erned by the laws of God, or the laws of the land. They have no respect for any written laws, when they interfere with the unwritten law of honor. The law of God which says to them. "Thou shalt not kill," is superseded by the law of honor which says "Thou shalt kill" if skill and intention can do it in certain circumstances. They are not men who are governed supremely by principle. Hamilton said that his moral and religious principles were opposed to duelling; and yet he made no objection on that score, and fell with the weapon of death in his hand. Since, therefore, there is no respect to the law of God, since there is no settled and fixed principle in the case, the only way is to appeal to that which does govern such men, and as they are controlled by a reference to the opinions of other men, to compel them to bow to that public opinion which condemns the practice and denounces it as murder. Besides, how can an honest citizen give his vote for a man who has no regard to written laws, where they interfere with his passions, and who is governed by no settled and inflexible principle?

(6.) The duellist is a murderer. He is expressly declared to be a murderer by Blackstone, and he has the characteristics of a murderer described in the Bible, and he is regarded as a murderer by almost all the laws of the civilized world. But how can a man who loves his country, and her laws, contribute to elevate to office a man who is a murderer? How can a father give him a vote who may yet murder his son? How can a Christian vote for a man for an office who has no regard for the law of God, or the law of man? Shall we snatch a man from the prison and the gallows, and elevate him to office, and confer on him the honors of his country? Shall we by our votes place at his disposal our lives, our property, our honor, and the liberties of our nation? To vote for such a man is to lend our sanction to the crime which he has committed. We become responsible for the influence which he shall exert in the office to which we elevate him. We contribute the weight of our name and our vote to pour public contempt on the law of God, and to defy the justice of the Almighty. We turn aside the divine vengeance which might have followed the individual, consent that it may be imputed to us, and that it may pass over to us and our children, and that the curse diffused may descend on our country. VOL. V.-28

Instead of punishing the crime as God commands, or instead of showing our abhorrence of it, we contribute to elevate the criminal to a place of trust and power, to set him before the world, and before heaven, entrusted with the highest proof of confidence which we can give, and hold him up as worthy of the approbation, and not the censure, of mankind.

(c.) The duellist insults the great mass of the community. He insults the laws of the land; the laws of God; the moral sense of the nation. He offers an insult to the religion of his country; to the efforts to diffuse just principles; to the feelings of fathers and mothers and sisters, and to all who are endeavoring to train up a generation in the way of virtue. He offers an insult to our principles as fathers, and to all our attempts to train up our sons in the way of virtue and the fear of God. He invades our rights by bringing in the force of his example to undo all that we are doing by the inculcation of moral and religious principles. He insults our reverence for that law of God which says: "Thou shalt do no murder." There is not one of our feelings as fathers, as patriots, as moral men, as Christians, to which he does not offer an affront and an insult. More than this. He insults the nation at large. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of a thousand in this nation are settled and determined foes of duelling. They regard it as absurd, wicked. They constitute the mass of intelligence, the moral worth, the talent, and all the piety of the nation. Abhorrence of the duel; of murder in all forms; of all the things that lead to murder; of all willingness to commit murder, is engraven as with the pen of a diamond on their hearts, and is the most settled principle of their moral nature. To all that is valuable, pure, lovely and pious, the duellist offers a public contempt. And will men coolly go and deposit their vote in the ballot box for such a man, and give him a place among the makers of the laws?

(d.) To withhold our suffrages from such a man would remedy the evil. Who elevate the duellist now to office? The moral men; the patriotic men; the religious men of the nation. In most of the States of this Union, there are not professed friends of duelling enough to turn the scale in contested elections. And there is not a man in the Congress of this nation, or

in any Legislature, or in any public office, who would dare to fight a duel-with all his boasted courage and bravadoif he knew that henceforward he would lose the vote of even the professed Christians of the land. Let a man know that by the act he will lose a few thousand votes, and this single item of intelligence will do what no principle which he has will accomplish; and what no dead and unexecuted laws will do to punish him. So long as he knows that his party will vote for him, no matter what he does, and that fathers and brothers, and Christians will vote for him, though his hands are red with blood, he will laugh the laws to scorn, and defy the courts, and walk abroad and look with contempt on all the array of justice in the land. And shall we contribute by one vote to elevate such a man to office?

