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distinction drawn between the "tormenting," and "hurting," seems far-fetched, and is too weak to lend much aid to the author's hypothesis.

Thirdly, Does not Pastorini in volve himself in a contradiction by applying to the Romish martyrs who were put to death by the Reformers; the representation of what happened at the opening of the fifth seal; the cries of" them that were slain for the word of God?" And do we not find here an additional proof, that the periods of the seals and trumpets are not the same? For be it observed, that the locusts, whose coming is announced by the fifth trumpet, were only allowed to hurt those men, who had not the seal of God in their foreheads and even those, they were only to torment not kill. How will a Catholic reconcile this latter circumstance with his accounts of the frequent martyrdoms of his brethren by the Protestants? Should he interpret the word kill, to mean kill eternally, (the only way, as it appears to me, of avoiding the difficulty,) how can he allow the murdered Catholics to be men which had not the seal of God in their foreheads?

The author calls upon the Protestants, I have no doubt with good intentions, though under an erro. neous persuasion, to reconcile themselves with his Church before the impending destruction shall come upon them. But, Sir, let the deluded members of his communion know, that protestantism, (such protestantism, at least, as the Church of England professes,) is the religion of Scripture, the religion which formed the union of the Church, in her days of Apostolical purity. In reliance upon the promise of Christ, we may venture to trust, that our religion, founded upon the rock of ages, will stand, when the corruptions of Papal Rome shall have sunk, to rise no more. It will supply the faith, the obedience, and the hope of the good, when the last friends of the mystic Babylon shall utter over her downfall, the

voice of their lamentation. "Alas, alas! that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come." (Rev. xviii. 10.) I am, Sir, &c. &c.

C. P.

To the Editor of the Remembrancer. SIR,

I BEG to direct the attention of your learned correspondents to the pas sage in St. Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians, where in combating the objections to the resurrection of the body, he instances the reproduction of the plant, from the grain buried in the earth. In discoursing on this text, I have heard many Clergymen speak of the rotting and corruption of the seed as necessary to the production of the new plant, of its becoming a mass of corruption like a dead body, and on referring to the family Bible, I find a note to the same effect.

I am not aware that any seed that rots in the ground can produce a plant; in most instances it remains in the earth, and supplies nourish. ment to the germ, in others it is raised out of the ground.

It is true, that it is sown bare grain, and that God gives it a body which bears as little resemblance to what is sown, as our glorified bodies may in substance bear to our natural body; but it had always appeared to me, that the death to which St. Paul alludes, is either the death of the plant, or of the seed, which we call the ripening of it; and I am disposed to favor the latter opinion. The loss of all appearance of life in the seed is necessary to the resurrection of the new body, for unless the juices cease to circulate, and vegetation in the grain is dead, and it is buried a bare grain, no resurrection or re-animation can take place.

In the production of the new

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mean, when "seeing Jesus coming unto him, he said, Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world!" but that this was the Messiah, who should make atonement, by the sacrifice of Himself, for the transgressions of mankind; the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world?" John, who was "filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother's womb;" who, while yet unborn, acknowledged the voice of the mother of his Lord; who confessed himself sent to prepare the way of the Lord; who, though he denied that

To the Editor of the Remembrancer. he was the very Elias, who had for

Sir,

As you admitted into your Number for July, 1821, my observations on the view which Mr. Benson had taken, in his Hulsean Lectures, of the message of John the Baptist to our Saviour, you will perhaps grant a similar indulgence to the remarks I have to make on Mr. Franks' discussion of the same text, Matt. xi. 2-6.

Mr. F. endeavouring, like his predecessor, to assign a reason for the Baptist's sending the message for his own satisfaction, declares himself" ready to allow that John might believe Jesus to be the Messiah;" but he "confidently denies that we have any authority from the evan'gelical records, to say that John ever ascribed to Jesus the title of the Messiah." Surely this mode of argument too nearly resembles that of those who deny the doctrine of the Trinity to be asserted in the Scriptures, because, forsooth, that word, by which we are accustomed to denote the mysterious union of the three Persons in one Godhead, has not been employed by the Sacred Writers. John, it is true, does not appear to have pronounced the very word "Messiah;" but did he not use an equivalent term, when he "bare record that this is the Son of God?" And what else could he

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merly been carried up into heaven, yet plainly intimated, that he was ordained to go before the Lord "in the spirit and power of Elias," as the angel Gabriel had explained the prophecy to Zacharias; John, I say, expressly taught, and, as it appears from his own words, was commissioned so to do, that Jesus was anointed to the office of the Messiah. "And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon Him. And I knew Him not; but He that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw and bare record that this is the Son of God." John i. 32-34. It was not merely an inference made for themselves by the two disciples who were present, when John, "looking upon Jesus as he walked, said, Behold the Lamb of God!" that they had "found the Messias;" but it was the obvious meaning of their Master's expression; and this great truth was clearly enough conveyed in all his discourses respecting his own office, and that of his successor.

I am perfectly sensible of the very arduous task which the Hulsean Lecturer has to perform, and most ready to make allowance for any

trivial incorrectness which may inadvertently gain admission into his volume. In so weighty an undertaking-non ego paucis offendar maculis, quas aut incuria fudit, aut humana parum cavit natura.

But I would most urgently caution him against an error, to which he is peculiarly exposed from having so large a portion of his labour as signed to him in the exhausted field of evidence. While he is searching out fresh proofs, or endeavouring to set old ones in a new light, he may be tempted to desert old established and clear expositions, and to subtitute others as better accommodated to his own theory; thus introducing (to use Mr. Franks' words)" visionary hypotheses, which serve only to perplex the question." Hence, with regard to the text under consideration, Mr. Benson, wishing to reconcile the Baptist's doubts with his former acknowledgment of Jesus as the Messiah, adopts an obsolete opinion concerning personal identity; while Mr. Franks boldly surmounts the difficulty by denying that any such acknowledg ment had been made.

