should spend time and strength in the endeavour to make all we have to say, as clear, as strong, as effective as we can make it; but if we have any sense of the tremendous issues of the conflict in which we are engaged between righteousness and sin, the love of God and the miseries of the human race, it will seem to us the greatest impiety to yield to the impulses of personal ambition, and we shall care for nothing except the glory of Christ and the salvation of mankind.'

Mr. Dale presents, in tender and sympathetic terms much encouragement to preachers and ministers, when they are tried with apparent want of success, or tempted to doubt the efficacy of the Gospel; and he offers valuable hints with respect to rendering evangelistic preaching more successful. His replies to the assumptions of certain modern scientists are pointed, caustic, and unanswerable. attach weight," he says, "to a man's views on any question of religious truth, because he is a distinguished geclogist, is just as preposterous as to attach weight to a man's views on geology, because he is a professed theologian."

"To

The

We cannot but express high approval and admiration of these Lectures as we consider their extensive circulation would be most profitable in the present day to the ministry and the Church. concluding paragraphs of the volume are a fine specimen of the author's earnest manner and glowing style :

"Gentlemen-Yours is a noble vocation. To be the ally of Christ in His great endeavour to save the world,-with Him to assert the authority of the throne and law of God; with Him to support human weakness in its vacillating endeavour to do the Divine will; to inspire the sinful with trust in the Divine mercy; to console sinners; to awaken in the hearts of the poor, the weak, and the desolate, the consciousness of their relations to the infinite and eternal God; to exalt and dignify the lives of old men and maidens, young men and children, by revealing to them the things unseen and eternal which surround them now, and the mysterious, awful, glorious life which lies beyond death-this is a great work. There is nothing on earth comparable to it. Whatever you have, whatever learning, whatever native moral force, will find their finest and loftiest service in the work to which you are consecrated. And in the ministry, even the humblest faculties, if used with devout earnestness, may, through alliance with the power of God, achieve great results. Give Christ your heart. Be faithful to Him-be faithful to your people-be faithful to yourselves—and you will not have to exclaim when your life is over-All is vanity and vexation of spirit.' You will thank God that He appointed you in this world to a service which was the most perfect preparation for the longer life, the loftier activities, the everlasting glory of the world to come.'

Christian Sunsets; or, The Last Hours of Believers. By James Fleming, D.D. Crown 8vo., pp. 463. Hodder & Stoughton, London.

THIS neatly executed volume contains a large number of brief records of characteristic sketches, and of the dying sayings of eminent Christians in different stations of life-Princes and Princesses, young persons in high rank, Ministers, Physicians, Reformers, Martyrs in ancient times and after the Reformation, Missionaries and devoted evangelistic labourers. The briefest notice is given of the life-work of the separate individuals; and their frame of mind and last words are presented in a vivid, and in some instances in a deeply affecting The volume is well fitted to excite serious reflection about the close of life, and an entrance into the eternal world. To those, whether younger or older, who betimes consider their own latter end,

manner.

it is calculated to minister important instruction, and to animate and strengthen Christian hope.

M'Comb's Presbyterian Almanac and Christian Remembrancer for 1878. Thirtyninth annual impression. Jas. Clelland, Belfast.

THE present issue of this excellent Almanac fully sustains the high character for accuracy and usefulness by which its predecessors have all along been known. Besides containing a great variety of select information on many important subjects, it presents valuable statistics of the state and work of different sections of the Presbyterian Church throughout all parts of the world. The incomes of the different British Missionary Associations are given; brief and interesting sketches of the history of Presbyterian congregations in Ireland; an account of the proceedings of the Pan-Presbyterian Council; accounts of the English Congregational Union, Baptist Union, Wesleyan Methodists, and of the Papacy-supply such condensed views of these Bodies as one desires for ready reference. A condensed, but clear, historical sketch of the Plantation of Ulster contains an exposure of some of the misrepresentations of the work recently published by the Rev. George Hill on this subject, and shows the accuracy of the statements of Dr. Killen, in his Ecclesiastical History of Ireland. The present impression of the Almanac has, as frontispiece, a good chromatic vignette portrait of Rev. George Bellis, the Moderator of the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly. We willingly give to this excellent annual our warm commendation.

