placed in rivalry with any of them in frenzy and fantastic silliness. They display an astonishing illustration of the certainty which the principle of Evil has of an irresistible triumph when permitted to act upon its congenial element the human spirit, without any counteractive moral element divinely interposed.. They illustrate the utter uselessness and worthlessness of whatever in that spirit may be called Reason, unenlightened and ungoverned by a Superior Agency. And they exemplify to the last excess that distinctive quality of superstition, that it devotes and prostrates the greatest passions to the most ridiculously paltry objects.

The account is far too long to be all transcribed, and has too rapid a succession of particulars to be satisfactorily abridged. Every step, after landing on the sacred territory, was to be considered by the pilgrims as in some sort a devotional act, and the Bey was of course to be in a state to be susceptible of the most solemn impression when he should come on a sudden, in near view of El Kaaba, the house of God.'

The guide arrested our steps, and pointing with his finger, said, with emphasis," Schouf, schouf, el beit Allah el Haram, Look, look, the house of God, the prohibited." The crowd that surrounded me; the immense size of the temple; the Kaaba, or house of God, covered with the black cloth from top to bottom, and surrounded with a circle of lamps, or lanterns; the hour; the silence of the night; (quære;) and this man speaking in a solemn tone, as if he had been inspired; all served to form an imposing picture, which will never be effaced from my memory.

Being arrived at the house of God, we repeated a little prayer, kissed the sacred black stone brought by the Angel Gabriel, named Hajera el Assouad, or the Heavenly Stone; and, having the guide at our head, we performed the first tour round the Kaaba, reciting prayers. It is a quadrilateral tower, entirely covered with an immense black cloth, except the base. The black stone is discovered through an opening in the cloth.

The Heavenly Stone is raised forty-two inches above the surface, and is bordered all round with a large plate of silver, about a foot broad. The part of the stone that is not covered by the silver at the angle is almost a semicircle, six inches in height, by eight inches six lines in diameter at its base.

It is a fragment of volcanic basalts, which is sprinkled throughout its circumference with small pointed coloured crystals, and varied with red feldspar, upon a dark black ground like coal. The continual kissings and touchings of the faithful have worn the surface uneven, so that it has now a muscular appearance.

We believe that this miraculous stone was a transparent hyacinth, brought from heaven to Abraham by the angel Gabriel, as a pledge of his Divinity; and, being touched by an impure woman, became black and opaque.'

The accompanying engraving of this stone gives but a very

indistinct idea of it; indeed, how should Ali, or any body else, have had the means of making an accurate drawing.

The prayers, the circumambulations of the Kaaba, the washings, the shavings, the potations of the sacred water of the miraculous well of Zemzem, were followed at the proper time by the grand coronation ceremony, the highest honour and bliss of the faithful short of paradise, the sublime devotional act which formally constitutes the performer Hhaddem-Beit Allah el Haram, or servant of the forbidden house of God;'—this was the washing of the floor of the Kaaba, on which water is copiously thrown by appointed persons, while the privileged and unspeakably envied devotee works away with a bundle of small brooms.' 'I began my duty,' says our man of sham, 'by sweeping with both hands, with an ardent faith, although the floor was quite clean, and as polished as glass.' And when he had finished, he was dubbed amidst solemn prayers, with the title we have named, and received from the vast croud the most animated congratulations. That these were most sincere, so far as expressing a full conviction of the value of the privilege which so many could not obtain, is evinced by the eagerness of the crowd to catch and drink some of the water as it was flowing out from under the door of the Kaaba.

Another part of the pilgrim's duties, is the procession to Mount Arafat, on which the common father of all mankind met Eve after a long separation; and it is on that account 'that it is called Arafat, that is to say, gratitude. It is believed 'that it was Adam himself who built the Chapel.' There was a prodigious mob of them, and there they were to wait till the setting of the sun. Then the tide turned, and

• What a tremendous noise! let us imagine an assemblage of eighty thousand men, two thousand women, and a thousand little children, sixty or seventy thousand camels, asses, and horses, which at the commencement of night began to move in a quick pace, along a narrow valley, according to the ritual, marching one after the other in a cloud of sand, and delayed by a forest of lances, guns, swords, kc.; in short, forcing their passage as they could. Pressed and hurried on by those behind, we only took an hour and a half to return to Modelifa, notwithstanding it had taken us more than two hours to arrive in the morning. The motive of this precipitation, ordered by the ritual is, that the prayer of the setting sun or Mogareb, ought not to be said at Arafat, but at Modelifa, at the same time as the night prayer, or Ascha, which ought to be said at the last moment of twilight, that is, an hour and a half after sun-set.'

He mentions one circumstance in the economy of all these sanctities, which is not perhaps in any great degree incongruous with the rest: the very dignified personage,-for he is in high favour with the superior powers in the state,-who bears the title and office of Chief of the Well of Zemzem,' may actu

ally and literally be designated, the Poisoner.' It is absolutely, according to our Author, his business, in the distribubution of the water, to contrive that it shall come mixed with poison to those individuals whom the legitimate authorities desire to send in haste to paradise. The miscreant is an uncommonly insinuating and pleasing young man; Ali became intimate with him, but was made aware what he was, and always, for fear of accidents, carried about with him some doses of the most potent emetics.

We must now bid adieu to the pilgrim whose many subsequent adventures, in his wide course of rambling, would supply, if we had room, plenty of entertaing quotations. He went to Jerusalem and Constantinople, taking many interesting places in the route. We had little certain information about the grand mosque of Jerusalem; and therefore the minute description he has given will be deemed one of the most curious parts of the book. It will not however be found so interesting as a revealed secret is commonly expected to be.

