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June 27. At Thornton House, Anna, eldest daughter of Colonel Cunningham.

-At Haddington, Mr Win. Shiells, late brewer there, in the 67th year of his age.

-At Milton Cottage, Capt. George Macpherson, R. N.

28. At Prestonpans, Ann Comb, daughter of the late James Comb, Esq.

-In James's Square, Edinburgh, Mrs Mary Hardy, relict of Mr James Gilchrist, navy agent London.

29. At Bandirran, aged seven years, William, only son of J. M. Nairn, Esq. of Dunsinane.

At Burghead, the Rev. Lewis Gordon, D. D. one of the ministers of Elgin, in the 76th year of his age, and the 55th of his ministry.

30. At Burnside of Dalbeattie, David Copland, Esq. late of Gregory.

At Burrowmuirhead, Mrs Janet Spottiswood, spouse of Mr John Robertson of Lawhead.

-At Paddington, William Ellice, Esq. in the 41st year of his age.

July 1. At Kielburn, parish of Laurencekirk, after ten years confinement by rheumatism, which she bore with exemplary fortitude and resignation, Elizabeth, wife of Lieut. Scott, half-pay 62d regiment.

2. Mrs Grizel Smart, relict of Mr William Cunningham, Haddington.

3. At her house in Berkeley Square, London, the Dowager Countess of Albemarle, in the 824 year of her age.

- At Clifton, at the advanced age of 93 years, William Compton, Esq. LL.D. Chancellor of the diocese of Ely.

4. In Cavendish Square, London, after a sudden relapse of illness, the Countess of Brownlow. -At Glasgow, Adam Graham, Esq. of Craig

allian.

- At Edinburgh, Mr Charles Moodie, of the Auditor's Office, Exchequer.

5. At Abbey St Bathan's, Mr Andrew Wallace, teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh.

-At the manse of Liff, William Scott, second son of the Rev. George Addison.

7. At London, in his 81st year, Sir George Wood, Knt. late one of the Barons of the Court of Exchequer.

8. At her house in Brighton, Amelia Charlotte, second daughter of the late Archibald Grant, of Pittencrieff, Esq.

-At Greenock, Thomas Ramsay, Esq. in the 85th year of his age.

-At Wakefield, Janet, wife of Daniel Maude, Esq. and second daughter of the late Geo. Munro, Esq. of Calderbank.

- From inflammation, after an illness of two days, George Earl of Tyrone, eldest son of the Marquis of Waterford.

9. At Mortimer Cottage, Berkshire, Elizabeth, relict of the late David Murray, Esq. brother of Lord Elibank, and daughter of the late Right Hon. Thomas Harley.

At Fort William, Mr Thomas Gillespie, tenant at Ardachy, one of the most extensive storefarmers in the north of Scotland.

-At Wellington Place, Leith, Mr James Marr, corn merchant.

- At Dalkeith, Mrs Ann Aitken, wife of Mr John Grey, merchant there.

At sea, on his passage home from Jamaica, Colin Stewart Bruce, Esq. of Seaforth.

-At Balfron manse, the Rev. James Jeffrey, in the 75th year of his age, and 37th of his mini

stry.

11. At Newck, Mrs James Haig..

-After a long and painful illness, Wm. Henderson, Esq. of Nunholm.

- At Inverary, Major General Dugald Camp

bell.

July 11. At Glasgow, Mr John Thomson, merchant, aged 71.

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At Calder Hall, near Carlisle, Isabella Anne, eldest daughter of General Sir R. Emilius Irving, Bart. late of Woodhouse.

13. At Ironside House, Abbeyhill, Edinburgh, Ann Somerville, aged 73, relict of the late Mr David Gray, merchant, Edinburgh.

-At Freeland, Penelope Leslie, daughter of Major Walker.

At Leith, William Henderson, Esq. of Bar dister, Shetland, in the 69th year of his age."

14. At Edinburgh, Mrs Margaret Macdonald, wife of Captain John Macdonald, barrack-master, Edinburgh, and youngest sister of Sir William Bulkeley Hughes of Plascoch, county of Anglesea, North Wales.

15. At Edinburgh, Gilbert Hutcheson, Esq. Depute Judge Advocate for Scotland.

--At the Cottage of Rockhall, Mary Anne, third daughter of Alex. Grierson, Esq. younger of Lag.

- At Brunstain, Mrs Brown, wife of Mr John Brown, farmer there.

