evil with the insult: but still, if it be a mistake, we cannot err in our endeavour to extract wisdom from even a supposed connexion of cause and effect.

IV. It is remarkable, that, hitherto, with judgment has been associated mercy.

Though the hand of God has been stretched out against us for evil, yea for increasing evil as apostasy has increased; yet it has not been so stretched out for unmitigated evil. We have reason humbly to be thankful, that good has been largely intermingled. Whence we may perhaps venture to hope, that, hitherto, our national punishments have been sent, as warnings for the future, no less than as inflictions for the past. And this brings me to what I would call the moral of my address to my countrymen. In a recent publication, I remarked as follows:

"Our only hope, I believe, of a mitigated judgment is: that the favourite political project of encouraging Popery and discouraging Protestantism was not so much the mind and wish of our people at large, as the daring foolishness of our self-imagined worldly-wise Legislature; who, by first solemnly declaring Popery to be idolatrous, and then by giving for its support the public money and the public patronage, having previously engrafted it upon the once Protestant Constitution, have insulted Almighty God to his very face in a way rivalled only by the POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY of Jeroboam."*

This, then, I think, is the secret of our present mitigated inflictions. The acts of apostasy have not, hitherto, been the acts of the NATION. On the contrary, they have been perpetrated in contemptuous defiance of petition upon petition, insomuch that the very privilege of remonstratively petitioning, awarded to the subject by our once Protestant Constitution, has been made to stink in our nostrils as a purely vain and practically obsolete right. Nor yet have these acts been the acts of an unanimous LEGISLATURE. We may bless God, that here again a noble protest has been made. The acts are those of an OVERBEARING MAJORITY only, abominated by the nation at large, and reprobated by all the most conscientious part of the Legislature in both Houses. To their lasting honour be it spoken, they were not accessories to the presumptuous wickedness of those, who first declared Popery to be Idolatry, and who next did all in their power to foster and promote and propagate it.

V. Before I proceed to my conclusion, however, I wish, though in danger of the charge of repetition, that the nature of my argument should be distinctly understood.

That the Church of Rome is grossly idolatrous in more modes than one, there can, I think, be no reasonable doubt, if, in rerum natura, there really be any such thing as Idolatry: and, accord

* Letters on Tractarian Secession to Popery, pp. 257, 258. Published for the Protestant Association. Dalton, 28, Cockspur-street, Charing-cross.

ingly, so our Reformed Church of England has most rightly pronounced.

But my argument does not precisely rest upon the abstract question, Whether Popery be or be not idolatrous it rests upon the concrete position, that persons, who THEMSELVES solemnly declare it to be idolatrous and therefore utterly offensive to God, systematically, and as yet incorrigibly, do all that lies in their power, as legislators intrusted with the stewardship of the public money, to encourage and foster, by endowment and otherwise, what, not honest members of the Anglican Church merely, but what THEY, their own veritable SELVES, have thus VOLUNTARILY stigmatised.*

Now, so far as I can judge, common sense itself teaches us, that a greater and more glaring insult cannot possibly be offered to Almighty God, than the conduct of persons thus freely circumstanced by their own proper selves through their own voluntary act and deed; while the insult itself is fearfully aggravated by the wretched plea on which it is offered: the plea, to wit, of a POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY, which sets God at nought, and which then leads its advocates madly to expect that good will result from a procedure upon which it is rank absurdity to expect the Divine blessing. Of such rebellious conduct, the wickedness can only be equalled by the egregious folly folly, altogether hopeless and inexplicable except on the basis of absolute Atheism.

VI. Thus runs my argument. In Scripture, there is a case, which bears a close analogy to the present case: and I shall therefore employ it, in the way of a sort of apologue, to point and illustrate my moral.

