THE QUARTERLY THEOLOGICAL REVIEW. JUNE, 1826. The United States of America compared with some European Countries, particularly England, in a Discourse delivered in Trinity Church, in the City of New York, October, 1825. With an Introduction and Notes. By the RIGHT REV. JOHN HENRY HOBART, D.D., Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the State of New York. 8vo pp. 56. 2s. London, Miller. 1826. WE are most reluctantly compelled to believe that England has given some irreparable offence to America; that all our old habits of friendship, our ties of blood, our mutual public interests, our common language, freedom, and faith, are but bands of flax; and that genuine reconciliation is impossible. Something of this might have been allowable, while the British sword was yet scarcely sheathed. But it has been now laid up in the rust of ten years; our navy on the lakes is turned into fishing boats; our garrisons are recruited by veterans from Chelsea; and the high road from London to Quebec is through New York. Dr. Hobart's pamphlet is, we will acknowledge, our strongest ground for this painful conviction; for we can account for the existence of such a document from such a person, but on the supposition of a national antipathy equally melancholy and irreconcilable. We have here a man of gentlemanlike habits, -nay, of considerable intelligence,-nay, of the sacred profession,-nay, of Episcopal rank, actually signalizing his first appearance in the American pulpit, on his return from the hospitality and marked attentions of the British Clergy, by a laboured, most unmeasured, and most unfounded attack on the established Church of England. NO. VII. VOL. IV. B We can account for this extraordinary proceeding on no other principle, than that of some of those stern public necessities to which all the minor morals must now and then give way. If Dr. Hobart has been unhappily placed in the formidable alternative of sacrificing the conventional honour of society, and the still more delicate honour of his cloth, to the sovereign mandate of his majesty the mob; we must lament that he should have been so tried. But still more repugnantly should we believe, that Dr. Hobart had volunteered this offensive publication; that he had been thinking only of a vulgar flourish to announce his arrival in America; and that any unfortunate. eagerness to grasp the contemptible popularity attached to libelling England, should have betrayed him into a flimsy and fantastic declamation, stiffened out with charges, which, if he had not examined, it was rashness and presumption in him to mention; and which, if he had examined, and even found to be true, he should have been the last man to mention. Things like this may do well enough for the regular trading politician, the struggler for some paltry name to be held on the wretched tenure of popular caprice, the thorough tool of rabble tyranny, exhibiting his fitness for servitude by his suppleness of prostration; for men like Mr. Walsh, who finding that the public feeling is against the truth, wrest the truth to the public feeling, not merely swallow their words, but substitute others in their room, and with true party devotion discover, the moment that they have reached their own side of the Atlantic, that England, their once lauded and magnified England, is a nation of paupers and pretenders. But why this humiliation might not have been escaped by a Churchman is beyond our conjecture. To have sold a few more copies of a sinking journal, or even to have been carried on the necks of a rabble from the hustings into the Congress, to have had thenceforth the licence to make a three days' harangue against every other nation of the civilized world, and dream of such immortality as awaits the civic, virtues of a Jefferson or a Monroe, may be potent temptations to the New York soul. But we are not aware that those temptations, resistless as they are, lie exactly in the way of a Protestant Episcopal Divine. Visions of political glory may flit before his eye, but the vista of possession is too remote to be reached in the present generation; for sale he has nothing but his sermons; and as for the immortality of such men as Jefferson and Monroe, their bankruptcy and obscurity in this age must be felt by a man of Dr. Hobart's sagacity but ominous evidences of their heirship of honour in any age to come. Or, was this depreciation of our Church, designed for the pastoral edification of his own, as his pamphlet seems to say? Here again we find ourselves utterly at a loss. The cui bono rises up in our way. Did he find his congregation becoming migratory and transmitting itself by the packet to the fancied superiority of the English Establishment? No. Or, did he discover that the spirit of Episcopacy in America would derive new purity from the announcement that, the great parent Church in England had fallen into gross decay? Impossible. Or could he have conceived, that, in the midst of his crowd of native sects, all fiercely jealous of the Church, the declaration' that the principles of Episcopacy were fallible, worldly and incapable of resisting rapid and rancorous corruption, would tend to raise them in the American eye? None of those suppositions will release him. He lies under the painful responsibility of having done, in his gravest mood, an act which nothing but the hottest partizanship could palliate; or of the still more painful charge of ignorance, where truth lay before him; and of thoughtlessness, where the natural movement of the mind would have been kindly recollection. But where was the necessity for this topic at all? Here is a man returning to his country after an absence of years. We greatly question whether among ourselves the most inveterate public haranguer, the most vigorous trafficker in political verbiage, the most bowed down lover of popularity, would not, at his first step on the threshold of his home, have found a hundred topics that flung politics aside. The "Domus et placens uxor," might have harmlessly withdrawn the most devoted of patriots from the grand duty of enlightening the populace on the crimes of "Church and