with costs of £70 or £80, on some technicality as to whether the law contemplated a baptized Church-member or only a steady attendant upon public worship, and the failure of the certificate to meet that exact (and extremely narrow) point. Dr. Backus-who, himself a Baptist, non ignarus mali, speaks strongly on these matters-says of this last law, 'No tongue nor pen can fully describe all the evils that were practised 'under it.'t And the detailed, and, on the face of it, apparently candid account which he gives of the way in which the Baptists of Ashfield were treated, their remonstrances disregarded, and their land sold by the sheriff to support the Congregational worship, would seem to excuse considerable plainness of speech.‡ Near the close of 1770, this old certificate law having expired, a new one was made, substituting the designation 'Antipedobaptists' for Anabaptists, and the word 'congrega'tion' for the word church; but the word 'conscientiously' was retained, apparently to enable the authorities to meet the case of any whom they were pleased to suspect of being governed in their religious professions by financial motives— 'those avaricious and dissolute persons who get under water 'to wash away their minister's rates, without any expectation 'or desire of washing away their sins.'§ During the previous year the Warren Association, formed at Warren, R. I., in 1767, had come to the front, as looking after the interests of the denomination, and appointed committees to draft petitions for redress, and to use their best endeavours to obtain the 'establishment of equal religious liberty in this land.' Their first memorials to the civil power being disregarded, they publicly invited all Baptists who had been oppressed in any way on a religious account to send in to them exact and attested details of the same, and at their meeting at Bellingham, Sept. 11, 1770, such facts were tabled in answer to this call as led the body to the unanimous resolution to send to 'the British Court for help, if it could not be obtained in 'America.' They also addressed a respectful but earnest 'Backus,' ii. 241. + Ibid. 240. Ibid. 246-259. § Boston 'Evening Post,' May 17, 1773. memorial to the provincial government, in which they adroitly availed themselves of a vote recently passed (with another aspect these were the days of the beginning of the revolution which severed the link between the mother country and the colonies), which declared that no taxation can be equitable 'where such restraints are laid upon the taxed as take from 'him the liberty of giving his own money freely;'* to pray the General Court to give relief in certain specified cases, and to grant perpetual exemption to all Baptists from all ministerial rates whatsoever, according to the full intent and 'meaning of the charter of the province.' How much this action had to do with the law just referred to, and the slight modifications apparent in it, must be altogether matter of conjecture. 6 The committee of the Association, having been called together as soon as it had taken effect, unanimously decided not to accept the new law as satisfactory, but to proceed to collect facts and move public opinion for such further action as remained necessary. Dr. Backus sat down to the composition of his History of New England, with particular reference to 'the Denomination of Christians called Baptists,' the patience of research and candour of spirit of which have given him a very high place among the historians of the New World. He printed also a number of pamphlets, in which he urged, from various considerations, the admission of Dissenters in New England to their full rights. Such appeals as the following from one of these, published in 1773, when the air was full of the coming war-storm, must have been rather hard reading for the men to whom they were particularly addressed :— 'Suffer us a little to expostulate with our fathers and brethren who inhabit the land to which our ancestors fled for religious liberty. You have lately been accused with being disorderly and rebellious by men in power, who profess a great regard for order and the public good; and why don't you believe them, and rest easy under their administrations? You tell us you cannot, because you are taxed where you are not represented; and is it not really so with us? You do not deny the right of the * Hovey's Backus,' 177. The first volume was published in 1777, the second in 1784, the third in 1796, with an abridgment (with additions) in 1804. Happy is the man who owns these original editions. A reprint, not greatly to its credit, was made by the Backus Historical Society, in 1871, British Parliament to impose taxes within her own realm, only complain that she extends her taxing power beyond her proper limits; and have we not as good right to say you do the same thing? and so that wherein you judge others, you condemn yourselves? Can three thousand miles possibly fix such limits to taxing power as the difference between civil and sacred matters has already done? One is only a distance of space, the other is so great a difference in the nature of things as there is between sacrifices to God and the ordinances of men. This, we trust, has been fully proved.'* (To be Concluded in our Next Number.) ART. VII.