PROCEEDINGS OF OPERATIVE

SOCIETIES.

Ar the Annual Meeting of the Finsbury Operative Protestant Association, held in the School Room, Church Street, Islington, February 10th, the following Report was read:

"Your Committee have much pleasure in being able to report very favorably of the progress of the Society, and of the abundant blessing with which God has been pleased to crown its exertions during the year which has just closed. Giving Him, who is the Author and the giver of every good and of every perfect gift, all the glory of any thing that may have been effected by their instrumentality, and acknowledging themselves as simply the humble means in the hand of the God of truth to carry on His plans of mercy, your Committee will proceed at once to a brief narrative of their exertions in the sacred cause of Protestantism.

VOL. II.

amount of the most valuable intelligence communicated at them by the various talented speakers and lecturers. Your Committee have reason to thank God that this department of their christian labours has been remarkably successful. Their meetings have been well attended, and the Protestant truths which have been enforced by the eloquence of the gentlemen who have kindly taken part in the proceedings, have been received with the strongest tokens of approval and responded to with intelligent and warm-hearted enthusiasm. To those gentlemen your Committee beg leave thus publicly to accord their grateful acknowledgments, and express not only their sense of the great value of their generous services, but also their hope that in the year just commencing they may still be favoured with their support, and that their labours in the cause of Protestant truth may be amply recompensed by the Divine Author of our faith. Your Committee have also to thank in the warmest possible terms the Editor of the Morning Herald, who has from time to time granted the proceedings of your Society a space in the columns of his Protestant and widely-circulating paper, thus extending the beneficial effects of your meetings and spreading a knowledge of your Society and its useful operations throughout the length and the breadth of the land.

"On the subject of publications and tract distribution, your Committee have to report that early in the year, after issuing a general circular explanatory of their views and objects, and appealing to the Protestant inhabitants of the borough of Finsbury for support and co-operation, they were induced to publish an address to their Brother Operatives of the United Kingdom, endeavouring to point out to them in plain and forcible language the dangers of the present eventful times, and to stimulate them to active exertions on behalf of our endangered Protestantism. That address, your Committee are glad to state, proved by the blessing of God eminently useful. It was inserted by the various Editors in the Standard, Morning Herald, Record, and other papers; it also appeared in the pages of that exellent periodical the Penny Protestant Operative. It was afterwards published by your Committee, and upwards of 20,000 copies have been circulated in all parts of the empire; and so highly did our esteemed Operative Brethren in Norwich approve of it, that they actually printed an edition for themselves and circulated it throughout that important city and its vicinity. Your Committee have also published two Protestant Lectures during the year, both on most vitally important subjects the first by Mr. Dalton, on the Objects, Views, and Duties of Protestant Associations; and the second by Mr. Holden, of St. John's College, Cambridge, on the Impossibility of Civil and Religious Liberty under Papal Supremacy of both of these lectures a large quantity have been disposed of. Your Committee have reason to know that the operations of your Society in this particular have not been confined in their happy results to the shores of England alone, but that the distant land of Canada has also reaped benefit from them; a newspaper published at Toronto, in Canada, having reprinted great part of Mr. Dalton's lecture, and warmly extolled the same.

"On the subject of tract distribution, your Committee have to report that they owe much gratitude to the Committee of the parent Society for their kindness in granting several supplies of tracts for gratuitous circulation. These grants, comprising many thousands of valuable tracts and handbills, have been carefully put into circulation: and on this point it is necessary to observe, that if any will volunteer to discharge the duties of tract distributors in any part of the borough of Finsbury, their services will be thankfully accepted by the Committee, they having experienced during the past year some lack of labourers in this department of the Society's operations.

Your Committee considered it one of their first duties to adopt a petition to parliament, praying for the withdrawal of the grant of public money to the Popish College of Maynooth in Ireland. Your Committee would earnestly press upon every member present, the solemn duty of not merely signing that petition himself but also persuading all his friends and neighbours to sign it too. It is surely high time that every effort should be made to wipe off this sad blot from our Protestant country. We are told in Scripture not to be partakers of other men's sins, and if we would not be partakers in the guilt of demoralizing and poisoning the minds of our Irish fellow-countrymen, we are bound to do what we can to put a stop to the supply of money to an Institution which trains the priests, and through them the people, of Ireland, in principles which are immoral, anti-social, persecuting, and anti-scriptural.

"On the score of patronage your Committee have the gratification to inform you, that since the first formation of the Society the following influential and distinguished gentlemen have consented to have their names added to the already respectable list of VicePresidents of your Society:-viz. Sir Digby Mackworth, Bart.; W. S. Blackstone, Esq., M. P.; and The Chisholm.

