And Dr. Jeremy Taylor has, " God is quick in sending angels of peace, and they fly apace, but the messengers of wrath come slowly."* It is obvious that these hymns of John Wesley, "from the German," are less cheerful and jubilant than the original ones of Charles Wesley. But if in him, who was destined by Providence to be the Bard of Methodism and the Choragus of Church-minstrelsy of the Anglican race, the poetic fire blazed up with a higher and intenser flame than that with which it had glowed in Germany, this may have been partly due to the diversity of national character in the two peoples; but, also, and in no small degree, to the possession by the Wesleys of a more genial and gladsome theology than most of the German hymn-writers were acquainted with. Yet if the hymns which John Wesley thus rendered into English do not equal his brother's original compositions in the fervent and glowing language of triumphant faith and holy joy, they have a charm of their own in their character of deep and tranquil solemnity, and that rapture of repose and peace which springs from entire trust and devotion, flowing like a mighty river from its hidden but perennial source along its chequered and winding way. J. W. T. THE JESUITS. NO. II. HOW JESUITS REPAY THEIR PATRONS. THE pretenders to a high antiquity would have us forget the past: but as they belong to a community which is called unchangeable, having a chief whom they must believe to be infallible, they cannot reasonably object to our own belief that they are what they have been, and will continue to be what they are until they cease to be; and that therefore they are to be studied in the past as well as in the present. Last month we spoke of the Jesuits in France, and related the warning words of De Harlay, President of the Parisian Parliament, addressed to Henry IV. of France. For a moment we recall that passage of their history. The University, the Parliament, and various monastic bodies had solemnly declared that the Jesuit Society was better fitted for destruction than for edification, and could not be safely tolerated. It had been suppressed for a time, although not quite extinguished, when, in the year 1561, an assemblage of archbishops and bishops, under the presidency of a friendly cardinal, declared the Order to be re-established in France; yet it was laid under many and great restrictions, and some people thought it would be thereby rendered harmless, as perhaps it was * Funeral Sermon of the Lord Primate. for a season, like a serpent coiled under a stone in winter. The wintertime passed over, and the serpent crept out again. The massacre of the Huguenots, on St. Bartholomew's Eve, 1572, refreshed the evil beast, and after that direful day, Henry, King of Navarre, to gain the throne of France, on the death of the king who had perpetrated that great crime, renounced the reformed religion, and professed himself a Papist. Having bartered his faith for a crown, they who gave him the crown thought him bound to hand over to them for it all those Reformed who had escaped the massacre, and to enrich the Romish Church with the full flood of royal favour and bounty. Against their demand he strove, willing perhaps to make some amends to man, if not to God, for the apostasy, and the wrong of which he had been guilty. He gave the pretended Reformed the humiliating Edict of Nantes in 1598, to quiet his own conscience, if possible; and he bestowed on the reviving Jesuits patronage, places, and revenue, to quiet them. It is not likely that he could find peace to his soul in that compromise, and having given so much to the Jesuits after their disgrace, he was repaid only with disloyalty and insolence. The so-called German "Catholic States" were hostile, and Henry was on the point of leading an army into Germany. He had also a war in Italy. Before leaving France, he thought it right to have his queen anointed and crowned, that she might govern the kingdom in his absence; and preparations were going forward rapidly, that the coronation might be conducted with all possible magnificence. But neither king nor queen was without misgivings. One Gonthery, a Jesuit preacher in the church of St. Gervase, had lately declared from the pulpit, when preaching there before the king and court, that any man who should say that the Pope was Antichrist,—and the Reformed, with the best reason, all said so, was not fit to live. He maintained that no peace the king could gain for France would be sure or happy so long as any such people were left alive in the land. He enforced his position by adding that, if the Pope was Antichrist, then Henry's marriage with Maria de Medici must be null and void, since it had been made by the Pope's authority. This looked like a brand flung to kindle civil war at the very juncture when France was threatened from Germany and Italy, if not also Spain. After sermon the king rebuked the Jesuit fiercely for his insolence, and while persisting in his purpose, made the best provision possible for the safety of the kingdom, including specially the coronation of the queen, mother of many children, and cordially beloved by the French in general, priests and Jesuits excepted. She was consecrated with great pomp, the cardinal Jousa performing the ceremony, assisted by three other cardinals, and several bishops, on the 13th of May, 1610. Meanwhile, rumours, whence coming no one could tell, arose, that