ITS STATE AND PROSPECTS. A MONTHLY JOURNAL ESTABLISHED AND CONDUCTED BY MEMBERS IN CONNEXION WITH THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE. "WHERETO WE HAVE ALREADY ATTAINED, LET US WALK BY THE SAME RULE, LET US MIND THE SAME THING.”—PHIL. III. 16. VOL. V. LONDON: PARTRIDGE AND OAKEY, PATERNOSTER ROW; AND No. 70, EDGWARE ROAD, (HANBURY AND Co., AGENTS;) (Publishers to the British Organisation of the Evangelical Alliance.) AND ALL BOOKSELLERS. MDCCCLI. PREFACE. OUR gratitude is due, and we would devoutly express it, to the Father of mercies, for the favour with which he has continued to encourage our work through the past year. We have pursued our course uninterrupted by any disastrous circumstance, and attended by many evidences of his blessing. To our subscribers and our correspondents we are also grateful. They have cheered our toils, and sustained us under them. To the latter we owe the materials with which, from month to month, we have supplied the former; and these, in their turn, have given us the opportunity of circulating intelligence among all sections of the Church of Christ with which it behoves them all to become increasingly acquainted. The desire to know more of the religious state of Continental Europe has, we believe, been considerably quickened among British Christians since we commenced our Journal; but it still needs to be stimulated. They are not yet sufficiently alive to the work which is to be done there for God. Those who read the information which we every month lay before the public do, as we know, appreciate its value, and are convinced by it that there are manifold reasons why the evangelical Protestants of this country should cultivate friendly relations with those of the various nations of the Continent, and lend their aid in every discreet way to the struggle in which they are engaged, against the Popish and the Infidel enemies of the Word of God. Our own opportunities of gaining an accurate knowledge of the state of things in the principal Governments of central Europe have been much enlarged during the past year; and all that we have seen and heard has tended to deepen our conviction, that affairs are again drawing on, and perhaps more rapidly than is imagined, to a crisis, a crisis which, when it comes, will not only shake the political world, but spread dismay and desolation among the ecclesiastical establishments which are so intimately and disastrously connected with it. In saying so, we mean to express no opinion on the question of the religious duty of kings and commonwealths; but simply to record a judgment, which we think every impartial observer would form, of the peril which impends over many of the churches of the Continent. The best men in those churches are themselves filled with apprehension; and if their prayers and godly zeal can avert the evil omen, it may yet pass away. And our prayers shall unite with their supplications, and with them, as we are able, we will labour, that God may be a strong tower to his people in every tempest, and that when he winnows his threshing floor, no grain of the wheat may be lost. As in our country, so also in most parts of Europe, Popery is putting forth extraordinary efforts to bring back the nations to her control. Not only is she holding despotic sway in Austria and Spain, and the Italian peninsula, and asserting practically her supremacy in France, but her Jesuit missions are pervading Prussia and Baden, and other Protestant States; and the systematic character of her efforts, as well as the exten |