and inexperience of his antagonist, the conciliatory disposition of the seconds, the fearful consequences of his soul, if he should fall, and the withering remorse which must ever follow him if he should kill the young man. He evidently thirsted for the blood of his antagonist; but observing that his friend and the surgeon seconded my reasoning, he replied with undissembled reluctance that he gave the challenge for sufficient reasons, and that if those reasons were removed he might recall it, but not otherwise.

I passed to the other-I admonished him of the sin he was about to perpetrate. I referred to his probable domestic relations, and the allusion. touched his heart: he suddenly wiped a tear from his eye. "Yes, sir,' said he, "there are hearts which would break if they knew I was here." I referred to my conversation with the seconds and the other principal, and remarked that nothing was now necessary to effect a reconciliation but a retraction of the language which had offended his antagonist. "Sir," replied he, planting his foot firmly on the ground, and assuming a look which would have been sublime in a better cause,- "Sir, I have uttered nothing but the truth respecting that man, and though I sink into the grave, I will not sanction his villainous character by a retraction."

I reasoned with increased vehemence, but no appeal to his judgment or his heart could shake his desperate firmness, and I left him with tears, which I have no doubt he would have shared under other circumstances. What could I do further? I appealed again to the first principal, but he spurned me with a cool smile. I flew to the seconds, and entreated them on any terms to adjust the matter, and save the shedding of blood. But they had already measured the ground, and were ready to place the principals. Gentlemen," said I, "the blood of this dreadful deed be upon your souls. I have acquitted myself of it." I then proceeded from the area towards my horse.

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What were my emotions as I turned away in despair! What! thought I, must the duel proceed? Is there no expedient to prevent it? In a few minutes one or both of these men may be in eternity, accursed for ever with blood-guiltiness! Can I not pluck them as brands from the burning? My spirit was in a tumult of anxiety-in a moment, and just as the principals were taking their positions, I was again on the ground. Standing on the line between them, I exclaimed, "In the name of God I adjure you to stop this murderous work—it must not, it cannot proceed." "Knock him down!" cried the elder duellist, with a fearful imprecation. exclaimed the younger, "I appreciate your motives, but I demand of you to interfere no more with our arrangements." The seconds seized me by: the arms, and compelled me to retire. But I warned them at every step. Never before did I feel so deeply the value and hazard of the human soul. My remarks were without effect, except on one of the friends of the younger principal. "This is a horrible place," said he, "I cannot endure it; and he turned with me from the scene.

66 Sir,"

"Take

"Now, then, for it," cried one of the seconds as they returned. your places." Shudderingly I hastened my pace to escape the result.

"One--two"-and the next sound was lost in the explosion of the pistols! "O God!" shrieked a voice of agony. I turned round. The younger principal, with his hand to his face, shrieked again, quivered, and fell to the ground. I rushed to him. With one hand he clung to the earth, the fingers penetrating the sod, while with the other he grasped his left jaw, which

was shattered with a horrid wound. I turned with faintness from the sight. The charge had passed through the left side of the mouth, crossing the teeth, severing the jugular, and passing out at the back part of the head, laying open entirely one side of the face and neck. In this ghastly wound, amid blood and shattered teeth, had he fixed his grasp with a tenacity which could not be removed. Bleeding profusely, and convulsive with agony, he lay for several minutes, the most frightful spectacle I had ever witnessed. The countenances of the spectators expressed a conscious relief when it was announced by the surgeon that death had ended the scene. Meanwhile the murderer and his party had left the ground.

One of the company was despatched on my horse to communicate the dreadful news to the family.-The dead young man was cleansed from his blood, and borne immediately to his carriage. I accompanied it. It stopped before a small but elegant house. The driver ran to the door and rapped. An elderly lady opened it with frantic agitation, at the instant when we were lifting the ghastly remains from the carriage. She gazed for a moment, as if thunderstruck, and fell fainting in the door-way. A servant removed her into the parlor, and as we passed with the corpse into a rear room, I observed her extended on a sofa, as pale as her hapless son.

We placed the corpse on the table, with the stiffened hand still grasping the wound, when a young lady neatly attired in white, and with a face delicately beautiful, rushed frantic into the room, and threw her arms round it, weeping with uncontrollable emotion, and exclaiming with an agony of feeling, " My brother! my dear, dear brother! Can it be-O, can it be !" The attendants tore her away. I shall never forget the look of utter wretchedness she wore as they led her away, her eyes dissolving in tears, and her bosom stained with her brother's blood.