-Political Questions in Italy. I. BUT a few years have passed since the patriots of the Frankfort Parliament declared themselves hostile to the Italian nationality; since the insurgent students of Vienna enlisted to go and fight the insurgents of Italy; the successors of William Tell, the citizens of free Switzerland, thronged to support the throne of the Bourbon of Naples; the cannons of the French Republic destroyed the Republic of Rome. It was not only the governments and the diplomacy of the prin cipal European Courts that plotted against Italy; it seemed as if she excited the envy and hatred even of some of the nations, and that they also ardently longed to see her op pressed, nay, exterminated. Who in those days would have dared prognosticate that in less than half a century the scene would be so completely changed? That Italy, that merely geographical expression, as the old Austrian minister, Prince Metternich, was pleased to call it, would be able, overcoming so many obstacles and enmities, to form herself into a nation? That she would acquire not only her independence, but also her liberty and unity in the space of as many years as barely sufficed other nations for the accomplishment of but even one of these great enterprises ? That she would succeed in so short a time in taking an important place in the assembly of nations, and win • An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty against the Oppressions of the Present Day.' P. 53. Boston. 1773. for herself the respect and sympathy not only of the peoples, but also of the Cabinets of all Europe? The causes of this phenomenon are both moral and political. It is impossible to discuss the present state of Italy without carrying back one's thoughts to her past, and discerning in the Italian revolution the providential part so wonderfully blended with that of man. We may well affirm that it was one of those revolutions which reveal themselves as designs of Providence, in whose hands man is but the instrumental agent. Short-sighted politicians vainly tried to appoint it limits it was destined to run the race marked out for it. It was, so to say, to break into two parts the history of the nation, and to retain in its future hardly any traces of its sad past. The Italian revolution finds no comparison in the anterior revolutions of other nations. Only in some points does it bear a resemblance to the glorious English revolution of 1688, especially as regards the morality of the means employed and the justice of the end. The Italian revolution has once more solemnly affirmed the rights of Christian nations; their right to be well governed, nay, to govern themselves; their right not to be bartered, ceded, sacrificed in the interest of a so-called equilibrium. It has once more affirmed that there is no legitimacy superior to the right of a nation to exist. History has her logic: right ends by becoming a fact. It was time that Italy should begin to belong to none but Italians; that she should cease to be the toy of diplomacy and the easy theatre for so many ambitions never sufficiently satisfied. It would be a mistake to judge of the political situation of new Italy by the same criterion which one applies to the great States of modern Europe constituted centuries since. In the long period during which the other nations of Europe were busied in increasing and perfecting their existence as modern States, Italy, oppressed and torn, now by one now by another, and sometimes by several together of those very nations, had been unable to do anything. Later, too, she had been violently excluded from political life; so that, instead of a spontaneous and national policy, which was impossible under those circumstances, Italian policy was long that of whatever foreign nation most weighed on her at the time. It were thus too much to expect that the Italians should already be furnished with all the qualities on which depends the strength of a great modern State. They have a right to reckon on their difficulties being taken into due account, difficulties entailed by the sad heritage left them by a past of many centuries. This violent passage from one period of political life to another, this contrast between the present and the past, cannot do otherwise than constitute a danger for Italy which she is obliged to combat. Nothing in fact is so difficult for a nation so to react against its own antecedents as to maintain the necessary harmony between its past and its present. The present has its roots in the past; a generation, and a century, are what preceding generations and centuries have made them it is unfair not to take into due account the ill as well as the good which they have inherited. When we think of the centuries of slavery and of misgovernment which weighed on Italy, and that her sole political training was till but yesterday only that far from moral training, of sects and revolutions, we cannot repress a feeling of sincere admiration on seeing the young nation, or rather the arisen nation, securely tread the way in the difficult paths of political life, and we have a right to put faith in her and in her future. Liebig, the illustrious chemist, said to Cavour in 1854, 'Don't be disheartened! If in a heap of dead matter there is 'an organised and living molecule, it suffices to organise and 'recall into life all the rest. I believe that this little Pied'mont at the foot of the Alps is the living molecule which will 'conquer the forces of death, and impart the movement and 'warmth of life to all the rest.' And such amidst the rest of Italy did Piedmont exactly prove to be, with its king, its men of state, and of war. Twenty years of fears and of hopes, of losses and of successes, of constant struggle, of firm resolves, of sacrifices of every kind, sufficed to realise the dream of many centuries. The baneful influence of dynasties now fallen, the prejudices of ages, the passions of the demagogy, the dislikes of some privileged classes, the strength of the clerical party, the boundless ambitions and jealousies of her neigh |