arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT,

THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration." (Rev. xvii. 1-6.) And then comes the inspired interpretation: "The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues." (ver. 15.) "The woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth." (ver. 18.) All these descriptions agree most entirely with the facts of history during the last twelve centuries. Rome has fallen into idolatry, which is spiritual fornication and adultery; she has corrupted all the peoples and nations and tongues, and the kings of the earth, with her fornications;-she has made herself drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: all this is simple historical fact, respecting which none but those who are themselves "bewitched with her sorceries" entertain the smallest doubt. In her, then, the predictions of the Apocalypse are accomplished and accomplishing. But without these facts, this remarkable and wonderful portion of God's word remains utterly unintelligible, and without hope of ever becoming otherwise. Deny this interpretation, and the task becomes utterly hopeless, of annexing any meaning to St. John's Revelation at all. We may cut the Gordian knot, indeed, by assuming the prophecy to be entirely "future,"-wholly "unfulfilled." But this is so absolutely at variance with the apostle's words,—" to shew unto them things which must shortly come to pass,' -as to be quite intolerable. Revert, then, to the plain and natural meaning of the words; and immediately ROME,-Romish idolatry, Romish persecution, Romish sway over the ten kingdoms, shine out as if written with a pen of fire.

AURICULAR CONFESSION: Article in the BRITISH CRITIC, No. LXVI., April, 1843.

WHOEVER the writers in the British Critic may be, they are evidently very anxious to lead, or to appear to lead, that controversy which some of its friends call the Anglo-Catholic, but which others of them, using the word in the sense of the Romish church, call unreservedly, the Catholic, movement. And among those bold and glaring attempts to aid "the movement," or to accelerate it, which have acquired for that periodical an unenviable notoriety, none has been characterized by greater effrontery than this recent attempt to hold forth Auricular Confession, as a duty authoritatively enjoined on the Church of England and a privilege to be cultivated by her people. The unscripturality and impropriety of that custom has been definitively settled in our Protestant church for three centuries; the evil and superstitious practice of Rome has been, during that time, a prominent ground of objection with all our able divines and accredited advocates; and yet the British Critic, availing itself of the opportunity presented by a loose and desultory newspaper correspondence, thrusts forth half an octavo volume on what, in its peculiar manner, it calls "a delicate and complicated question;" and (as if it had not been sifted to the dregs by Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and others,) under the name and profession of Church of Englandism, proposes for our benefit to "adjust this question." Beyond, however, what has long taken place, the intelligent and well-founded rejection of the practice,there ought to be and can be no question at all "to adjust;" and the proposed adjustment, when fairly examined, turns out to be only an artful and insidious, though at the same time, as it could scarcely fail to be,—a shallow and inefficient advocacy of one of the very worst features of the Romish corruption.

The reviewer enters upon his subject with an expression of mawkish regret that "the movement "is too rapid, that Catholicism is becoming too "fashionable," so as to produce a holy alarm and jealousy among its friends lest the multitude should too hastily adopt "Catholic forms, ritualisms, and symbolical proprieties," without receiving at the same time the power of godliness, (an alarm which the actual state of all Roman Catholic countries both now and at all times will too surely justify), and on this ground (whether he is sincere or not is another question)—but on this ground he takes his stand to recommend to Protestants, who are in the process of change, and who have not yet lost their characteristic anxiety for the real sanctification of the people, not the

abandonment of those questionable forms and superstitions; but the introduction of "the severer and more searching provisions," "the sterner features," "the counteracting agencies of tried and infallible efficacy,” "the wholesome restraints and corrective accompaniments," the "strictness" of the Roman church. And then he proceeds to show that this remedy, so wrapped up in laudatory and lying phrases, consists in the revived exercise of the power of the confessional, and the professed austerities of a compulsory penance, which have availed more than any other single cause to deluge Europe first with demoralization and crime, and then with revolt and revolution. Verily these are days of bold pretension indeed!

The paper appears to have, besides the recommendation of the Romish practice of confession, a special regard to certain individuals, who are looking up hungry-mouthed like young unfledged sparrows, to be fed with these same "Catholic proprieties." It seems that the "crotchettiness of Protestant objection" to Monachism is in some instances passing away; and that at Littlemore, of Tractarian notoriety, and probably in other places, "unions of clergy or clerical persons are occurring in which there is "as yet no security for order or discipline;" and that some of these headlong converts to the "Catholic movement" are somewhat difficult to manage, and are sadly in need of wholesome instruction as to the "complicated and delicate" difficulties in which they may involve themselves and their leaders. One peculiar object of the paper therefore is evidently to give them a mass of argument in favour of submitting themselves individually to these "severer and searching provisions" for surveillance; to rivet in fact their chains, and at the same time while it enables them to advocate the custom where their influence extends, to guard them against that incautious and prurient interference with the wives and daughters of their flocks or neighbours, which might produce an indignant revulsion of feeling, and prematurely blow up the wily scheme by their untoward blunderings. And certainly there is prudence in the stealthiness with which the Hierophant creeps onward in this work; for most assuredly whatever be the slavish discipline to which these youthful superstitionists submit themselves for the completion of the reign of priestcraft over them, we would warn them to be specially guarded how they introduce this prying system into the sanctuary of England's yet Protestant homes; lest what the reviewer himself designates as "an interference between persons standing in the closest and most sacred relations to each other, in a way which would be felt with present motives absolutely intolerable,"—should issue in an outbreak of natural,

