his duty to go down to Cambridge and watch the progress of these extraordinary prosecutions. Thither, too, went Mr. Andrew Fuller, who, naturally enough, was requested by the Calvinists from Soham to do what he could in their behalf. Mr. Fuller and Mr. Aspland were looked to as the respective guides of the two parties. Both were acquainted with the leading Dissenters of Cambridge, who felt a painful interest in the prosecution, believing that, if carried on, it would entail great disgrace on the cause of Nonconformity. They offered to mediate, but their first efforts were frustrated by Mr. Fuller's influence. In a conference between Mr. Fuller and the mediators, the indictment was read. It immediately struck the Cambridge friends that it was founded on the penal laws against Antitrinitarians. They the more earnestly pressed for a compromise. The offer to withdraw the indictment against Mr. Gisburne if he would retire from the meeting-house, was by Mr. Aspland's advice rejected, who urged Mr. Gisburne "to stand the event of a trial, however disastrous the issue, rather than thus bargain away his reputation." Subsequently, Mr. Fuller consented to refer the matters in dispute to arbitration, each party to withdraw the indictments and to pay its own expenses. In a personal conference between Mr. Fuller and Mr. Aspland and the rest of the two parties, it was agreed to choose two referees from amongst the Dissenters of Cambridge. Notwithstanding the reference, the indictments were carried before the Grand Jury. It was proved by the Calvinist witnesses themselves that their leader, Thomas Emons, had in the midst of the service challenged Mr. Gisburne to substitute Mr. Fuller's book against the Socinians for the Bible. A juror unacquainted with matters and names of religious controversy, asked the witness, "What book was mentioned?" Upon this the foreman, Sir Charles Cotton, interposed with the remark, "It does not signify whose book it was; no book can be put in competition with God's word." So clear were the merits of the case, that the Grand Jury threw out the bill presented against Mr. Gisburne, but found the bills against his persecutors. This unexpected result struck terror into the Soham Calvinists. They were now at the mercy of the friends of him whom they had designed to crush. With scrupulous honour, Mr. Aspland used, and with success, his influence in carrying the proposed arbitration into effect; and the result was that the arbitrators, two orthodox Dissenters of Cambridge, awarded Mr. Gisburne a sum of money as compensation for the chapel, which he agreed peaceably to resign into the hands of the Calvinist minority. For the time, Mr. Fuller seemed moved by the honour and generosity of his Unitarian opponent, and in the freedom of social intercourse admitted that some of his censures, in former days, of his heretical brother were not deserved.

The money awarded to Mr. Gisburne was the first contribution to a fund for raising an Unitarian chapel at Soham. Mr. Aspland gave all his assistance in promoting the fund, and with this and money derived from other sources, in the course of a few months after the close of the Cambridge prosecutions, a neat chapel was erected. It was opened April 3rd and 4th, 1810, by Mr. Aspland, Mr. Wright, Mr. Madge, and many other Unitarian friends from London and other parts of the kingdom.

The good humour with which the Calvinist chief had parted at Cambridge with his opponent was soon disturbed. He made a claim of the

payment of the costs contracted by his party in getting the indictments withdrawn, affecting to regard them as the proper costs of Mr. Gisburne's friends, and therefore to be paid by them. The claim was of course not conceded.

Comments were freely made on the conduct of Mr. Fuller in abetting legal proceedings against a fellow-christian based on the penal statute against the impugners of the Trinity. Eighteen months after the transactions at Cambridge, Mr. Fuller put forth a short pamphlet, which he entitled, "A Narrative of Facts relative to a late Occurrence in the County of Cambridge, in answer to a Statement contained in a Unitarian Publication called the Monthly Repository." The statement referred to was in the Monthly Repository for August, 1809, and was, in fact, the Fifth Report of the Unitarian Fund. One portion of the pamphlet is an impeachment of his opponent's honour for not allowing the costs of withdrawing the indictments to be paid out of the money awarded by arbitration to Mr. Gisburne. The other and more important part was a defence of himself against the charge of having endeavoured, in the spirit of persecution, to enforce the penal laws against Antitrinitarians. This is his defence:

• On

"Advising with a few of our Cambridge friends, we first heard the indictment read. It struck them that it was founded on the penal laws in force against Antitrinitarians, on which account they pressed a compromise. At that time I had not sufficiently thought upon the subject. I knew my object was not to prosecute Mr. Gisburne as an Antitrinitarian, but merely to prevent the place of worship being wrested from its rightful owners. Wednesday morning, about half-past eight or nine o'clock, having had further conversation with one or two of my friends at Cambridge, I waited on our counsel, Mr. Best, to whom I stated this among other difficulties, as nearly as I can remember, in the following words:-It is the opinion, Sir, of some of our friends, that our indictment rests upon the ground of the penal laws against Antitrinitarians, and that if we go into Court, it must be to enforce them. If so, Sir, we cannot go; for, whatever we may think of Antitrinitarian principles, we disapprove of all penal laws on account of religious opinions. Mr. Best did not deny that the indictment rested upon that ground. I then asked him, seeing we could not in conscience go into Court on such a principle, whether he would not recommend a compromise? He answered, he would. From him I immediately proceeded, with an attorney, to Mr. Aspland and his friends, who I had been given to understand had expressed a willingness to settle the affair by arbitration. We found them so disposed, and acceded to that mode of adjustment."

