I am not meaning, however, to utter any opinion whatever on the religious position of the two great parties. It is sufficient for entire sympathy with the royal Swede, that he fought for the freedom of conscience. Many an enlightened Roman Catholic, supposing only that he were not a Papist, would have given his hopes and his confidence to the Protestant king.] in modern days, fighting for the violated rights of conscience against perfidious despots and murdering oppressors, exhibit to us the incarnations of Wordsworth's principle. Such wars are of rare occurrence. Fortunately they are so; since, under the possible contingencies of human strength and weakness, it might else happen that the grandeur of the principle should suffer dishonor through the incommensurate means for maintaining it. But such cases, though emerging rarely, are always to be reserved in men's minds as ultimate appeals to what is most divine in man. Happy it is for human welfare that the blind heart of man is a thousand times wiser than his understanding. An _arrière pensée_ should lie hidden in all minds--a holy reserve as to cases which _may_ arise similar to such as HAVE arisen, where a merciful bloodshed [Footnote: "_Merciful bloodshed_"--In reading either the later religious wars of the Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as indirectly opening the channels for benign principles of morality through endless generations of men. Here especially he will have read one justification of Wordsworth's bold doctrine upon war. Thus far he will destroy a wisdom working from afar, but, as regards the immediate present, he will be apt to adopt the ordinary view, namely, that in the Old Testament severity prevails approaching to cruelty. Yet, on consideration, he will be disposed to qualify this opinion. He will have observed many indications of a relenting kindness and a tenderness of love in the Mosaical ordinances. And recently there has been suggested another argument tending to the same conclusion. In the last work of Mr. Layard ('Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, 1853') are published some atrocious monuments of the Assyrian cruelty in the treatment of military captives. In one of the plates of Chap xx., at page 456, is exhibited some unknown torture applied to the head, and in another, at page 458, is exhibited the abominable process, applied to two captives, of flaying them alive. One such case had been previously recorded in human literature, and illustrated by a plate. It occurs in a Dutch voyage to the islands of the East. The subject of the torment in that case as a woman who had been charged with some act of infidelity to her husband. And the local government, being indignantly