The unfortunate young man was of New England origin. He had settled in the town of N- where his business had prospered so well, that he had invited his mother and sister to reside with him. His home, endeared by gentleness and love, and every temporal comfort, was a scene of unalloyed happiness, but in an evil hour he yielded to a local and absurd prejudice, a sentiment of honour falsely so called, which his education shou'd have taught him to despise. He was less excusable than his malicious murderer, for he had more light and better sentiments.-This one step ruined him and his happy family. He was interred the next day, with the regrets of the whole community.

His poor mother never left the house till she was carried to her grave, to be laid by the side of her son. She died after a delirious fever of two weeks' duration, throughout which she ceased not to implore the attendants, with tears, to preserve her hapless son from the hands of assassins, who, she imagined, kept him concealed for their murderous purpose. His sister still lives, but poor and broken-hearted. Her beauty and energies have been wasted by sorrow, and she is dependent on others for her daily bread. I have heard some uncertain reports of his antagonist, the most probable of which is, that he died three years after, of the yellow fever, at New Orleans, raging with the horrors of remorse. Such was the local estimation of this bloody deed, that scarcely an effort was made to bring him to justice. Alas, for the influence of fashionable opinion! It can silence by its dictates the laws of man and of God, and exalt murder to the glory of chivalry.

When we consider how many hearts of mothers, sisters, and wives have been made to bleed by this cruel and deadly custom, shall we not invoke the influence of woman to abolish it? It rests upon an incidental state of public opinion, a fictitious sentiment of honour. Whose influence is more effectual in correcting or promoting such sentiments than woman's? Human laws have failed to correct it, but her influence can do it. Let her, then, disdain the duellist as stained with blood. Let her repel him from her society, as one who has wrongly escaped the gallows. Let her exalt, all the benign influence of her virtues and her charms to bring into disgrace the murderous, sentiment which tolerates him, and it cannot be long before the distinction between the duellist and the assassin will cease.

ON THE ROMISH CONTROVERSY.

WHEN the controversy against the Church of Rome is separately directed against the greater number of her numerous errors and corruptions, the contest is much the same as that waged against any other body of professing Christians, who might hold one or more of those separate errors, or others of a different character. Of course, such a course is useful, and our arguments may be directed against Mariolatry, or Purgatory, or the Doctrine of the Mass, or ony other error; and may be conclusive on that point against Rome, or any other church in that point agreeing with Rome. But each and every one of these errors are also part of a compact whole; and no Romanist could recant and reject them without abandoning that " masterpiece of Satan," the elaborated system of Tridentine Romanism.

That system depends on the three principles-the supremacy of the bishop of Rome, the existence of an infallible authority in the church, and the authority of tradition.

The first of these principles is contended for on the authority of Scripture, by misapplying the declaration, Thou art Peter-the power of binding and loosing the commission to feed the sheep and the lambs, &c.—all connected with the assumed fact (which is historically false), that St. Peter was ever bishop of Rome. But the inferences from the principle obviously are, the necessity of communion with the church of Rome-the duty of implicit obedience the right and duty to persecute recusants, and to control princes and kingdoms.

The second principle is contended for from the sense put into Christ's promises to his church-from the Scriptures not being a sufficient guide without an interpreter-and from the authority conferred on St. Peter, at the same time that Romanists widely and irreconcileably differ as to the seat of this infallible authority. But hence the Scriptures have been withheld, or their perusal limited and discouraged, where it was practicable, and the dictum of an infallibly interpreting church substituted for them.

The third principle, the authority of tradition, is urged on the ground that the Scriptures are obscure that they need an interpreter-that many things were written, but only handed down by oral tradition. But, even granting all this, we here want an infallible authority to distinguish between them and false tradition.

Hence, in those very particulars in which consists the very specialty of

C C

the Romish controversy, we are driven into the perpetual circle of the authority of the church founded on Scripture, and the truth and teaching of of Scripture founded on the authority of the church. The Romanist will shift about from one point of the circle to another, as best suits his purpose. Let us rest on the supreme authority of Scripture, "what may be read therein, or proved thereby."

F.

ENCROACHMENTS OF PAPACY UPON THE IRISH CHURCH. (From the Achill Missionary Herald.)