To Mr. Fuller's "Narrative" Mr. Aspland replied in a series of Letters to John Christie, Esq., Treasurer of the Unitarian Fund, entitled, "Bigotry and Intolerance Defeated; or, an Account of the late Prosecution of Mr. John Gisburne, Unitarian Minister of Soham, Cambridgeshire with an Exposure and Correction of the Defects and Mistakes of Mr. Andrew Fuller's Narrative of that Affair."

Mr. Fuller is asked to explain (note, p. 59) why the indictments were pressed to a decision. Had he and his party at once, on the agreement to arbitration being entered into, withdrawn their witnesses, the witnesses on the other side would have retired of course, and much trouble and expense would have been spared. The continuance of the proceedings after Mr. Fuller's recognition of the fact that they were based on a persecuting statute, is fatal to his reputation as a friend to

religious liberty. Thus powerfully was the well-deserved rebuke administered:

The

"Mr. Fuller first heard the indictment read in company with some of his Cambridge friends. It struck them, but not him, that it was founded on the penal laws against Antitrinitarians. Mark the effect of habit! well-read, liberal, private gentlemen of Cambridge, though Calvinists, were quick to discern and prompt to expose intolerance. They had been the hearers (occasionally or regularly), and some the companions, of ROBERT ROBINSON, that brilliant genius who kindled up the flame of religious liberty in the bosoms of all that knew him, and from the lightning of whose wit and eloquence the malignant spirit of persecution instinctively shrunk away. When the indictment was read, the Cambridge friends were struck; there was persecution in the formulary of law; they felt the blow, and they protested against the iniquity. There spake the mind of Robinson! Much as they were struck, the mind of Mr. Fuller was unaffected. He does not pass for a man of dull and slow apprehension, but his sensibilities were not awakened by the stirring up of penal laws against Antitrinitarians. He is quick of discernment as to heresy; he can see an Arminian under the mask of Calvinism, and in the detected Arminian can discover the future Socinian; but he could hear an indictment read in which, word after word, and line after line, were the direct characters of persecution, and yet not perceive the malus animus, the detestable meaning. Mr. Fuller had not sufficiently thought upon the subject.' Thirty years' reflection and discourse as a Dissenting minister, had not prepared him to feel instantly and act decidedly in a case of persecution! For the greater part of that time he had been at warfare with the Socinians, but he had not catechized his heart so as to know that there were some hostile weapons, and amongst them indictments, which his honour would not allow him to use. A whole night did Mr. Fuller sleep upon this indictment!—a thorny pillow, surely, for a Christian head! He was pushing a proceeding which his friends warned him would issue in persecution. He could not at once resolve to desist. I solemnly declare that I would rather bear the utmost severity of all the penal laws against me as an Unitarian, in their combined force and most rigorous administration, than I would have passed such a night as Mr. Fuller went through, if he felt as he ought." -Pp. 38-41.

To this exposure Mr. Fuller published no reply; in truth, none could be made. This was felt by his two biographers, one of whom, Dr. Ryland,* *has passed over the matter with perfect silence, not even giving a place in his enumeration of Mr. Fuller's publications to the "Narrative of Facts;" and the other, the Rev. J. W. Morris,† has more candidly pronounced a deliberate verdict of disapprobation of Mr. Fuller's conduct. The whole passage deserves attention.

"The mental and moral energy of Mr. Fuller's character was evidently allied to something like misanthropy, or at least a disposition to indulge the most unbounded suspicions of human nature, which in too many instances produced rashness and dogmatism in the opinion he formed of others. Some may be disposed to attribute this to his superior discernment and acquaintance with mankind. It is true he studied this subject; but he studied it till he could

"The Work of Faith, the Labour of Love, and the Patience of Hope, illustrated in the Life and Death of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, &c. Second Edition, with Corrections and Additions: chiefly extracted from his own Papers. By John Ryland, D. D." London, 1818.

"Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Rev. Andrew Fuller. By J. W. Morris." London, 1816.-For its honest and faithful delineation of the character of Mr. Fuller, this work received emphatic praise from Robert Hall.

see nothing to commend, where he found any thing to censure. "To think ill of man and well of men,' was with him an established axiom; but it would be a rare thing to arrive at the latter sentiment through the medium of the former, or to feel benevolently towards the individual of a species which we have previously agreed to vilify and condemn. Mr. Fuller's ideas on the abstract doctrine of human depravity might be perfectly correct and scriptural; but it does not follow that the position they occupied in his thoughts, or the effect they actually produced on his feelings, must needs be equally unexceptionable; and when the mind becomes accessible to every suspicion, this is not likely to be the case. The constitutional tinge given to his moral and religious system, infused into his preaching and conversation a style of malediction neither the most favourable to usefulness nor adapted to form an amiable trait in the Christian character.

