"Portstewart, Coleraine, Oct. 17,

1844.

"MY DEAR SIR-I have received yours of the 14th instant, communicating to me a resolution unanimously passed at an influential and numerous meeting of magistrates and landholders of the county of Cavan, stating their high approval of the proposed line of railway from Dublin to Cavan, and their determination to support the same to the utmost of their power. Your letter also contains the expression of a wish by those present that I would consent to allow my name, as High Sheriff, to be placed at the head of the signatures attached to the said resolutions.

"It can be no slight cause which could induce me to decline co-operating with a body of gentlemen whose names and character, so well known to me, are a sufficient guarantee that they are influenced in their present undertaking by a lively interest in the well-being and prosperity, not only of our county, but of the country at large. In declining, therefore, to comply with a request apparently so reasonable as that contained in your letter, independently of the high official situation which I at present fill in our county, I feel that, as a private individual, it is incumbent on me to explain the motive which impels me to adopt a line of conduct which I am aware will be by many considered as eccentric. I cannot better do so than by transcribing the copy of a letter written by me on the 10th instant, in reply to a document similar to that enclosed by you, most respectably and numerously signed, on the subject of establishing a railway from Wexford to Carlow:

"I regret that I do not feel at liberty to comply

with your request, especially as I thereby decline associating myself with many gentlemen whom I know to be deeply interested in the prosperity of the two counties in question. As a landlord and magistrate in both counties, no less interested, I trust, in their prosperity than they are, I feel that I am called upon to assign my reason for withholding my name from the document which you have sent to me.

"My observation of the great desecration of the Lord's Day, caused by every railway which has come under my notice, and of the failure of all efforts of God-fearing men, in committee, to remedy this great evil, has placed in my mind a conscientious scruple in the way of responding to such a call as that made upon me in your letter, and prevents my mixing myself up in any railway undertaking.'

"These remarks equally apply to your communication. I beg you to make known to the gentlemen, who do me the honour of seeking to associate my name with theirs, the contents of this letter. It will be seen, that my objection is entirely of a religious nature, and amounts, in a word, to this, that a vast increase in the desecration of the Lord's Day must necessarily result from the establishment of the Dublin and Cavan railway, unless it be intended, (and I take it for granted it is not) to conduct it on a wholly different principle from that which regulates every other railway.

"By giving my name, or contributing my aid in any way to the object in question, I conceive that I should be taking a part in the promotion of an evil which I, as a Christian man, consider cannot be too strongly deprecated, or too strenuously resisted.

"I would just add, that the evil which I thus iden

tify with the railway system is, in my opinion, of such magnitude, as not to be counterbalanced by any amount of personal convenience, or commercial and agricultural prosperity which may result therefrom. "I remain, dear Sir, yours very truly,

"SOMERSET RICHARD MAXWELL.

"To William Bell, Esq.'

FAITH.

'BUT our father,' said the other, our father told us it is the earth that moves.' "That is impossible too,' replied the elder: 'for you see it does not move: I am standing upon it now, and so are you, and it does not stir: how can you pretend to think that it moves, while all the time it stands quietly under your feet?' I see all that, as plain as you do,' rejoined the younger I feel the ground quite still under my feet-I see the sun rise on that side, and set on that side of the heavens. I don't know how it can be-it seems impossible—but our Father says it, and therefore it is so.'-Sunday Afternoons at Home.

Review of Books.

AN INQUIRY into the predicted character of Antichrist; or the Antichristianism of the Church of Rome investigated. A Charge delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Ely, at a Visitation, &c., on Tuesday, April 23, 1844. With an Appendix. By the Rev. J. H. Browne, M.A., Archdeacon of Ely, &c. Published at the request of the Clergy

Hatchards.

WHAT Would John Bunyan have said, had any one suggested to him that in the course of a few generations it would become necessary for the ministers of the gospel to engage in active and arduous warfare against the old giant Pope, whom he describes as being, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth,

grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them. It would have tended to stay that unnatural civil war in which Protestantism was engaged against itself, to have caught a glimpse of what was coming.

Archdeacon Browne has gone over the whole ground of a controversy that we might well have hoped was long ago terminated; but every inch of which is again to be contested. He has well and boldly, as is his wont, fulfilled the task, and has again renewed the branded mark on the front of the Papacy, which certain traitorous hands among us are labouring hard to efface. In the long and valuable appendix, we rejoice to find this zealous champion taking up the gauntlet also in defence of the maligned Albigenses; while he gives some deeply interesting extracts bearing on the Inquisition and other instruments of popish cruelty. It is always a pleasure to us to announce one of these Charges. Long may the Archdeacon be spared to contend earnestly for the faith!

MISSIONARY JOURNALS AND LETTERS, written during eleven years residence and travels amongst the Chinese, Siamese, Javanese, Khassias, and other Eastern Nations. By J. Tomlin, B.A., formerly of St. John's College, Cambridge.-Nisbet and Co.

THE heavy calamity which befel the pious and amiable writer of these memorials, will account for occasional imperfectness in their details. The ship in which he had embarked, with his family, for the