the Catholic religion" was in extreme danger. Secret agitators whispered complaints that the king had been persuaded by heretics to make emperor and the Catholic princes of Germany, and to that two or three assassins were ready to kill the king, but he proinvade Italy, the chief seat of the Catholic religion. It was now discovered ceeded fearlessly, nevertheless. The army was just on the march. The war upon the coronation was over. the city before joining the troops, and attended by a few members of the He only desired to take the queen in state into court, one of them in the same carriage with himself, he was riding from the Louvre one afternoon to inspect and hasten the preparations. Some carts happening to obstruct the road, the king was for a moment separated from his suite, and the way was blocked. Seizing the opportunity, a man, who had followed the royal carriage from the palace, crept alongside, threw himself on Henry like a tiger, buried a sharp knife between his fifth and six ribs, and cut through the ascending and descending branches of the aorta. Death was instantaneous. The murderer did not attempt to escape, and so was caught at once, glorying in the deed. Under long examinations, and tortures as cruel as ever human fiends inflicted, he refused to tell who had incited or aided him. He only said that he had been assured by many persons that it would be a pious and meritorious action to kill the king, who was an enemy to the Church. He did indeed mention one D'Aubigny, a Jesuit confessor, to whom he had disclosed his intention, but who had only replied that he was under a delusion, and should cast off such idle thoughts, and saying no more, let him go. D'Aubigny was brought into his presence, and he persisted in saying that that was the priest to whom he had confessed. D'Aubigny persisted in denying himself to be the same. Yet, surely, the Jesuit, even if he was not an active accomplice, might have taken some measures to prevent the murder. He might have restrained the man, and warned the king of danger; but he did nothing of the kind. D'Aubigny simply allowed the crime which Gonthery had in effect pronounced beforehand to be so just. Other persons were mentioned by the assassin, who gave a full account of himself and his relations, but none were produced except D'Aubigny, and therefore not one could be examined. De Harlay, it will be remembered, at the head of the Parliament of Paris, had gone into the king's presence six years before, read an impassioned remonstrance against the favours that his majesty was bestowing on the Jesuits at that time, earnestly and without reserve discoursed on their doctrine of the lawfulness of killing heretical kings, and almost as clearly as if he had been a prophet, predicted to Henry the very death he afterwards suffered, quoting the case of his predecessor, Henry III., who was murdered by the Dominican monk, Jacques Clement. Here, too, was a coincidence too striking to be left untold. After the surgeons had examined the royal corpse, the heart was removed, and sent to the church of La Fleche, in Anjou, there to be buried, according to a promise given by the king and queen when they presented that church to the Jesuits, who had a large establishment at the same place, that their hearts should be laid there. There it was that their preacher launched his threats in the very face of the king. What was commonly believed may be inferred from the fact that the Senate, after the funeral, caused a book of Mariana, wherein regicide is advocated, to be burnt publicly. Some members of the Senate made great efforts to prevent this burning, lest they should offend the excellent and pious Jesuits,-perhaps fearing for their own lives, and so, by way of compromise, the words "Spaniard" and "Jesuit" were tenderly, but significantly, omitted from the sentence. While speaking of the abolition of this obnoxious Order, which was Nicholas Rigaltius, in continuation of Thuanus, devotes one masterly chapter to this event. proclaimed just a century ago this year, we must not fail to notice Russia, where the fugitive members found ready refuge and the kindest treatment, and relate after what manner they acknowledged the compassion shown them. Murders, like those of the two Henrys in France, and thousands more, are not usual in countries where the confessional is not in full play. So far as the present writer is aware, they were not resorted to in Russia by ecclesiastics. When Clement XIV. was constrained to abolish the Society in 1773, his brief could not have any force beyond the limits of the Popedom, nor did he desire that it should; and even within those limits Jesuits lurked in considerable numbers. Catherine II. believed that a body of fugitives from Romish countries, casting themselves on her hospitality, offering to promote much-needed education in her dominions, being repudiated by the Pope, and then welcomed by herself, would prove themselves her faithful subjects. She haughtily saluted the Pope as "bishop in his own district," denied him any authority over persons of the Latin rite in Russia, and vested the disciplinary administration of their Church in a Synod of their own bishop, subject to the control of the sovereign in regard to external discipline, but not interfering with their doctrine. The Jesuits professed themselves well content; the sovereign of the Russias held the Pope in