CONVERSATIONS ON INSTINCT. A First Book of Natural History for the Young.-Foster.

A nice little first-book: there is information in it, and some home truths too that children are not always told.

THE POPE AND THE GOSPEL, or another farewell to Rome. By J. J. Maurette, late Parish Priest of Serres, department of the Avierge, in France; now Minister of the Gospel. Translated from the French.— Dalton.

GOD is raising up many bold protesters in France; and not a few of them in spots rendered sacred and dear to memory by the sufferings of the Albigenses. We meet, in this spirited little volume, with the names of places that cause a thrill of solemn gladness: for there the martyrs of Christ suffered in olden time; and there the seed, long hidden in the ground, is again springing up. We do believe that France will yield a golden harvest of souls yet and the perusal of these pages will excite the same hope in most minds, and quicken to prayer too, we trust, on behalf of this rising church.

SIGHTS IN ALL SEASONS.-Religious Tract Society.

THE four numbers that we have before noticed bound in one. A beautiful specimen of patent oil painting forms the frontispiece; and the volume is a very pretty

one.

A THOUGHT on God's word for Each Day in the Month, in words of one syllable. By the Rev. Edward Dalton, Assistant Curate of Trinity Parish, Waterford; Author of The Watchful Providence of God,' &c. -Dalton.

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So says the title-page, in very orthodox phrase, but the cover has it, 'A Month's mind for the soul,' which is quite too Popish. Our dear Protestant friend,—a truehearted and working Protestant he is,-will not however plead guilty to anything Popish. This is in the style of some of his little books that became very popular among our operative societies, as indeed, all his writings do. We do not advocate the monosyllabic fashion, farther than as it may arrest the attention of some who are caught by novelty, and who may thus be brought within the hearing of truths that would not otherwise reach them. The Thoughts' are truly spiritual, and instructive.

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THE REV. CHARLES POPHAM MILES has published a Second Address to the Members of St. Jude's congregation, in reply to Bishop Russell. We suspect that the Scottish prelates begin to wish they had never come into collision with these English clergymen. Every new exhibition of the case leaves a new stigma on the former parties. A letter from Mr. Drummond, in a recent number of the 'Record,' communicating among other facts the addition of the tinkling of a bell, at certain parts of the communion-service, in Bishop Russell's chapel, will convey a due impression to the minds of such as know what are the accompaniments of the original mass. Sir William Dunbar through the same

channel, has shown what is the measure of the spirit of justice, and of Christian courtesy deemed becoming towards him on the part of Bishop Skinner; and, altogether, we do not see how any conscientious minister of the Gospel of Christ can long continue to hold allegiance in the position in which they are placed, who look up to these prelates as their ordinaries. It is a deplorable state of things, tending to disruption and ruin. Yet we must say, Let anything be ruptured rather than the spiritual bond that unites the true pastor to his flock, and both to Christ. Let anything be ruined rather than that the broken fragments of great Babylon's idol temples should again be rebuilt, and her impious rites revived among us, to bring a curse upon the land.

THE PROTESTANT.

'ANOTHER new year, and with signs how new accompanying it!' said my uncle. 'I do not know any page of our history, since the Reformation, on which I would lay my hand, to mark events so marvellously stirring in matters of the deepest spiritual import, as those that now surround, and impend over us.'

'The events themselves, are not stranger to me, uncle, than are the means by which such a state of popular feeling has been brought about.'

'Indeed it is very wonderful: for years past, our best divines have been preaching, our most eloquent orators speaking, our ablest authors writing, to fix the public attention upon what was going on within the Establishment, and especially among its ministers, but with very little apparent effect. True, the feeling of repugnance, alarm, disgust, was general enough, but it spoke not openly, nor opposed any tangible barrier between these innovators and their ulterior designs. All went on evenly; all tending to the subversion of Christianity, and the restoration of Popery in this land. First, the minds of some men high in official ecclesiastical authority, were deeply imbued with notions peculiarly congenial to the naturally proud spirit of fallen man. A system was set forward, that could not but invest them with the highest order of temporal power and dictation, seeing that its foundations were laid in the depths of spiritual domination; while as

an integral part of its very being, the same system asserted and established doctrines based on a perversion of our Protestant Articles, and on a very strong interpretation of some unguarded expressions unhappily left in the Book of Common Prayer. To claim for the ordinances of any Church, that spiritual efficacy which belongs only to the Spirit Himself: to confine the administration of such ordinances to a body of men who thereby were supposed to exercise a power that never was delegated to any uninspired individual, and thus to exalt that order on a fictitious eminence, which it became necessary to their continued elevation that they should by all means sustain and defend; this was the first step. The next was a gradual putting forth of the authority so acquired; and this must of course be done on behalf of the system that created and asserted it. Deposing the Lord Jesus Christ from his pre-eminence as the True Vine, supporting and nourishing alike every branch and shoot, and leaf, and blossom, and berry, that forms the Church, this device, went, in fact, to saw off our national branch, and to stick it in strange soil, apart from its own or any other root, there to wither, and to become a spectacle to men and angels even like the worthless, shrivelled branch of Rome. Well, so long as these clerical assumptions were passively permitted by the Church, that is the laity, combined with all orders of the clergy, no difficulty could appear; and there lacked only a bold spirit to stand forward, invested with a high ecclesiastical name, to take the first open step towards planting us in the miry clay of human authority.'

'Such a spirit was not lacking, as events have proved.' "The way for this assertion of a power that we never can nor will recognize, was to be opened decently.