17. At Meadow Place, Edinburgh, Mrs Catharine Webster, widow of the Rev. John Webster. - At Ploughlands, near Edinburgh, Mary, daughter of Alexander Fraser, Esq. accountant.

At Walker-Street, Edinburgh, George Sandilands, Esq.

19. Charles Louis Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, of Bridge-Hill House, in Kent, and of the Chateau de Labrede, near Bourdeaux, South of France. He was formerly a distinguished officer in the French service, of an ancient and noble family of Guienne, and descended of the illustrious Montesquieu, one of the greatest ornaments of French literature. The Baron settled in Kent, after the revolution of France.

-At Gogar Lodge, Mrs Dr Stewart.

At Edinburgh, the Rev. Dr Thomas Fleming, one of the ministers of Edinburgh, in the 70th year of his age, and 45th of his ministry.

20. At Ruthwell Cottage, Mrs Ann M Murdo, relict of the Rev. George Duncan, minister of Lochrutton, in the 79th year of her age.

21. At the Priory, Stanmore, Lady Jane Gordon, eldest daughter of the Earl of Aberdeen.

- At Aberdeen, Mrs Ann Garioch, widow of the late Dr Walker of Laurence kirk.

22. At Falmouth, in the 58th year of his age, George Munro, Esq. of the colony of Berbice. 25. In Charlotte-Street, Ayr, Andrew Belch, Esq. writer in Ayr.

24. At Sansonate, Mexico, George Cochran, Esq. of the house of Robert Cochran and Sons, Paisley.

25. At Edinburgh, Major James Ballantyne, of Holylee.

27. Her Grace the Duchess of Gordon, after a most severe illness of above twelve months, which she bore with the greatest fortitude and resignation.

Lately. At Drayten, near Abingdon, Berks, aged 85, William Hayward, Esq. In his lifetime, Mr H. had distributed many thousands among his relatives, nevertheless, he died worth £.400,000, the greater part of which he has left among them, many of whom are in indigent circumstances.

-On his passage to Europe, for the recovery of health, Ensign George Huntly Gordon, of the Hon. East-India Company's service, youngest son of Lieutenant-General Gordon Cumming Skene, of Pitlurg and Dyce.

-Off Algiers, suddenly, Mr Wm. Rogers, Master of his Majesty's ship Glasgow.

- At his house in Duke-Street, St James's London, Major-General Macquarrie, late Gover nor of New South Wales.

J. Ruthven & Son, Printers.

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*The Correspondents of the EDINBURGH MAGAZINE and LITERARY MISCELLANY are respectfully requested to transmit their Communications for the Editor to ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & COMPANY, Edinburgh, or to HURST, ROBINSON, & COMPANY, London; to whom also orders for the Work should be addressed.

Printed by J. Ruthven & Son.

THE

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE,

AND

LITERARY MISCELLANY.

SEPTEMBER 1824.

A DEFENCE OF THE LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, ON MIRACLES.

"The scoffers who have laughed at the miracles are unacquainted with this faith of ours; the unction of the spirit which teaches us does not render them docile, and hence all things must be natural to men unacquainted with what is supernatural. They will descend with Spinoza to the vis medicatrix naturæ, and search for the attributes of the Divinity in the inertness or volubility of matter,—or, with Hobbes or Hume, they will disarm the Deity of his power, cast down with human liberty the essential land-marks of right and wrong, and, with Rousseau, doubt, or, with the sage of Ferney, laugh at all that is sacred in the Gospel dispensation. They will do this, and, with a profaneness and insolence peculiar to infidelity, affix names of reproach to characters the most blameless, filling their reviews, or pamphlets, with a silly bombast, which a man of letters, or a Christian, can scarcely peruse, but which gratifies the appetite of the unlettered and profane; as Lactantius has it,' omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque inversis quae sub verbis latitantia cernunt.' J. K. L.

To the Editor of the Edinburgh Magazine.

SIR, Audi alteram partem is a maxim which those who conduct the periodical press will, I trust, always keep in view; and presuming that your respectable Miscellany is open to those who may consider themselves aggrieved in its columns, I mean to offer some observations, by way of vindication, on the article entitled “ Irish Miracles," inserted in your Numbers for March and April last, professing to be a critique on my hasty literary trifle in the shape of a letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Review. Had the reviewer confined his remarks to my proposition, that miraculous powers had never ceased, and would probably always continue in the Christian church, I would have been contented to have passed him over in silence; but as he has been pleased to make an unfair attack upon Catholics, and their religion, it becomes necessary to endeavour to counteract the baneful effects which his misrepresentations may produce in the minds of such of your readers as may be unfortunately prepossessed against both, by exposing them in their true colours.