State;" and even if no natural and sacred gratitude for preservation in distant lands, or in the world of waters that lay between-in escape from the common hazards of life and climate, "the arrow that flieth by day, and the pestilence that walketh in darkness," had formed his first feelings, he might have given himself the indulgence of a momentary respite from the passions and exasperations of party oratory. Yet we have in Dr. Hobart, a clergyman stepping from the very shore to the pulpit, brimfull of the most unfortunate opinions on our affairs; laying upon his cushion, for a sermon, a political pamphlet; and calling upon his congregation to rejoice in the superiority of their obscure Church over the fallen and decrepit grandeur of the mighty Church of England. A What we may think of the preacher who could thus employ himself, we need not say; but we are intitled to draw from it a higher moral, and thank heaven, that we are not yet the slaves of democracy. Democracy is, all over the world, the most jealous of mas ters; the despotism of the mob differs from the despotism of the individual only in its being more intense and inevitable, in its deeper ignorance and its more remorseless execution. What it is in its day of angry power we have seen, and possi bly must be prepared to see again. We are no panegyrists of the offences of thrones, yet we cannot but remember that even the Bastille, odious as it deservedly was to every friend of the common rights of our nature, contained at its fall but eight prisoners, and in its whole duration but three hundred! The single year of mob government and Robespierre threw two hundred and fifty thousand families into prison, from which the noblest, most sacred, and most learned, were released only by proclaimed and open massacre! This was the power of the multitude, undegraded by the pomps of courts and establishments-when the red cap and the sabre outblazed the old glittering abominations of crown and sceptre; and atheism, equality, and bloodshed sat upon the popular throne, like three Fates spinning and cutting off the threads of empires. In the almost boundless world of America this influence may not have been yet compressed into ruinous energy. The population is yet a scanty stream in a mighty bed, and all its foamings and swellings are but wasted on its interminable shore. It is a potential agency, that requires resistance for its vigorous display, and can do nothing when its realm is emptiness and solitude. Its emblem might be found in the "evil spirit" of Milton, partially forgetting his fixed evil and native hostility when once loose on the wing among the endless bowers, and purple mountains, and fresh streams of the new creation; but when the hour of this vagrancy was done, and he was again within his narrower world, bursting out into his old malignity, burning with his inveterate passions, and marshalling his legionary strength against the peace of God and man. Yet the influence of this formidable power in America has already gone the length of placing every public man under mental duress. It is painfully obvious, that to please the populace is the high road to authority. The honourable minds in its legislature are rendered impotent by the most trivial displeasure in the streets; and from the highest reputations to the lowest (a few excepted) there is a readiness to abandon declared opinions, to e bon daavi kai seul big w 46lut ja loodre 99 previous rules of conduct, and all that we understand by the name of public pledges, strange in our eyes, and unaccountable on any other principle. Popularity is there the supreme good, the twenty thousand of the wheel; that "richest and golden merchandize,' that justifies every man's venture and submission to all the capricious fluctuations of the public wave and wind. It is this that has compelled so respectable a man as Dr. Hobart to consult its will, even in his absence, by gleaning up "abuses" palatable to the popular taste, and by employing his first moment of return, to assure his countrymen that he is just the same man, as when he first placed his foot on the deck; that his native prejudices are not diminished by a grain; and that neither the brilliancy of France, nor the classic glories of Italy, nor the hereditary wisdom, power, and prudence of England, have shaken his inborn admiration of the land of swamp, the yellow fever, and universal suffrage. But the main effort is to prove that he is not Britainized; and for his proof he has given the "experimentum crucis,"the irresistible evidence of an ultra American zeal; by an attack upon that Protestant Establishment, which he might be expected to deeply venerate; and which is, of all our great national institutions, the most endeared and hallowed to us by time, by its connexion with our freedom, and by its solemn accordance with the faith in which we live and die. It would be a curious speculation to enquire why this antiEnglish feeling should be the hire of popularity. But the subject does not lie in our way, and it is not worth while to pursue it among the underwood and weeds of faction. We are concerned only with the fact, that the living generation of the United States have been pleased to adopt a very fretful temperament in all that touches on England. This runs through all the gradations of public utterance. The President's annual exposé, long enough to take a year to compose and another to understand, omits no opportunity of querulousness; even in its best temper it is decorously angry and pacifically quarrelsome. But when an occasion can be made; the whole virtuous vigour of the trans-atlantic soul is poured out at once, the diplomatist swells into the orator, and his eloquence is a perfect Niagara, a foaming flood of indignant grief and turbulent patriotism. The Reviewer, Quarterly, Monthly, or Weekly, canvasses for readers on the same principle, and woe be to the English authorship that falls under the indigenous pen. The newspaper placards itself into reputation on its righteous horror of the "tyrants of the seas." Without England the whole school of American rhetoric would lose its livelihood, its pabu |