12 MAY 1866, Page 1

The religious May blossom is in full blow, and presents

us with the usual amount of perfume and prickle. Lord Shaftesbury especially is outdoing himself, and showing, with his usual true benevolence and narrow piety, which no one recognizes more sincerely than we, much more than his usual proportion of thorn, and a tendency to hysterical invective which the re- verend Governor of Tennessee, who proposed to fight the Confederates till Hell froze and then to fight them on the ice, might himself envy. At a meeting of the Church Pastoral Aid Society, held last Thursday week at St. James's Hall, Lora Shaftesbury took occasion to exhibit this licence of language, as unfortunate as it is novel from a veteran English peer and politician, with respect to Ecce Homo, which he termed "that most pestilential book ever vomited, I think, from the jaws of Hell." The qualifying "I think" with which Lord Shaftesbury recalls, for the sake of impartial comparison and review, the various materials which hell has returned upon us in this un- pleasant way, is almost a touch from Mr. Pecksniff. But perhaps he scarcely saw the force of his own metaphor. Lord Shaftesbury is of course aware that what is one man's meat is another man's poison, and so also, we suppose,' of heaven and hell. Ecce Homo seems to us precisely the sort of book that would be poison to the constitution of absolute Evil, and we do not wonder that when it was " exhibited " to Hell, the patient could not keep it on its stomach.