The Express.
London, England, 1858-11-18 00:00:00

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/PORTING INTELLIORNCL

A lIMICIAL EDITION of the " EXPRESS,•
eseileieleig the melts of the day's Races, is patty
Wised even, evening daring the Sporting Beeson, at
ell o'clock.

Trees hundred yeseeespired yesterday since the
accession of the great Qraev whose memory is still
held in just veneration by Englishmen. The broad
popular view which represents Queen ELIZABETH SI
identified with the firm establishment of the Re-
formation in these realms, and with the maintenance
and assertion of the Protestant cause in Europe, is
based on substantial truth. The painful diligenee
of exact historians has no doubt succeeded in show-
ing that the Protestantism of the great Qt I= was
right royal and prelatical in its character; that *owe
of her ecclesiastical tenets were not free from
the kern of Romanism ; and that her sen-
timent, on Church Government and Regal
Supremacy smacked strongly of the overween-

ing absolutism of the TUDORS, and stamped her
as a true daughter of lIINST THI EIGHTH. Bat
when all due allowance has been made in these
respects, the broad fact remains behind, that this
wise, haughty, and fearless Englishwoman did brave
battle throughout the world against the ascendancy
of Rote, and the ambition of Bpain, and that it is
mainly owing to her undaunted spirit and her con-
summate prudence that Protestantism and all its
attendant blessings have been firmly rooted in
the land over which she ruled. It is not, there-
fore, without moon that the anniversary of
her accession has been chosen for celebration in
pulpit and on platform as the true birthday of that
great and ummorable epoch in the world's history
—the progress and development of Proteataat
England. When we think of what wo are
and what we have been ; when we trace through
these three varied and eventful centuries the
successive phases of the national is
impossible not to see the direct and intimate
connexion that has throughout existed between
the free spirit of the Reformation and all that
is most heroic in what we have achieved, moat
valuable in what we enjoy. These three centuries,
indeed, have not flowed on in an even tenor
of uncheckered and utdropeded progress. There has
been a noise of confused strife; deadly conflict ; bard-
woo victory ; occasional retrogression. There Mohan
action and re-action ; flux and refine. But the great
periodic law has been advance. Hasty and impa-
tient watchers may often have been in doubt whether
at any given moment there were any movement
at all ; but the flow- of the great tide of tendency is
only to be measured by the landmarks of centuries.
We who look backwards across the stormy surface
of ten generations can be in no doubt as to the
reality of the progress which has taken place sines
those November days of ISM, when the great Pro.
Minitel Princess bad just ascended the English throne.
It is well that the nation should at this time bo
moved deeply to meditate on the almost inlaid
value to a free country of that firm protest against
the ascendancy of an infallible Church, a sacrificial
priesthood, and a foreign Bishop, which it was
the happy destiny of our English ELIZ4BETie to
establish and perpetuate as the permanent expree-
Rion of the national will. A protest against the
intermeddling of any foreign potentate with the
temporal or spiritual affairs of Englishman—a pro-
test against the authority of any Church to impose
its absolute decrees on an Englishman'. C4:10111i01101
—a protest against the intrusion of any body
of men claiming • transmitted character of
mediatorial sacredness, to interpose between the
Eaglishmas and him family—between the English-
man and his Gota—these eve the three great cornet
atoms is th►t national edifice of free thought, per-
social piety, and domestic purity, which the bed
spirits of the modern world recognise as constitoting
the peculiar glory acid the peculiar strength of Eng-
land. It is well that these things should be borne in
mind ; it is 'speedily right that they should be
prominently dwelt epos jest now, when we axe
going through one of those singular phases of
Romanistic re-action, which in the lest three
centuries have more than oyes troubled the
peace of the Church and aroused the indig-
nation of the People. For the people—and
it is a great and memorable fact—the real people
of England—the middle and working classes, who
constitute our national greatness, and stamp our us.
tioual diameter, have never been misled by these
galvanic and ghostly revivals of a dead Put.
It is in the fastidious ranks of the Upper Ten Thou-
sand craving for new excitement ; it is among the
women of some culture and much leisure craving
for spiritual direetim—it is among the more ambi-
tious and eager of the clerical ordercraving for fresh
power—it is among these classes, and their like,
that the Romenising tendencies are to be found in
their full development. That in these quarters
the taint has spread, and is spreading far and
fast, no dispassionate observer can doubt. The mani-
fold activities., the diversified indulgences of modern
life, are eminently favourable to the wide and rapid
propagation of the sinister inflaeoce. In a literary
and aesthetic age, all the blandishments of art and
all the resources of literature are called in to aid the
teachings of the clergy ; nor are directer agencies
wanting. Recourse is had to the most drive, ive but most