In his letters patent, Charles made Sharp "Archbishop of the archbishopric of St. Andrews, and metropolitan of all Scotland." When he scrupled to be re-ordained, the Bishop of London told him that it was the custom of the Scots to scruple at everything, and yet to swallow all; and the new primate speedily showed how well he was fitted for the work he had to do the extinction of spiritual freedom, and shedding the blood of God's saints.

He soon began his work of extermination, and a mere catalogue of his atrocities would evince the ferocity with which Sharp pursued his object. The death of James Guthrie was a result of his plans and machinations. Robert Blair, one of the most gifted ministers of that day, was cited to appear before the Council. because Sharp wished to put one of his creatures into Blair's place in Edinburgh; and the old man, weighed down by disease, was thus deprived of his position as a minister of Christ. But the High Commission Court was, perhaps, the master-stroke of Sharp's policy. Though opposed in his plans by Glencairn and other noblemen, he had influence to carry his measure; and the king appointed the archbishop, once so zealous for the Covenant and the Kirk, along with several noblemen, bishops, and others, "to promote the peace and order of the Church," by summoning before them, among Jesuits and other delinquents, "all holders of conventicles: all ministers who, contrary to the laws and acts of Parliament or Council, remain or intrude themselves into the functions of the ministry in those parishes inhibited by those acts: all such who preach in private houses, or elsewhere, without license from the bishop all such persons who keep meetings at fasts and the administration of the sacrament of the Lord's supper, which are not approven by authority: all who speak, preach, write, or print to the detriment of the estate or government of the Church or kingdom as now established: . . . . all who are not orderly to attend divine worship.". . . . But we need not recite more of this abhorrent document. It begins by asserting the king's prerogative to rule "in all causes, and, over all persons, as well ecclesiastic as civil." It makes sure that an archbishop or a bishop shall always be one of the Commission's quorum of five; and thus that Scottish Star-Chamber-the High Commission Court-which eventually shed the blood of men like water, was set up by one who had, three years before, been zealous for the Covenant and the Kirk-who hastened to London, and thence to Breda, under pretence of managing matters for Christ! It was on the 16th of January 1664 that the king signed the commission, and little time was lost by the apostate in carrying its instructions into horrid effect.

We cannot find room even for specimens of the atrocities perpetrated by that court, in the name of justice, religion, or the Church. By a special patent, Sharp was advanced by Charles so as to take precedence in rank of all the nobility, and he also took precedence in cruelty. Fines, imprisonment, exile, the torture in most appalling forms, and death itself, with every accompaniment of brutality and

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ignominy, were the result of the High Commission's labours, Sharp being ever the presiding genius of the judgment-room, or rather the hall of torture. When his haughty insolence and taunts so goaded his mangled victims that they retorted his charges, or denied to him his lordly titles, another blow of the mallet, another turn of the screw glutted his vengeance, and punished the mutilated offender. And to ferocity he added meanness: history presents us with few such embodiments of hatred against the godly as the apostate Sharp. When even Lauderdale would have spared, the archbishop demanded blood. Not satisfied with fining the people of Scotland, or murdering them in detail, he prevailed on Charles to raise a standing army in Scotland, and quarter them among the people; and it is known that, in about a quarter of a century, no fewer than about eighteen thousand, many of them the best and holiest in Scotland, were butchered. The rising at Pentland gave him ample scope for indulging his malignity; and in addition to all that he inflicted, he evinced his meanness in keeping up a letter received from the king, and designed to stay the judicial murders, till his vengeance was appeased. "This letter," Wodrow says, came to the primate as president, and ought to have, by him, been communicated to the Council; but the bloodthirsty marr kept it up till as many as he had a mind should die were despatched." Another archbishop (Burnet) has been blamed for this transaction. There seems no reason to doubt that it was Sharp. But whether Sharp or Burnet, can mingled malignity and meanness go farther? But even when the letter was read, the prisoners were not spared. Sharp had influence to turn aside even the scantling of mercy which Charles would have imparted. Ten men were speedily hanged; and that was but the commencement of the murders which he perpetrated with the sword of justice. We need not wonder though such proceedings excited men to violence; and though we deplore it, it is nevertheless a natural result of such atrocities, to read that an attempt was made on the life of Sharp, in the year 1668, by James Mitchell, a preacher of the Gospel. The attempt was unsuccessful, but it eventually proved fatal to Honeyman, bishop of Orkney, a creature of Sharp's, and, like him, an apostate and a persecutor.

