and of sophistry, had been exhausted, and the humbled foe appeared to retire discomfited from the field, and to leave its possession to triumphant Christianity. Yet it was in appearance only. It was the master movement in the tactics of the great prince of cunning and delusion. Christianity was suffered to retain the field; and the attention of the world was diverted from the scheme itself, and its primitive purity and comeliness. An effort was made, gradually, to revive the system of idolatry, baptized with the Christian name; and to turn the professed advocates for Christianity to the real defence of paganism. When Julian, with the power of empire, could not re-establish it; when arts and arms only enlisted the entire church against it; and when it was compelled to retire with shame from the field, it occurred to the grand adversary, that all the skill and force of the Christian cause could be enlisted in his service. If idolatry could be introduced into the church itself, the victory would be gained, and gained too without the hazard to the cause of Satan, which had been experienced in the times of persecution and of conflict. It was done and after the times of Julian, we are introduced to a different scene. The din of controversy and the shouts of alternate victory die away. The noise of strife is gone. The field is yielded to the Christian; and the banners of the faith float peacefully over all the palaces and cottages of the empire. The foe has suddenly disappeared, and the church has the aspect of peace. Instead

of the foe now visible, a thousand pious hands are seen bearing into the church the trophies of con. quest, and the spoils of victory. The ancient temples of the gods are stripped to adorn the churches of the Saviour. The altars are removed to grace the triumphs of the Christian religion The robes of the pagan priesthood now adorn the ministers of the Christian religion; and paganism is everywhere reminded of its defeat, by witnessing the triumphal movements of the church of the Redeemer. With the pomp and splendor of pa ganism; with the imposing rites of the ancient Roman worship; with the gorgeous vestments, the titles, robes, and crowns, of the heathen priesthood, Christianity walked in triumph and in state. Paganism, humbled and subdued, saw ev· erywhere the memorials of its ancient grandeur, now passed into other hands-and smiled. The name was changed. The thing remained. The church became the defender of that which it had for centuries steadily assailed; and dreaming of triumphs, it reclined on the arm of the vanquish ed, and pressed to its bosom that which it had struggled so long to overcome. Henceforward it became the defender of the trappings and pomp of the assumed paganism. It blended the rites of the ancient superstition with the doctrines of the cross; and we know nothing more of Christianity on the spot of her triumph, except as vanquished in her victories, subdued in her laurels, and a slave led captive amid her triumphal

arches.

THE motives which induced Henry to cast off the supremacy of the Pope excited strong prejudices against all innovation, and strengthened the opposition to the Reformation. He inflicted a double injury upon the Protestant cause. He brought odium upon it, while he neither embraced the principles nor defended the persons of the reformers. If by an act of despotic power he hastened the separation of the English Church from the Roman See, by that same power he prevented the diffusion of Gospel truth, and retarded the progress of its principles among his people. Although he had abjured allegiance to Rome, he still maintained all her errors and superstitions; and while he clothed himself with the authority he had wrested from her, and assumed a new title as the "Head of the Church," he was careful to unite to it his old office of Defender of the Faith, and he strenuously asserted all the powers thus conferred.

Ever despotic, now absolute from the union of the highest ecclesiastical to the civil power, his will became at once the rule of faith and law of action; and he persecuted all who questioned his infallibility, or presumed to doubt the dogmas he imposed. To believe either too much or too little was alike criminal. The Catholic who clung to his ancient head, and the Protestant who would embrace a purer faith, were alike obnoxious. He was merely Pope of England instead of Rome; and those argue truly who argue that the English Church was not a Protestant church in the days of Henry. He was separated from Rome, but not reformed from its errors.

As Henry cast off the supremacy of Rome that he might abandon the wife of his youth and marry another, he thus identified the opposing interests of those two women with the conflicting claims of the two systems. Catharine of Aragon was endeared to the English by a life of purity, and by the real excellence of her character; while her high descent, and the large dowry she brought the kingdom, seemed to give her additional claims. She united firm principles to deep affections, and blended the dignity of regal state

with the softness of the woman, and the devoted tenderness of the wife. Shakspeare has well portrayed her character. He drew her as she was remembered by the people-although he wrote when the daughter of her rival reigned-and he has drawn her from life. You feel that he has given a portrait, not a picture. She differs from the mere creations of his fancy, and she is superior to them in the true elements of female excellence-so queenly in her bearing, so tender in her affection, so true as a mother, so faithful to the husband who cast her off.