Notes on Public Events.

DEATH OF THE KING OF ITALY.-By this unexpected event, which took place at Rome, on the 9th of January, the Kingdom of Italy has lost a constitutional sovereign, to whose efforts, under God, it has been very largely indebted for the unity to which it has attained, and the religious freedom now there enjoyed. Whatever may have been his personal character and private life, the public career of Victor Emmanuel, since he ascended the throne of Sardinia in 1849, has been a remarkable one; and it is unquestionable that, with the advice and help of sagacious and patriotic statesmen, he was eminently instrumental in effecting such important salutary changes throughout the whole Italian peninsula as will cause his reign to be long and gratefully remembered by those who shall enjoy the fruits of these. In the prosecution of their enlightened labours the King and his ministers came repeatedly into conflict with the Vatican, which hurled its anathemas at their heads, yet, undismayed, they went on with their reforms, and the result is a united and free country, blessed with constitutional government, which is destined, we believe, to take a high place among the nations of Europe. While Victor Emmanuel broke so far politically with the Papacy, it is matter for regret that he was not led also to renounce his personal allegiance to the Pope as the spiritual head of the Roman Church. He died a member of that Church, and ere he expired he received the Pope's blessing. We thus see there may be political opposition, for state reasons, to the arrogant claims and doings of the Papacy, where there is unbroken personal adherence to it as a religious system. It is to be hoped that King Humbert will steadily follow in his father's footsteps

as a constitutional sovereign, and that he will be kept from yielding to the Jesuitical influences which will to a certainty be brought to bear upon him in his new and important position. And let us trust and pray that both he and his counsellors may be brought to embrace that Gospel in its purity, which its friends are now at liberty to proclaim through the length and breadth of the Italian kingdom, none daring to make them afraid.

DEATH OF THE POPE.—It is very remarkable that, within a month, the death of the King of Italy has been followed by that of the Pope, at the advanced age of 85. The man who may be said to have closed his long, eventful, strangely chequered career, as the head of the Romish apostasy, and to have put the copestone upon that accursed system, by impiously clothing himself with the awful attribute of infallibility, has at length fallen beneath the resistless stroke of the last enemy, and gone to his account at the bar of the righteous Judge of all. And throughout the Roman Catholic Church prayers have been presented for the repose of his soul, and for its speedy exit from purgatory and admission into heaven, toward which place it has been represented as already probably on its way! Strange that such prayers should be needed by an infallible Pope! He was elected in 1846, and has occupied the Pontifical chair for a longer period than any of his 256 predecessors in office; and he was the last of the 163 Popes who have wielded the power of temporal sovereigns in addition to their spiritual functions— Pius IX. having been deprived of the temporal sovereignty on the absorption of the States of the Church into the Kingdom of Italy, and the acquisition of Rome by Victor Emmanuel as his capital.

The day after the news of the Pope's death were received, Dr. Wylie made the following interesting reference to the event in his class at the Protestant Institute:— "Pius IX. has passed for ever from the stage on which he has acted so conspicuous and so eventful a part. The tiara put off, he now lies arrayed in the ring and robe in which it is usual to attire a Pope when about to be laid in sepulchral marble. Of all the Popes, Pius IX. is the only one who has seen the day of Peter. The duration of Peter's imaginary pontificate at Rome was twenty-five years; the deceased Pope has not only fulfilled that term, he has added seven years thereto. When Charles V. was standing by the grave of Luther, in the Schloss Kirke at Wittemberg, one of his courtiers advised him to take up his bones and

burn them. The Emperor nobly and indignantly replied, I war not with the dead." Protestants do not war with the dead; not even with dead Popes, at least till they have fairly taken their place in past history, and then it is for the world's good that their character and actions should be freely but honestly criticised. Pius IX. was portly in figure, blameless in personal deportment, so far as I know, and endowed with a firm will, which grew only the stronger as he advanced in years. He was sanguine in temperament, and ambitious even beyond the measure of Popes, a race of rulers who have excelled all others in ambition. When I first saw him in 1851 his face was radiant with affability and happiness, though its light was blended with that strange sinister expression which I never yet found absent from the face of priest of whatsoever degree. He had just returned to his capital from Gaeta, by favour of the French arms.

