Mutability is written upon the face of all earthly things, whether they be good or evil in themselves. We progress and we retrograde according as influences act upon us. If we would judge in candour, we cannot take any class of facts of things or persons by themselves--all are parts of one whole; but how made one, is a speculation of a deep philosophy. It is hard to place upon the map of understanding the hidden causes, and their relation to each other, which make up the general social aspect at any one period. However we may advance, in knowledge, however that knowledge may operate as a check, mankind are in heart intrinsically the same they ever were--they have within them the same passions, the same instincts; and though we are daily pronouncing, as we look back upon past ages, that such and such things never can be again, that we cannot have the same superstitions, nor exercise the same cruelties, whatever we may hope, we do in fact say but this, that the identical facts and identical personages will not come again upon the stage of life. Of this we may be sure, that under certain influences, always within the sphere of our liabilities, the passions of men will lead them to the same excesses, the same fanaticism, the same crimes. The plot of the drama may be somewhat varied, or even new, but tragedy and comedy will still designate the play of human actions. We may have crusades without a Holy Land to recover--as we have had a Bartholomew massacre; we have had, and may have again, in civilised Europe, the political massacres which, in reading history in our closets in our own peaceful homes, we had fondly deemed passed away for ever. Fanaticism in religion and politics is still a human instinct--the sleeping volcano in every man's breast, though he knows it not, believes it not. "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" Who can answer for himself? It is wiser, far better to bow the head in humility--"Lead us not into temptation." As the times are, as people are, in peace or in suffering, will be their religious hopes or their religious fears--a gloom or a comfort, a wholesome practical virtue or a feverish excitement, a personal selfishness, a frenzy of despair--intolerance and persecution the result. The civil troubles of England made our religion, or that which passes for religion among the masses, gloomy and morose on the one hand, and, on the other, an awful conceit of self-righteousness. There was the asceticism of the early ages, but in a new form: there were no deserts, no dens into which fanatics could fly from worldly pleasure: compelled to live in its sight, they persecuted it to the death, and took their own insane pleasure in denying pleasure to others. General distress will naturally engender unwholesome excitement, and it will infect invariably the religious mind. These remarks are not superfluous--they arise out of the subject. Mrs Jameson herself sees analogies of times, which it may be worth our