"With his zeal for whatever he believed to be true, his want of forbearance towards moral and heretical offenders, and the paramount importance he attached to an inflexible integrity, he would have been in danger in darker times of employing other arguments than those which sober reason would approve.

"It is extremely painful to advert to particular instances of this kind of severity; and if truth, justice, honour and impartiality, did not imperiously demand it, we would not advert to the unhappy transactions in which he was concerned at Soham, in the year 1809, in a dispute between his former friends and a party of Socinians who claimed a right to their place of worship, and to the incorrect and unsatisfactory statement he was induced to make of those transactions nearly eighteen months afterwards, in defence of his own conduct. Under no pretence whatever can we attempt to justify those transactions, nor the part which Mr. Fuller took in them, nor the means which he afterwards employed to exculpate himself from the charge of wishing, indirectly at least, to avail himself of those disgraceful statutes since repealed by the legislature, to secure what he considered the rights of the injured party; much less can we agree to consider him as having been influenced by any sinister or dishonourable motive, of which he was utterly incapable. The whole was a downright and palpable mistake, founded indeed, as in many other cases, on a large quantity of misinformation, and a wilful design of accomplishing the supposed ends of public justice. There is no need of any farther comment. His 'Narrative of Facts' relative to these occurrences, which we have consigned to oblivion, instead of classing it with his other publications, admits but of one apology. It was written long after the facts had taken place, and must be attributed, as his eloquent and judicious friend observed, to ‘a most unhappy lapse of memory,' though unfortunately there are some other 'facts' which demand a similar apology.”—P. 488.

In the year 1819, Mr. J. G. Fuller, a highly respectable printer of Bristol, put forth in the Baptist Magazine for June a vindication of his father's memory from the charge of persecution. From his statement it appears that Mr. Fuller composed a reply to Mr. Aspland's Letters, which, however, was never published. The only material statement is the following:

"It was a conviction of the injustice of Mr. Gisburne's proceedings towards the people whom he professed to serve, and not antipathy to his religious tenets (of which, however, I have the same opinions that I always have had), that made me feel as I did towards him. That which Mr. Aspland has all along attributed to a persecuting spirit, was no other than indignation against what I considered as disingenuous conduct."

He adds, that the subject on which he had not sufficiently thought was, "not the unlawfulness of persecution, but the nature and bearings of the indictment."

It will be seen hereafter that the proceedings at Soham and Cambridge were observed by others besides Unitarians and Calvinists, and proved to the satisfaction of some men in power the necessity of extending to Unitarians, as well as other Dissenters, the protection of the law. For this reason, as well as on account of the curious picture which the affair exhibits of the spirit of a portion of the religious world in England in the beginning of the nineteenth century, these details have been given.

THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES.

CONCEIVE a being born and bred in the Judenstrasse of Hamburg or Frankfort, or rather in the purlieus of our Houndsditch or Minories, born to hereditary insult, without any education, apparently without a circumstance that can develop the slightest taste or cherish the least sentiment for the beautiful, living amid fogs and filth, never treated with kindness, seldom with justice, occupied with the meanest, if not the vilest, toil, bargaining for frippery, speculating in usury, existing for ever under the concurrent influence of degrading causes which would have worn out long ago any race that was not of the unmixed blood of Caucasus, and did not adhere to the laws of Moses,-conceive such a being, an object to you of prejudice, dislike, disgust, perhaps hatred. The season arrives, and the mind and heart of that being are filled with images and passions that have been ranked in all ages among the most beautiful and the most genial of human experience; filled with a subject the most vivid, the most graceful, the most joyous, and the most exuberant-a subject which has inspired poets, and which has made gods-the harvest of the grape in the native regions of the vine. He rises in the morning, goes early to some Whitechapel market, purchases some willow-boughs for which he has previously given a commission, and which are brought probably from one of the neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his miserable tenement, builds his bower, decks it, even profusely, with the finest flowers and fruits that he can procure, the myrtle and the citron never forgotten, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the service of his synagogue, he sups late with his wife and his children in the open air, as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee, beneath its sweet and starry sky.— Disraeli's Tancred.

POWER OF BAD HABIT.

I KNOW from experience that habit can, in direct opposition to every conviction of the mind, and but little aided by the elements of temptation (such as present pleasure, &c.), induce a repetition of the most unworthy actions. The mind is weak where it has once given way. It is long before a principle restored can become as firm as one that has never been moved. It is as in the case of a mound of a reservoir; if this mound has in one place been broken, whatever care has been taken to make the repaired part as strong as possible, the probability is that if it give way again, it will be in that place.-JOHN FOSTER.