in order to decide an important controversy between (Roman) Catholics and Protestants." "It is false then," he says, "that Theodore, or rather the council of Herudford, over which he presided, mentioned, or so much as alluded to, the unlawful practice of divorce."

That you would not follow this ill-mannered*

* Bishop of Castabala I had called him, till I learnt from his present pamphlet that he had been translated to the see of Billingsgate.

This Vicar Apostolic has written under the name of John Merlin, for what other reason than his liking for an anagram I have not been able to discover, unless it be that John Merlin might (in large letters, p. 64.) advise his readers "to consult the unanswerable LETTERS TO A PREBENDARY, AND THE END OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY, by Dr. Milner;"-wherein he asserts himself to have proved-some of the rankest falsehoods that ever proceeded from the Jesuits manufactory of slander.

There have been three eminent persons of the name of Merlin. Merlin Sylvester (or Merddin Wyllt as the Welsh call him) was the first. He was a poet, a prophet, and a madman; the Titular is neither. The second is the Merlin of Spenser and the Round Table Romances, the well-known enchanter. Dr. Milner works no miracles himself; he only testifies to those of St. Winifred, and believes in those of St. Dunstan and Co. This Merlin, moreover, though the son of the Devil, was, as his biographer assures us, "a gentleman on the mother's side;" now the Titular writes as if he were without a drop of gentle blood in his veins. Mr. Berington indeed observed long ago that he had no aristocracy in his manners.

man in his language was to be expected, Sir, from your habitual urbanity; a disposition which will always prevent you from thus exciting the scorn of your antagonists and the sorrow of your friends; and perhaps you have only repeated his remark for the sake of silently re

The third and last Merlin was the ingenious mechanist well known in his day, who, had he lived in the proper age and been lay-brother in a convent, with this worthy defender of St. Dunstan for Abbot, might have enriched the fraternity by making images weep, sweat, speak, lift their hands and roll their eyes, more than he enriched himself by the amusing exhibition, which I remember some four-and-thirty years ago in London.

To neither of these Merlins can I trace any resemblance; but there is a fourth to whom some similitude may be recognized, as he figures, not in the French Revolution, but in an epigram as rememberable as a good Welsh triad.

Connoissez-vous rien de plus sot,

Que Merlin, Bazire et Chabot?
Non, je ne connois rien de pire
Que Merlin, Chabot et Bazire;
Et personne n'est plus coquin

Que Chabot, Bazire et Merlin.

Both the spirit and the temper of this person's writings are worthy of Bishop Bonner; but I believe that Bonner himself would have had more decency than to have written one of the notes in the thoroughly malignant and scurrilous publication which has provoked this notice ;-a publication, be it remembered, for which the British Roman Catholic Association voted their thanks in a body to its author! Bene nobiscum agitur quod latrare, non etiam mordere, possunt.

proving him, by showing that the objection derives none of its force from the insolent terms in which he has advanced it. But how is it that

you have relied upon this

faithless writer so

blindly as to adopt the paltry quibble which he has had the effrontery to bring forward?... The Council of Herudford* has not mentioned divorce! This is reversing the usual form of brother Peter's sophistry; what that brother could not find in his father's will totidem verbis, he was accustomed to look for totidem literis, and accordingly spelt out in it whatever he wished it to contain. But here it seems the word divorce has not been used, and therefore the thing itself cannot have been intended! The argument reminds me of a most reprehensible artifice practised by the Socinians not many years ago, and reported as worthy of imitation in one of those journals which are open for every thing that is mischievous. They offered a reward to a set of school-boys for any

The Herudford of Bede is not Hereford, as Mr. Butler and many other writers have supposed, but Hertford, the peortFond of the Saxon Chronicle, (p. 49. in the late edition of Mr. Ingram.) The error is pointed out by Fuller in his Church History, (p. 87.) who seems to think it originated with “ judicious and industrious Bishop Godwine," partial to the place whereof he himself was Bishop.

one who should find the word Trinity in the Bible; and this was represented as an ingenious and praiseworthy device for leading the boys to infer that the doctrine is unscriptural! An infidel might just as fairly invite them to look in the same place for the word Christianity, and argue, with equal reason, that Christianity is a fable, because there is no such word either in the Old Testament or the New! If divorce is not the subject-matter of the decree,* will Dr. Milner be pleased to inform us what is?

Had he maintained that there is more in the decree than meets the ear, and that while it professes to allow of one cause alone for divorce, it implies a power in the Church of annulling marriages between persons within the prohibited degrees, the letter might have borne him out, and perhaps the intention also. I am not without suspicion that it was so worded as to convey more meaning than it was thought convenient to express; and that this was done

* Nulli liceat nisi legitimum habere connubium. Nullus incestum faciat: nullus conjugem propriam, nisi, ut sanctum Evangelium docet, fornicationis causá, relinquat. Quod si quisquam propriam expulerit conjugem legitimo sibi matrimonio conjunctam, si Christianus esse rectè voluerit, nulli alteri copuletur, sed ita permaneat, aut propriæ concilietur conjugi.-Bede, 1. iv. c. v. p. 89.

with the view of aiding the Romish church in one of its most vexatious and shameless devices for extending its influence and supplying its expenditure. I suspect this because the ecclesiastical laws upon this subject were purposely concealed from the Anglo-Saxons at the time of their conversion.

The marriage of cousin-germans, and consequently of persons in any remoter degree of consanguinity, was allowed in the first ages of the church, as it was by the Roman law,... Christianity having introduced no restrictions upon this point, nor sanctioned any, beyond those which are indicated by the order of nature, and necessary for the peace of families and the well-being of society. St. Ambrose, however, took up the strange and untenable opinion that the union of first-cousins was prohibited in scripture; and the Emperor Theodosius is supposed to have acted under his advice when he promulgated an atrocious law, by which persons intermarrying under such circumstances were to be burnt, and their property confiscated. Both Saints Augustine and Athanasius delivered it as their judgement that these alliances were not forbidden by any divine law. But the unreasonable doctrine prevailed; and though the edict was mitigated by Honorius in