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In course of time, even the bishops began to resent the lordly oppression of Sharp. They complained that he managed the Church like an arbitrary pope. Some of them refused to attend a meeting of their order at St. Andrews; and matters soon began to wear such an aspect as showed that, though Sharp had sacrificed both his own conscience and the lives of hundreds to establish himself in his position, he was speedily to reap the reward of his oppressions and his haughtiness, in the recoil and revulsion of those whom he had treated as tools, or trampled on as despicable.

Passing over other incidents of his history, and referring to the annals of the period for a fulllength portrait of this cunning, cruel prelate, we hasten to advert to the closing scene of his life.

There is reason to suppose, that for some years he lived in terror of assassination by night and day. We are now to see how his fears were all realized. On his way to St. Andrews from Edinburgh, on the 3d of May 1679, he had to cross Magus Moor, then a treeless waste, about three miles south-west of the former city. Certain of the victims of persecution happened then to be on the outlook for a noted informant, William Carmichael, whom the archbishop had long employed to search out conventicles, and whom some of their number meant to slay, as the cruel servant of a cruel master. About ten of them had agreed to waylay him; but as he was not found at the place expected, they were about to disperse, when intelligence was brought that the bishop's carriage was seen approaching. Chafed by past sufferings, and disappointed at the loss of one victim, some of the party most rashly concluded that Sharp was providentially delivered into their hands, and proposed he should be murdered as the Church's persecutor. Hackston of Rathillet opposed the proposal, but it was carried against him; and in a brief period they attacked the archbishop's carriage. He made every effort to escape, but in vain; the coachman was hewn from his horse, and the coach was stopped by the band. The prelate's daughter was with him, but the party resolved to inflict no personal injury upon her; and after firing at him without effect, amid the shrieks of his agonized child, they commanded him to come out and die, in return for his "perfidious betraying the Church of Scotland," and his shedding the blood of the saints like water. One of the party stabbed him with his sword, when the prelate exclaimed, "I am gone." He at last came out of the coach, knelt down in the attitude of prayer by the command of his murderers, and after being treated with a ferocity equal to his own, their "redoubled strokes wounded him in several places, and killed him outright."

It was thus that Archbishop Sharp closed his career. No man, with the Word of God before him, can reckon the transaction aught but a murder. Vengeance is mine; I will repay," is the Lord's declaration; but those men usurped the Lord's prerogative. They took the sword, and at least by the sword of justice they deserved to die. They might be goaded by the haughty prelate's persecutions-they might be peeled and pillaged by his creatures, and compelled to live with their lives in their right hand; but no amount of oppression could justify the murder, attended as it was by such circumstances of atrocity. It became an additional reason or excuse for persecution to the bloodthirsty men who were then in power; and whatever we may think of the character of Sharp, no dispassionate man can doubt that his death was a murder just as unjustifiable as his own judicial and sanguinary atrocities. The dispassionate words of Sir Walter Scott on the subject are: Sharp's "illiberal and intolerant principles, and the violence which he committed to enforce them, were the occasion of great distress to Scotland, and of his own premature and bloody end." Such, then, is another instance of apostasy-the abandonment of principle, and committing the soul

to the guidance of interest, ambition, and the lust of power. When we first met Sharp it was as a student of some note, and a minister of religion, seeking to do God's work in the sphere in which he was placed; but he entered on a new career, where principle succumbed to vanity, and the blandishments of an earthly sovereign enticed him away from the law and the testimony of the King of kings. We found Sharp at first strenuous for the Covenants. He was selected by his fellow-labourers to represent their interests and defend their principles. He undertook the commission; and from the moment that he changed, and yet concealed his new tenets from his old friends, he became an apostate and something worse. It is not against his Episcopacy that we reason here; it is against his being a Prelatist at heart and a Presbyterian with the lip. Taking all the circumstances into view, his duplicity ranks him high among the most unprincipled of men; and his whole career, after he had mounted to power, exhibits the hardening and deadening effect of tampering with principle amid light let in upon the conscience. Lauderdale pleading for mercy, the archbishop refusing it, and the former rejoining regarding the man they were about to murder, "Then, let him glorify God in the Grassmarket," is a picture of prostrate humanity which should serve as a beaconlight for warning to all.

A PAGE FOR SERVANTS. I.-REPROOF TO THOSE WHO HAVE CHOSEN TO LIVE IN THE FAMILIES OF THE UNGODLY.