1. When, by God himself, Jeroboam was constituted King of the ten severed tribes; forgetful of his Divine benefactor and distrusting the protection of the Almighty, he resorted, like our modern equally sagacious statesmen, through a total want of faith, to a plan of POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY, from which, still like them, he anticipated the greatest benefits and the fullest security. Lest his subjects, by their regular stated attendance at Jerusalem as enjoined by the law of God, should be induced to renew their allegiance to the house of David, he set up two golden calves in Bethel and Dan, instituted a new priesthood, and unblushingly sacrificed to the calves which he had made.

2. Hitherto, the wickedness of setting up POLITICAL EXPE

* A Member of one of the Houses, I recollect, though I forget which House, stepped forth during the debate, and advanced the following extraordinary position.

"It is the height of illiberal presumption," said our logical and consistent orator, "to stigmatise as idolatrous the religion of a full half of Europe."

The logic of this very liberal Gentleman is shewn, by its equally proving both Paganism and Mohammedism to be true, because they both have been and still are the religions of a very large part of mankind. His consistency is brought out by the very simple and natural question; If you do not BELIEVE Popery to be Idolatry, why did you solemnly DECLARE it to be such?

DIENCY against THE LAW OF GOD was simply that of Jeroboam and his unscrupulous Government. He himself avowed, that it was based on POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY: and what he said was perfectly true. RELIGIOUS CONVICTION had nothing to do with. the matter for an indisputably able man, like Jeroboam, no more believed the golden calves to be gods, than his brethren, our modern expediency-loving statesmen, believed in the theological soundness of wafer-worship, or Mary-worship, or saint-worship, or image-worship, or relic-worship, when they endowed Maynooth for the more effectual and more extensive propagation of what they had themselves declared to be Idolatry. In this stage of the apostasy, the wickedness rested exclusively with Jeroboam and his unprincipled government; just as, with us, the wickedness of fostering declared Idolatry rests hitherto, exclusively with the prime mover and overbearing majority of our own Legislature. Had the ten tribes rejected with indignation the vile policy of their new sovereign, they would have delivered their own souls. Their Government alone would have been guilty: and, though they might have partially suffered in the righteous judgments which no doubt would have fallen on Jeroboam and his guilty associates, still they would nationally have been secure.

3. But, unhappily, this was not the case. By a ready adoption, they made the sin of their Government their own sin. This placed them in a materially different situation. The thing became a NATIONAL sin: for the PEOPLE went to worship before the one or the other of the calves even unto Dan. What, then, was the result? Why, the precise opposite to which either they or Jeroboam, in their short-sighted political wisdom, had anticipated. The family of Jeroboam himself was hurled from the throne, which he had so ungratefully abused: and the people, sinking from one stage of idolatrous wickedness into another, were led away into a captivity from which they have never returned. Thou hast done evil, said the Lord to this time-serving lover of expediency, above all that were before thee: for thou hast gone and made thee other gods and molten images, to provoke me to anger; and hast cast me behind thy back. Therefore, will I bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam. For the Lord shall smite Israel as a reed is shaken in the water, and he shall root up Israel out of this good land which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river, BECAUSE they have made their groves, provoking the Lord to anger. And he shall give Israel up, because of the sins of Jeroboam, who did sin, and who made Israel to sin. In short, the boasted POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY of Jeroboam is erected by the sacred writers into a sort of proverb: and that prince is ever commemorated, as Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger with their vanities. VII. The application is so plain, that it requires little prompting on my part.

1. Hitherto, the daring sin of fostering and encouraging and endowing, what our legislators themselves have declared to be Idolatry, rests solely with a Government, which has deliberately and now repeatedly preferred POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY, or what has been fancied to be such, to A FAITHFUL FEAR OF GOD. Through numerous petitions and protests, insolently disregarded as so much waste paper, the NATION has repudiated the unhallowed deeds of their Governors: and, consequently, the wrath of Heaven has been tempered and mitigated.

