tically in fervent love to one another. Many of them were the poor quarrymen themselves. Here they worshipped God; here they baptized their children, and received the Supper of the Lord; and these gloomy vaults echoed with the cheerful though subdued song of praise. The inscriptions still inscribed upon the chambers of the dead within these catacombs, or removed to the museum of the Vatican, reveal secrets which the Vatican would do well to hide. They inform us that the minister, whether bishop, priest, or deacon, was often the husband of one wife; and that this state of things continued down to the fall of Rome. There are inscriptions of the fifth century "to Basilus the presbyter and Felicitas his wife;" to "Petronia, a deacon's wife, the type of modesty." These primitive clergymen had their children too. "Here Susanna, the happy daughter of the late presbyter Gabinus, rests in peace together with her father." And greatly was that peace coveted which comes, with death, to a believer! Dreadful were the sufferings of the early Christians, making death for its own sake welcome; much more welcome as the gate of everlasting life!

Though many of these sepulchral monuments were erected in the fourth and fifth centuries, they indicate a remarkable freedom from superstitions with which the religion of the New Testament has been since defiled. These witnesses to the faith of the early church of Rome altogether repudiate the worship of the Virgin Mary, for the inscriptions of the Lapidarian gallery, all arranged under the papal supervision, contains no addresses to the mother of our Lord. They point only to Jesus as the Great Mediator, Redeemer, and Friend. It is also worthy of note, that the tone of these voices from the grave is eminently cheerful. Instead of speaking of masses for the repose of souls, or representing departed believers as still doomed to pass through purgatory, they describe the deceased as having entered immediately into the abodes of eternal rest. 'Alexander,' says one them, 'is not dead, but lives beyond the stars, and his body rests in this tomb.' Here,' says another, lies Paulina, in the place of the blessed.' 'Gemella,' says a third, sleeps in peace.' 'Aselus,' says a fourth, 'sleeps in Christ.'"

In private life they were examples of benevolence and purity. Not that the saintship of the early Christians, to use Dr. Killen's words, was "of a type altogether unique and transcendental; for as man, wherever he exists, possesses the same organic conformation; so the true children of God, to whatever generation they belong, have the same divine lineaments." We speak of them as they must have appeared to a candid looker-on. Their poverty, the uncertainty of all their earthly prospects, their daily exposure to persecution and to death, made them indifferent to the world, and taught them to set their affection on things above. This alone was marvellous, where all around was steeped in the mad pursuit of earth, and its pomp and vanity; and when few or none of the heathen so much as dreamed of an existence after death. Yet they were not eminently spiritually minded;

it was rather the absence of strong attachment to the world, than a high and close communion with God. Their life was an incessant protest against idolatry; its vile superstitions and abominable pollutions. They detested images; and a canon of the council of Elvira, A. D. 305, forbids pictures in the church, "lest that which may be worshipped and adored be painted on the walls." They abhorred, as well they might, the heathen games; and every child at his baptism was required to renounce the devil, his pomps and angels: a declaration which implies the renunciation of the public shows. Pagan statesmen and philosophers took pleasure in the combats of the gladiators; the Christians, chiefly the poor of this world, gave lessons in humanity. Tertullian informs us that those who were present at the amphitheatre incurred the sentence of excommunication. Their morals were exemplary; they could challenge the heathen magistrates with the fact, that although the prisons were crowded with criminals for theft and other crimes, no Christian was to be found amongst these, except as a sufferer for his faith. Polygamy was common, especially amongst the Jews; the Christians reprobated even marriage with a heathen; and after a time the polygamist was excluded from communion. Slavery was universal: Gibbon computes the slaves at one-half of the entire population of the Roman empire. The heathen thought it impious to admit a slave to some of their religious ceremonies; the Christian treated him in spiritual matters as a brother and a friend. A slave might be the presbyter of the church, and his own master one of the congregation. But the genius of the gospel was too strong for slavery however modified; the manumission of Christian slaves was encouraged in all the churches; and slavery gradually disappeared, as amongst ourselves in England, without any compulsory enactment, except the great statute law of Christ, "to do unto others as we would they should do unto us." The reader who reflects on the horrible cruelties practised upon the slaves at Rome,without a shudder or a thought of wrong-doing on the masters' part, must be amazed at the secret power of the gospel in working out this silent revolution, and bearing down the pride and cruelty and selfishness of man. Heathenism was cold and suspicious; the Christians displayed a genial character, and full of charity. Their hospitality to each other, their kindness to the sick, their care of their own widows and orphans, struck the heathen with astonishment, and woke up suspicion. They could not comprehend the nature of that bond which united the Christians as one large family; and even statesmen observed with uneasiness the fraternity which reigned among them; dreading some secret association, which might one day prove dangerous to the state. Nor was the love of the Christians confined to their own body. When the pagans at Alexandria deserted their nearest relations in a pestilence, the Christians ministered to their sick and dying. When the Gentiles left their dead unburied after