DOST thou know whither thou goest? Thou art running, with Jonah, from the presence of the Lord, and mayest expect a storm to be sent after thee. Haply thou art a servant who once lived in a godly family, where thou hadst many sweet privileges and spiritual advantages; a table spread every day for thy soul as often as for thy body, thereby enjoying a kind of heaven upon earth; but, for a little ease in thy work, or gain in thy wages, thou hast made this unhappy change, to put thyself under the roof of those who will sooner teach thee to curse than to pray, and where, by the orders kept in the family, thou canst not know a Lord's-day from a week-day, or whether Maker or no. there be such a thing as religious worship due to thy

Alas, poor creature! What! wert thou in so green a pasture, and now wandering upon the barren heath, where nothing is to be got for thy precious soul; where (as on the mountain of Gilboa) none of those heavenly dews fall with which thy soul was wont to be watered! Truly, thou art gone out of God's blessing into the warm sun. Had God, indeed, cast thee by a necessary providence on such a place, thou mightest then have hope to keep thy spiritual state, though wanting thy former repast, but being thy own choice, it is to be feared thou wilt soon languish leanness is likely to shrivel up thy soul, while thou hast thy fat morsels in thy mouth; thy spirit will grow poor, though thy purse may grow heavy: we shall have thee ere long complaining, as Naomi, that thou wentest out full, but camest home empty. How darest thou choose to dwell where God himself doth not visit with his gracious presence? "He inhabits the praises of his people," and takes his abode in the house of prayer; and if the Holy Spirit dwells not, walks and breathes not, in the house, it must needs be haunted with the evil one. Make thy stay there as short as possible. Leave the

ease; without all misery, or without all happiness: not partly at ease, and partly in pain; partly happy, and partly miserable; but all the one or the other. This life is a middle place betwixt heaven and hell; and here we partake of some good and some evil. No judgment on this side hell upon the worst of men but there is some mercy mixed with it; for it is mercy that they are yet on this side hell: and no condition on this side heaven but there is some evil mixed with it; for, till we get to heaven, we shall have sin in us. In heaven all are good, in hell all are bad; on earth some good, but more bad. In hell misery, without mixture of mercy or of hope: they have no mercyand that is bad; and they can hope for none-and that is worse. While they be in time, they are pitied; God doth pity them, and Christ doth pity them, and good men do pity them; their friends and relations do pity them, pray for them, and weep over them: but when time is past, all pity will be past, and they in misery without pity to all eternity: "The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night." (Rev. xiv. 10, 11.) "No?" Then, for the Lord's sake, for your souls' sake, as upon my knees I beseech you, if you have any dread of God, any fear of hell, any desire of heaven, any care whither you must go, take no rest night or day in time, till you have secured your everfasting happy state, that you might have everlasting rest night and day in eternity; or that you might pass into that eternity where it is always day, and no night, and not into that where it shall be always night, and never day.

ADVICE TO THE POPE.

THE following finely conceived passage of Sir Richard Steele occurs in his preface to Cerri's Account of the State of the Roman Catholic Religion throughout the World, published in 1716, when there was an alarm about Popery in this country:

Descend, holy father, from your seven hills, and disdain not to tread upon the level plain. Unrobe yourself of all the gaudy attire of a pompous superstition. Lay aside all the embarrassments of worldly grandeur. Turn your eyes from the coffers of gold and silver, of which your great predecessor, St. Peter, and his greater Master, had none. Acknowledge religion to be something more than being wrapt up in a heap of fine vestments; or being skilled in a dexterous performance of antic gestures.

And then, look inwards. Divest yourself of your infallibility; and own yourself to be like one of us. As to renounce a kingdom for your Church hath been accounted the height of honour and saintship; so now, it will be your glory, in the most exalted degree, to renounce, in the name of your Church, a double kingdom for Christ that temporal kingdom which, in his name, and to his reproach, you have erected over the bodies and estates; and that spiritual one, which you have established over the consciences of mankind.

Remember, in the midst of all your luxury, and delicacy, and ostentation, what ground you stand on. The bowels of the earth are armed against you. The

Renounce, therefore, your golden keys, and your fruitful kingdoms. Throw away your fopperies and your indulgences, and your possessions and your canonizations. Show yourself in the nakedness of simplicity; and take the Gospel into your hand and into your heart. Call in your emissaries and your, missionaries from all parts of the world; and let them receive instruction themselves before they pretend to convert others.

Trouble the world no more with quarrels about the holy sepulchre, but believe that He is risen who once

was laid in it. Let the wood of his cross cease to be magnified to an immense bulk, and his natural body cease to be multiplied to an infinite number. Restore the heads of holy men and women to their bodies, if they can be found. Let the bones of dead saints lie at rest, and their blood be released from the perpetual fatigue of working wonders.

Throw up all your legends; discard all your miracles, stated and unstated; and make over all your tricks to the jugglers of this world. Declare to the Jesuits that their game is at an end; and restore the inquisition to hell, in which it was forged.

And for the conclusion of this great work, celebrate an open and solemn marriage between faith and reason; proclaim an eternal friendship between piety and charity; and establish an agreement, never to be dissolved, between religion, on the one side, and humanity, forbearance, and good nature, on the other.