And gusty cheese and stoups of milk or whey.
Beneath the branches of a spreading tree,

Or by the shady side of the tall rick,

They spread their homely fare, and, seated round,
Taste every pleasure that a feast can give.

Old Allan Ramsay has caught the inspiration of one of his most charming songs from the same scene:

The lass of Patie's mill,

Sae bonnie, blithe, and gay,

In spite of all my skill,

She stole my heart away. When tedding out the hay,

Bareheaded on the green, Love 'midst her locks did play,

And wanton'd in her een.

Her arms white, round, and smooth;

Breasts rising in their dawn;

To age it would give youth,
To press them with his han'.
Through all my spirits ran
An ecstacy of bliss,
When I such sweetness fan'.
Wrapt in a balmy kiss.

Without the help of art,

Like flow'rs which grace the wild,
Her sweets she did impart,
Whene'er she spoke or smiled:
Her looks they were so mild,
Free from affected pride,
She me to love beguiled;-
I wish'd her for my bride.
Oh! had I a' the wealth
Hopetoun's high mountains fill,
Insured long life and health,

And pleasure at my will;

I'd promise, and fulfil,

That none but bonnie she,
The lass of Patie's mill,

Should share the same with me.

Burns invites his "bonnie lassie" to go forth to the "foaming stream" and "hoary cliffs," when "simmer blinks on flowery braes." He only echoes the general summons to the enjoyment of "the lightsome days" which Nature gives to all her children :Bonnie lassie, will ye go, will ye go, will ye go, Bonnie lassie, will ye go to the Birks of Aberfeldy?

Let fortune's gifts at random flee,
They ne'er shall draw a wish frae me,
Supremely blest wi' love and thee,
In the Birks of Aberfeldy.

Bonnie lassie, &c.

Leigh Hunt, who ever delights in rural happiness, pictures the

season:

Bright Summer comes along the sky,

And paints the glowing year; Where'er we turn the raptured eye

Her splendid tints appear.

When Morn, with rosy fingers fair,
Her golden journey takes;

When Noon averts his radiant face,
And shoots his piercing eye;
And Eve, with modest, measured pace,
Steps up the western sky:

Thus when so fit to lift the song

To gratitude and heaven,

When freshening zephyrs fan the air, To whom her purple charms belong,

And animation wakes:

By whom those charms are given?

Primitive Christians.

W. CAVE.

[WILLIAM CAVE, a distinguished divine and voluminous theological writer, was born in 1637. He was of St John's College, Cambridge, and received various preferments in the Church, without having reached any very important ecclesiastical dignity, during his long life. At his death he was Canon of Windsor, and Vicar of Isleworth. His "Lives of the Apostles," "Lives of the Fathers," and "Primitive Christianity," are works of standard value and authority. He died 1713.]

The Christian religion, at its first coming abroad into the world, was mainly charged with these two things, Impiety and Novelty. For the first, it was commonly cried out against as a grand piece of Atheism; as an affront to their religion, and an undermining the very being and existence of their gods. This is the sum of the charge, as we find it in the ancient Apologists: more particularly Cæcilius, the heathen in Minucius Felix, accuses the Christians for a desperate, undone, and unlawful faction, who by way of contempt did snuff and spit at the mention of their gods, deride their worship, scoff at their priests, and despise their temples, as no better than charnel-houses, and heaps of bones

and ashes of the dead. For these, and such like reasons, the Christians were everywhere accounted a pack of Atheists, and their religion the Atheism; and seldom it is that Julian the emperor calls Christianity by any other name. Thus Lucian, bringing Alexander the impostor, setting up for an oracle-monger, rank the Christians with Atheists and Epicureans, as those that were especially to be banished from his mysterious rites. In answer to this charge the Christians plead especially these three things:

