Great projects are not to be accomplished without many disappointments. The first attempt is seldom the successful one. In spiritual things, this may be regarded as the established rule, or law, in accordance to which the Head of the church controls while he purifies his servants' zeal. They are made to feel their weakness. Where they expect honour they meet with opposition, perhaps with scorn. Their favourite plans are those which bring, for a time, the least success and the greatest anxiety. Thus they are taught the great lesson of their own weakness, and the only less important one of the insignificance of others in whom they trusted. And thus, too, in the painful but salutary school of adversity, they learn that the highest wisdom is, after all, simply to accept the cross of Christ, and to cast themselves on the unerring guidance of the Holy Spirit; and, in a word, "to cease from man." The new governor, General Macquarie, had arrived out a few months before Mr. Marsden. He was an able commander, and had the good of the colony much at heart; and he had a task of no little difficulty to perform, in reducing what was still a penal colony, just recovering from a state of insurrection, into order and obedience. His powers were great; he considered them absolute. Mr. Marsden, too, was justly tenacious of public morality and virtue, and still more so of the spiritual independence of the ministerial character. It seems that the rights of the governor on the one side, and those of the ministers of religion on the other, had not been accurately defined by the government at home, and thus a collision between two minds so firm and so resolute as those of the governor and Mr. Marsden, was inevitable. Occasions of difference soon arose; the governor anxious, we doubt not, to raise their character and elevate their position, with a view to the future welfare of the colony, placed several of the convicts on the magisterial bench, treated them with respect, and even invited them to his table. With these men, Mr. Marsden refused, as a magistrate, to act, or to meet them in society on equal terms. Some of them were notoriously persons of a bad and vicious life; while none of them, he thought, could, without gross impropriety, punish others judicially for the infraction of that law which they themselves had broken. He would gladly have resigned his magisterial office, but the governor knew the worth of his services, and refused to accept his resignation, which was repeatedly tendered. The new magistrates were of course offended, and became his bitter foes; and some of them harassed him for twenty years with slanders and libellous insults, until at length an appeal to the laws of his country vindicated his reputation and silenced his opponents. Differences of opinion may exist as to the wisdom of Governor Macquarie's conduct in these civil affairs, and many will perhaps justify his proceedings; but every