a battle, and cast the wounded into the streets, the disciples hurried to alleviate their sufferings. Such were the primitive Christians. It is not in the debates of synods, far less in the conflicts of rival sects on questions of orthodoxy or church government; it is in acts like these we trace the power of the gospel, and learn the fulfilment of the promise that a church should exist in the darkest days, against which the gates of hell should not prevail, whatever persecutions might assail it from without, whatever distractions and heresies might defile it from within.

It used to be a favourite argument against national establishments, that the primitive church throve well till Constantine took it into his royal favour, and with superfluous kindness undermined its constitution. If this be said of the mixed multitude of which the visible church was composed at the close of the third century, it has little historical truth: if of the spiritual Christians, the true fold, it has none at all. Nominal Christianity showed no symptoms of decay, either in the east or western church, till Mahomet arose four centuries after the time of Constantine, and even then its losses were retrieved by fresh conquests in the north of Europe. If the spiritual church be meant; it was very little affected, whether for good or evil, by the endowment of religion, that is, a religion such as Constantine endowed. The people of God had long been "a little flock ;" and we find it difficult to trace its history, difficult even to detect its presence. It is by incidental allusions to some of their peculiarities, their indifference to the world, their love for the scriptures, in turbulent times their love for one another, after pestilence and battle their tender care of the sick and wounded, once their persecutors and tyrants, that we make out the presence of the true Christians and trace their lofty lineage. We do not deny that the holiest of them are sometimes to be met with in the palaces of kings, or filling the chief offices in the church visible. But the cases are few; the pure undefiled religion of Jesus had long been that of a small minority. The edict of Constantine made but little difference in their condition; it relieved them from heathen persecutions, and probably that was all it did. In a corrupt church, spiritual religion is hateful to the many; it exposes its possessors to a thousand taunts more formidable than dungeons, to domestic hatreds more terrible than death; imputations of the vilest kind are lavished on the pure in heart, and the slightest errors are magnified into gigantic crimes. This had been the case long before the days of Constantine, and it was so long afterwards. The stream of pure religion must now be sought amidst the sands of the desert, in mountain wilds, in the thicket and the forest. We trace it amongst the Paulicians of the East; gradually winding through the countries bordering on the Euxine, finding their homes in Transylvania and Hungary, penetrating at length to Switzerland, and settling down in the south of France. At the dawn of letters

they re-appear as the Albigenses; and later still become known as the Moravians, and the Vaudois. Probably a very pure branch of the church existed in these islands from the earliest date, known as Culdees and the disciples of St. Columb. We have many traces of it in Anglo-Saxon times; and when Augustine came amongst us, though the proof is difficult, it seems probable that pure and undefiled religion still had a home in England..

