subjects of the king of Spain have done their best to ruin my country: ergo, I will try to ruin the king of Spain's country." Would it not be silly to call the Argonauts pirates in our sense of the word?

March 18. 1832.

ASTROLOGY. - ALCHEMY.

It is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by inadequate means. Now they applied to their appetites, now to their passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the intuitive reason again. There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must be chemical relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes

compared with that of their distances, is not explicable otherwise; but this, though, as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune-telling and other nonsense. So alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry: there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all; but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver.

I HAVE heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing this Reform Bill, and they are in substance these:

1. We will blow your brains out if you don't pass it. 2. We will drag you through a horsepond if you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both.

Talk to me of your pretended crisis! Stuff! A vigorous government would in one month change all the data for your reasoning. Would you have me believe that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with God at one end and the Devil at the other, and that the Devil is now uppermost! Are you a Christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense!

March 31. 1832.

JOHN, CHAP. III. VER. 4. — DICTATION AND

I CERTAINLY understand the τί ἐμοὶ κα σο yúval; in the second chapter of St. John's γύναι Gospel, as having aliquid increpationis in ita mild reproof from Jesus to Mary for interfering in his ministerial acts by requests on her own account. I do not think mat yuva was

* Verse 4.

ever used by child to parent as a common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but I cannot think that μtep and yúval were equivalent terms in the mouth of a son speaking to his mother. No part of the Christopædia is found in John or Paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal authority in Mary. See the two passages where she endeavors to get access to him when he is preaching:-"Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother"*: and also the recommendation of her to the care of John at the crucifixion.

There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. Balaam and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, I suppose, will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. It is my profound conviction that

* Mark, chap. iii. ver. 35.

St. John and St. Paul were divinely inspired; but I totally disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout their writings. Observe, there was revelation. All religion is revealed; - revealed religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. Revelations of facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were as undoubtedly made to John and Paul; but is it not a mere matter of our very senses that John and Paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? We receive the books ascribed to John and Paul as their books on the judgment of men, for whom no miraculous judgment is pretended, nay, whom, in their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred. Shall we give less credence to John and Paul themselves? Surely the heart and soul of every Christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all things that concern