"Your Committee feel happy to be able to congratulate the members of the Society generally on the rapid spread of sound Protestant principles among the operative classes of society. The operatives of the large manufacturing districts, led on and encouraged by such valiant and lion-hearted champions of the truth as the Rev. Hugh Stowell, the Rev. R. J. McGhee, and the Rev. Hugh McNeile, are forming themselves into Associations, establishing Protestant loan libraries, distributing Protestant pamphlets, tracts, magazines, and handbills, and holding their periodical meetings for mutual improvement and edification. All this is cheering and animating-we are not working alone. From thousands of British hearts ascends the prayer, night and morning, that God would bless our honest endeavours to preserve our pure and holy religion from the assaults of its enemies. From thousands upon thousands of honest operative tongues has the spirit-stirring cry of "No Popery gone forth. By tens of thousands of truth-telling lips has the solemn declaration been uttered, that while they have hearts to feel and tongues to speak-while they have domestic treasures to protect, wives, children, sisters, mothers to defend from the corruptions and the tyranny of Papal domination, they will

have and they can have no peace with Rome." Would we perpetuate that noble resolution, we must perpetuate, we must redouble, our christian exertions. Your Committee feel imperatively called upon to urge you to still more zealous, more active, more incessant labours. It is no time for inactivity. Our adversaries do not rest they are moving heaven and earth to advance the interests of their false and baneful system. Shall we be less active?-Shall we be less energetic and determined and self-denying in a good cause than they are in a bad one? May God forbid! Let us never forget that we serve a good master. Our Lord Jesus Christ looks down from heaven upon His faithful soldiers who are wrestling with the powers of darkness, and will cheer them and strengthen them in fighting the battles of their Lord. Let us all try, whether committee-men or not, to enlist new recruits in this christian warfare. Let us keep our eye of faith steadily fixed on the great Captain of our Salvation, and with a bold heart and a fervent spirit, contend still more earnestly than we have ever yet done for the faith once delivered to the saints. Above all, let us join together in our earnest constant supplications to Almighty God for the success and prosperity of this and all kindred institutions, that Antichrist may decay and perish, and Christ's kingdom rise upon its ruins.

"Brethren, the time is short,- -our work is a great and an important one,- -our adversary a powerful and a crafty one,-the privileges for which we contend priceless; what should our labours be but great, powerful, and proportionably mighty? We pray you not to slacken in your zeal, but pursue your high and holy objects with renewed ardour, with rekindled hopes, and the sure anticipation and blessed expectation of reaping an abundant harvest for all your toil, and in the last great day, of hearing the sweet voice of the Redeemer saying in accents of unutterable tenderness and love- Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Ye have been faithful even unto death, enter ye into the joy of your Lord.'

POPISH UNITY EXPOSED.

In the present day of awful delusion and growing dereliction from those pure gospel principles handed down from the apostolic age to this highly favored nation, I hold it to be the duty of all reflective characters to add their mite-however feeble the attempttowards exposing the fallacy of those dogmas and fatal errors which are unhappily working on the minds of all classes, through the satellites of the Roman Pontiff, in this still christian land; which are too alarming not to urge us to rouze a sleeping population, who, alas! doating on every new shoot of fancy, awake only to fall into antichristian principles. Friends! neighbours! countrymen! When will you learn that it is Christ that gives you light: the fathers only confuse-the Pope darkens the whole horizon. Think on our noble forefathers, who started at every innovation that did not promise essential good. Britons were wont to be bold in the cause of their valuable privileges in Church and State,—and will you disgrace them by giving heed to a few jesuitical speeches which warp your fine minds and hoodwink your understandings?

The following facts, which have been extracted from their own writers, I present to your consideration, in the hope that they will expose to you the false and impious assertion of the supremacy and purity of St. Peter's Chair, or more justly speaking, the Roman Hierarchy. The few following facts are well calculated to expose the baneful assertion of the infallibility and purity of the Roman Pontiffs, who make a daring boast of their appointment by St. Peter through the Holy Spirit.

Pope John 23rd was charged at the Council of Constance with the blackest and most enormous crimes under seventy articles, among which were heresy, simony, schism, &c. &c.-and was actually deposed for denying the immortality of the soul!”

"In the thirteenth century several Popes (all infallible!) owed their dignity to Merozia and Theodora, two courtezans, who elevated their gallants to the Pontifical throne."

We sincerely trust that the above Report will be read with interest by the members of Operative Associations generally, and that it may have the effect of stirring them up to greater zeal and diligence.

and even Baronius, who called them monsters, bastards, robbers, assassins, magicians, murderers, and barbarians,-no less than sixteen of them were guilty of perjury."

Those were themselves Romanists who thus designated their Pope-the guardian of their temporal and eternal happiness.

Englishmen Protestants! I demand of you to say, can these be the men who were the chosen instruments of the Holy Ghost,