We close by saying, that the prevalence of the religion of the Redeemer would be a remedy-perhaps the only effectual remedy, for the evils of this mode of barbarous war. That would produce mutual respect between man and man; would prompt every man to do justly, and to treat all others with kindness and good will; would prevent every man from offering intentional insult, and dispose to forgiveness and peace; would lead men if their real rights were invaded, to appeal to the operation of just and equal laws, and if the laws furnished no redress, to commit the cause to him who hath said,-"Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will repay;" would impress men with the awful guilt of either offering to throw their own life away, or of sending a fellow-mortal with the guilt of intentional murder in his heart to the bar of a holy God; and would diffuse everywhere respect for the laws of God, for the feelings of the community, and for the statutes of the land. With the spirit of the Redeemer of the world, no man would either give or accept a challenge. For want of that spirit, men fall and die in high places, and men of rank and office and talent, are consigned to a murderer's grave. The land is polluted. The nation is disgraced in the eye of the world. Guilt unpunished occupies places of trust, and unrebuked, aspires to any office in the gift of the people. Many a family in the land sits solitary. Many a wife has wept over a husband cut down; many a household has been bathed in grief because a father has

fallen; many a parent's heart has been broken over a much loved son, a sacrifice to the implacable laws of private revenge. High heaven is offended. Atheists may laugh, and fools may make a mock at sin, but there is a God of justice in the heavens; and that God watches the conduct of rulers and people, in regard to the violation of his laws.

cern.

To the American people this is a subject of common conIn the honor of our country we all have an interest; and not less in the course which it is necessary to pursue to avert the vengeance of offended heaven. The great God is putting the question to this nation, whether they will elevate to office, men whose hands drip with blood; whether crime shall go unrebuked by the justice of the country; whether men will deliberately commit the dearest interests of the world to these cowards in heart, and murderers in principle, and in fact, who set the laws of heaven and earth at defiance, and who outrage the moral and religious feelings of a community. Shall we, by elevating such men to office, teach our children that there is no guilt in murder? Shall we suffer our deliberative bodies to become a host of armed men? Shall we aid in the prostration of justice, in the escape of criminals, in the extinction of liberty? Shall we in any way, contribute our influence in provoking God, and in drawing down his vengeance on a guilty land? Rather let the nation be humbled and mourn. There is enough to make the nation tremble, when it is remembered that God is just. No man does his duty unless he brings the whole of his influence as a citizen, and as a man against this barbarous practice; no man does his duty who does not frown in his private life, in his public walks, at the polls, and every where, upon the duellist while living, and upon his memory when dead. Let no splendid mausoleum be erected over his grave; let not his memory go down to future time with honor -though he has been distinguished on the battle-field, or in the senate chamber; and if an epitaph of honor has been written on his tomb, come some "Old Mortality," who shall chip out the letters, and inscribe the name of "murderer" there!

ARTICLE IV.

*LIFE AND TIMES OF NICHOLAS DE CLEMENGIS.

Few periods in the history of the Church previous to the Lutheran Reformation, will better repay a careful study than that toward the close of the fourteenth and the commencement of the fifteenth century, which embraces the schism of the Papal Church, and the Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basle. Christendom seemed to be awakening to some consciousness of her condition. She could no longer sleep undisturbed beneath the heavy burdens that were crushing out her life. Wickliffe's voice in England woke many an echo much nearer to the Papal court. Pontifical profligacy, priestly corruption, the schism of the Church, which saw in the rival contestants for the tiara, rivals in duplicity, ambition, and pride-the deep and wide-spread conviction of the necessity of reform, the growing consciousness of their rights and their humanity in the popular usages, the spreading seriousness in many neighborhoods and communities, appalled by the iniquities of the times, or trembling at the mysterious march of pestilence which moved over Europe again and again, like the curse of an angry God-the uprising of bold and earnest men, like Huss and Jerome, and Jacobel, at Prague, Vincent of Ferrara, in Spain, and the celebrated Triumvirate of the Paris University, in France, (Clemengis, Gerson, and D'Ail ly,)—all these objects hurrying forward out of that background of knightly valor, princely splendor, violence, bloodshed, anarchy, superstition, and crime, depicted by Froissart in colors as vivid as the illustrations of his own pages-present the outlines of an era attractive in the interest it excites and painful and instructive in the lessons it conveys.

The removal of the seat of the Papacy from Rome to Avig

*The materials of this Article are drawn mainly from the treatises and letters of Clemengis. (Nicholai de Clemangiis Opera Omnia. Leyden. Elzevir edition of 1613.) The best account of his times is to be gathered from Van der Hardt's compilation of materials for the history of the Council of Constance. L'Enfant, Bower, Schröckh and Michelet present us with the condition of the papacy in that age.