Thus, and it may be for the wisest purposes, the history of Christ's true church on earth has been suffered to perish. We might have doated on it. We might have been disposed to idolize the past instead of girding ourselves to fresh enterprise in God's behalf. Like a proud but decaying family which lives on its ancestral renown, while the shields of a long line of warriors blazoned in the hall only reflect a deeper disgrace upon its sloth and selfishness. But so it is; Church history is an unprofitable study when contrasted with what it should be, and what it may one day be made; for it is the history of the church's diseases; of disgraceful wounds which she has received, not in glorious battle, but in the house of her friends; of her evil tempers and unholy alliances; in a word, of her dishonour and her defeats.

MEMOIRS OF THE QUEENS OF PRUSSIA.

Memoirs of the Queens of Prussia. By E. W. Atkinson. One Vol. 8vo. W. Kent and Co. 1858.

It

ENGLAND has a national interest in the history of Prussia. is not yet two years ago since she consigned to the heir apparent of the Prussian throne the princess royal of England; and from the affectionate interest which the nation took in the event, it seemed as if each family was sending forth the first and bestbeloved of their daughters, and were following her with the tearful interest of a family. The rough sailors, who parted from the princess at Gravesend with moist eyes, and bade her husband tend her carefully and treat her well, on pain of their displeasure, expressed the national desire that her future fortunes among a strange people might be as happy as her childhood. Nor was it without anxiety that, amidst many omens of happiness, the nation, who had watched her youth, and rejoiced in her opening promise, saw her transplanted into a foreign continental court. He who is on the throne of an absolute government, or stands on its steps, is not likely to be left untried. Nor is the history of any despotic country without its warning, that the most favourable promise of princes may be blighted by the intrigues of those who would rise to power through the weakness of the sovereign.

The kingdom of Prussia only dates from the beginning of the last century; yet, though no long line of kings has occupied the throne, the fate of their consorts has not been enviable. Two of the Prussian sovereigns, the second and the fifth, made the life of their consorts unhappy by their vices. The temper of the third king, who, with some estimable qualities, had a roughness which amounted to mania, has been made familiar to us in Mr. Carlisle's history. The queen of his celebrated successor, Frederick the Great, was a princess of Brunswick Bevern, and was forced upon the prince by the peremptory commands of his father. He discovered, indeed, under the shyness of her first appearance, occasioned by circumstances so unfavourable, a mind worthy of esteem and a heart full of affection. It was not her fault that she was not thoroughly loved; and, indeed, during the few years spent by the crown prince and her at Rheinsberg, in the literary retirement which Frederick affected, there was an interval of domestic union which rendered more trying the estrangement of later years. Nor was this estrangement due to the wife. She raised herself to be the worthy partner of her husband. His love was the spell which developed her faculties. From an untaught girl she grew into the matured and intelligent woman. She became versed in the literary subjects which occupied Frederick. She read, and thought, and listened. With a woman's tact, she penetrated the character of the men who frequented the prince's society; and, while Frederick was bandying flattery with Voltaire, his princess detected the baseness which lurked under that French polish of wit and genius. But while her position was apparently strong, and her husband's esteem manifest, the loving heart discovered that there was no return to her deep affection. It does not appear that Frederick was naturally heartless; his feeling towards both his parents refutes this. But he had entered on two courses of life which are sure to blunt affection and to harden the heart. He threw off belief in Christianity, and he allowed himself the free indulgence of vice. Sadly in his later years, when the contrast of old Ziethen's piety was presented to him, did he confess his error and repent it; but he said it was then too late to change. The affection of a true-hearted wife was neglected, till he left himself. morose, sullen, and dissatisfied, to pass his old age in the company of his dogs; with many admirers, but with scarce a friend. The affection, indeed, from which he isolated himself, remained, on the part of his wife, invariably true. The prince of her young affection remained throughout her life the idol of her heart. All his chilling coldness, his neglect of his wife, while he paid attention to his mother and sisters; her seclusion, left solitary in the capital while Frederick gathered his family round him at Rheinsberg; his indifference to her feelings when she lost her favourite brother in his wars; his determination not to confide to her either his pleasures or his sorrows; his court at Charlottenburg, where his queen was only suffered to spend the day, and had to return at night