The storm which had darkened

The

the early days of his Pontificate, occasioned by his sudden change of policy from that of Liberal to that of an Absolutist, had passed away, the clouds were gone, the sky had cleared up around the chair of Peter, and to the eye of Pius the future appeared bright with visions of boundless glory and triumph to the Popedom. When I next saw him in 1864, how changed, how unlike his former self. tall, portly, herculean figure was still left him, but the storms had again returned, and during the interval of 13 years, had been warring fiercely around him, and had graven their traces deeply on his face, like the scars which the thunder prints hope; it had darkened into sullenness, doggedness, and defiance, and had become on the mountain's brow. His countenance no longer glowed with affability and deadly pale. And truly there was cause for that sad change! joyous anticipations had been fulfilled. The cup of sweets, as he fancied it, held

Not one of his

to his lips for a moment and tasted, was found to be a cup of wormwood! Not one of his confidentially anticipated triumphs had been realised-all had been converted into terrible disasters. He had seen Spain burn the Concordat, he had seen the House of Savoy, which had borne unswerving allegiance to the Papal See for ages, revolt against him; France, and this was "the unkindest cut of all," the eldest son of the Church, had unsheathed the sword, and despoiled him of the goodliest portions of his territory. Nor had misfortune yet done her worst, for over and above all these calamities there was the "writing on the wall," prognosticating greater disasters to come; for Louis Napoleon had just written him to say that in two years his temporal sovereignty must end. The historian Ranke says of Clement VII. that "without doubt he was the most ill-fated Pope that ever sat on the Papal Throne." Were Professor Ranke to write this portion of his history over again he would substitute the name of Pius IX. for that of Clement VII. as the man whose pontificate is the longest and most disastrous known to history.

"But from another point of view the pontificate of Pius IX. is seen to be one of the most illustrious, perhaps I ought to say most successful on record. Its great and notable characteristic is the remarkable recuperation of the inherent energies of the Papacy to which it has been witness. Among the pontificates of all his predecessors I do not know one in which so sudden and so prodigious a development of the Papacy, pure and simple, has taken place. In after times it will be accounted the glory, or the infamy, of the reign of Pius IX., that during it Popery, in its three leading branches, was advanced till further advance was impossible, by the very perfection to which it was carried. Pius IX. has left nothing in this respect for his successors. As a system of Mariolatory, Popery was crowned by the decree of the Immaculate Conception. As a system of earthly jurisprudence and temporal tyranny, Popery was perfected in the Encyclical and Syllabus. As a system that defies man and clothes a mortal with the attributes of the Eternal, the topstone was put upon it in the unparalleled blasphemy of the Vatican Decree which declared the Pope infallible. The latter end of the Papacy how like to its beginning! It was when the Gothic nations were pouring down on the Roman Empire, and a world seemed to be dissolving, that the Pope laid the foundations of his great authority and raised aloft his spiritual chair, in the midst of fallen thrones, by giving out that he was God's vicar. It is when a second deluge of revolution is rolling round his seat, and when thrones are again falling, that he shows the innate strength, durability, and omnipotence of his system. Never before was its organisation so perfect as now, never were its spiritual powers so marshalled, and its agencies so thoroughly disciplined and prepared to act over a field so vast, and with an execution so prompt. So stands the Papacy in this the 19th century, a more consolidated and firmer knit despo tism, spiritual and temporal, than even in the 13th century. We behold its camp pitched, its lines marked out, and its warriors in their panoply of burnished steel going their rounds impatient for the contest. For what are all these preparations? why, for this even, that the Papacy may fight its last and world-wide battle with Christianity and civilisation. And what is the lesson which God is seeking to teach the world by these opposite courses of decadence and growth which the Papacy has been running? of increasing political weakness and rapidly advancing spiritual strength? why, even this, that its terrible power lies not in its temporal adjuncts but in its professedly spiritual forces. Stript, naked and bare, deprived of temporal crown, its vassal kings in revolt, it yet rises up stronger than ever, prepared to wage war to the death against conscience, against liberty, and against the gospel. Pius IX. is no more, but Peter never dies, and in a few days the vacant throne of Popedom will be seen filled with another Pope, in all probability more astute than the one who has just passed away."