INDEPENDENT as our Church originally was, and though long she struggled to preserve her independence, she in the long run allowed herself to be deprived of it, though centuries later than the sister church of Britain. "Evil communications corrupt good manners." It was so with the ancient and apostolically constituted church of Ireland. Rome, by getting so good and firm a footing in a neighbouring island, had become her next-door neighbour, and thus, at length, opened up the way to a mutual communication and intercourse, the effects of which came by a slow, but steady progress, to be gradually visible in the loss of much of her primitive orthodoxy of belief and purity of worship, with the introduction of many superstitions and practical corruptions. A great help to all this was the injuries which the church sustained from the destructive invasions of the Danes and others, in the ninth, and tenth, and eleventh centuries-injuries which had well nigh amounted to the very extirpation of Christianity from our land. But the first successful step towards the consummation of our country's ecclesiastical degradation was in the year 1152, when, at the Kells convocation, and in opposition to the remonstrance of others of the brethren, the Archbishops of Armagh, Tuam, Cashel, and Dublin consented to receive, at the hands of Cardinal Papero, four palls, sent them by Pope Eugenius the Third. And the great climax of it was twenty years after, when, at another synod assembled in the city of Cashel, Henry the Second produced from Popes Adrian and Alexander those bulls so well known to the readers of the Irish history as what conferred upon that monarch the sovereignty of Ireland, upon condition that he would help to purify her from her alleged ecclesiastical disorders, and subject every house to the yearly pension of a penny to the chair of St. Peter.

While we regard the submission at Kells as the first decisive step towards this unhappy result, we must bear in mind that it was preceded by ceratin preparatory steps, in which the Irish hierarchy would appear to have been more passive than otherwise. It was no wonder that the extent of injury which the Irish Church had sustained from the invasions referred to, in the destruction of her temples, colleges, literature, religious institutions and other privileges, should-when contrasted with the comparative prosperity of the English Church, now Romish-incline her members to a greater readiness to submit to a connexion with the latter, than if their own Church had lived on in the undiminished enjoyment of all her native resources. But this was not simply the doing of the clergy, at least of the native portion of them, or of those who in their ordinations and consecrations were so.

The amount of success that attended their ministerial labours in the conversion of their Fagan invaders-while on the one hand it seemed to promise a restoration of their former prosperity-on the other hand contributed much to the destruction of their ecclesiastical independence; for these new and foreign accessions to their ranks, so far from being jealous of a connexion with the Anglo-Roman Church, or conformity to its ways, rather courted, for various reasons, both the one and the other, and were mainly instrumental in the first approximations to both.-What an approximation was the appointment by a Danish king of Dublin, in the 11th century, of one of his countrymen (Donagh) to the bishoprick of that city-and he consecrated to that office, not by any of the bishops of the Irish Church, but by the Pope's obedient Servant, the Archbishop of Canterbury! A wheel once set moving on an inclined plane is not easily stopped. Patrick, the next in succession to Donagh, was similarly consecrated, with a "promise of obedience, in all things relating to the Christian religion," to his most Rev. consecrator (Lanfranc) and his successors. Lanfranc having thus obtained in Ireland a footing similar to what the Pope had secured in England between four and five hundred years before by the establishment of Augustine in the See now held by that prelate himself-being a man of cleverness and address he knew well how to work himself into the good graces of the Irish kings, and through them advanced the interests of Romanism in the country which they ruled. His successor was Anselm, equally clever and successful in pushing on the cause they had so much at heart. When they had succeeded in getting into their hands the consecration of an Irish Metropolitan, with his consequent submission to the jurisdiction of the English Primates, they had not much difficulty in securing a Legate in the person of another Irish bishop, but a foreigner, and the bishop of a Norman settlement, Gillebert of Limerick. This paved the way for further encroachments, and rendered the Irish clergy, in general, more accessible to the emissaries of Rome; and so things went on bit by bit, Rome gradually increasing the number of her adherents, until she further succeeded, early in the 12th century, in getting even the ancient See of Armagh into the keeping of one of the most zealous of them--Malachy O'Morgain. Malachy went so far in his exhibition of attachment to the Papal See, as immediately, on his elevation, to go himself in person to Rome, and apply for an archiepiscopal pall to Pope Innocent the Second. The Pontiff, however, seeing that his cause had not yet made sufficient progress in Ireland to bestow that favour at once, deferred doing so till a future period, when he hoped the application for it would be more an act of the body of the hierarachy than of an individual; and though he did not himself live to give it on such terms, no more than about nine years elapsed from h's death, when one of his successors had the satisfaction of conferring that badge of submission to his supremacy on the four Irish metropolitans, all in a batch. Then followed the additional security to this submission by the stipulation with Henry, by which also it was rendered not only more extensive and compact, but also more corrupting in its moral influence upon the whole character of the Irish Church, though as Romish writers have been forced to confess, and as their own authentic documents are found to testify-still opposed, till towards the dawn of the Reformation, by a few isolated but faithful little bands of witnesses, not included within the pale of the English settlements.

Thus do we trace the progress and consummation of an unholy UNION