence. The friends of liberty, during the short reign of the Constitution, did all that they could safely do, to destroy that influence and relieve the country from the long night of Papal darkness. The Cortes, at their first session, abolished the Inquisition, with a great number of monastic institutions; and appropriated their revenues to the payment of the national debt. They decreed that no new convents should be founded, no novitiates be enrolled, nor any person assume the monastic habit. To monks already in sacred orders, they allowed a small pension in lieu of their sequestered revenues, and held out to nuns a provision of one hundred ducats per annum, to induce them to renounce their vows. They gave freedom to the press, and published great numbers of political and other writings, and encouraged the education of all classes. By these measures they greatly diminished, but did not destroy the influence of that system of things which had so long enthralled the minds of the Spanish people. Its hold was too ancient, and too deep, to be broken off at once. "In anticipating a period in which the Spaniard shall be freed from monkish influence," says an interesting writer, from whom we quote the following observations, it must not be forforgotten, how interwoven is that influence with his most delightful recollections and associations. His festivities, his romerias, his rural pastimes, are all connected with, and dependent on, the annual return of some saint's day, in honor of which he gives himself up to the most unrestrained enjoyment. A mass is, with him, the introductory scene to every species of gaiety, and * * Observations on the state of Religion and Literature in Spain, made during a journey through the Peninsula in 1819. By S. Bowring, Esq. a procession of monks and friars forms a part of every picture on which his memory delights to dwell. And a similar, though perhaps a stronger impression, is created on his mind by the enthusiastic love of song,' so universal in Spain. He lives and breathes in a land of poetry and fiction: he listens with ever glowing rapture to the Romanceros, who celebrate the feats of his heroes, and surround his monks and hermits with all the glories of saints and angels. He hears of their mighty works, their sufferings, their martyrdom and the tale, decorated with the charms of verse, is dearer to him than the best of holy writ.— He feels himself the most privileged among the faithful. On him "our Lady of Protection" (del Amparo) smiles; to him the Virgin of Carmen bows her gracious head. In his eye, ten thousand rays of glory encircle the brow of his patron saint, the fancied tones of whose voice support, assure, and encourage him; he believes that his scapulary (blessed by a Carmelite friar,) secures him from every evil: his house is adorned with the Pope's bull of indulgencies; a vessel of holy water is suspended over his bed, and what more can be want,-what danger can approach him? His mind is one mass of undistinguishing, confiding, comforting faith. That faith is his reli gion! How difficult will it be to separate the evil from the good, if, indeed they can be separated. What a fortress must be overthown before truth and reason can advance a single step! What delightful visions must be forgotten, what animating recollections, what transporting hopes! This is indeed the ignorance that is bliss. Is it not folly to wish him wise? But alas! this is only one side of the picture! For, however soothing, however charming the contemplation of contented ignorance may be to the imagination, in the eye of reason the moral influence of such a system is baneful in the extreme. All error is evil; and the error which substitutes the external forms of worship for its internal influence on the heart, is a colossal evil. Here we have a religion, if such it may be called, that is purely ceremonial. Its duties are not discharged in the daily walk of life, not by the cultivation of pure, and pious, and benevolent affections, but by attending masses, by reciting Paternosters and Ave Marias, by pecuniary offerings for souls in purgatory, and by a thousand childish observances, which affect remotely, if they affect at all, the conduct and the character. The Spaniard attends his parish church to hear a service in an unknown tongue. He bends his knees, and beats his bosom, at certain sounds familiar to his ear, but not to his sense; he confesses and communicates with undeviating regularity; and sometimes, perhaps, he listens to a sermon in the elegant style, and beautiful language of his country, not, indeed, instructing him in the moral claims of his religion, but celebrating the virtues, and recounting the miracles, of some saint or martyr to whom the day is dedicated. He reads his religious duties, not in a bible, but an almanac; and his almanac is but a sort of Christian mythology. His saints are more numerous than the deities of the pantheon; and, to say the truth, there are many of them little better than these. He is told, however, that his country exhibits the proudest triumphs Schism of orthodox christianity. and heresy have been scattered, or at least silenced; and if in Spain the eye is constantly attracted, and the heart distressed, by objects of unalleviated human misery; if the hospitals are either wholly unprotected, or abandoned to the care of the venal and the vile; if the prisons are crowded with a promiscuous mass of innocence and guilt in all its shades and shapes of enormity, what does it matter? Spain, Catholic Spain, has preserved her faith un be forgiven, but not