towards us, in that while our fathers were yet sinners, being alien: from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenant of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world; He thus devised the means of making them partakers of His promise in Christ, by bringing them to the knowledge of the Gospel, according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When the time is fulfilled, that GOD will have His designs accomplished, the vices of the wicked are made to serve His purposes as effectually as the willing obedience and zealous devotion of those who seek to do Him honour. For this reason He saith of a conqueror, he is the rod of mine anger; and the staff in his hand is mine indignation. I will give him a charge, to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets. Yet his heart thinketh not so; but it is in his heart to destroy and cut off nations.

Such an one was Julius Cæsar, who had for some years commanded the Roman armies in Gaul*; where, to gratify his restless ambition, he had attacked nation after nation, till it became his wicked boast that he had plundered and ravaged a thousand towns, had slain a million of his fellow-creatures, and made slaves of a million more. Nor could he allege the ordinary excuse, of the right of defending one's country, for this amazing destruction of human happiness and human life. His wars were wars of aggression; made, almost in every case, for the express purpose of robbing the people whom he attacked of their property and liberty. Indeed one Roman senator had such a just sense of the wickedness of these unprovoked wars, that, when Cæsar's friends proposed that the Roman senate should order so lemn processions in compliment to his victories, this

* Under this name were comprehended the countries since called Lombardy, Switzerland, France, and Flanders.

honest man said, they ought rather to deliver Cæsar up to the people whom he had treacherously attacked; that they might take vengeance for the crime, and not leave it unatoned, to bring a curse on their city. But his countrymen loved military glory too much to prefer justice before it. They gave their wicked general additional powers; and he was ordained to become their scourge also. But he was politic, as well as bold; and therefore, before commencing a direct attack on the long-established liberties of his native land, he thought it necessary to make himself master of still more extensive conquests; to form an army accustomed to serve him, without feeling any affection for home; and to collect, wealth, which he might distribute-in bribes to those whose duty it was to expose and prevent his treacherous projects. So, when he had overrun and plundered nearly the whole of Gaul, and arrived on its northern shore, he cast his eyes on the opposite coast of Britain.

It was said that the merchants of Tyre had long carried on a profitable trade with the British for tin; and Cæsar had been deceived into a belief, that a valuable pearl fishery was carried on by the natives. At any rate, he thought the inhabitants would make able-bodied soldiers, or slaves. The hopes of plunder were enough to determine him to invade an island, whose inhabitants could neither compare in arms nor discipline with his own troops. But whilst he was making preparations for conveying his army across the British channel, he endeavoured to obtain such accounts as could be relied on, about a country, as yet, very little known to the civilized world. The merchants, to whom he applied for information respecting the British Isles, were acquainted with little more than the coast opposite to France; the savage state of the people, in the interior, having afforded them no inducements to penetrate far inland. By help of the knowledge which Cæsar him

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self, and others, afterwards acquired, we are able, however, to give a better description than he could. then obtain, though still a very imperfect one, of the country and people he was bent on invading. The geographical outline of the British isles was, indeed, the same then as now; but the face of the country has since undergone almost as great a change as its population.

The island of Great Britain is about 600 miles in length, and 300 at its greatest breadth, and is computed to contain above 56 millions of acres; of which England comprehends rather more than 32, Wales nearly 5, and Scotland nearly 19, millions. At the present day twenty-five of the thirty-two millions of acres which England contains are under cultivation, either as corn-fields, pastures, gardens, or orchards, affording food to numerous neatly built villages, and large and populous towns; to which the produce of the soil is conveyed by roads and canals, intersecting the country in every direction. But in Cæsar's time, though the cultivation of corn had been partially introduced on the southern coast of England, it was unknown to the ruder inhabitants of the interior. They lived on the produce of their herds, assisted by an occasional addition from such of the few native animals as they could catch, or by the still less substantial relief which acorns, wild berries, and roots now thought uneatable, might at certain seasons afford. A great part of the country was covered by forests. There were none of those drains which cultivation has introduced to carry off the waste water from every field; nor of those embankments which keep the floods within their bounds till they reach the sea, or prevent high tides from extending over the low grounds near the shore. Hence every spot abounding in springs would become a rank and deep morass; and when floods rushing down from the hills, or poured in by the sea, had overspread a valley whose outlet was nar

row, or choked up by obstructions, long accumulating and never removed, the valley became a lake ; till the slow retreat of the water, and a summer's sun, turned it into an impassable bed of mud, generating the corrupt atmosphere which keeps down a savage population by fevers and pestilence. In valleys which are now very rarely covered with water, and that only for a few hours, or days at most, fleets of such vessels as had crossed the German Ocean are known to have sailed and harboured for months, in times later, much, than Cæsar's; and the wrecks of these vessels have been dug up in modern days, where the English farmer now sows his corn, without any fear of its being carried off, or even injured, by an inundation.

It is evident, that, had the country been more healthy than it could be in so neglected a state, the number of inhabitants which such scanty and irregular sources of food could maintain, must have been very limited. The population of Great Britain was, in 1821, above fourteen millions; of England alone, nearly eleven millions and a half. If, when Cæsar invaded this island, its soil and its shores maintained as many inhabitants as modern European Russia supports on the same space, England might then have had a population of a million and a half; and so little is made of the natural resources of a country by a nation of herdsmen, hunters, and fishermen, and so much of what they do make of those resources is wasted, that the Britons could scarcely have been so numerous as even this mode of computation would allow.

How long our island had been inhabited before the period at which British history regularly commences, is unknown; but we are able to trace, in heathen history, the progress of a people, called, by the Greeks, Cimmerians, and by the Romans Cimbri, who very possibly bore this name as descendants of Gomer, the son of Japheth, and who

FIRST INHABITANTS.

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gradually took possession of the country before them, till they reached and occupied the north-western parts of Europe, including the British isles. The great extent of territory over which these people spread themselves, was an early fulfilment of GOD's declaration, that He 'would enlarge Japheth.' We farther find, that a race called Celts, Galatians *, or Gauls, are, about the same time, spoken of as possessing the same countries; and we gather that whilst Celts, Galatians, or Gauls, were intended for the same name, but differently pronounced and formed by different nations in speaking of them †, Cimmerians was a more general name belonging to the same people; just as Judæi, Jews, Juifs are well known to be different imitations of the same name, whilst the people thus called shared the name of Israelites with the other descendants of Jacob. The name which the Greeks modified into the word Cimmerii, and the Romans into Cimbri, is still borne by the Welsh; who call themselves Cumry, and their language Cumraig. The same name is retained in the word Cumberland, which is known to be so called from the people who remained masters of that country long after the remaining districts had been subdued by the Saxons. On the other hand, the Scotch Highlanders call themselves Gael, and their language Gaelic; which words differ little from Gaul and Gallic, the acknowledged designations of the continental Celts.

Thus may the two great national appellations, Cimmerians and Celts, be still traced amongst us. Nor are satisfactory proofs wanting, at this day, that they were the same people; for the Welsh, the

It was to a colony of these people, settled in Asia, that St. Paul wrote the letter which bears their name.

+ Celts and Galatai, Cimmer and Gomer, will be understood to be more nearly the same word, when the letter C is pronounced hard, The Romans called those Galli, whom the Greeks called Galatai.