2. But, if, in the approaching general election, the NATION, with their eyes wide open, shall uninquiringly return a House of Commons, servilely ready to grant any encouragement and any endowment to Popery which may be advocated by a Ministry prepared to sacrifice GOD'S WORD to AN INFIDEL EXPEDIENCY: it is quite clear, that, as in the parallel case of the Ten Tribes, the wickedness of the Government will forthwith become the wickedness of the Nation. It is true, that various conscientious individuals may exonerate themselves personally from guilt, by refusing all participation in the gross insult offered to the Almighty: but this will not prevent the sin from being national, if we return a House of Commons bent upon encouraging the declared Idolatry of Popery, and upon discouraging the Scriptural truth of Protestantism. Nations,* as Nations, have no existence beyond this present world. Consequently, here, as in the case of the Ten Tribes, must be the stage of their judicial punishment.

3. Are, then, my countrymen prepared to take upon themselves, and thus to make their own, the daring wickedness of their Legislature, or rather (God be praised), as I have noted above, the majority only of their Legislature? By this overbearing majority, under the influence of the Minister of the day, their petitions have been so contemptuously disregarded, that they are sick of the hopeless task and unavailing trouble of sending any more. But they have not, I trust, been forgotten: and now is the time to show, by something more stringent and energetic than humble petitions to a body which depends upon themselves, and which is purely their own creation, what is really the national will, touching the encouragement of the repeatedly declared Idolatry of Popery.

4. Nothing can be more simple than the line of action, which, on religious principles, every conscientious Protestant ought to adopt. Let no honest man, who has a vote for county or town, give it to any candidate, unless such candidate will distinctly pledge himself to oppose all future projects for either endowing the Romish priesthood, from whatever source the endowment may

[See "National Religion," reprint of a sermon of Archbishop Tillotson. No. 32, of Tracts of the Protestant Association.]-Ed. P. M.

be derived, or for making grants to their colleges in order to the more effectual propagation of what our senators themselves have pronounced to be Idolatry, or for juggling into their hands exclusively, funds which are pretended to be devoted to national education, or for promoting the same unrighteous object in any other way which the ingenuity of an unprincipled Minister may devise. Unless we possessed the gift of prophecy, it is clearly impossible to specify every mode of encouraging Popery and discouraging Protestantism. But, to bind any really honest and honourable candidate as contradistinguished from a quibbling trickster who might have graduated in the congenial school of Jesuitism, nothing more can be necessary, than the signature of a written form, purporting: that, neither directly nor indirectly, in any conceivable way that the perverted wit of man can devise, or with any reservations, or particularities, or exceptions, will the candidate, if elected, vote for the encouragement or support or promotion or endowment of Popery, whether such endowment respects the Romish priesthood at large, or Maynooth and any other of their Institutions in speciality. With this might be fitly associated a further pledge, to relieve us, if possible, from the national guilt of paying the College of Maynooth for the more effectual propagation of what those very persons, who thus shamelessly voted away the public money, have themselves solemnly declared to be Idolatry.

5. Let such a plan be steadily carried out: and, through God's mercy, I shall still not despair of my country. But, if by our return of an un-English expediency-mongering House of Commons, we enable the Minister of the day, whoever he may be, to carry into effect any unprincipled scheme of a virtual Infidelity: we then make his sin a national sin; we then nationally challenge the Almighty to do his worst; we then nationally court the very extremity of God's judgments.

6. Recent events, not particularly creditable to the actors in them, have given rise to what has been called The Country Party: a party, formed for the laudable purpose of giving protection to native industry and produce. Cordially do I wish this English party all success; but they will, I think, very much lower themselves in the public estimation, if they confine their exertions to matters purely secular. While they strive to protect our property from the selfish rapacity of the master-manufacturers, they ought equally to strive for the protection of our religion against the infidel Popery-favouring Liberalism of the day. Unless this be done, it will naturally enough be remarked to their disparagement, that, while they are zealous for the protection of property, they are indifferent as to the protection of true religion and as to the late shameless encouragement of false religion. They were right in using the one: but then, even for their own influence and credit, it is desirable, that they should