adulterated and unchanged; and her head. In a word, intolerance, in its widest and worst extent, is the foundation on which the whole of the Spanish ecclesiastical edifice rests. It has been called the main pillar of the constitu tion; and is so inwrought with the habits and prejudices of the nation, that the Cortes, with all their general liberality, dared not allow the profession of any other religion than the "Catolica Apostolica Romana unica Verdadera." Would they look around them, they might see the melancholy effects which superstition and intolerance have produced in their hapless country. How many a town and city, once illustrious, has sunk into nothingness. What remains of their ancient glory? The ruins of palaces, of fabrics, of storehouses, and dwellings, and undilapidated churches and monasteries, and hospitals, outliving the misery of which they have been the cause. One might surely expect that in a country possessing eight archbishops, more than fifty bishops, and more than a hundred abbacies, with a jurisdiction almost episcopal; "in which," to use the language of a Spanish writer, "there are more churches than houses, more altars than hearths, more priests than peasants;" in which every dwelling has its saint, and every individual his scapulary,-one might expect to see some benefits, some blessings, resulting from this gigantic mass of ecclesiastical influence. Let us, then, look upon a picture drawn by the hand of an acknowledged mas ter. "Our universities are the faithful depositories of the prejudices of the middle age; our teachers, doctors of the tenth century. Beardless novitiates instruct us in the sublime mysteries of our faith; mendicant friars, in the profound secrets of philosophy; while barbarous monks explain the nice distinctions of metaphysics. "Who goes into our streets without meeting cofradias, processions, or rosaries; without hearing the shrill voice of eunuchs, the braying of sacristans, the confused sound of sacred music, entertaining and instructing the devout with compositions so exalted, and imagery so romantic, that devotion itself is forced into a smile. In the corners of our squares, at the doors of our houses, the mysterious truths of our religion are commented on by blind beggars, to the discordant accompaniment of an untuned guitar. Our walls are papered with records of authentic miracles,' compared to which, the metamorphoses of Ovid are natural and credible. And ignorance has been the parent, not of superstition alone, but of incredulity and infidelity. The Bible, the argument and evidence of our Christian faith, has been shamefully abandoned, or cautiously buried beneath piles of decretals, formularies, puerile meditations, and fabulous histories. "Monkish influence has given to the dreams and deliriums of foolish women or crafty men, the authority of revealed truth. Our friars have pretended to repair with their rotten and barbarous scaffolding the eternal edifice of the gospel. They have twisted and tortured the moral law into a thousand monstrous forms, to suit their passions and their interests. Now they describe the path to heaven as plain and easy,-now it is difficult, tomorrow they will call it impassable. They have dared to obscure, with their artful commenta ries, the beautiful simplicity of the word of God. They have darkened the plainest truths of revelation, and on the hallowed charter of christian liberty, they have even erected the altar of civil despotism. In the fictions and falsehoods they have invented to deceive their followers, in their pretended visions and spurious miracles, they have even ventured to compromise the terrible majesty of heaven. They show us our Saviour lighting one nun to put cakes into an oven; throwing oranges at another from the sagrario; tasting different dishes in the convent kitchens, and tormenting friars with childish and ridiculous playfulness. They represent a monk gathering together the fragments of a broken bottle, and depositing in it the spilt wine, to console a child who bad let it fall at the door of a wine shop; another, repeating the miracle of Cana to satisfy the brotherhood, and a third restoring a still-born chicken to life that some inmate of the convent might not be disappointed. "They represent to us a man preserving his speech many years after death, in order to confess his sins; another throwing himself from a high balcony without danger, that he might go to mass. They show us the Virgin feeding a monk from her own bosom; angels habited like friars chanting the matins of the convent, because the friars were asleep. They paint the meekest and holiest of men torturing and murdering the best and the wisest for professing a different religious creed. "We have indeed, much religion, but no christian charity. We hurry with our pecuniary offerings to advance any pious work, but we do not scruple to defraud our fellow men. We confess every month, but our vices last our lives. We insist, almost exclusively, on the name of christians, while our conduct is worse than that of infidels. In one concluding word, we fear the dark dungeon of the inquisition, but not the awful, the tremendous tribunal of sound, instructive discourses, and God." This is the representation of a Spaniard. Though the colouring is high, it is a copy from nature." To the Editor of the Christian Spectator. Eloquence of Ministers. I was much pleased with some remarks on this subject in the Christian Spectator for May 1823, believing that they are founded in reason and confirmed by experience. I confess I was not a little surprised to