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improve the quality than augment the number of her agents: but it is the very vice of the system to multiply numbers, while it deteriorates the quality of the agents employed. And the immense revenues of the English hierarchy, which are supposed to amount to about £2,000,000 per annum, are divided with a most shameful partiality and in justice.

Each of the six-and-twenty bishops has from £2,000 to £20,000 or 30,000 a year; the eight-and-twenty deans, about £5,000 a year each; the two universities divide about £180,000 between them; £680,000 divided amongst livings of from £1,000 to £200 a year each, and £500,000 amongst those (of which there are more than 5,000) of from £40 and £50 to £100 a year. So that, of the 10,000 clergymen of the establishment, about one thousand, and these generally the most worthless and useless of the whole, engross all the richer preferments; or, according to a late analysis, the sum total of benefices, dignities, and minor canonries, in England and Wales, is 12,000; these are divided amongst 7,669 persons, of whom 3,853 hold one preferment only; 3,304, two; 370, three; 73, four; 38, five; 13, six; 4, seven; 1, eight; 2, nine; and 1, fifteen!!! While the Rev. the Earl of Bridgwater, and the Rev. Viscount Barrington, both golden prebends of Durham, and holding parochial livings besides, were (like the late Lord Bristol, bishop of Derry) permitted to reside abroad, and dishonour their sacred profession by spending the revenues of the Protestant church in Catholic countries, the former having died a short time since at Paris, and the latter at Rome!

The income of the Irish establishment is more than proportionably splendid, as nearly the same amount of revenue is spent upon a much smaller number of clerical agents; while it is subject to the same partiality and abuse in its distribution. Is it not monstrous that a church, which devours more than a tenth of the landed wealth of the kingdom, and costs more than all the ecclesiastical establishments of Christendom, or perhaps of the world, besides, should be stow the great mass of its revenues to enable a minority of its ministers to live in luxury and idleness, while (Oh tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon!) a vast body of working clergy are so scantily provided for, as to be compelled to seek the aid of a charitable society? But when we consider that the wealth of the church was bestowed upon her during the dark ages; that tithes were first given to the clergy in the eighth century by the grossest tyranny and spoliation on the part of two of our

popish and superstitious kings; and in one instance, as a commutation for murder! we do not so much wonder at the result, and are ready to confess the application of her riches is well worthy of their origin. Our only wonder is, that so vile a system of pollution and spiritual sacrilege should have so long survived the doctrinal reformation of the sixteenth century. That it can remain very much longer untouched by the hand of reform, amidst the rapidly growing light and intelligence of the times, we will not believe, notwithstanding the powerful interests which are opposed to the least innovation.

It is very fashionable to fling the most opprobrious epithets at the Roman church, and to call her the mystic whore of Babylon; but in her present degraded condition, the hierarchy of this country can be viewed as no other than the eldest daughter of that firstborn of wickedness. Let none presume to

"lay the flattering unction to their souls," that such a state of things can be much longer tolerated; and if the settlement of the Catholic question produce no other effect than a thorough cleansing of the Augean stable of our ecclesiastical establishment, although no benefit should accrue to the Catholics, it will have materially contributed to the spiritual strength of the Protestant

cause.

The meeting last year at Cork of the high Protestant Tories, at which the Earl of Mountcashel presided, to petition Parliament for a reform of the abuses of the establishment, and the late meeting of the friends of church reform in the north of England,* clearly indicate what must sooner or later be the consequence. The question simply amounts to this, whether the church shall be made for the parish, or the parish for the church. Christianity can never, in my view, be universally extended, till all civil establishments of religion be abolished throughout Christendom; and I believe our own favoured land will never be fully christianized till the episcopal church be wholly disconnected from the state, and left to rely for support, as in the United States, upon its merits alone. Let the cross no longer rest upon the throne, or upon an arm of flesh, and it will soon be triumphant. Let establishments no longer make it the but of infidels, and it will soon, by a spiritual force which will prove irresistible, subdue its enemies, whether pagan, papal, or infidel, beneath its

feet.

