character has withstood, for above a century, the corrupting influence of all the causes which singly proved fatal to her predecessors in that dazzling career; conquests greater than attended the standards of Rome, even in the days of Cæsar; commerce more extensive than flowed into the golden horn of Constantinople; wealth more boundless than Eastern riches poured into the Lagune of St Mark. While France, her equal in years, was immersed in the corruptions and infidelity which induced the desolating tempest of the Revolution; while Spain, debilitated by prosperity, had sunk into an inglorious old age; while Italy, her elder born in national existence, unmindful of her immortal predecessors, had yielded to the deadly poison of long established refine ment, England alone remained comparatively pure and unchanged in its public character, and exhibited, though grey in years of renown, the energy and vigour of youthful civilisation. What is the chief cause of this singular exception in favour of the British Empire, of that tendency to decay which seems the common lot of earthly things? The purity and practice of her Established Church; the incessant efforts which its teachers have made to struggle with so many and varied causes of corruption; the principles which they have implanted in the minds of youth, and exemplified in their own blameless and blessed career. It is here that we are to find the secret of the long duration of British prosperity; of the matchless progress she has made in arts, and usefulness, and arms; and the unexampled resistance she has opposed to the many principles of decay fermenting in her own bosom. Extinguish these fountains of living water; mingle them with the bitterness of sectarian zeal, or the indifference of foreign infidelity and how rapidly will the unresisted principles of corruption spread-how speedily will her long averted old age fall upon the British Empire!

Ignorant men may rail at the sloth and indolence of the Esta⚫blishment; sectarian zeal may magnify the vices or weakness of a few of its unworthy members; but history, judging by the actions of

men, will pronounce the labours of the English Church the most astonishing monument of Christian beneficence that ever has existed upon earth. It is institutions which make men. The efforts of the English Church have been so astonishing, because its Establishment is admirably calculated to combine practical beneficence with speculative research, and unite humble usefulness with dignified exertion. If its members had been exclusively of the aristocratic classes, it would have sunk into the corruptions of the French Hierarchy; if of the lower, it would have been lost in the jealousies of the English Dissenters. It is by the happy combination of the two,-by the admixture of plebeian vigour and ability with patrician lustre and descent,-by the union of the elevated character and simple habits of the old English gentlemen with the talents and energy of its rising urban society, that its admirable and dignified character has so long and durably been imprinted on the Church of England. Remove the operation of these causes, by the destruction or mutilation of the Establishment, and how soon would this character be lost, and this usefulness extinguished, and these virtues cease to bless mankind?

Where is now the Church of France? In that revolutionized and regenerated realm, what are the character, utility, and prospects of the Christian clergy? What barrier have they opposed to the flood of licentiousness, profligacy, and corruption which broke in upon the State with the triumph of revolutionary principles? Where are now the Bossuets and Fenelons, the Massillons and Bourdaloues, the Flechiers and Saurins, the Malebranches and Pascals of the best of republics? Buried in the vault of all the Capulets; overwhelmed in the ruins of the Establishment; drowned in the ceaseless struggle for the necessaries of life, which is imposed on pastors in their wretched circumstances. French talent is unquestionably not extinct; the glory of her arms is indelibly engraven in the records of history; the researches of her philosophers have rivalled all but Newton's fame; the taste

of her people attracts all the nations of Europe to her capital. How has it happened, that no addition whatever has been made to her religious celebrity, nor any men arisen to bear the standard of the Cross abreast of the ensigns of temporal glory? The cause is to be found in the destruction of the Establishment; in the consequent casting down of religion into the lower walks of life; in the ceaseless and humble toil imposed upon the degraded members of the present Church. No man in France would make his son an ecclesiastic who could get him as an apprentice into a grocer's shop, or had the prospect of making him a sergeant of artillery. The Church, the first and most important of professions in every Christian state, is abandoned to the lowest classes of society; and so humble are their means, that they are unable to give to their younger members even the decent education which in Britain is placed within the reach of every peasant. Such have been the effects of destroying the Establishment in the first of European monarchies.

