In Toplady's creed there were no venial sins, any more than in Sir George Mackenzie's, who used this impious argument for the immortality of the soul, that it must needs be immortal because the smallest sin, “the least peccadillo against the Almighty who is Infinite cannot be proportionably punished in the swift glass of man's short life.” And this man, said the Doctor, laying his finger upon Toplady's book, thinks himself a Christian, and reads the Bible and believes it! He prints and vouches for the authenticity of a painter's bill at Cirencester delivered in to the Churchwarden of an adjacent parish in these words:—Mr. Charles Ferebee, Churchwarden of Siddington to Joseph Cook, Debtor: To mending the Commandments, altering the Belief, and making a new Lord's Prayer £1. 1_s._ The Painter made no such alteration in the Christian creed, as he himself did, (when he added to it) that the Almighty has predestined the infinitely greater number of his creatures to eternal misery! God, says good old Adam Littleton, made no man purposely to damn him. Death was one of man's own inventions, and will be the reward of his evil actions. The Roman Catholics have a legend from which we may see what proportion of the human race they suppose to be redeemed from perdition: it relates that on the day of St. Bernard's death there died threescore thousand persons, of whom only four souls were saved, the Saint's being one;—the salvage therefore is one in fifteen thousand! But one legend may be set against another, and Felix Faber the Monk of Ulm gives us one of better import, when he relates the story of a lovely child who in her twelfth year was stricken with the plague, during the great pestilence which in the middle of the fourteenth century swept off a greater portion of the human race than is ever known to have perished in any similar visitation. As the disease increased upon her, she became more beautiful and more cheerful, looking continually upward and rejoicing; for she said she saw that Heaven was open and innumerable lights flowing upward thither, as in a stream,—which were the souls of the elect, ascending as they were released. When they who stood beside her bed were silent and seemed as if they gave no credit to her words, she told them that what she saw was no delusion, and added in token of its sure truth, that her own death would take place that night, and her father die on the third day following: she then pointed to seven persons foretelling to each the day of their decease, and named some others who were not present, who would in like manner be cut off by the plague, saying at what time each of them would expire; and in every instance, according to the legend, the prediction was punctually fulfilled. This is a tale which may in all its parts be true; for such predictions at such a time, when whole cities were almost depopulated by the pestilence, were