At which a vote of thanks was passed to Mr. Rippon, for his concise, able, and public-spirited remonstrance to Sir Robert Peel, on the shameful abuse of Dean Philpotts being made bishop of Exeter, and allowed to retain the rectory of Stanhope (worth 4,0007 ayear) besides!

A grand source of the evils which have oppressed this, and almost every country in the world, has been the attempt of rulers to erect and bolster up institutions, which dare not abide the test of utility and public opinion. But if any thing in the arrangements of human society cannot bear such a criterion, founded upon the spirit and precepts of the gospel, we are sure it must be radically vicious; and, in the name of religion and common sense, let it fall, and the community will be benefited.

Captain Basil Hall, in his "Travels in North America," says, "the subjection of the state to the church, as in Catholic countries, would not fail to corrupt both religion and civil government; but that, as copartners, they are mutually beneficial." We say, on the contrary, that the distinction of the gallant captain between copartnership and subjection, is purely imaginary; that whereever such an unholy alliance obtains, the subjection must be reciprocal-of the church to the state, for the sake of the ecclesiastical revenues; and of the state to the church, for the perpetuation of the present system of government, and resistance to any political innovation or reform.

Some clerical advocates of the church tell us, that but for its civil establishment, the land would be overrun with infidelity; yet, what is this but saying, they would not stir an inch to promote the well-being of their country and their fellow-men, unless stimu. lated by self-interest and filthy lucre? And can any man doubt that the church would do infinitely better without such ministers than with them? The zeal, activity, and success of the dissenters and Methodists, however, disprove the allegation, and show that if the prevalence of infidelity is to be dreaded, it is from any thing rather than the want of a church establishment; and if the episcopal church of this country were immediately severed from the state, it would only be purged of the dross and corruption which it has contracted from its secular attachments, detach from her only such clergymen as ought never to have desecrated her altars, and enable all her faithful pastors to labour with tenfold energy and effect. The conclusion is hence irresistible, that no civil power on earth has any right to meddle with the religious interests of its subjects; that when it does so, it steps beyond the bounds of its legitimate authority; and that, as all history proves, such interference of necessity most awfully corrupts, degrades, and secularizes the church.

"Men are never so likely," says an able critic, "to settle a question rightly, as when they discuss it freely. A government can 2D. SERIES, NO. 3.-VOL. I.

interfere in discussion only by making it less free than it would otherwise be. Men are most likely to form just opinions, when they have no other wish than to know the truth, and are exempt from all external influence either of hope or fear. Government, as government, can bring nothing but the influence of hopes or fears to support its doctrines. It carries on controversy, not with reason, but with threats and bribes. If it employs rea. sons, it does so, not in virtue of any powers which belong to it as a government. Thus, instead of a contest between argument and argument, we have a contest between argument and force. Instead of a contest, in which truth, from the natural constitution of the human mind, has a decided advantage over falsehood, we have a contest in which truth can be victorious only by accident.

"We will not be deterred, by any fear of misrepresentation, from expressing our hearty approbation of the mild, wise, and eminently Christian manner in which the Church and the Government have lately acted with respect to blasphemous publications. We praise them for not having thought it necessary to encircle a religion, pure, me ciful, and philosophical-a religion, to the evidences of which the highest intellects have yielded-with the defences of a false and bloody superstition. The ark of God w..s never taken, till it was surrounded by the arms of earthly defenders. In captivity its sanctity was sufficient to vindicate it from insult, and to lay the hostile fiend prostrate on the threshold of his own temple. The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave. To such a system it can bring no addition of dignity or of strength, that it is part and parcel of the common law. It is not now for the first time left to rely on the force of its own evidences, and the attractions of its own beauty. Its sublime philosophy confounded the Grecian schools in the fair conflict of reason with reason. The bravest and wisest of the Cæsars found their arms and their policy unavailing when opposed to the weapons that were not carnal, and the kingdom that was not of this world. The victory which Porphyry and Dioclesian failed to gain, is not, to all appearance, reserved for any of those who have in this age directed their efforts against the last restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched. The whole history of the Christian religion

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shows that she is in far greater danger of being corrupted by the alliance of power, than of being crushed by its opposition. Those who thrust temporal sovereignty upon her, treat her as their prototypes treated her Author. They bow the knee, and spit upon her; they cry, Hail! and smite her on the cheek; they put a sceptre into her hand, but it is a fragile reed; they crown her, but it is with thorns; they cover with purple the wounds which their own hands have inflicted on her; and inscribe magnificent titles over the cross on which they have fixed her to perish in ignominy and pain.'

