the power and willingness of God to bring them in, and actually proposed to make a captain to return into Egypt.

Some or more of these may have been afterwards penitent, and so have been saved, but it was for a flagrant act of contemptuous unbelief that they were in a body excluded from the pleasant land, and as we are not told that they were saved we cannot argue from it as a fact: Moses and Aaron were excluded not for unbelief, but for pride and impatience when they struck the rock they were commanded to speak to, (neither of them seem ever to have doubted respecting Canaan); and Moses, though thus excluded from Canaan, was nevertheless the person chosen to stand on Tabor as the representative of the dead in Christ who rise first, even as Elijah was of those who do not sleep, but are changed. On the other hand, believers who do not receive the pre-millennial advent doubt neither the power or willingness of God to save; they give strained and fanciful interpretations to a large portion of scripture, (having been trained from infancy to do so) but they believe as firmly as we do in the future glory of the saints, though they do not understand the manner of that glory; they look for His appearing at the final judgment; if they love Him they surely love His appearing, even though they do not yet expect it; and in patience possessing their souls they wait for Him, though doubtless with a vague and indistinct idea, rather than with a steady and enlightened hope: they may be in some respects unable to look beyond the cloud; but if they follow that cloud whithersoever it goeth, it will surely lead them into the promised rest. As surely therefore as any soul sleeps in Jesus,

so surely will God bring that soul with Jesus in the day of His appearing; as surely as any soul lives by faith on a crucified Saviour, so surely will that soul, if it remain to that blessed day, be caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and so be ever with the Lord.

I have rested for positive proof on the fact that all that are in Christ are partakers of all things in Him-if separate texts are required, I can produce them in rich abundance.

H. B. M.

'MANY are able to remember the early lessons of hatred to the Jews, which were taught in the nursery, where a ready name to express the condensation of every thing to be despised, was found in the word Jew, which is as freely used as the taunt to irritate, and the bugbear to alarm. But do fathers in the present day teach their children such lessons as these? Is not the very idea repulsive to the heart? True it is, that the debased character which Gentile treatment has mainly helped to foster in the Jewish mind, has engendered a feeling of suspicion, that it is not easy to shake it off.'-Dallas's' Look to Jerusalem,' p. 83.

LETTERS TO A FRIEND.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

XXI.

RODERIC O'Conner, the last Monarch of Ireland, was inaugurated with the general consent of the states, being without a rival.

1167. During this year, the second of his reign, the King convoked a general assembly at Athboy in the county of Meath. Including the provincial kings, nobles and clergy; the guards, soldiers, horsemen and attendants assembled on this occasion, were in all 30,000 persons, as has been stated.

Roderic ascended the throne in his fiftieth year, undistinguished by any heroic act, or noble trait of character. He had been imprisoned by Tordelvac, his father, and kept in chains for an entire year for some misdemeanor. At the commencement of his reign several deeds of injustice and cruelty are laid to his charge, especially in regard to his brothers, and some others whose rivalship he dreaded.

During the reign of O'Lochlin, the prince of Breffney underwent a variety of injuries and wrongs from Dermot, his implacable enemy, but when Roderic ascended the throne, he espoused the cause of his father's friend, and the Lord of Breffney found in him a powerful ally. The name of the disgraced wife of this prince is mentioned among those who

made offerings at the consecration of the church of Mellifont. Hence Dervorgilla is supposed to have been a penitent. The same may be inferred of Dermot, if an ostentatious display of promoting religious institutions were the test. None more active than he in this work. His royal residence was at Ferns, of which a considerable ruin may still be traced. In this neighbourhood, he richly endowed several monasteries and abbeys which for some centuries existed. Besides these, he established the like institutions in Dublin; one on the present site of Trinity College called Hoggin Green, now College Green.*

Dermot did not, by these public works, gain for himself public approbation. He was universally detested. His own subjects, and even his private vassals, deserted him and joined the forces of Breffney, Meath, and the Dano-Irish of Dublin, under the command of his rival Tiernan O'Ruarc, which formidable army invested his territories. Dermot had no resources to resist such overpowering forces, and he fled to his castle at Ferns: sensible, however, that he could not long remain there in safety, he left this retreat, and having set fire to the town made his escape to England, in the hope that Henry II. would grant him succour, and replace him in the principality of which he had been dispossessed. Long before this period, Henry had fixed his eyes on Ireland, and under the specious pretext of converting the nation to Popery, he obtained from Adrian the IV. that which no Pontiff had any lawful right to grant, namely, his full permission to invade and subjugate not only Ireland, but all other of the Christian islands, and take upon himself the right of jurisdiction, in *Ware-Archdall-Lanegan.

acknowledgment of which, the Pope's Bull stipulated the levying annually St. Peter's pence from every dwelling-place therein. As a token of the Pope's right of investiture, a golden ring, richly set with an emerald was sent by John of Salisbury, the King's envoy, which ring, with the accompanying document, were, by order of Adrian, deposited in the public archives.

From the year 1155, Henry's scheme of conquering Ireland lay dormant, other cares engrossed his attention, and during the interval, it does not appear that the Irish had the slightest suspicion that he entertained any such design.

The English had never yet attempted it, although both William the Conqueror, and Henry I. had a desire to make this addition to their territories.

Of William Rufus, Hanner in his chronicle relates the following anecdote. "Cambrensis in his Itineraric of Cambria, reporteth, how that King William, standing upon some high rocke in the farthest part of Wales, beheld Ireland, and said, 'I will have the shippes of my kingdome brought hither, wherewith I will make a bridge to invade this land.' Murchardt, king of Leynster, heard thereof, and after he had paused awhile, asked of the reporter, 'Hath the King, in his great threatening, inserted these words, 'if it please God.' 'No.' Then said he, 'seeing this King putteth his trust only in man, and not in God, I fear not his coming."

Dermot's application to the King of England obtained for him permission to raise the forces he required to reinstate him in his principality upon the conditions proposed by Dermot himself, that he would receive it as a fief, and render to Henry the