The Papal Conclave assembled in the Vatican to elect the new Pope, on the 19th of Feb., and next day Cardinal Pecci, Archbishop of Perugia, was chosen, and has assumed the name of Leo XIII. He is sixty-seven years of age, and is described as a "man of blameless character, sincerely pious, well-versed in Church matters, and of moderate opinions," though by one who styles himself “a clerical inmate of the Vatican," he has been classed among the ultra-Ultramontane

Cardinals. Time will soon show of what spirit the new occupant of St. Peter's chair is ; but there is every reason to believe that nothing will be left undone by him to further the interests of that soul-destroying, yet doomed, system, at the head of which he has been placed. It has sometimes been said we would never see another Pope after Pius IX. was gone; those who said so, however, have been mistaken. We now see another, and more than this, we see the whole system he represents, in all its parts, girding itself with renewed energy to the task of pushing its spiritual claims in every country with a proselytizing zeal to which a fresh and mighty impetus has now been given. And while this is going on, we behold, alas, Protestants folding their hands in listless indifference, and some of them even lauding the self-denying missionary efforts of Rome's emissaries amongst us! Verily, if Rome's bold and insidious advances are to be met and checked, there must be a revival of the stern, resolute spirit of Reformation Protestantism, for assuredly the "liberalized," pithless Protestantism of these days will never succeed in doing this, should it even make the attempt.

THE PAPAL AGGRESSION AND DISESTABLISHMENT.-Among the last acts of the deceased Pontiff, was that of completing and sanctioning the arrangements made for the restoration of the Papal hierarchy in Scotland, so that unless decided action be at once taken in this country to prevent it, the thing will be an accomplished fact ere long, if indeed it be not this already. The matter has been discussed in a number of Church Courts during the past two months, but the utterances on the subject, in some instances, have been such as to show that the Protestantism of our Broad Churchmen is a poor feckless thing indeed. Woe to the day when professed ministers of Christ in Scotland begin to speak with bated breath of the evils and perils of Popery! Had the spirit now so extensively prevailing been dominant three hundred years ago the Reformation had never been effected; and unless a change take place, the principles of the Reformation, to all appearance, will soon be lost sight of altogether. As there are laws in the statute-book of the realm sufficient to protect the nation against all such Romish aggressions, it lies with the Government of the country to enforce these laws, and it behoves all who wish to see this audacious step met and resisted as it ought to be, to unite in calling upon our rulers to do their duty. It is earnestly to be hoped, therefore, that the mind of the country will be made known, in the proper quarter, in an unmistakable manner, ere it be too late. The following memorial has been forwarded to the Prime Minister by one of the Sessions of our Church :

:

"That your memorialists understand from public report, universally credited, that arrangements have been made for re-establishing a Roman Catholic hierarchy

in Scotland.

"That your memorialists view this further step of Romish aggression with indignation and alarm, as being not only wholly uncalled for and unjustifiable on true principles of toleration, but as an open and insulting violation of those laws abolishing the Pope's jurisdiction in this land, and establishing and defending the Protestant religion, which were enacted at the period of the Reformation from Popery, and confirmed anew and declared unalterable at the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England:

"That your memorialists are profoundly convinced that such a flagrant violation of important statutes lying at the very foundation of our Protestant Constitution would imperil the best interests of the nation, and ought not therefore to be permitted:

"And that your memorialists regard the rulers and people of this country as under special solemn obligations, arising from the National Covenant of Scotland and the Solemn League and Covenant of the three Kingdoms, to resist, as it is in their power to do, all such Papal aggressions, to protect our precious civil and religious liberties when thus threatened, and to maintain and further the sacred