How much more judiciously have the Editors of the Family Bible acted in adopting the easy and obvious explanation of the passage,

which represents John as wishing to instruct his disciples by the most convincing evidence, by evidence greater than his own, that of miracles, that Jesus was the Christ foretold by the prophets !

In my former letter, I supposed our Saviour to have alluded to some scruples, by which the disciples of John might be influenced from contrasting their master's austere with his social habits, when he said at the conclusion of his answer to the message," and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me." I did not, of course, mean to limit the scope of the sentence to their case; but the probability of such an allusion having been intended, will be heightened, if we refer back to Matt. ix. 14. "Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?" This proves that such scruples had existed in their minds, and as the answer of our Lord on that occasion was not calculated entirely to remove them, a caution on the subject was properly added, when they were taught to "believe for the very work's sake." I am, Sir, &c.

11 June, 1822.

BIPARY.

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Acts ii. 20.

The sun shall be turned into darkness.”
Luke xxiii. 44.

"And it was about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over all the earth

until the ninth hour: and the sun was darkened."

The following are singular and accurate illustrations of this plague of darkness in Egypt, Exod. x. 21, 22, 23.

It is recorded that the darkness was such as might be felt. Surely this cannot be more clearly explain. ed than by supposing it to have been' accompanied by a profuse shower of dust or fine sand which insinuated itself into every part, and must have added considerably to the inconvenience of total darkness; it is also recorded that the children of Israel were blessed with light in their houses, which part of the miracle is equally explicable on the supposition that they still continued. to reside at Ramases, which had

Miraculous Circumstance, or phenomenon been originally allotted to them upon

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Ezekiel xxxii, 7.

their first establishment in Egypt, Gen. xlvii. 11. For Ramases being ata considerable distance from Memphis, might (as in the case of the parts of Persia, which in the above extract they saw unaffected by the passing cloud) have been beyond the extent of the darkness which the Almighty had caused to come upon Egypt...

March 15, 1775.-At four this afternoon, at Bussora, the sun then shining bright, a total darkness commenced in an instant, when a dreadful consternation seized every person in the city, the people running backward and forward in the streets, tumbling over one another quite distracted, while those in the houses ran out in amazement, doubting whether it were an eclipse, or the end of the world. Soon after the black cloud, which had caused this total darkness, approached near the city, preceded by as loud a noise as I ever heard in the greatest storm,

I will cover the sun with olond, and this was succeeded by such a vio the moon shall not give her light." lent whirlwind mixed with dust, that 3 E

REMEMBRANCER, No. 43.

no man in the streets could stand upon his legs; happy were those who could find, or had already obtained shelter, whilst those who were not so fortunate were obliged to throw themselves down on the spot, where they ran great risk of being suffocated, as the wind lasted full twenty minutes, and the total darkness half an hour. The dust was so subtle and the hurricane so furious, that every room in the British Factory was covered with it, notwithstanding we had the precaution to shut the doors and windows on the first appearance of the darkness and to light candles. At half past five the cloud had passed the city, the sun instantly shone out, no wind was to be heard, no dust felt, but all was quite serene and calm again, when all of us in the Factory went on the terrace, and observed the cloud had entirely passed over the river, and was then in Persia, where it seemed to cover full thirty miles in breadth on the land, but how far in length could not be even guessed at, it flew along at an amazing rate, yet was half an hour in passing over the city. It came from the N.W. and went straight forward to the S. E. The officers of the Company's cruizers came on shore as soon as the cloud had passed their ships, and declared that the wind was so violent, and the dust so penetrating, that no man could stand on the decks, and that after it was over, every place below, on board the ships, was covered with dust. Such a phenomenon never was known before in the memory of the oldest man now living at Bussora.-Parson's Travels, p. 163.

In the afternoon the horizon to the eastward was thick and hazy, and the Moors prognosticated a sand wind; which accordingly commenced on the following morning, and lasted with slight intermission for two days. The force of the wind was not in itself very great; it was what a seaman would have denominated stiff breeze; but the

quantity of sand and dust carried before it, was such as to darken the whole atmosphere. It swept along from east to west, in a thick and constant stream, and the air was at times so dark and full of sand, that it was difficult to discern the neigh bouring tents. As the Moors always dressed their victuals in the open air, this sand fell in great plenty amongst the kouskous: it readily adhered to the skin when moistened by perspiration, and formed a cheap and universal hair powder. The Moors wrap a cloth round their face to prevent them from inhaling the sand, and always turn their backs to the wind when they look up, to prevent the sand falling into their eyes-Parker's Travels, p. 131.

In Macgill's Travels in Turkey, Vol. I. p. 202. a similar phenomenon, though not to the same degree, is related.

The wind which is generally strong carries this fine dust into the air in such clouds, that I have actually1 seen the sun darkened by them for a considerable time, and at the breadth of a street have not been able for several minutes to distin guish a man from a horse; this dust is carried so far, that with the wind off the land at three versts (about 24 miles) distance, I have been al most choaked by it. The first time I saw these clouds, I concluded that they were forerunners of an earthquake.

In the 9th Volume of the Spectator, is an account of the total eclipse of the sun, Friday, April 22, 1715, which gives an interesting account of the feelings excited by an event of this description.

"The different modifications of the light formed colours the eye of man has been five hundred years unacquainted with, and for which I can find no name, unless I may be allowed to call it a dark gloomy sort of light, that scattered about a more sensible and genuine horror than the most consummate darkness. TM€ All the birds were struck dumb and

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