This was a monstrous Act of Parliament; but when we take into consideration the sneaking perfidy, coarse brutalities, and bloodthirsty cruelties practised by Papists during late years in Ireland, in Scotland, and even in England itself,—when we remember that Papists in foreign lands were concocting dark intrigues against the British throne and British nation, recently rescued from the tyranny of papal domination,—and when we remember further, that, as lately as the year 1692, De Grandval, a captain of French dragoons, instigated by the Popish King James, had entered into a conspiracy against the life of King William, and had been shot for his intended assassination,—and that, in 1696, there had been another more widely ramified Popish plot for the same infernal purpose, which resulted in three of the conspirators being executed at Tyburn,—we are prepared to understand why Papists were excluded from the benefits of the Toleration Act, and why they were made the subjects of the legalised persecution of the act of 1699, “for the further preventing of the growth of Popery.” Abstractedly considered, the act was monstrous, and merits reprobation; but severe maladies sometimes need severe remedies to effect their cure. Our space forbids any further review of ecclesiastical affairs during William and Mary’s reign; and we must now content ourselves with miscellaneous notices of this eventful period in English history. In 1690 occurred the death of a man whose name, despite his almost insane eccentricities, will always occupy a place in English Church annals. More than forty years had elapsed, says Macaulay, since George Fox had begun to see visions and to cast out devils. He was then a youth of pure morals and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, with the education of a labouring man, and with an intellect in the most unhappy of all states; that is to say, too much disordered for liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for bedlam. At the time, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists were refuting and reviling each other. He applied in vain for spiritual direction and consolation. One jolly old clergyman told him to smoke tobacco and to sing psalms; another counselled him to go and lose some blood. After some time, he came to the conclusion that no human being was competent to instruct him in divine things; and that the truth had been communicated to himself by direct inspiration from Heaven. He argued that, as the confusion of languages began at Babel, and that, as the persecutors of Christ put on the cross an inscription in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the knowledge of languages, and more especially of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, must be useless to a Christian minister. One of the most precious truths revealed to this new apostle was, that it was falsehood and adulation to use the second person plural instead of the second person singular. To say good morning or good evening was highly reprehensible, for the