see the remarks of another of your correspondents in the number for July. It is not my intention to reply at large to these remarks; but I wish to express a few thoughts which were suggested by reading them. Much which the writer says respecting preaching to the consciences of men is certainly important; yet may not his treatment of this topic induce some to undervalue discussion in sermons? Instruction is important as well as impression, and indeed is important considered in its connexion with the desired effect upon the conscience. I would have the preacher charge upon sinners the full extent of their guilt, and would allow him even to say, "Ye stiff necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost" but I would have him, previous to this, take such steps as to make the charge come to their minds like a peal of thunder; even if he must, like Stephen, go back to the call of Abraham in Haran and give us the history of the Jews for several hundred years. In relation to the second topic of your correspondent, I wish merely to advert to one error into which I think be, with others who talk like him, has fallen: it is overlooking the difference in the talents and qualifications of ministers. One man has imagination, another has not. The latter never can be eloquent; it is impossible. He can perhaps write preach in a good degree to the conscience; but preach extempore he cannot. One man has a mind well disciplined, and can study his sermon without writing it; another has a mind, that, like a discontented boy, never can be at home when it is wanted, and cannot be brought to act with efficiency upon a subject and study it thoroughly, unless at the same time the result of its operations is committed to paper. This inan cannot preach, at least cannot give that varied and thorough instruction which is expected of a 66 pastor and teacher," without writing his ser mons. He who preaches written sermons need not be dull when writing them. If he is a dull man, he will be; and if he preaches extempore he will also be dull. But if he has any imagination and christian feeling, he will write eloquently. The operations of the imagination are not confined to a public assembly, and the Holy Spirit is as ready to bestow his assistance in the study as in the church. But The most eloquent preachers of our country, when they preach their best and most eloquent sermons, have them written. The unthinking multitude, perhaps, dignifying their heedless judgment with the name of common sense, attribute the eloquence of these men to their speaking without their sermons before them. a person capable of writing the article which is the subject of these remarks, should not be ignorant of the fact, that they write their sermons, and that there is eloquence which may originate in the study of a minister, and be exhibited through the medium of written composition. E. To the Editor of the Christian Spectator. One of the most important ecclesiastical Councils, that has been held in this state, was the General consociation which assembled at Guilford, by order of the General Assembly, in the year 1741. Our venerable historian, Dr. Trumbull, after giving an account of a memorable act of the General Assembly, relative to ecclesiastical transactions, passed in May 1742, speaks particularly of the Guilford Council. The preamble to the act, after noticing the ecclesiastical constitution of the colony formed in 1708, with its beneficial operations, and having adverted to some unhappy recent events, observes : "Whereupon this Assembly did direct to the calling of a General Consociation at Guilford, in November last, which said Consociation was convened accordingly, at which convention it was endeavoured to prevent the growing disorders," &c. After giving a transcript of the act of the Assembly, the historiau remarks, (History of Connecticut, Vol. 2, page 165.) "What ministers composed the General Association [Consociation] at Guilford, cannot be known, as there is not the least minute of any such council on the records of the General Association, nor is there any intimation of the result or doings of it, any further than what is found in the preamble to this extraordinary Act, and in references to it, by associations, and consociations afterwards. But it undoubtedly gave countenance to this and other violent measures, adopted and pursued by the Legislature; and was a concerted plan-to suppress as far as possible, all the zealous and Calvinistic preachers." I have lately found a copy of the proceedings of the Guilford Consociation, and am persuaded, that if our excellent historian had seen their Resolves, they would not have been made the subject of such serious animadversion. And whatever judg. ment may be formed of the proceedings of the General Assembly at that period, I think this document will satisfy any person that they must have arisen from some other cause than the Resolves of the Guilford Consociation. T. R. NIGHT. BY MONTGOMERY. Night is the time for rest; How sweet when labours close, Night is the time for dreams The gay romance of life, Night is the time for toil To plough the classic field, Its wealthy furrows yield; Night is the time to weep To wet with unseen tears, Night is the time to watch Ön ocean's dark expanse, The full moon's earliest glance, Night is the time for care Brooding on hours mis-spent, Come to our lonely tent; Night is the time to muse Then from the eye the soul Descries athwart the abyss of night, Night is the time to pray Our Saviour oft withdrew So will his followers do- Night is the time for death- |