favor of Rome, from the discovery of the base and ribald character of popular controversy. The unreasonable generosity of their tempers feels, as it were, bound to make up to Rome for this foolish, and, to us, very perilous injury. Their turn of mind, also, shows them the general beauty of the Roman system, and the particular beauty which lies in the lap of each Roman error, while they have no time or taste for examining the multitudinous details of indictment, brought by Anglican doctors against Rome; and they see that, at any rate, the outward face and frame of that indictment is highly scholastic, and therefore likely to be unreal. I know and love some, to whom, should these words meet their eyes, I would suggest, whether they have not tried to learn doctrine in a way to which no blessing is promised; whether they have not begun in their libraries rather than their oratories (for, in truth, a library is but a profane place if it be not an oratory also); whether their sins have deserved that they should be free from doubt, or have unclouded views; whether they have not sought soothing medicines, rather than a rougher but safer healing, and are endeavoring to allay the disquiet of the head, rather than feed the craving of the heart? Let them contemplate themselves, as in a glass, in the character of Paolo Sarpi. Let them see and beware of the moral temper which is generated by a literary theology. They seek indifference for its dignified composure; and lo! it brings with it man's most disturbing passion, in its basest form, a

hatred of spiritual authority. It will not be consistent in logic, but it will be consistent in temper, for these men to enter Rome, at last, by the very gate where they have been ashamed that their enemies should speak with them heretofore, the gate of infallibility.

I spent an evening on the Lido before quitting Venice, in hopes of meeting my mysterious friend. However, he did not come, and I was left to my own meditations. Who does not recognize the Lido in the poet's description?

"The bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice; a bare strand
Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,

Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,

Abandons; and no other object breaks

The waste but one dwarf-tree, and some few stakes,
Broken and unrepair'd, and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon."

The history of Venice passed in review before me; her rise, her conquests over the infidel, her too great wealth, and consequent corruption, her fall, her beautiful, majestic ruin, where she hides herself at the head of the revolted Adriatic, withdrawn from the eye of the unchained sea within these desolate and wet sandbanks. I thought of a passage in George Herbert's poem on the Church Militant, in

which he speaks of religion standing "tiptoe on our land, ready to pass over to the American strand.” Certainly the Cross has moved ever in a westward direction; and, more than that, the ship, the Church which bears it, has passed westward also. In the regions of the east, which she cleaved with her holy prow, the vestiges of her wake are little more than discernible. She has not established herself. She anchored awhile, and then passed on. Her course is to be traced by the tombs of the prophets, who died at the several harbors in which she touched. Pursuing, then, this train of thought, which must not be taken to the letter, one would be led to suppose that, when the Cross has made the pilgrimage of the world, and arrived at the east by the way of the west, its journey will be over, and the end come.

Such is the sort of conclusion at which George Herbert's idea lands us. And it would seem to point out some very glorious ecclesiastical destiny for America; which appears, in the present state of things, and to human eyes, not near an accomplishment, especially if we fix our eyes, as most of us do, upon the United States, and Canada, which will one day belong to them. For, putting aside the insufferable treatment the Americans have received at the hands of needy vulgarity, and pert book-making, it certainly does appear that moral littleness, in the full sense of the term, is the prominent characteristic of the American mind and spirit. Washington and their rebellion were, both the man and the event,

singularly destitute of greatness; indeed, quite surprisingly so, when we consider what mighty historical consequences the rebellion was pregnant with, and must, sooner or later, give birth to. This want of greatness must have been what Carlyle meant to hint, when he says disparagingly of Lafayette, that he was never able to get beyond the "Washington Formula."

Also, we should not beforehand imagine that America was capable of being entrusted with any high Christian fortunes, till she had been prepared for the glorious responsibility, in the only Christian way of preparation, that is, by suffering, contest, abasement, and, it might be, bloody times; for it is when nations are undergoing all or some of these things, and only then, that great minds and characters are gendered to any extent; such times as turn the gay, careless, pleasure-loving friend of Villiers, into Charles, the sad-featured king and blissful Martyr. Prosperity, wealth, intense and successful activity, extended commerce, luxurious domestic living, loud talking, and boastful self-praise, these are not tokens of a people ready for great destinies. Indeed, it seems strange that a commercial power should be invested at all with great destinies. We talk of cities being types; and, if ever there was one city more than another set forth by Scripture, and pointed at by history as a type, it is Tyre. Almost all that is said of her, and was acted by her, and has come upon her, is transferable to the generality

of great merchant cities throughout the world. There seems some portion of the mantle of AntiChrist to have rested upon them; and parts of the description of Tyre's sinfulness are almost identical with some of the signs of Anti-Christ enumerated in Scripture. For, independent of the general resemblance between the temper of apostasy and the temper of great towns, it is recorded of Tyre, that her heart was lifted up, and that she said, "I am a God. I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas." "She set her heart as the heart of God." The like is also said of Anti-Christ. Now, if we look at Tyre, we see, as in a glass, with more or less fidelity, the day of Carthage, Corinth, Venice, and other places. It seems as if God made all these merchant cities to serve His Church in their day, and then that He had "given a commandment;" not against Tyre only, but against all "merchant cities." Venice, for example, so long as she was fighting the battles of the Church, and standing as a living frontier on the isles of Greece, between western Christendom and the Moslem, and humbling the infidel by repeated defeats, so long she was great; but when peace came and wealth, therewith came a most corrupt and worthless aristocracy, and an unspeakably dissolute rabble; and then her Adriatic throne was pulled indignantly from beneath her by the hand of the pagan republic of France. Indeed, hatred of Venice was almost like an unaccountable instinct in the French. While they adorned most of the cities