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III.-National churches inevitably corrupt legislation, and infringe civil and religious liberty. In proof of this fact, we have no occasion to look into the records of papal Christendom at large, or to trace down from the period when Christianity first acquired a political establishment. We find it abundantly confirmed by the history of our own country.

Before the Reformation, the clergy of this country, as in most Catholic states, formed virtually the third estate of the realm. Our laws were framed almost exclusively for the advantage of the monarch, the nobility, and the church; the people were not deemed worthy of consideration. And, from that period to the present time, the same spirit has too generally pervaded our legislation, though the public mind has latterly been too enlightened to tolerate the grossness of oppression.

The same abuses were most flagrant in France before the revolution. Every national church is conceived in the very spirit of infallibility, and assumes to itself the right of enforcing conformity to its dogmas, or, at least,of compelling dissidents and conformists to provide for its maintenance, or both. But is not such an assumption the most daring usurpation of the rights of conscience, and arrogant impiety against the Majesty of heaven? The antichristian conjunction of the civil and ecclesiastical power-the prostitution of civil authority to the maintenance of a particular religious system-is the fertile source of all the persecution and intolerance which have devastated the church, and filled the world with violence and blood. Hence originated the cruelties inflicted upon the primitive church by the Pagan and Jewish authorities of the day; the atrocities of the papal power; and the tyranny and coercion of many of the reformed, or soidisant Protestant establishments of Chris

• Edinburgh Review, No. C. Article, Southey's Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society.

tendom. It is true, that from the spread of general knowledge, and the consequently greater prevalence of the spirit of civil free. dom, some hierarchies of the present day no longer dare to coerce acquiescence in their forms or tenets by fire and sword, fine and imprisonment. But that, even in this country, this is not at all owing to the ameliorated genius of ecclesiastical power, but to the free spirit of our civil institutions, and the force of public opinion, is evident from the petty vexations of brief authority, which continually call for the vigilant aid of the "Religious Liberty Society," and show the demon of intolerance to be still alive"willing to wound, though yet afraid to strike."

That it is not at all owing to priestly favour that we are not now deprived of liberty of conscience by a second Act of Uniformity, is evident from many facts. Some years since, a vicar of the church of England (will it be believed, gentle reader?) had the arrogance and audacity to propose to the legislature a law for depriving all ministers, who had not received apostolical (i.e. episcopal) ordination, of their functions!!! Popery could never have existed as a persecuting power, but for the impious and adulterous connexion of church and state; nor could it have obtained any ascendancy as a degrading and debasing superstition over the human mind. The main principle of the reformation, i. e. the right of every man to judge for himself in sacred matters, is diametrically opposed to church establishments, and had it been carried to its necessary and legitimate consequences, must have completely dissevered ecclesiastical from civil authority. When, however, we consider the darkness of the age of that great event, and the political agency which directed its rise and progress, we rather wonder so much was achieved, than that it should not have at once attained its full consummation. Coverdale, and some other of the reformers, saw this to be the inevitable result, but the majority of their colleagues were less enlightened, or perhaps hesitated to go further, from a fear of strangling the infant cause in its birth.

