NORTHERN WORTHIES. ANNE CLIFFORD, COUNTESS OF DORSET, PEMBROKE, AND MONTGOMERY. 66 JOHN KNOX, during his second residence at Geneva, put forth "The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment* of women." It was aimed at that Mary of England who was persuaded by priests and other ill-disposed persons to attempt the re-establishment of what she conceived to be the CHURCH, by the exertion of her secular power. John Knox ought to have written against the monstrous regiment of priests," which in kingdoms as in private families, is always most powerful over women, because women are more docile, more confiding, have a much greater yearning after heaven than men. Moreover, they are almost sole patentees of the virtue of self-denial, and if once they can be convinced that humanity, pity, toleration, or what you will, is a self-indulgence, and a self-seeking, it follows as necessarily as U after Q, that cruelty, hard-heartedness, and intolerance, are a mortification VOL. II. *i. e. the Government. B of the flesh, meritorious exactly in proportion as it is painful. The priests of some religions undertake, for a consideration, to bear the sins of such of the laity as put trust in them. They may perhaps find, at last, that they have spoken more truth than they meant to do.* It is no small portion of the sins of the earth, *These petulant crudities of indigested thoughts from the prima viæ of reflection, these temerities of interpocular talk, vex my spirit in dear Hartley's writings. So here. In abusing the Priest he at once justifies the principle or assumption by which he deludes, and removes all the mischief consequent upon the delusion, that is, makes it practically no delusion at all. So, too, Southey has taken pains to quiet the universal conscience, by the assurance that prayers offered to the Virgin Mary, or St. Boniface, will be equally acceptable to God, and bring down the same blessing, as those offered to the Omniscient through the only Mediator. But in this charity to the poor benighted Papists, what a cruel bill of indictment is brought against Wickliff and Luther, yea, against John and Paul !-S. T. C. The heresy against which these earnest and suggestive remarks are directed, is that which denies the existence, despairs of the attainment, or slights the value of objective truth, in things spiritual, making the whole efficacy of religious observances to consist in intention. This inference however was not present to the mind of the writer when he penned the passage in question. He prayed sincerely, and in his way contended earnestly for the prevalence of truth over error; to which he would have attributed an immense importance upon the whole, however charitably, however hopefully, he may have looked upon the case of individuals. With Dr. Arnold, and many, very many pious thoughtful Protestants, both before and after the Reformation, he held the Christian Priesthood, to be in reality, as in name, a Presbyterate, ministerial and pastoral merely. To sacerdotal pretension, under every disguise, he was irreconcilably opposed, as well on religious as political |