should come a time when public opinion should be favourable to the destruction of the small boroughs and the admission of householders to vote in counties, it will be well not to make some paltry changes which would whet the appetite for fresh designs, but to make a warrantable alteration which may stand the test of time and be fitted to serve the purposes of the coming generation.

For this purpose it is well to look back to the project of Oliver Cromwell. His frame of government provided for a protector who, upon his death, was to be replaced by another chief of the State, to be elected likewise for life.

What part of Cromwell's plan of representation Lord Clarendon would have thought fit to adopt in better times is quite uncertain, but it is obvious that Cromwell was a man of large conceptions, and that if he had had anyone fit to succeed him in the Protectorate he might have founded a commonwealth which John Milton and Algernon Sydney would have contributed to support, the one with his extensive learning, the other with his high spirit, and both by their lofty and unblemished characters.

These things are past; we have happily contrived to join with the rights of hereditary Monarchy as large a scheme of popular freedom as any of the ancient Republics ever devised. That it may long endure is my fervent and humble prayer.

I will not attempt to review the changes which have taken place in Europe from the days of Charles V. and Louis XI. to the present time. But there is some advantage in having attained to old age in a period of happy progress, and to be able to bear testimony to the advances which have been made in the cause of civil and religious liberty during the half century which has elapsed since 1824 to the present year. At the former of these periods it was laid down as an axiom, which no one could venture to contradict, that changes introduced by Sovereigns from above would be productive of peace and improvement, but that if introduced from below, by the initiative of popular movements, they could produce nothing but anarchy and confusion.

In 1874 we see institutions introduced in Germany by universal suffrage, planted in Italy by popular revolution, resting in France, as in Germany, upon universal suffrage.

Generally speaking the authority of Governments. in Europe is based upon those principles which in 1824 were pronounced to be the parents of anarchy and disorder. No one can say that, with the exception of England, the Powers of Europe have yet attained a settled condition, but there are many signs which give hope of the prevalence of religious liberty. In the course of this retrospect it is impossible not to recollect that the Madiai were severely punished for reading in

a family circle some chapters of the Holy Gospel, and that in Spain some few scattered Protestants were punished for a similar profanation.

We hear now of Protestant places of worship at Cordova and Seville in Spain, and at Florence and Rome in Italy.

When the great truths of the Gospel are thus admitted and allowed to reach the public ear, we may have good hopes for the cause of civil and religious liberty. With this sentiment I conclude my work. John Milton has said :

What more oft in nations grown corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.

Such is happily not now our case. From 1815 to 1873 there has been a course of gradual progress towards civil and religious liberty. There is nothing so conservative as Progress. England is in the full enjoyment of civil and religious freedom. I hope she may never descend from this height, and that the wish of the great poet, under whose roof I conclude, may see his vision fulfilled, and become the creed and the confidence of a better and a stronger age of mankind.

Of old sat Freedom on the heights,
The thunders breaking at her feet;
Above her shook the starry lights,
She heard the torrents meet.

There in her place she did rejoice,
Self-gather'd in her prophet-mind,
But fragments of her mighty voice
Came rolling on the wind.

Then stept she down thro' town and field,
To mingle with the human race,
And part by part to men revealed
The fulness of her face.

ALDWORTH: October 29, 1874.

RUSSELL.

APPENDICES.

I.

In the progress of liberal opinions it is important to record the relaxation of the chains by which the Church of England has been bound. The Low Church endeavour to confine the Established Church within the strict letter of its Calvinistic Articles; the High Church, especially the Ritualistic portion of the body, wish to condemn all who do not follow with servile obedience the syllogisms of Aristotle and the abuses of the Roman Church; the Broad Church, alone, wish to give that full liberty to the Church of England, which the late Bishop Wilberforce delighted to boast of and to celebrate.

One of the first cases which, after Lord Brougham's Act of Parliament, came before the Ecclesiastical Committee of Privy Council was the case of Mr. Gorham. Mr. Gorham had been appointed to a living in Cornwall. In looking over the new scene of his labours he found in a corner of his church, a square stone altar which had been used before the Reformation. He moved the altar back from its corner and replaced it by a communion table suitable to the reformed Church. But his offence was not overlooked by the High