gun to the church on the Sunday, and, after mass had been performed, to place himself at the head of some hunting party of his parishioners. The stain of blood was also upon the church of France. During the reigns of Louis XIV. and xv.-to say nothing of the earlier periods of French history-the Protestants had been persecuted with great cruelty. Some had been banished, some confined to the galleys, and others executed. The church of France had left the great body of the people in extreme ignorance; so much So, that upon one occasion the populace in Brittany rose in revolt upon the first introduction of pendulum clocks! Public respect had, in short, for a considerable period previous to the revolution, been withdrawn from the French church. Fierce and violent dissensions had arisen within its bosom, occasioned by the quarrels of the Jesuit and Jansenist party, while its mummeries were objects of contempt to the more enlightened portion of the nation. Even madame Pompadour, the mistress of Louis xv., when writing to the French ambassador at Rome, to procure some popish relics, sneeringly gave instructions that care should be taken not to send the body of a saint with two left legs, as had been

the case with the one transmitted on a previous occasion. Drunk with the blood of God's saints-a branch without spiritual life-the blind leader of the blind-the church of Rome deservedly bears the heavy stigma of having been one of the great causes of the French revolution.

While such a thick darkness covered the land, the spirit of infidelity grew and waxed strong. Accustomed to judge of Christianity only by the deformed and distorted likeness of it which Romanism presented, people confounded the two systems. A conspiracy was formed among the leading literary men of France to extirpate Christianity entirely from the earth. "Crush the wretch!" was the watchword of this miserable band; the epithet "wretch," being applied to that meek and gentle Saviour who died upon the cross for their redemption. With a perseverance worthy of a better cause did this unhallowed alliance labour. Their pernicious and soul-destroying doctrines were disseminated in every form. Whether the work selected for conveying the poison was an encyclopædia, a treatise on science, a poem, or a novel, the virus of infidelity was diffused through it with the most refined subtlety. "We light the world," was the

inscription placed on the statues of Voltaire and Rousseau; inscriptions awfully verified by the destructive conflagration which their writings enkindled. These men sowed the wind, and the generation which succeeded them reaped the whirlwind; for to the absence of all moral and religious restraints which their works produced, may be in a great measure ascribed the outrages which stained the French revolution.

With infidelity was connected its necessary concomitant, dissoluteness of manners. The French literature of the period was extremely licentious. The leading writers of France, just before the revolution, appear to have been almost studiously anxious to scatter indelicacies through their pages. The morals of the age

were sunk to that low standard which more surely tends to the destruction of the framework of society, than even open outrage. σε Το call duty," says a writer, himself a Frenchman, "a weakness-honour, a prejudice-delicacy, affectation-such were the manners of the times; seduction had its code, and immorality was reduced to principles." Yet while this was the low state of public morals in France, there was no time, perhaps, when more high-sound

ing declamations in favour of virtue were to be found. The dignity of human nature was a phrase on every lip, and dreams of its perfectibility abounded. Some of the survivors of the French revolution, indeed, confessed that nothing astonished them more, in the retrospect of that appalling period, than the recollection of the enthusiastic panegyrics on private and public virtue with which it had been ushered in. Like the unhappy and deluded Socialists of our own times, with their dreams of a new moral world, these men did not know that, abounding as infidelity ever does in high-sounding professions, it proves, in the hour of trial, a baseless and unsubstantial support. Had the principles of the word of God been the guide of the leading men of France at the time of the revolution, no painful disappointment would have attended their endeavours to effect national improvement. To a people, as well as to an individual, the precepts of the Divine word are 66 a lamp unto the feet, and a light unto the path," Psa. cxix. 105.

To the causes of the French revolution above enumerated, might be added, among those of a more proximate character, the liberal sentiments introduced by that portion of the French

army which had served in the American revolutionary war. Louis XVI. was often heard to lament the facility with which he had yielded to the importunities of those ministers who had hurried him into this contest. Whatever was the justice or injustice of the original disputes between England and its colonies, the interference of France was uncalled for, and was prompted by an ungenerous desire to humble her rival in a moment of weakness. Such was the admission of the French monarch himself; and a signal retribution, it will be found, followed this national deviation from the paths of rectitude. The army which returned to France under general Lafayette, was enamoured with the vision of republican liberty which it had witnessed in America, and was not slow to contrast it with the despotic constitution of its own country. A sound experience would have suggested the great differences which existed between the circumstances of the two nations, and that a form of government well adapted for a new country, might be wholly unsuitable for an old one. There was an absence in France, however, of correct public opinion on questions of government. All discussion upon the defects of the French monarchy had been rigorously