The great principle of the scriptures, and the reformation, which recognized afresh their sole authority in religion, completely annihilates the claim to infallibility, and asserts the right of every man, not merely to judge, but to choose for himself in sacred matters, and to give effect to such choice by an exclusive and voluntary support of that ministry which he deems the best. If the reformation has not established this; if it has not decided that human authority can

ordain nothing in matters of conscience, it is perfectly nugatory, and has done nothing. Its principle is therefore directly subversive of that of every church establishment. A compulsory provision for its maintenance is the character of the mildest as of the most intolerant hierarchy. Every such institution, whether papal or protestant, is founded in injustice, and inevitably violates the religious liberty of the subject. "The language and spirit of the mildest establishment, even of the English establishment as administered at this day, to all dissidents, is, 'We invite you to unite in the creed and forms which to us seem best: if you differ from us, you are at liberty to choose your own institutions; but remember, though we will not contribute a farthing to the maintenance of your worship, we shall tax you for the support of ours; and if you refuse, remind you, in a way not very grateful to the flesh, that you cannot with impunity demur to the payment of tithes, church rates, and Easter offering.'

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It is not, however, a whit more equitable, though it may be less cruel and absurd, to compel dissentients to contribute to the revenues, than to coerce their conformity to the doctrines or discipline of the hierarchy. Civil government, as we have observed, is a compulsory authority ordained for quite another purpose, and when it presumes to employ its coercive powers in religious matters, it transgresses its legitimate bounds, and becomes oppressive and unjust. It is then just the same in principle, whether the state merely enforce a provision for the church, or insist upon an acquiescence in its creed and forms; the latter is only a greater stretch of usurped authority. The civil power has just as much right to compel one as the other. If it has no right to coerce my religious profession, it has none to tax me for the support of its own; both assumptions, in point of equity, must stand or fall together; once admit the right of private judgment, and the right to choose, and give effect to that choice by exclusively voluntary means, follows as a matter of course. Christianity allows of no means but persuasion and argument for the spread of its tenets, and consequently nothing but freewill offerings to maintain its institutions; and I am persuaded, that nothing has created a greater repugnance to the gospel than the attempt to support its claims by coercive means, and that it never can assert its primitive power, till all such factitious and unnatural aids be withdrawn and done away.

Eclectic Review, May, 1830. Article," Scott's continuation of Milner's Church History."

As the intervention of the civil power in matters of conscience gave birth to the man of sin, so in my view must the abolition of all church establishments precede his entire downfall. "National churches," says Mr. Gilbert Wakefield, " are that hay and stubble, which might be removed without difficulty or confusion from the fabric of religion by the gentle hand of reformation, but which the infatuation of ecclesiastics will leave to be destroyed by fire. National churches are that incrustation which has enveloped by gradual concretion the diamond of Christianity; nor can, I fear, the genuine lustre be restored, but by such violent efforts as the separation of substances so long and closely connected must inevitably require." Such an unwarrantable compound of politics and religious forms fully merits the castigation thus inflicted upon it by one of our poets:

"Inventions added in a fatal hour,
Human appendages of pomp and power,
Whatever shines in outward grandeur great,
I give it up-a creature of the state;
Wide of the church, as hell from heav'n is wide,
The blaze of riches, and the pomp of pride,
The vain desire to be entitled Lord,
The worldly kingdom, and the princely sword;
But should the bold, usurping spirit dare
Still higher climb, and sit in Moses' chair,
Pow'r o'er my faith and conscience to maintain,
Shall I submit, and suffer it to reign?
Call it the church, and darkness put for light,
Falsehood with truth confound, and wrong with
right?

No: 1 dispute the evil's haughty claim,
The spirit of the world be stiil its name;
Whatever called by man, 'tis purely evil,
"Tis Babel, antichrist, and Pope, and Devil."

The immortal Locke, in his imperishable work "Of the Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes," is more than a match for all the advocates of religious establishments; but the title of his book, which very imperfectly describes its contents, is perhaps one reason why it has not been so generally read and understood as could have been desired. That it should not have been a favourite with the clergy, and that they should think the less that is said about it the better, is explained, when we find that it proves unanswerably, that the civil magistrate can either ordain every thing in religion, or he can ordain nothing, and that the scope of its argument throughout is decidedly against ecclesiastical establishments of every kind. The secular power, as the whole of his reasoning goes to shew, has no concern with the soul, beyond equally protecting the religious rights of every class of its subjects. Its maxim should be "Tros, Tyriusve mihi nullo discrimine agetur."