just, and uncontrollable indignation and disgust. The reviewer and the whole phalanx of his party will find, we trust, that the mind of the British people is too enlightened as to the position in which revelation places man toward his God, and too well informed of the moral state of Romish countries, and has even yet too vivid and painful a recollection of the influence of the confessional on the domestic and political welfare of the empire, to be readily cajoled even by the fulsome and insinuating style of the British Critic, into a renewed patronage of such abominations. The story of Little Red Riding Hood is almost matter of history.

Before, however, we enter on the substantial part of the article, it will be well to notice certain occasional features of it, which rather call in question the honesty of its origination. It is professed repeatedly to be written by one who is in communion by preference with the Church of England; and though the writer says occasionally "the church," when he means "the Church of Rome," yet there are instances of distinct averment of his belonging to the Church of England; such as, "the Caroline age of our church," and "our church since the reformation." There are, however, other expressions which hold forth the writer as having been accustomed to think and act in a very different line; and in fact he seems so much more at home in the habits, prejudices, and bearing of the Roman church, and drops the indications of them so casually, naturally, and con amore, that a discriminating observer cannot fail to entertain a strong suspicion of his being really a member of the Romish communion. We give a few instances:"A mere general confession, involving no shame and entailing no penalty, is but an insufficient guarantee for penitential sorrow."-(p. 300.)

This hardly looks like attachment to our liturgy.

"Those confidential relations between the priest and the penitent which the Catholic theory requires."-(p. 301.)

"The confessor stands towards the penitent in loco Dei.”—(p. 302.) "What true penitents pant to disclose are not of course their experiences,' but their sins, and this too in such plain downright language as they feel necessary towards bringing the idea of their heinousness before the mind. Penitents wish to call things by their right names."-(p. 311.)

How does he know this if he has not been in the confessional? "We will never grant that the direct confession of sins, necessary as all Catholics deem it, can duly supply the place of confession to a priest.”— (p. 314)

"The church lends her aid in this, as in other cases, to the process of forming habits. Confession to a priest serves to impress upon the mind a consciousness of guilt."-(p. 316.)

44

The sense of shame, which is so necessary an element in all true penance."-(p. 318.)

Here the technical term drops out.

"We should have thought that it (the shame attendant on a general confession) must be on the whole as nothing in comparison of that humiliation and 'confusion' of face for which sacramental confession is a guarantee.”—(p. 318.) "It comes with a bad grace from Protestants.”—(p. 324.)

"An argument of which we own ourselves more intolerant, at least, as it is commonly urged by members of the Church of England against the principle of Auricular Confession."-(p. 325.)

"We will not concede that this objection lies particularly against the Roman practice of confession."-(p. 325.)

"The necessity of manuals for private Christians is greatly diminished by the regular use of confession, a benefit of that practice to which it surprises us that Roman Catholics are not more alive."—(p. 327.)

"There is no single danger against which good confessors are more anxiously on their guard than that of suggesting ideas of evil by an incautious method of examination."-(p. 328.)

"We are not of course claiming Hooker as an advocate of the Roman theory." (p. 333.)

"It may have been through a deep and far-seeing spiritual discernment of these combined tendencies of the Jansenistical system, that the see of Rome was led to take measures against that specious and insinuating heresy.”— (p. 343.)

Such passages as these seem to indicate a habit of mind essentially and wholly Romanistic. None but a thorough-paced Romanist could easily have thus thought and felt. Allied with a somewhat ostentatious profession of Anglicanism, there is a vigour and freedom in these buddings-forth, which could scarcely appear but on a true Romanist stock. Certainly the suspicion is very strongly confirmed by the constant practice of the reviewer in writing "Catholic" for "Roman Catholic," and "church" for the "Romish church;" by the very trashy character of the legends quoted in this article, which none but a mind long enslaved by the system could ever have so relished as to call them "beautiful extracts," and by the custom at length openly adopted of only quoting Scripture from the Latin Vulgate version. Are we right then in inferring that the British Critic has noiselessly passed into Romish hands, to complete the incipient work of Messrs. Newman and Moseley? Has the exercise of the right of search betrayed the "slaver" character of the craft, though sailing under Anglican colours?

The substance of the article must now occupy our attention. It commences with a very cursory and ornamental view of Auricular Confession; it then attempts to show that in this mitigated sense the practice is enjoined in the Church of England. It dismisses in one short paragraph all the strong arguments against the custom. It quotes a few passages in favour of some kind of confession from Anglican divines, most of them very unfairly. It then takes up that class of objections which is most likely yet to linger in the minds of young gentlemen "straggling in the direction of Rome," and handles them with that dexterity which