At Constantinople, and each of the places which many other travellers have visited and described, he finds some materials for additional information.

Our general impression, on the whole, in passing through the book, is, that it may be relied on, as a true history of what the Author did and saw. With the exception of a few scientific speculations, an occasional compliment to the French, and, nevertheless, some indignant declarations against despotism, he deals almost wholly in matters of fact; and that with a bareness and particularity which render the work in many parts extremely dry. He is much more a man of observation, in the plainest and most limited sense of that word, than of reflection. Except on points of physical philosophy, he does not display any very striking faculty of thought. He was not at all made for a profound examiner of the human condition and character, under the various forms in which they are presented to such a rover. And there is less of that lighter kind of sagacity which may be denominated shrewdness, than we should have anticipated in a world-worn, trained adventurer, capable of imposing on so many suspicious tribes of barbarians, by a perfect consis-. tency of assumed character.

He announces a sequel to the work, of a nature entirely scientific.

The engravings, exclusively of several plates of fac-similes, and other mere characters, are about eighty, including several maps. They are for the most part on a rather small scale; but there are several of unusual dimensions, in order to give the whole length of the sacred edifices of Mecca and Jerusalem. Excepting the maps, handsomely engraved in London, the VOL. V. N. S.

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plates are by a French artist, being the same that were executed to accompany the French edition of the work, in 3 vols. 8vo. They are of rather inconsiderable merit, and will bear no sort of comparison with the common illustrative embellishments of our English travellers in 4to. Nor can any great reliance be placed on their truth of representation; some of them have been observed by a contemporary critic to be so completely different from some engraved representations of one of our own travellers of the highest authority, as to throw great doubt on the general fidelity of the Mahometan's pencil. And, as to many of the objects, it was plainly impossible he could have attempted to delineate them on the spot, even if, which is more than doubtful, he is in any moderate degree master of the art.

Art. II. 1. Two Tracts intended to convey correct Notions of Regeneration and Conversion, according to the Sense of Holy Scripture and of the Church of England.—By Richard Mant, M. A. 1815. 2. The Essay on the Signs of Conversion and Unconversion in the Ministers of the Church, to which the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Church Union in the Diocese of St. David's adjudged their Premium for the year 1811.-By Samuel Charles Wilks, of St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford. 8vo. pp. 71. Hatchard,

1814.

1T T is a deeply interesting, but difficult problem, how far errors of highly pernicious quality, are capable of being neutralized by virtuous motive or by corrective moral principles, so as to fail in producing their natural effects on the character and conduct. We are sometimes compelled to recognise the indications of sincerity, of upright intention, and even of genuine piety, in individuals, whose professed tenets on some important points, we cannot but condemn, not only as being erroneous, but as tending to the most dangerous consequences. No error indeed, of radical importance, can, where the opportunity of ascertaining truth is afforded, be held without involving a degree of criminality, without implying a defect in the character, and without in effect having some prejudicial influence on the conduct. No error will be found to terminate in mere opinion at the point of doctrine which it ostensibly respects: it has a secret connexion with some less obvious deformity or defect in the conformation of the mind, as local defects in the bodily structure produce a degree of distortion in other parts of the frame. We might, however, instance many pious and exemplary members of the Romish Church, men blindly attached to its grossest superstitions, and holding opinions repugnant to reason and to Christian morality, yet exhibiting a be

nevolent zeal, an elevated piety, an enlargement of mind, which it might have been supposed could not consist with a cordial belief in those mischievous doctrines; in proof certainly not of the harmlessness of error, but of its yielding in some cases to the counteraction of a moral antidote. And a similar concession is due to certain modern promulgators of the Antinomian system, who glory in making void that moral law which the Apostle Paul declared it to be the object of his ministry to establish. The lives of these infatuated men are holier than their doctrines: the seat of error is their understanding. Where the errors of men spring from educational prejudice, from partial views of truth, or from a morbid dread of opposite error, there will be found particular occasion for candour in judging of their characters by their opinions. If, in too many cases, (to borrow an observation from "The Friend,") men are worse than their principles, there are others in which the principles are obviously worse than the men.

The only legitimate conclusion to be derived from these facts, is, not that any error is to be regarded with indifference, because it exists in combination with much practical excellence; but, that no respectability of character, or of numbers, on the side of error, ought to induce us to surrender the interests of truth. The actual tendency of error is not to be estimated by its effects in particular instances, but by its essential nature and its origin.

It was not to be supposed that the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration existed as a solitary and inconsequential proposition in the minds of those who so zealously contend for it on the ground of ecclesiastical authority; that it had no connexion with other errors; that it was the mere excrescence of opinion, or the only relic of an exploded system. Dr. Mant's Second Tract evinces that this is far from being the case. But, indeed, the connexion of this error with a system of error, exists not only in the opinions of individuals. The doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, and of the inherent efficacy of the Sacraments; the denial of the universal necessity of Conversion, in the sense of a spiritual change; the wild assumptions of the secular clergy respecting their Apostolic Commission; the claims of the Church, in fact, no less than the errors of her ritual and the constitution of her hierarchy: all originate in those false views of the nature and the end of Religion, which are to be traced to the great corruption of Christianity by the Romish Church.

That this is not a hasty or gratuitous assertion, made in the spirit of a partizan, we might prove, by tracing the historical origin of these opinions to the same source. But it is not so much our object to prove these to be Romish errors, as to shew their mutual dependence, and to demonstrate that those