known to us. They spread desolation and ruin wherever they came; sometimes they were succesfully resisted, at others bought off, and at others again, and for a considerable period, they were lords of the ascendant. The term lurdan used in some parts of the kingdom, for an idle worthless fellow, is a corruption of Lord Dane, strongly marking the abject dread, yet hatred of these proud oppressors. The famous Guy Earl of Warwick, who, as tradition says, lived many years, and at length died as an anchorite, at Guy's Cliff, that well known and most beautiful spot, in Warwickshire, flourished in these times, and won great praise by the overthrow of Colbrand, a Danish champion, of gigantic stature. Notwithstanding the many absurd fables mixed up with the narrative, there can be no doubt that these were real persons, and real transactions. Once for all, we protest strongly against the cold sceptical spirit so prevalent, which rejects every traditionary story, because it does not possess strict documentary evidence in its favour. Hence we cannot class with mere myths and apologues the fine and well known tradition of Canute's reproof of his courtiers, for their blasphemous adulation of him. We have no doubt as to the fact, and we are most unwilling to give up belief in this and many others of the pleasant anecdotes which have descended to us, from the olden times.

The government and manners of the Anglo-Saxons, form a very curious subject for investigation, and one also of considerable importance, for there can be no doubt that much of the spirit of both, and many of the forms of the first have descended to our own times, and are observed, even now, especially in our courts of justice, mixed also with remnants of feudalism. The Wittenagemote or the assembly of wise men was the king's council, and some antiquaries have recognised in it, the rudiments of our Parliament; but it wanted the essentials of a Parliament, as we now behold it. It was by no means a representative system, the members were not elected, but sat as do the present house of peers by their own right. It appears also, they could not make laws, and could only interpose by their advice. There were three orders of men, the nobles, the free, and the slaves. The nobles generally, were called thanes; the highest kind, probably, were the aldermen or eldermen, from whence the titles so well known now, of earl and of alderman. The admirer of Shakespeare will at once recur to the thanes of Glamis and Cawdor in the splendid tragedy of Macbeth. The freemen

or smaller owners of land, went by the general naine of Ceorles, from whence the not very complimentary appellation churl. The slaves were called villeins, because usually attached to villages, and sold as the cattle with the estates; and hence comes the word villain, now so much a term of reproach.

Trial by jury is usually understood to have been the invention of Alfred, but it is more likely he revived and improved a system, in partial use for ages before. It has been justly styled the palladium of British liberty. No doubt combined with the Habeas Corpus, it is so. I know that the system inflicts on many persons, a great burden, an expense of time and money, but this cannot be allowed to weigh against its manifold advantages. In this world and under the course of Divine Providence, it appears to be an inflexible rule, that no good shall result generally, without some evil or inconvenience accruing to individuals thereby; it is the tax that must be paid. Trial by jury secures publicity and impartiality in, nearly, the greatest degree. A popular writer not long since remarked on a trial he had witnessed for murder, that under the present system it was next to impossible to convict an innocent person. Surely this is saying volumes in its favour; and not less honourable is the fact, that foreigners who have a right to a jury composed half of foreigners and half of Englishmen, almost invariably choose all Englishmen, thus manifesting their confidence in the judgment and fairness of an English jury. True, juries have been tampered with, have been threatened, and have given way, have been swayed by prejudice, especially in times of great political excitement; but this only shews that they are but inen, and we recollect with gratitude, many instances in which juries have rended the prey from the lion, and let the oppressed go free. The jury, who in the teeth of fine and imprisonment, acquitted William Penn, and the juries who sent Tooke, Thelwall, and Hardy, to their homes instead of the scaffold, served their day and generation nobly, and their fame should be in everlasting remembrance.

We can but briefly notice other modes of trial among our Saxon ancestors; that by compurgators where several men were sworn as to their belief of the truth of the accusation; by ordeal of burning ploughshares and of boiling oil, the accused to walk over, as in the first, red hot ploughshares and barefooted, as well as blinded; in the second to thrust his naked arm into the cauldron and fetch up a piece of gold; the corsned or

consecrated bread which would choke the guilty; and the wager of buttel," wherein the accused challenged the accuser to mortal combat; all these, the marks of a very barbarous age, gradually fell before the increasing light of knowledge, and the more widely spread influences of religion, and in their place, a milder and more equitable system of jurisprudence has arisen, that which declares the great truth, dear to justice and humanity, that every man shall be esteemed innocent till he is proved to be guilty.

THE CHRISTIAN REFORMER,

AND

THE LATE REV. ROBERT ASPLAND.

B. M. B.

"THE CHRISTIAN REFORMER; or, Unitarian Magazine and Review," is a valuable publication issued Monthly. It is "oue of the instruments of promoting the truths of Divine Revelation, according to the simplicity and purity of the Holy Scriptures" which merits the support of all believers in those truths. Few articles of a biographical character have more interested us than the Memoir of its original projector and Editor, the late Rev. Robert Aspland, which has been partly given in past Numbers and will be completed in future months. It is full of reminiscences of those we have valued and honoured from our earliest years. It cannot be read without instruction. We hope it will be published separately We trust our readers will increasingly make themselves acquainted with "The Christian Reformer," and our Congregations and Members put forth more earnest and efficient support to its indefatigable Editor in his arduous labours.

