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THE

CHRISTIAN OBSERVER,

CONDUCTED BY

MEMBERS

OF THE

ESTABLISHED CHURCH.

FOR THE YEAR 1821.

BEING

THE TWENTIETH VOLUME.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY ELLERTON AND HENDERSON,
Johnson's Court, Fleet Street

PUBLISHED BY HATCHARD & SON, 187, PICCADILLY; TO WHOM COMMUNICATIONS
(POST PAID) MAY BE ADDRESSED; AND OF WHOM MAY BE HAD THE PRECEDING
NUMBERS OF this work, EITHER SEPARATELY OR BOUND UP IN VOLUMES.

SOLD ALSO

IN LONDON, BY SEELEY, FLEET STREET; AND SHERWOOD, NEELY, AND JONES,
PATERNOSTER ROW: AT OXFORD, BY PARKER: AT CAMBRIDGE, BY Deighton,
AND NICHOLSON: AT BATH, BY BINNS: AT BRISTOL, BY MILLS, AND BULGIN: AT
EDINBURGH, BY THOMSONS, BROTHERS; OLIPHANT; AND WAUGH AND INNES:
AT GLASGOW BY OGLE: AT DUBLIN, BY COLBERT:

AND BY ALL OTHER BOOKSELLERS, AND BY THE NEWSMEN,
THROUGHOUT THE KINGDOM.

JODLEIAL

LIBRARY

PREFACE.

We have been accustomed, at the close of our annual labours, to advert to a few of the principal topics which have engaged our attention during the year. For such a purpose the last twelve months would furnish many fruitful and instructive themes :-Abroad, the political struggles which have occurred in various parts of the world, and particularly the momentous events in Naples, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and South America; the progress of liberty, and, we grieve to add, the still greater progress of licentiousness, with the corresponding growth of a spirit of arbitrary interference with the rights of independent states; and the death of that singularly gifted and singularly fated Individual who had so rapidly subjected almost the whole of Europe to his sway, and whose end has left an imperishable lesson to posterity:-at home, the alarming animosities respecting the late Queen, with which the year was ushered in; the sudden and striking Death of their Object; the splendid and imposing ceremonial of the Coronation; the recent occurrences in Ireland; the many important questions which have been agitated, affecting, not only the commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United Kingdom, but the moral and religious welfare of all classes of its inhabitants; and lastly, what to every Christian mind must be a subject of intense interest, the general progress of piety, and the proceedings of those numerous institutions whose success involves the extension of the Redeemer's kingdom throughout the world.

Such are some of the subjects on which the memoranda of the past year would naturally lead us to expatiate; but, in closing our TWENTIETH volume, we feel inclined to take into view a yet larger portion of human history, and to cast back a glance on a fifth part of a century, now" numbered with the years beyond the flood," during which the Christian Observer has contributed in its proportion towards the welfare or the injury of mankind.

Under a deep impression of our responsibility, we look back, not without trembling, to the accumulated pages of our volumes, considering into how many thousands of families they must have found their way, and what effect, during so many years, they may have produced on numbers who are now acting their part in the important scenes of life, or are gone to their eternal account, to answer for what they have read, as we shall have to do for what we have written. Before that awful tribunal our only

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