First, That the Gentiles were, for the most part, incompetent judges of such cases as these, as being almost wholly ignorant of the true state of the Christian doctrine, and therefore unfit to pronounce sentence against it. Thus when Crescens the philosopher had traduced the Christians, as atheistical and irreligious, Justin Martyr answers, that he talked about things which he did not understand, feigning things of his own head, only to comply with the humour of his seduced disciples and followers; that in reproaching the doctrine of Christ, which he did not understand, he discovered a most wicked and malignant temper, and showed himself far worse than the most simple and unlearned, who are not wont rashly to bear witness and determine in things not sufficiently known to them; or, if he did understand its greatness and excellency, then he showed himself much more base and disingenuous, in charging upon it what he knew to be false, and concealing his inward sentiments and convictions, for fear lest he should be suspected to be a Christian. But Justin well knew that he was miserably unskilful in matters of Christianity, having formerly had conferences and disputations with him about these things; and therefore offered the senate of Rome, (to whom he then presented his Apology,) if they had not heard the sum of it, to hold another conference with him, even before the senate itself; which he thought would be a work worthy of so wise and grave a council. Or, if they had heard it, then he did not doubt but they clearly apprehended how little he understood these things; or, if he did understand them, he knowingly dissembled it to his auditors, not daring to own the truth, as Socrates did

in the face of danger-an evident argument that he was où piλ6oopos, áhλà piλódogos, "not a philosopher, but a slave to popular σοφος, ἀλλὰ φιλόδοξος, applause and glory."

Secondly, They did in some sort confess the charge, that, according to the vulgar notion which the heathens had of their deities, they were atheists, i.e., strangers and enemies to them; that the gods of the Gentiles were at best but demons, impure and unclean spirits, who had long imposed upon mankind, and by their villanies, sophistries, and arts of terror, had so affrighted the common people, who knew not really what they were, and who judge of things more by appearance than by reason, that they called them gods, and gave to every one of them that name, which the demon was willing to take to himself. And that they really were nothing but devils, fallen and apostate spirits, the Christians evidently manifested at every turn, forcing them to the confessing it, while, by prayer and invocating the name of the true God, they drove them out of possessed persons, and therefore trembled to encounter with a Christian, as Octavius triumphantly tells Cæcilius. They entertained the most absurd and fabulous notions of their gods, and usually ascribed such things to them, as would be accounted a horrible shame and dishonour to any wise and good man, the worship and mysterious rites of many of them being so brutish and filthy, that the honester and severer Romans were ashamed of it, and therefore overturned their altars, and banished them out of the roll of their deities, though their degenerate posterity took them in again, as Tertullian observes. Their gods themselves were so impure and beastly, their worship so obscene and detestable, that Julius Firmicus advises them to turn their temples into theatres, where the secrets of their religion may be delivered in scenes; and to make their players priests, and that the common route might sing the amours, the sports and pastimes, the wantonness and impieties of their gods, no place being so fit for such a religion as theirs. Besides the attributing to them human bodies, with many blemishes and imperfections, and subjection to the miseries of human life, and to the laws of mortality, they could not deny them to

have been guilty of the most horrid and prodigious villanies and enormities, revenge and murder, incest and luxury, drunkenness and intemperance, theft, and unnatural rebellion against their parents, and such like; of which their own writings were full almost in every page, which served only to corrupt and debauch the minds and manners of youth; as Octavius tells his adversary, where he pursues this argument at large, with great eloquence and reason. Nay, those among them that were most inquisitive and serious, and that entertained more abstract and refined apprehensions of things than the common people, yet could not agree in any fit and rational notion of a Deity; some ridiculously affirming one thing and some another, until they were divided into a hundred different opinions, and all of them further distant from the truth than they were from one another; the vulgar in the meanwhile making gods of the most brutish objects, such as dogs, cats, wolves, goats, hawks, dragons, beetles, crocodiles, &c. This Origen against Celsus particularly charges upon the Egyp tians.

"When you approach (says he) their sacred places, they have glorious groves and chapels, temples with goodly gates and stately porticos, and many mysterious and religious ceremonies; but when once you are entered, and got within their temples, you shall see nothing but a cat, or an ape, or a crocodile, or a goat, or a dog, worshipped with the most solemn veneration!" Nay, they deified senseless and inanimate things, that had no life nor power to help themselves, much less their worshippers, as herbs, roots, and plants; nay, unmanly and degenerate passions, fear, paleness, &c. They fell down before stumps and statues, which owed all their divinity to the cost and folly of their votaries; despised and trampled on by the sorriest creatures, mice, swallows, &c., who were wont to build nests in the very mouths of their gods, and spiders to perriwig their heads with cobwebs; being forced first to make them, and then make them clean, and to defend and protect them, that they might fear and worship them, as he in Minicius wittily derides them: "In whose worship there are (says he) many things that justly