Christian Retrospect.

We have peace in our borders, for this let us be thankful, all countries are not 80 favoured. England thanks be to a gracious Providence, has been preserved from the horrors of a civil war; of all wars the worst. France was quiet at last dates, thanks to bayonets; the quiet of a slumbering volcano. Austria is torn by intestine conflict from one end to the other of that heterogeneous and widely extended empire; thanks to the oppression which has been practised there for so long a time. “Oppression maketh a wise man mad.” Is it to be wondered at that it has made unwise men furious? The empire in danger of dismemberment, its chief city defaced and injured by a bombardment, and oh! how many of its sons destroyed in the struggle. Prussia in a bloody ferment, thanks to kingly insicnerity [sic: insincerity], and in fact the whole of Europe is in throes of politial agony with the exception of Great Britain, though page 233 attempt shave not been wanting to make it a land of blood. Thank God these have failed, and the promoters of the nefarious project been punished with both ridicule and legal penalties. What is to be the end of these things? One thing gained (and a desirable one too) will be grenter liberty to the subject. Despotism has received a deadly wound in most of the European kingdoms, if it has not received its quietus. Another will be a greater degree of religious freedom, a thing we consider of more importance than political freedom, to which it will lead, and which it will guide. In most of the kingdoms agitated hitherto, the right to worship God according to conscience has been conceded. This is as it should be, Councils, Diets, and Parliaments to the contrary notwithstanding.

The long oppressed Vaudois appear to have realized their ardent aspirations. Let us hope that it is a fact, and that they will henceforth be treated as men, and that they will be like their forefathers zenlous for the truth.

In Italy itself the most strenuous efforts have been made, and if there had been no divisions in the camp, the object of desire might have been realized. The union of the secular with the sacred in the person of “The good Pope,” has been for the present a hinderance to, if not the ruin of Italy's effort to obtain liberty. For this some of his spiritual subjects do not spare him, his goodness seems to have been in their eyes “like morning cloud or early dew.” But what could the power of such a man do? The head of the Church, so called, is but the creature of Austria, a puppet the strings of which are pulled at Vienna.