spirit. The injured person was not to feel a malignant pleasure in the pain inflicted upon the offender; but to act only as consulting the well-being of society, desiring to protect others against the evils which had assailed himself, as well as lawfully vindicating his own reputation by the means which Providence had placed within his power.

Our Lord instances three kinds of injuries: first, affronts offered to our persons; secondly, encroachments on our property; and, thirdly, the invasion of our liberty: and, in all these cases, he commands us not to resist evil with evil, but ⚫rather to yield submissively to the provocation. But it seems very clear, that he speaks only comparatively, not as enjoining us to provoke new injuries from those who have already shewn their willingness to inflict them, but only to run the hazard of a second injury, rather than suffer ourselves to indulge a revengeful spirit, and also to endeavour, by a meek and unirritating deportment, to disarm the anger of the assailant. Our Lord himself acted thus; for, when a public of ficer struck him with the palm of his hand, he shewed himself to be neither insensible to the injury, nor eager to revenge it; but with the utmost simplicity, yet dignity, he

thus expostulated with the offender: "If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why smitest thou me?" Thus," when he was reviled, he reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously." And this his characteristic meekness is prophesied of in language very similar to that which he himself uses in the injunction under consideration; for, as he commands us, if the one cheek is smitten, to turn the other also, so he himself " gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: he hid not his face from shame and spitting."

Does it not, in conclusion, then follow, from the foregoing considerations, that a revengeful spirit was never lawful either to the Jew or to the Christian; and that our Lord, in prohibiting it, was only rendering more clear the Divine law upon the subject, divesting that law of the false interpretations put upon it by the Scribes and Pharisees, and extending its provisions, which had hitherto been viewed as applying exclusively to the case of the Jews among the members of their own nation, to the whole brotherhood of mankind?

the apostolic succession, if that be the subject of the controversy, was thereby broken: but it has been again and again shewn to be utterly false; and this upon such decisive evidence, that it seems incredible that any person, who candidly examines into the question, can do otherwise than pronounce the whole alleged transaction to have been a deliberate fabrication. Still, as it continues to be triumphantly urged by the Roman-Catholic priesthood, and is probably believed by many of the laity of that communion, it may not be improper to devote a few columns of your miscellany to the subject. Should any of your readers wish to enter more fully into the minute facts of the case, I would refer them to a work written by Dr. (now Bishop) Elrington, on the validity of English ordination, in answer to Mr. Gandolphy, a Roman-Catholic priest, who saw fit in 1815 to publish a sermon from John x. I, reviving the Nag's Head controversy, which had been suffered to sleep for nearly a century. Bishop Elrington's work contains an extensive collection of most convincing authentic documents, which it might have been supposed would set the question for ever at rest. For the information of my fellowProtestants, who may not have time or taste for the discussion at large, I shall avail myself of his lordship's volume to lay before them a brief history of the trans

action.

The death of Cardinal Pole having taken place on the day which released England from the tyranny of the relentless Mary, Elizabeth, on coming to the throne, found the see of Canterbury vacant, and, anxious for the interests of that reformation in religion of which she considered herself designed by Providence to be the guardian, made it her earliest care to fill that important station with a man whose learning, moderation, and firmness might qualify him for such a trust. Her own inclinations must naturally have

led her to think of Matthew Parker, who had been her instructor in religion; and the opinions of her able ministers, Sir Nicholas Bacon and Burghley, united in his favour. In the collection of records annexed to the second volume of Burnet's History of the Reformation, we find that the correspondence upon this subject began so early as the 9th of December, 1558, within three weeks of Elizabeth's accession, by a letter from Sir N. Bacon, summoning Parker to London on business touching himself; and this was followed by another summons, in the name of the Queen, from Cecil, on the 30th of the same month. Parker's reluctance to undertake so weighty an office protracted the correspondence for nearly six months, and we find him at length writing with the utmost earnestness to the Queen herself to excuse him. The important affairs which engaged the attention of Elizabeth and her first parliament contributed not a little to delay a final settlement. Indeed, till the act restoring the mode of appointing bishops by election, under a congè d'elire, had passed, nothing could be done towards filling up the vacant sees; and Parker, who had been deprived of his preferments, and had narrowly es caped with life, during Mary's persecution, we may be assured, would have resisted-all attempts to make him a bishop, until the service of the Church was restored to that state in which it bad been left by King Edward the Sixth.

daff, met at the Nag's Head tavern in Cheapside, and performed a mock ceremony of consecration among themselves. Of this strange tale, no less than seven or eight versions are extant; which, however, are so defective in themselves, and discrepant with each other, that, were there no other evidence on the subject, we might shrewdly conjecture the whole pretended transaction to be fabulous. I shall not trespass on your pages with a transcript of these various narratives, which would occupy considerable space; but the leading deficiencies and discrepancies may be briefly summed up as follows.-Among all the narrators, no one speaks of the transaction as coming within his own knowledge; and even the hearsay which most of them refer to is but at second-hand. They contradict each other as to the number of witnesses present; and some of them assert that there were none present but the parties concerned, who certainly did not give evidence against themselves. Those who quote Neale as their authority contradict each other as to him; it not being agreed among them whether he was resident with Bonner in the Tower, and employed as his agent, or in Oxford, and only coming to London out of curiosity. They contradict each other as to the number of persons said to have been consecrated in this sacrilegious manner, whether there were four or five, or seven or eight, or fifteen. They contradict each other as to whether it was Kitchen bishop of Llandaff, or Oglethorpe bishop of Carlisle, that refused to consecrate them; and surely they were not misled in this by any similarity of names. They contradict each other as to whether Llandaff was or was not at the Nag's Head. They contradict each other as to whether the mock consecration did or did not immediately follow his refusal. Some of them state that there was an application to an Irish Archbishop, and the rest relate the story in a manner directly

inconsistent with that application; and finally, they contradict each other as to the words and the ceremony employed in this mockery of every thing solemn and sacred.

So much for the popish side of the story. On the other side, we have Archbishop Parker's own official register still extant, and confirmed by an overwhelming mass of independent collateral proofs. Is this registry a forgery; or is it a narrative of a transaction which really happened?

Those who maintain it to be a forgery assert that Parker, Grindal, Horne, Sandes, and Jewell, at least, were consecrated at the Nag's Head tavern in Cheapside, before the 9th of September 1559. To persons who are not acquainted with the facts connected with this question, it may seem not to have been difficult to forge a paper such as that which contains the account of Parker's consecration, and to bring it out at the end of a great number of years; but it can be shewn (for the proofs are readily accessible, if the limits of this paper allowed of their insertion,) that it was referred to within a few years of its date; that the actual consecration of the bishops in the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, according to a regular form, was acknowledged by Sanders and by Stapleton, and appears, from an examination of the arguments of Harding against Jewell, to have been admitted by him also; and I shall proceed now to shew the impossibility of forging Parker's registry, by mentioning various records and papers which must also be deemed forgeries, if this be considered as supposititious.