It was among the evils following the passion of the king for the Maid of Honor, that the circumstances in which Catharine was placed threw her entirely into the arms of Rome. She was of a character to have embraced the principles of the Reformation, for she was deeply pious and truly conscientious, and she felt the need of a higher standard of piety in the Church of Rome, and the reproach the lax lives of the clergy and their open indulgence in sin brought upon the church. Had Catharine of Aragon been the patroness of the Reformation-had Henry introduced the changes he wrought from the convictions of conscience, rather than the impulse of passion, very different had been the history of the English Church and nation. The change might then have been effected by constant progression, as the nation were enlightened, and ages of commotion and oceans of blood been spared.

But as it was, as Catharine was placed, she clung to Rome as for more than life,-as she would maintain her rights as she would save her name from shame, and her child from dishonor-as she would preserve her purity as a woman, her dignity as a queen. And the great body of the people united in their feelings her rights with those of the church which protected them; and the sympathy for an injured woman an abandoned wife, quickened their zeal for the faith to which she adhered, and the church which defended her rights.

Although from her position, the interests of Anne Boleyn were blended with those of the re

formers, and she undoubtedly regarded them as her partisans, and they hoped much from her influence, there is no reason to suppose that she ever took the trouble to investigate, or had the courage to enhance the principles of the Reformation. And in her character and life she surely did not afford a very gratifying illustration of their power. The reckless levity and giddy thirst for admiration, are contrasted very unfavorably with the pure life and pious example of Catharine; and the adherents to the Romish Church would not be slow to note the difference. She was willing to lend her influence to those who from the purest motives were pursuing a course which abetted her ambitious policy; yet she had no true sympathy with the conscientious reformers. She acquiesced in the changes which promoted her ambition; but she never reverenced the doctrines of Rome. Had she dared to think or reason on disputed points, she would have been made amenable, and the proof of her contumacy had not been disregarded when occasion was sought against her.

The character of the individual stamps the nature of the influence exerted: that of Anne was most unfortunate, both as it affected individuals and the nation, as divided by the great questions of the day.

The difference between Catharine and Anne was exemplified by the course of the king-by the change his passion wrought in his character. He was a Tudor, and the race were ever despotic and arbitrary; but his earlier years were unmarked by gross profligacy or great cruelty. He was vain and arrogant, but his people were proud of his handsome person and gallant bearing; and he proved himself occasionally, as in the case of Suffolk and his sister, the queen of France, capable of the kinder feelings and gentler sampathies. He honored Catharine, and lived peacefully with her, while he was a fond father to their only surviving child. The passion for Anne drew forth all the fierce passions and malignant feelings. All were concentrated by his strong self-will upon the desire of exalting and possessing her.

Yet the influence of Catharine was not easily cast off. It long restrained him. Compare the long delay of her divorce with the speed and haste of the subsequent trials and executions. Motives of policy-the power of her royal friends -may have had their influence; but that of her character was greater. Not easily or lightly could he shake off or disregard the claims of one whose life had attested her worth. By her arts and coquetry Anne at once stimulated and piqued the passion of the king, but she forfeited his respect when she encouraged his love. He cast

aside all restraint, as he violated all principle, when he married her; and she who had unchained his fierce nature was among the first victims to it. The obstacles which opposed his wishes stimulated his self-will, and kept alive his passion; when these were overcome, the gratification which strengthened the one extinguished the other, and the despotic will which had led him to place Anne on the pinnacle of earthly greatness, now induced him to cast her into the abyss of destruction.

She was doubtless guiltless of the darker charges against her, but in her prosperity she had been vain, arrogant, and presumptuous; and the levity which encouraged the lover, disgusted the husband. She had disappointed the expectations of the king, who desired a son, and who saw not the future greatness of the queen in the infant princess; and the sufferings of a mother impaired the charms which were now opposed to the fresh beauty of the fair Jane Seymour. Anne might have foreseen the future as she recalled the past, when she found her attendant acting toward herself the same part that she had played toward Catharine; and her agitation was followed by a result which precipitated her ruin. A son was born, but the heir so impatiently desired was lifeless; and the brutal husband poured forth his wrath and denunciations upon the pallid sufferer, even while she touchingly reminded him that "had he been more kind, it had not been thus."