The reviewer, no doubt, occasionally displays some sound sense, and a little good feeling, but his imagination seems to be so bewildered at the very idea of miracles happening in any Christian country, that he frequently lays aside both, and thus involves himself in the greatest contradictions. He shews, for instance, his good sense in ridiculing the "worse than trifling" plan of those Protestants who "deny the fact of the cures," who " grasp at the certificates of the physicians," and who "try the said cures by the tests of what they deem true miracles ;" and he indicates his good feeling, when I i

VOL. XV.

he says, that "the absurdity of the Protestants consists in attempting to invalidate the fact, (of the cures,) by imputing to the patients, the witnesses, and the DIGNITARIES of the Roman Catholic Church, a duplicity, hypocrisy, and fraud, which charity scorns and liberality rejects." Yet, a little before, he had designated the miracles, as "barefaced imposture ;" and towards the end of his article, as if forgetting what he had previously written, he gravely talks of the "manner in which the whole affair was got up and carried on at Ranelagh !"

In the reviewer's apprehension, the "ground" which both Catholics and Protestants have taken up is "unsatisfactory;" for the Catholics are said, "as usual," to mix " a little bit of sophistry" in their argument, by maintaining, what appears to the reviewer a very extraordinary proposition, that an incurable disease cannot be cured by natural means; and the Protestants, instead of denying "this conclusion," which the reviewer wisely says "is unwarranted, on the principles of fair reasoning, analogy, and experience,” are guilty of the "absurdity" of calling the fact of the cures, and the evidence on which they are founded, in question-of trying the miracles by tests,—and of having recourse to the most uncharitable insinuations! He therefore laments that "the Protestants have not entrenched themselves within those principles from which they could not be driven by all the learning, subtilty, and force of the enemy ;" and, of course, like a skilful general, he proposes to erect an impregnable fortress of principles, out of which neither learning, power, nor stratagem, shall be able to drive him. He disclaims all unfair dealing; and, "casting away from his mind," with the candour, magnanimity, and charity of a Christian hero, the unworthy insinuations of Protestants, "which charity scorns and liberality rejects," and "admitting the cures as told by the patients themselves, and their witnesses," he proceeds to shew, that these cures, to all their supposed extent, however wonderful, are not supernatural." But before entering upon his mighty task, the reviewer, as if afraid of the solidity of the structure he is about to raise, has the singular precaution to intimate, that, although the "cures were sequences of the Prince's prayers, and the sacrifice of the mass, AS MUCH SO AS EFFECTS ARE OF CAUSES, yet it would not necessarily follow that these have been brought about by the interposition of Heaven, through the instrumentality of the Prince, or his power with God!!"

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To establish his position, that the cures in question are not supernatural, the reviewer first considers the "infallible tests of true miracles,"-secondly, the objects for which the cures were wrought; and, by the application of certain principles deduced from these, to the cures before us," he concludes, "that there was nothing supernatural in them whatever;" a method, he observes, which rids us at once of all the obstacles "about the efficacy of prayer, the efficacy of the mass, the power of working miracles being continued in the Church of Rome, conspiracy and fraud, and natural causes, and brings the question to a short and satisfactory issue!" The main object of the reviewer's plan, which he endeavours to support by a strange misapplication of Scripture, seems to be, not so much to controvert my proposition, (which indeed were impossible,) as to shew that miraculous powers cannot now exist in the Catholic Church, on account of certain alleged additions to, and subtractions from Scripture, which the reviewer fancies to exist. Yet he does not pretend that any of the reformed churches either had, have, or will have these powers conferred on them, and therefore the truth of their doctrines is to be ascertained by an absolute negation of miracles, contrary to the opinion of Grotius, Paley, and the other learned advocates of revelation, who consider miracles as the criterion of truth!

In his borrowed enumeration of the tests of true miracles, the reviewer is undoubtedly correct; for as, under the old law, the workers of false miracles were to be known by their attempt to withdraw God's chosen people from his worship, and to induce them to "go after other gods,"-so, under the New Testament dispensation, the false Christs and false prophets, who are to shew great signs and wonders, will be recognised by their open hostility to Christ, and by their denying that he has come in the flesh. But as the tests

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