That these are not mere words of course and of Editorial courtesy; to evince the estimation in which we hold the character and labours of the late Rev. Róbert Aspland, and the interest we feel in the efforts of his Son, as well as to chronicle in our pages the virtues and deeds of the honoured dead, we subjoin the conclusion of the discourse preached by Mr. Harris, in Hanover Square Chapel, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on Sunday morning, January 11, 1846. Text, I Corinth. xv., 28.

These instructions of Christian wisdom and benevolence are at all times cheering and soothing; and more particularly are they so when the earthly removal of much valued

and long honoured Friends constrains us to meditate on the deep things of God; the mystery of life; the purposes of human trial; the effects and rewards of Christian philanthropy, zeal, and integrity. It has never been my custom to notice, specially, the characters of individual members of our Congregations, when summoned from their probation of time. The privacy of domestic life, is too sacred to be unveiled to public observation; and private worth is most hallowed in its own sanctuary of affection and sympathy; the spot which it has sanctified by virtue and probity. But I should be unjust to the memory of the honoured dead, I should do violence to my feelings of respect and gratitude for departed moral excellence, were I to suffer the grave to close over the mortal remains of a revered personal Friend, and an eminent ornament of the Christian denomination to which we belong, without paying a passing tribute, however inadequate and feeble, to the sterling integrity by which he was characterized ; his fearless moral courage; his untiring devotedness to the good and the true; his hatred of hypocrisy and cant; his love of the noble and the right; his persevering advocacy of unpopular Christian truth; his unconquerable energy in the discharge of onerous duty; his powerful and commanding eloquence in behalf of Civil and Religious Liberty; of the Education of the People; of all that could elevate and enfranchise the millions; his deep sympathy with the wronged and oppressed; his indignant and manly exposures and castigations of intolerance and bigotry; his heartfelt reverence of the Martyrs to Conscience, the sufferers for the truth in Christ Jesus; his clear perception of the glad tidings of the glorious Gospel of the blessed God; his consistent and masterly expositions of the principles of the faith in Christ, which continued study of the Christian Scriptures enabled him to give ; his unswerving adherence to the pure and undefiled Religion of the Son of God, undazzled and unseduced by vain and baseless novelties or yet vainer mysticism and philosophy, falsely so called; crowned and pervaded by a trust in the Divine Father, which no difficulties lessened; no afflictions dimmed; no disappointment tarnished; a love of Christ and of humanity which prompted labour, even when physical power was inadequate to accomplish the wishes which the soul breathed forth for human well being; and a piety which glowed on ever brightly, till the summons from on High closed it on earth, only to be relumed, for ever, at the resurrection of the just.

I fear that few, if any, amongst you have enjoyed the opportunity and the pleasure of listening to the religious exercises of the late Reverend Robert Aspland; but most, if not all, have heard of, and valued his labours, in connection with the welfare, and extension of our religious denomination; and many, I hope, have read, with interest and profit, the varied publications, which, during the last forty years, have issued from his pen. The announcement of his death, on the 30th of December, in the 64th year of his age, has called forth more respectful and eulogistic notice from the Metropolitan Press, than is commonly awarded to the decease of a Dissenting Minister; notice, praise, honourable to those who gave it, evincing as it did, a truthful appreciation of departed worth.

Mr. Aspland, was born in 1782, at a small village in the immediate vicinity of Soham, Cambridgeshire. His Parents were members of the Baptist congregation of that place; holding the reputedly orthodox views of that religious body. Early destined to the Christian ministry, Mr. Aspland received his preparatory education for its duties, at Marischal College, Aberdeen; a University celebrated for its admirable theological Professors, and Christian Pastors, Gerard and Campbell, and whose instructions and writings doubtless contributed materially to the freedom and Scriptural character of his after thoughts and principles. On the completion of his College course, Mr. Aspland received and accepted an invitation to settle with the General Baptist Congregation, at Newport, in the Isle of Wight. With that Society, as he himself afterwards publicly acknowledged, "he passed the first years of his ministry, with pleasure, and he trusts with improvement;" and to whose Members, he expresses "his obligations" as also to two individuals whose "praise is in all the Churches," the late respected heads of the family of Shore, in Derbyshire. These testimonies he bore in the Preface to the Sermon, preached July 7, 1805, on entering on the Pastoral charge of the Congregation at Hackney, near London. To so young a man as our Friend then was, it was indeed an arduous task to be called to occupy a Pulpit, which had so recently been filled by the Rev. Thomas Belsham, who himself had succeeded, Dr. Priestley, and Dr. Price, in the same important charge. That he nobly and worthily discharged it, is manifest in the fact, that as the faithful and beloved Pastor of that Society he passed forty years of his laborious and useful life,