Catharine had died in January; and her death awoke some feeling in the heart of Henry. He commanded the court to wear mourning; but in defiance Anne flaunted in robes of yellow, while she called upon her friends to rejoice in the death of the former wife; "for now," she exclaimed, "I am indeed a queen." Short was the exultation! In May she was beheaded,-and the shot of the cannon from the tower which announced that her head had fallen was the signal for the king to start with his bridal train to wed Jane Seymour.

In the hour of trial Anne needed the consolations of religion, and she resorted to the offices of the Romish Church. She early in her imprisonment besought that she might have the Host in her closet, and she must have then rendered it worship; while by confession and absolution she tried to prepare for the fearful change, she feared that she had not embraced those doctrines which

had opened to her “ the way, the truth, and the life," that she had no sympathy with the great principles of the Reformation. If to Protestants who were taught to regard her as the patroness of the Reformation, the friend of the reformers, who, from a conviction of benefits conferred by her

upon the cause of the Reformation, have been led to pass lightly over her errors, and to regard her almost as a martyr to their cause, it is startling to find that she died a Catholic, it seems a fact well proved.

From the time that Henry yielded to his passion for Anne, every malignant principle rapidly developed, and unruly passions and fierce tempers from thenceforth ruled his soul and desolated his kingdom, every indulgence strengthened his despotic self-will, religious persecution aided political proscription, and the kingdom was blackened by fire and marked by blood, as the rack or the stake secured the victim. None were so high as to escape his power, none so low as to be beneath his persecution; and the royal Blue Beard alternated the cares of state with the wooing, beheading, or divorcing his fair brides.

If the English, as a nation, had reason to deplore the change thus wrought, there was yet one who, suffering deeply from the guilt, folly, and injustice of others, in after years fearfully avenged upon the innocent the injuries she had received from those who made the Reformation a covert for their selfish designs. The Bloody Mary, at the period when the dalliance between the king her father, and the Lady in attendance upon her mother commenced, was in the first years of womanhood. Always treated as the Princess Royal of England, the premature deaths of the other children of the royal parents, had seemed to confirm to her the succession; and she had been presented to the world as the heiress of the throne, while her father had appointed her an establishment suitable to her rank and expectation. She had been carefully educated, and was learned and accomplished, pleasing in person and manners, and while her father was both proud and fond of her, her mother watched over her with most tender affection.

The change which separated the husband from the wife, alienated the father from the child; and Mary was involved in all the trials and sorrows of her mother. The clouds which darkened her youth, destroyed her health, and embittered her temper. She was deprived of the right of succession, branded as illegitimate, and exposed to every species of contumely. By a peculiar refinement of female malice, when Elizabeth was born, Anne transferred the household and establishment, appointed Mary, as the heiress of the throne, to the infant who had supplanted her in the rights of inheritance, while Mary was still forced to remain as a mere appendage to the state of her sister; a dependent in a household of which she had late been the head. Such a course was enough to engender all the bitterness often

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|| displayed between the sisters. During the decline of Catharine, the mother was not permitted to see her daughter, and the daughter was forbidden the sad privilege of receiving the mother's dying blessing. Alike crushed and trampled upon, their rights violated, their feelings outraged, they were denied the sorrowful consolations of communion in woe. It is some gratification to the heart to know that in her disgrace and sorrow, Anne repented of her treatment of this unhappy princess, and sent a message beseeching forgiveness.

Like her mother, Mary was thrown into the arms of the church which hurled its anathemas against the monarch who had dared to annul his marriage without its sanction, and thus she ever clung with the warmest devotion to the papacy; and the bitter prejudices she early imbibed against the reformers, who to her appeared but as the partisans of her enemies, led her the more readily to sanction and encourage the cruel persecutions which disgraced her reign and darkened her memory.

Although the memory of Jane Seymour is cherished, as she was the mother of the first Protestant king, she could have exerted little or no influence upon the religious sentiment of the age. Dying in the hour when a mother forgets her sorrow, and while the exultant shouts of a nation rejoicing in the birth of an heir to the throne were ascending, her fate excites a sympathy which keeps us from scanning her character too closely. While she conformed to the demands of the king, she probably did not enter into any vexed questions; and it is only known that, as dying, she received the rites of the Catholic Church, she was buried with all its forms, and was doubtless in heart a Catholic.

Anne of Cleves, a Protestant princess, was a mere Dutch housewife, and could have exerted little influence. Yet it is somewhat curious that while Henry married her to strengthen his interests by uniting with the Protestant cause, and she came to England a Protestant, she afterward renounced the Protestant faith and embraced that of Rome.