abeyance, and there was little to disturb the public tranquillity for forty years. But when the great European war was concluded in 1815, the Pope reinstated at Rome, and a morbid pity for him excited among multitudes in all countries who justly abhorred the atrocities of the French Revolution, and exulted over the fall of Napoleon Buonaparte, who had held Pius VII. in captivity; and when the same Pius VII. called back the Jesuits to share with him in his triumph, the disguise of loyalty cast over their private operations in Russia, as elsewhere, was thrown aside. The Jesuits in St. Petersburg and Mohiloff had been professedly confining the instructions in their colleges to literature and science, using no bias, but leaving undisturbed the religious opinions and principles of the scholars. Sometimes, indeed, both youths and adults presented themselves for admission into "The Catholic Roman Apostolic Church," but such approaches, they declared, were always discouraged; nay, resisted, until the more earnest postulants would no longer be denied. The process of perversion was so slow and silent, and the Jesuit fathers were so studiously unobtrusive, that hundreds and thousands of perverts were mingled with the so-called Catholic Congregations, from one extremity of the empire to another, without arousing any general concern. After the European peace, when Alexander I. returned from his visit to England, Dr. Pinkerton and others were pursuing their labours on behalf of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Russia. At that time friendly communications between that country and England were attended with much truly Christian intercourse: the Bible Society was welcomed at the Court of St. Petersburg, and Prince Galitzin, Minister of Worship, promoted the distribution of the Holy Scriptures with exemplary zeal. Then the Jesuits bestirred themselves. They had a nephew of the Prince among their scholars in St. Petersburg, and probably set about securing for themselves the adherence of this young man in order to counterbalance the weight cast by his uncle into the scale of Protestant Christianity. The young man, no doubt sincerely attached to his amiable masters, and entirely open to any influence of theirs, professed himself publicly, with a solemnity which does not seem to have been previously accustomed, a member of the Church of Rome. The natural remon strances of his uncle were resented by the Jesuits as persecution. They assumed a tone of defiance, and were very properly put in check by the Emperor, who required them to leave the chief cities, and pursue their labours modestly in the country, refraining from proselytism, according to their original engagement, and not interfering with ecclesiastical arrangements. But then it became apparent that they had been indus triously working up to the point actually gained. The Russian converts to Romanism were already imbued with disaffection to the principles of their own Government, but not so much through weariness of despotic rulers, which would have been right enough in itself, as through the instigation of foreigners. Plotting in a foreign interest, and actually claiming for the Pope the right of ecclesiastical control in all the Russian dominions, the Jesuits were inviting the members of the Greek Church, in those dominions, to return to communion with the See of Rome, which their fathers, as they were told, had wickedly forsaken. The supremacy of the Emperor was declared sinful; the Pope claimed authority over him and all his subjects; the Jesuits refused to pray for the Emperor, in spite of St. Paul's injunction to pray for kings, given when Nero himself was Emperor at Rome. Therefore, as faith-breakers and rebels, they were deservedly banished from all Russia. So are they now. The laws of God, the principles of true Christianity, and the sacred Volume whence these are to be learned, were set at nought. This treachery provoked in Russia the bitterest antipathy, and against it the Russians have striven, and still are striving, with all their power. But their conduct has ever been consistent; the experience of every nation where they have found refuge for a time, has always been the Their friends have been rewarded with ingratitude, and their patrons with rebellion. W. H. R. same. THE AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS ON THE LATE ANNUAL MEETING IN NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT. THIS important Board represents the first great American movement for foreign missions. It was formally organized in the year 1810, and obtained a deed of incorporation from the Legislature of Massachusetts in 1812. Its carliest missionaries were Judson, Newell, Nott, and Hall, and it has now connected with it some of the foremost men in the foreign field. By its constitution it was entirely undenominational, and in the year 1831 it had, out of its sixty-two corporate members, thirtyone Presbyterians, twenty-four Congregationalists, six Reformed Dutch, and one Associated Reformed. Gradually, however, as denominational efforts for the diffusion of the Gospel became organized, the Presbyterians and others have withdrawn from it, leaving it now almost entirely in the hands of Congregationalists. The last amicable secession of this sort was immediately after the union of the Old and New School Presbyterians, two years ago, when the New School Presbyterians, taking |