The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1851-05-20 00:00:00

VARIETIES.

QUAKERISM AND POPERY.—There is a great similarity
between Quakerism and Popery. Both are the religion
of the priests, and the people are compelled to an out-
ward conformity. The domineering influence of the
Friends who take part in the discipline, over the body, is
exactly a counterpart of that which the priests exercise
over their flocks. The one requires obedience, because
they are inspired, they tell us ; the others call themselves
the Church, and demand it. The spirit is the same in
both !—Quakerism, by a Lady forty years a " Friend."
EFFECTS OF INDUSTRY.—AII the performances of hu-
tnaa art at which we look with praise or wonder, are in-
stances of the resistless force of perseverance. It is by
this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant
countries are united with canals. If a man were to com-
pare the single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression
with the spade, with the general design and last result, he
would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion;
yet those petty operations incessantly continued, in time
surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are le-
velled and oceans bounded by the slender force of human
beings.
VIL,rTNS LAY AND VILLEINS ECCLESIASTIC.."-Sir
Thomas Smith, who was secretary to Edward VI., speak-
ing of the few pure villeins, or serfs, remaining in England
In his time, says that such as were remaining were those
who had belonged to the ecclesiastical corporations in the
preceding times of Popery ; " for," he says, " the holy
fathers, monks, and friars, had in their confessions, especi-
ally in their extreme and deadly sickness, convinced the
laity how dangerous a practice it was, for one Christian
man to hold another in bondage, so that temporal men by
little and little, by reason of that terror in their consciences.
were glad to manumit all their villeins. But the said holy
fathers" (he duly adds) " with the abbots and priors, did
netlike in sort by theirs; for they also hada scruple in con-
science to impoverish and dispoil the church so much as
to manumit such as were bond to their churches, or to the
manors which the churches had gotten ; and so kept their
villeins still !'—Vide Blackstone's Commentaries.
EMACIATION.—The emaciation of phthisis is so promi-
nent a part of the disorder that it is quite natural it should
attract the principal attention of patients and of their
friends, and that anything which gives it relief should be
looked upon by medical men as a valuable instrument in
their hands. And probably with much justice ; for
though it is impossible to prove directly that life has been
prolonged in phthisical cases where an arrest of wasting is
produced, yet the universal alleviation of other symptoms
which accompanies this arrest gives a rational hope that
such is the result. Any means that can be employed to
replace on the body the fat which it has lost certainly
supplies it with a power of resistance to the deleterious
influences which are destroying life, and prevents these
influences from acting on matters more important than
that fat. Physiology concurs with experienceinplacing
in
in the first rank of means for restoring fat, animal oils,
and especially those derived from the livers of fish. We
have here a substance which, as we saw before, nature
finds the readiest material for the formation of their pro-
per secretion in the odipose vesicles ; and we have it
mixed with a small quantity of bile, which preserves it
from being made rancid to the stomach, and probably
makes it more easy to be taken off by the lacteals. The
liver of the cod, being large and abundant, is no doubt the
one most used for the purpose of making this oil, and has,
therefore, given its name to the article ; but that of many
other animals of the same &ass would be equally effics_
cious. Among the inhabitants of the sea, the dogfish,
otherwise destructive and useless, is employed. Being a
few weeks back at Filey, in Yorkshire, I found that the
herring-fishers not only destroy this wolf of their scaly
flocks, but keep his liver to make " cod-liver oil." And
of fresh-water fish, the salmon. An old Scotch lady tells
me that in her youth the Highland women used always to
request that the oil which comes to the surface when the
fish is boiled should be preserved for them, as a cure for
chronic rheumatism and consumption, the two classes of
cases in which the cod-liver oil of the present day is roost
largely employed,—Dr, Chamberr on Corpulence.