aversed by processions and lighted up
with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"
of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. Popes, bishops, and cardinals, in
straw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amid
the shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtless
been quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishop
of Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about and
burned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one.

In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legal
restrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may on
its own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishops
Methodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, it
is not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter at
issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. It
is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it
cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the
spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a
hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and
tent-makers of the New Testament.

Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary Guy
Fawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train under
the Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of New
England, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the younger
plants of grace in the Puritan vineyard. In those solemn old days, the
recurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideous
images of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strong
waters, and its blazing bonfires reddening the wild November hills, must
have been looked forward to with no slight degree of pleasure. For one
night, at least, the cramped and smothered fun and mischief of the
younger generation were permitted to revel in the wild extravagance
of a Roman saturnalia or the Christmas holidays of a slave plantation.
Bigotry--frowning upon the May-pole, with its flower wreaths and sportive
revellers, and counting the steps of the dancers as so many steps towards
perdition--recognized in the grim farce of Guy Fawkes's anniversary
something of its own lineaments, smiled complacently upon the riotous
young actors, and opened its