And has the boasted spread of education, have the efforts of the schoolmaster been able to supersede the necessity of Christian instructors in that great and varied community? The rapid progress of demoralization, the frightful increase of profligacy, afford decisive evidence that it has not; and that, with the destruction of the National Church, the national regenerators have destroyed the seeds of lasting prosperity, or even durable existence. In the condition of France, therefore, we may see a living in stance of the effect of demolishing the Church Establishment upon public morality, and, of course, by a rapid process, upon national safety; and if we would follow the course of corruption upon which they are now so far advanced, we have now only to imitate their example.

The argument which supposes that religious instruction is not necessarily dependent upon national support, and that you may leave the people to choose and pay their own pastors, as they choose and pay their own butchers, bakers, and tailors, is obviously and palpably unsound. It presupposes that the people are qualified to judge what is good for them in religious tuition; that an unerring instinct will lead them to church, as it leads them to breakfast or dinner; and that they will provide themselves with the requisite supply of spiritual food, just as certainly as they will provide for the physical necessities or desires of their being. Does any one's experience of human nature, any one's knowledge of the world, any one's acquaintance with history, support such an opinion? Is it not certain, on the contrary, that mankind, if left to themselves, will, in general, make no provision whatever for their spiritual necessities; that, engrossed with the necessities of their present condition, and pressed by the wants of their animal desires, they will utterly neglect the weightier matters of the law; and that to apply the principles of free trade and unlimited competition to religious instruction, is, in other words, to deliver both poor and rich over to the unrestrained influence of passion, sensuality, and wickedness?

Self-preservation is the first law of nature; but it is preservation in this world, not the next, which is the ruling principle. The clergy, deprived of all steady support or fixed incomes, and driven to depend on their flocks for their subsistence, must adapt themselves to the tastes and dispositions of the mass of the people; and what that is we may every day see. They must teach, not what is true, or in the end useful, but what is agreeable, and at the moment profitable. Fanaticism, extravagance, and absurdity-stimulus to the imagination-food for the passions-must

become the predominant characteristic of the theological instruction of the great bulk of the people. Reason, justice, beneficence, self-command, and devotion, will be speedily discarded. David Hume himself has said, that a Church Establishment is necessary to preserve religious instruction from extravagance and error; and the observation is perfectly just in all ages, because it is founded on the experienced inability of the human mind, in the multitude, when left to itself, to resist the inroads of imagination and excitement upon the domain of religion and reason.

Nor is it only upon the middling and lower orders that the ruinous effects of the want of a religious Establishment would be speedily felt. Consequences, if possible still more disastrous, would inevitably follow upon the higher orders-upon the noble, the haughty, the affluent. They would speedily draw off from their humbler brethren-an aristocratic religion would arise-fashionable preachers, in highly-rented places of worship, would attract brilliant audiences-the temple of God would become the theatre of vanity. Those who know how much this has already taken place in the metropolis, even with all the equalizing effect of parochial places of worship and an Established Church, may conceive, how rapidly it would spread if the Establishment were annihilated, and the different classes of society were scattered abroad to seek each their own places of devotion, according as their finances, their habits, their inclinations, led them. A King's Theatre of religion would speedily arise; the avenues to certain churches, favourites with the higher orders, would be thronged with carriages, while the unnoticed poor were allowed to slink away to their humble meetinghouses through lanes and alleys. In such fashionable places of worship, could we expect truth to be openly and fearlessly spoken, or vice right ly and sincerely stigmatized? Is it likely that prevailing vices would be loudly condemned, and agreeable weaknesses sternly reprobated, and fashionable indulgences vehemently exposed, by pastors who, by the propagation of such wholesome but

unpalatable doctrines, might be reduced from a thousand to a hun dred a-year?