Catharine Howard was a frail, fair child. Her sad, short life teaches the need of maternal care, of watchfulness, of instruction; and her fate proves the danger of any departure from the paths of rectitude, while it confirms the common assertion, showing us that in the highest ranks, as in the lowest walks of life, it is almost utterly impossible for a woman, once erring, to retrace her steps and regain the path of virtue and hon

or. A sadder romance was never written than

that acted by the fifth wife of Henry; and her life might well be dwelt upon-but not in this connection. She could have taken little interest in, or have exerted little influence upon, the great movement of the age,‚—so young and so ignorant,|| that it is supposed that she could neither write nor read the letters addressed her. The shame of an exposure, the disgrace, the degradation which would have allowed a period for repentance, had been a sufficient and meet punishment for one so early betrayed, so utterly unguarded. Blood, blood alone could expiate an offence against the royal tyrant, in concealing the levity of early girlhood; and the bride of six months died upon the scaffold-before twenty-for the errors of fifteen.

There was a marked similarity in the characters of Catharine of Aragon and Catharine Parr --the first and last wives of Henry, which happily did not extend to their fate. Yet while there was a general resemblance, there was an opposition in particulars. They were both immeasurably superior to the interesting Jane. They were both learned, accomplished, and exemplary, in the fulfillment of every domestic duty. Both united acquirements, not common to the other sex, to a love of female occupation. Yet the one was the daughter of the loftiest royal house in Europe, the other a private English gentlewoman; and while the one was the patroness of the reformers, the friend of the Reformation, the other was one of the most faithful devotees at the feet of the Roman Pontiff.

Catharine Parr was a true Protestant, the first Queen of England who truly embraced the principles of the reformers; and as by a diligent discharge of every duty, a careful fulfillment of every obligation, she commanded respect, while she conciliated the love of the various branches of the royal family, the influence thus acquired was all eventually made to subserve the cause of the reformers.

The royal household was composed of very discordant materials. There were the children of three different mothers. The two princessdaughters-the one of a mother supplanted and divorced, the other of a mother disgraced and beheaded, and each declared illegitimate-with the young heir to the throne, might well be sup posed to regard another step-mother with jealous dislike, or at least apprehension. Yet by her judicious kindness, the new Queen preserved her own dignity, and introduced something like harmony into the royal circle, while she secured the affection of the individual members. Even the morose and unhappy Mary, bigot as she proved

to be, was won by her kindness, and assisted her in the translation of portions of sacred writ. Elizabeth, early politic, felt or affected fondness; and Edward honored the wife of his father; and her example and her approbation were a stimulus to him in his studies. There were more distant members of the royal family who were brought under the influence of the Queen-the daughters of the sisters of the King. The Ladies Suffolk and Douglas composed a part of her circle, and these became among the firmest friends of the Reformation; while the example and the influence of Catharine doubtless encouraged that attention to study which gave so many learned women to the succeeding courts of England.

Yet Catharine was surrounded by enemies, and suspected of favoring too much the principles of the reformers. Her life was more than once endangered, and on a memorable occasion, there seemed but a hair's breadth between her and the scaffold. We must admit that the address which turned the scales and saved her life, deprived her of a martyr's crown, while it saved her from a martyr's fate. And while this incident shows the exceeding cautiousness she was obliged to exercise to preserve her own life, it proves, too, that she was obliged to conform to the rites and ceremonies which had been still retained, and the dangers incurred by Catharine prove how difficult it must have been to disseminate the doctrines of the Bible and the Reformation, in the highest circles of the kingdom.

Henry continued to insist upon the appointed observances, and to uphold the Mass and Transubstantiation, while he lived by the stake and the fagot. Yet when he died, the court was found to be reformed,—and during the ensuing regency, the church was purified from many of its superstitious observances, and its articles conformed to those of the Protestant churches. Many of the principal nobility, many ladies nearest to the Queen, with her, became openly and decidedly the patronesses of the reformers. The leaven of truth had been hid, but it now appeared that court and kingdom were leavened, and the principles of the Reformation embraced and acknowledged by those who never abandoned them, While we regard the influence of Catharine as having been propitious so far as she dared exert it, we believe there were others, more obscure, but more efficient agents, who had prepared the way for these results. The seeds of divine truth have ever been sown in toil and painfulness, in want and self-denial--it has still been watered by tears and blood.

The great, the powerful, the high, the rich, may