good faith and earnestness, or swamp, amid the bitter cheers of the disappointed, insulted, and exasperated nation, hailing the downfal of a predestined faction, whom no danger could warn, and no power could save. Could Ministers even, for a few months longer, contrive to baffle the demands of the people, for the reform of notorious, proved, and acknowledged abuses, the measures to which they are themselves directly pledged in the present Session,-the Local Courts' Bill, in any event, however it fare with their other Cabinet measures,-must precipitate the collision of which they shew such dread. With how much more vigour and confidence could this awful day- -so very awful to the Whig aristocracy have been met earlier,-than now when their pitiful course of trimming, temporizing, and expediency, has swollen the ignorant Ultra-Tory Peers into tenfold conceit, and actually lessened the power of their moderate leaders, for managing and restraining them? An amended Cabinet, admitting it were substantially and extensively improved, must remain an ineffective instrument, without an amended House of Peers; and the one must produce the other. The entire question resolves itself into the old proposition of What is to be done with the Peers? And on this topic, