Nevertheless, while the Port Royal divines and their friends are perused with pleasure and advantage, and while the reader is often inclined to admit that in depth, fervor, and solemnity of religious feeling, in richness and elevation of thought, in holy abstraction from earthly interests, in devotedness of zeal, and in the exemplification of some difficult duties, they much surpass the divines of England, he still feels, and sometimes when he can hardly assign the grounds of his dissatisfaction, that a vein of illusiveness runs through every page. Although the great principles of religion are much more distinctly and more feelingly produced than generally they are in the writings of the fathers, and though the evidence of genuine and exalted piety is abundant and unquestionable; yet is there an infection of _idealism_, tainting every sentiment; a mist of the imagination, obscuring every doctrine. In turning from the French writers of this school to our own standard divines, the reader is conscious of a sensation that might be compared to that felt by one who escapes into pure air from a chamber in which, though it was possible to live, respiration was oppressed by the presence of mephitic exhalations. Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to which they so fondly clung, the piety of these admirable men failed in the force necessary to carry them triumphantly through the conflict with their atrocious enemy—"the Society." They were themselves in too many points vulnerable, to close fearlessly with their adversary; and they grasped the sword of the Spirit in too infirm a manner to be able to drive home a deadly thrust. Had it been otherwise, had they been free, not merely from the shackle of submission to Rome, but free from the debilitating influence of mysticism and monkish notions, their moral force, their talent, their learning, and their self-devotion, might have sufficed, first, for the overthrow of their immediate antagonist, whose bad cause, and worse arguments were hardly supported against the augmenting weight of public opinion, even by the whole power of the court. Then might they, not improbably, have supplied the impulse necessary to achieve the emancipation of the Gallican church from the thraldom of Rome; an event which seemed, more than once, to be on the eve of accomplishment. And if, at the same moment, the Protestants of France had received just that degree of indulgence—of mere sufferance—which was demanded, we do not say by justice and mercy, but by a politic regard to the national welfare; and if by these means a substantially sound, though perhaps partial reform had taken place within the dominant church, and dissent been allowed to spread itself amicably through the interstices of the ecclesiastical structure; if religious liberty, not indeed in the temper of republican contumacy, but in the Christian spirit of quiet and grateful humility, had taken root in France, is it too much to say that