of very dangerous and impudent things. We forgot to add, that the holy army were to have an oath administered unto them, under the title of the union and vow of every knight or soldier of the army of Jesus Christ.

GREEK CHURCH.

We have heard of a very uncompounding bishop. M. Gatt in his travels, records his paying a visit to the Greek bishop Theophones: and the opinion of the latter about his own church is really curious, for thus he characterizes it: "One "half of the Greek church," said he, “has no

religion at all: and those who have any are 66 worse than the other."

CURIOUS COMMENTARY ON SCRIPTURE.

There have appeared some very curious commentaries on, and translations of, some parts of the Holy Scriptures. As these are sufficiently eccentric, perhaps they will not be out of place if inserted here. Upon Samuel i. 25. viz. David sending courteously to Nabal. Matthew Henry, in his Exposition, explains the message in the modern way, thus; "Tell Nabal, I sent you to

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present my service to him, and to enquire how "he does and his family." This author afterwards censures David, for what he thinks his

too great condescension. "David (says he) me"thinks past too high a compliment upon Nabal, "when he called him the man that liveth. David "knew better things; that in God's favour is life, "not in the world's smiles. And by Nabal's rough answer he was well enough served, for "the too smooth address to such a muckworm !"

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TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

With respect to the subject of the following article, well do the Papists direct the poor people in their English Manual of Prayers before mass, 1725 p. 409. "Herein 1 utterly renounce 'judgment of my senses and all human under"standing." To avoid any mistake upon the construction of their doctrine, we give the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth points of the Rev. J. Berrington's, state and behaviour of the English Catholicks, from the Reformation, to the year 1730. "12th--That in the most holy sacra. "ment of the eucharist, there is truly, really, "and substantially, the body and blood, together "with the soul and the divinity of our Lord "Jesus Christ. 13th.-That in this sacrament "there is by the omnipotence of God a conver"sion or change of the whole substance of the "bread into the body of Christ, and of the whole "substance of the same into his blood: which we

"call transubstantiation. 14th. That under "either form, Christ is received whole and en"tire." And yet we find that at the beginning of the thirteenth century, it had been fixed by the fourth Lateran council, that the bread of the sacrament was the body, and the wine the blood of Jesus Christ; but it was ordained before the close of the same century, that the body and blood were included in the bread, aud that the wine was only mere wine.

BISHOP BULL.

We are told in the life of Bishop Bull that the lodgings he, when a parochial clergyman, had taken in his parish were contiguous to a powder mill. After he had been there for several months, ' Mr. Morgan, a gentleman of the parish, and his lady, paid him a visit, and having represented the danger to which he was exposed by continuing in those lodgings, invited him to their house. Mr. Bull was at last prevailed upon to accept their offer, and some few days after, the mill and his apartment were blown up, on such a day and hour as he had always been in his study, from the time he first came to that place.

LAUD.

Down to as late a period as the seventeenth century, it was not only usual for princes to keep court fools, but in many distinguished families they retained along with their servants, such an exhilarating housemate, as a good antidote against the insipidity and wearisomeness of ordinary life; as a welcome interruption of established formalities. Great men, and even churchmen, did not consider it beneath their dignity to recruit and please themselves, after important concerns, with the conversation of their fools. The celebrated Sir Thomas More had his fool painted along with himself by Holbein. The dismissal of the fool has been extolled as a proof of refinement; and our honest forefathers have been pitied for taking delight in such a coarse and farcical entertainment. It may however be suspected that the practice was dropped from the difficulty in finding fools able to do full justice to their parts:* On the other hand, rea

* See Hamlet's praise of Yorick. In The Twelfth Night, Viola says:

This fellow's wise enough to play the fool;

And, to do that well, craves a kind of wit;

He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons and the time:

And, like the haggard, check at every feather

son, with all its conceit of itself, has become too timid to tolerate such bold irony; it is always careful lest the mantle of its gravity should be disturbed in any of its folds; and rather than allow a privileged place to folly beside itself, it has unconsciously assumed the part of the ri diculous: but, alas, a heavy and cheerless ridicule!" Since the little wit that fools have was "silenced, the little foolery, that wise men have "makes a greater show. As you Like it, Act 1. "Scene 2." It would be easy to make a collection of the excellent sallies and biting sarcasms (for it is well known that they, frequently told such truths to princes as are never now told to them) which have been related of celebrated court fools. The following is said to have occasioned its author a long imprisonment, if not life itself, Archbishop Laud, the smallness of whose stature but too truly represented the littleness of his mind, and whose cold repulsive austerity, perhaps we may add, whose antichristian qualities, had drawn upon his head the hatred of the English nation at large, had rendered him particularly obnoxious to the retainers at the court, and attendants

That comes before his eye. This is a practice,
As full of labour as a wise man's art:
For folly, that he wisely shows is fit;

But wise men's folly fallen quite taints their wit.