Of all the numerous delusions that democratic ambition has succeeded in palming off upon mankind, there is none so utterly extravagant as the doctrine, that an Established Church, and the payment of the clergy by means of tithes, are aristocratic institutions, and that the lower orders would gain by having the revenues of the Establishment applied to other and secular purposes. Who pays the clergy in the Established Church? The landowners in the country, and the houseowners in towns; that is, the richest classes in both situations. The tithe, apparently paid by the farmer, is in reality defrayed by the landlord; if it did not exist, the rent he receives would be proportionally advanced: the Scotch farmer who pays no tithe, pays more in rent than the English does in rent and tithe put together. The clergy are, in truth, landed proprietors, who draw their share of the produce on the condition of furnishing gra tuitous instruction to the people in the momentous subjects of religion; while the landowner draws the remainder under no such condition. In what way the labouring or industrious classes are to be benefited by depriving the clergy of the landed estates which now enable the poor to receive from them the blessing of religious instruction for nothing, and throwing them directly as a burden upon the hard-earned wages of the poor, we leave it to the advocates of such a change to explain.

The effect of such a change must be either to extinguish religious instruction altogether, and leave the people in a nominally Christian state, without information on their duties or the other world, but what they could pick up from the Mechanics' Institutes and Penny Magazines, or to force every congregation to maintain its own clergyman. If the revolutionists intend the first, we understand them. They wish to reduce Great Britain to a heathen state; to allow the human mind, deprived of the light of revelation, to recur to the absurdity and grossness of polytheism: they would restore us to the barbarous rites of

the Hindoos, or the brilliant mythology of the Greeks, or the austere superstition of the Druids. If not, they are doubtless prepared to shew how the human mind, consumed as it is with ceaseless anxiety on the government of this world, and the events of the next, is to be prevented from relapsing into error, heathen superstition, pagan belief, the invariable attendants, in every former age of the world, of the extinction or neglect of the worship of the one true God. If this is not the design of the revolutionists, and they really desire to preserve the Christian religion in this country, they are doubtless prepared to shew how the working classes, whose interests they pretend to advocate, are to be benefited by confiscating the property which now pays for the religious instruction of the poor, and laying the maintenance of the clergy as a direct tax upon the wages of industry.

Of all the classes of landed proprietors, the clergy are the one who spend their incomes most directly and immediately among the people of their own vicinity. This is a most important circumstance, especially in an age when the tendency to fly abroad, and forget the anxieties of Britain in the dissipation and luxury of foreign capitals, is so extremely prevalent in the landed proprietors. How strange, then, that the clergy and bishops, who are the class of all others of the landed proprietors who are most resident, and encourage domestic industry most largely by their wealth, should be the one against whom so great a clamour is raised, and that the lay owners, who are subject to no obligation of residence, and do nothing what ever for their incomes, should be allowed to range the world over in quest of pleasure or excitement, without raising any jealousy of their possessions! O'Connell sees this clearly, though frequently for party purposes he thinks fit to conceal or suppress it. When the Irish Church Reform Bill was brought in last session, he said that he hailed it, and especially the suppression of the ten bishoprics, as the greatest boon ever conferred upon the Emerald Isle; but, this session, in summing up

the catalogue of Ministerial delinquencies against Ireland, he placed in the very front rank the extinction of the ten bishops, "almost the only remnant of resident landowners left in the country." Such are the inconsistencies of the revolutionists; and the opinion to which the great Agitator has now arrived as to the propriety of not extinguishing the clergy, and depriving the people of the in estimable benefits of such a body of landowners constantly residing amongst them, will be universal, when the voice of passion is stilled; but not perhaps before the great work of spoliation is effected, and the Church has ceased to be numbered among the landowners of England.

