individual members of His Church be in His view thus identified with His own, how intimately must He sympathize with the fortunes of that Church itself, of that Church which He deigned Himself to found, and especially to commend to our reverential care. Surely if we, blind to His gracious presence, presume to insult, despoil, or irreverently treat as a merely human thing His hallowed institution, we shall one day hear the voice once heard by Saul, "Why persecutest thou Me?" God grant that we may, like Saul, hear it while time yet lies before us; that we may hear it in the gentle accents of mercy, not in the trumpet-tone of judgment.
Let worldly politicians and legislators, then, do as they list. Let them, if they imagine it will further their ambitious views, fearfully insult the Church established in our islands. Christ's true servants, stedfastly refusing any countenance to their irreverent projects, will protest against them, if in no other way, by the quiet and consistent tenor of their lives. They will show the world by their actions that they behold the Redeemer, as He has taught them to behold Him, in His Church, And if that Church, having long been an honoured guest in our islands, is to be cast down from her high estate, and, whether in England or in Ireland, to be trampled under the foot of power, and made to give place to any one of the unauthorized sects which would usurp her place, they will continue to cling in her adversity to her who had been in her prosperity their nursing mother and their guide. Beholding her built upon the rock of apostolical authority, and convinced that she has not forfeited, by apostatizing from the faith, her original commission, they will reverence her Ministers as much when become the objects of the world's contempt, as they had reverenced them when that world bowed before them with pretended homage.
The rulers of that world may suppose that the Church is in their hands; that they may deal with it according to their pleasure; and that its very existence is at their disposal. Thus thought the rulers of a former day, when the Redeemer had given Himself into their hands, and when their agents exerted a last malice upon His lifeless remains. They knew it not that even then, in that dark hour, a limit was set to their presump-