To talk of toleration implies that one set of men have a right of dominion over the faith of another, than which nothing can be

a more preposterous and daring usurpation of the inalienable attributes of humanity. It were just as rational, as has been well remarked, to talk of tolerating a man's head upon his shoulders. The assumption of such a power is the very essence of popery, and involves a claim to infallibility; for if every man must give an account, and by consequence has a natural right to judge for himself in matters of conscience, the license or prohibition of erring mortals must be altogether out of the question. How singular is it that the world should have continued down to the seventeenth century almost totally insensible to the claims of religious liberty, and that even now a large portion of protestant Christendom is hardly awakened to a full recognition of the rights of private judgment.

Leonard Busher appears to have been the first in this country who publicly advocated entire religious liberty. In the reign of James I. he presented to the king and parliament his "Religious Peace," in which he pleads the right of every person to be protected in his religious sentiments, and to write, dispute, confer, print, and publish any matter touching religion, either for or against whomsoever, and that all members of the state were in this respect perfectly equal as brethren and fellow-disciples. Then followed Roger Williams, Owen, Milton, and, lastly, Locke, though the two latter admit of some restraint in the case of infidels, which is hardly to be reconciled with the general principle they have so unanswerably contended for. The above writers then have placed the subject on an irrefragable basis, and developed principles as imperishable as liberty itself, which shew that all coercive interference in religion, whether in the shape of pains and penalties, or of church establishments, is a most unwarrantable infringement of religious liberty, and the right of private judgment. For as the religion of every prince is orthodox to himself, no power can be entrusted to the magistrate for the suppression of error, or maintenance of truth, which may not in time and place be perverted to the very opposite.

If we claim for a Christian government the right to establish a national church, we must concede an equal right to rulers of a different persuasion, whether Jewish, Mohammedan, or Pagan; since there is no medium between this, and denying such a right altogether. The truth or falsehood of the particular religious system cannot in the least affect the question, because every government believes its own to be true, or, at any rate, professes to do so. Will then the advocates of the hierarchy, the Hookers,

Paleys, Jewells, and Wilkes, of the day, contend for the principle in full, in behalf of every kind and mode of faith, or abandon it altogether? Will they assert, that if any other sect of this country were elevated to the supremacy, it would be equitable to compel them to contribute to its maintenance? Or that if they should become resident in foreign countries, they may justly be obliged to support the particular superstition which may chance to be predominant? Common sense, to say nothing of moral principle, revolts at the idea. Yet upon the horns of such a dilemma are the abettors of an establishment thrown. " Utrum horum malunt, accipiant."

What then is all the special pleading of such advocates, compared with the unanswerable arguments in behalf of religious liberty, and the fact, which stands unique in the annals of the world, of the government of the United States of America, which knows no religious party, but extends equal protection to all; where religion pervades all classes of the community much more than in this country, and infidelity never assumes the daring front which is witnessed here, though they have no statute against blasphemy, and Christianity is not, in any but the right sense, part and parcel of the law of the land? Such a state of things affords a most edifying example to the whole civilized world; and whatever may be alleged by the lovers of antiquity and expediency, we would say, "Go to the schoolmaster, and learn."

Christianity part and parcel of the law of the land! The phrase is now a mere farce; for the fact stated has never yet taken place in this or any other part of Christendom, where religious establishments exist; and never will, until the grand principle of Christian justice-of "doing to others as we would be done to," pervade our whole legislation, and be fully recognized in political as well as private affairs-until every religious test, as a civil qualification, be abolished, and the combination of civil and ecclesiastical power be done away-until the criminal code be purged of its sanguinary character, and law be reduced to equity, and founded on the basis of the Christian morality.

When Christianity shall thus be exhibited in her real character, as being, both in public and private matters, the parent of every virtue; when she shall no longer be smitten and wounded in the house of her pretended friends, and establishments cease to rob her of her angelic aspect, she will prove omnipotent to subdue the world—the golden age will be again witnessed on earth, and the

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