Incalculable would be the evils to the poor, if the present race of resident clergymen were extirpated by the dissolution of the Establishment, and their place supplied only by dissenting ministers, or curés, as in regenerated France. Would such a body, hardly equal in point of acquirement, family, education, or income, to the humblest class of present schoolmasters, be expected to perform the functions, or discharge the duties, or carry on the beneficence of the present parish priests? Connected as the clergy now are with the landed proprietors, and frequently the aristocracy, by family, university education, and society, and with the poor by duty, proximity of residence, and Christian benevolence, they form a link, binding together the higher and lower orders, of inestimable value and importance; whose influence has done more than that of any other class to knit society together, whose value could only be fully appreciated if they were removed, and an irreparable chasm left in the place which they occupied. Suppose a tax-gatherer sent down to every county, to collect the tithes for behoof of the consolidated fund, or in aid of the establishment for the diffusion of politico-economical and scientific disquisitions; will such an officer supply the place of a Christian clergyman, living in the several parishes, visiting the poor, heading all the undertakings for their improvement, instructing them in their religious duties, rejoicing with them when

they rejoiced, and weeping with them when they wept? Are the farmers likely to compound their tithes for a twentieth instead of a tenth of the produce with such a Government collector, as the Parliamentary returns prove they now do with the Established Clergy? Widely, wofully different will be their situation, when the parsonage-house is in ruins, the parish church going to decay, its pulpit occupied by a dissenting zealot, or a Catholic bigot, maintained by themselves, and their tithes paid besides to an inexorable collector in the county town, from what it now is under the shadow of the great and venerable Establishment of Eng. land, with grateful feeling and social interchange of kindness, endearing the pastor to his parishioners, and the Christian shepherd and his affectionate flock living and dying together.

The inequality in the emoluments of livings in different situations, and the abuse of pluralities, is the incessant theme of declamation. But while we admit that something should be done, and that, too, right speedily, to raise up the numerous small livings to a level with the incomes requisite for a clergyman's family, we are prepared to maintain, that if all livings are made of the same, or nearly the same size, and pluralities are abolished, the peculiar dignity and use fulness of the Establishment will be in a great measure destroyed. It is a most perilous thing to extinguish emulation in any class of men, or say to a man put down at five-and-twenty in a living, "Here you are for life: exertion can neither better, nor indolence injure your fortunes." If you have a complete equality in livings, beware lest you have at the same time a similar equality in the intellectual qualifications of their incumbents. If every clergyman is bound for ever to one spot, is there no danger that they will often be reduced to the contracted ideas and narrow views, hardly avoidable by those constantly chained to a limited set of objects? We have the highest regard for the respectability and utility of the Presbyterian clergy of Scotland; but we cannot shut our eyes to their obvious inferiority in theological acquirement and general

information to their brethren in England, and often marvel that, among a thousand men of good education, and decent competence, so few names of general celebrity should be found; that so few Chalmerses or Thomsons exist in the land of Robertson and Blair. It would be a most lamentable circumstance if, from the triumph of democratic principles, a similar equality of income and intellect were to be found under the Church of England. The inequality in the livings of the Church of England, the brilliant prizes in its lottery, the numerous blanks which threaten its members, and invigorate their exertions, are the best security for general and unflinching exertion, and perfectly suited to the varied, and, at first sight, heterogeneous mixture, which distinguishes the lay society of the empire-that singular union of aristocratic feeling with democratic ambition, of patrician pride with plebeian vigour, of general equality in rights, and excessive difference in condition, which characterises English society. A more equal distribution of livings may be gratifying to democratic envy, or suitable to republican equality; but it could not fail to diminish the varied acquirements and high standard of excellence which has so long distinguished, and now more than ever distinguishes, the Church of England, and would rapidly extinguish those illustrious names which, in every branch of knowledge, and theology more than any, have immortalized its history. The present is an aspiring and an energetic age. No class in society can slumber with impunity at its post. So great are the efforts making in every line of life, under the pressure of overbearing necessity, that to remain still is to retrograde. If the English Church, under the paralysis brought on by the extinction of all great objects of ambition to its members, is reduced to comparative obscurity and indolence, it will rapidly fall into contempt, and, like the revolutionized Church of France, fail in possessing any influence over a corrupt community, or discharging the most essential duties of a Christian Establishment.

When we reflect how respected the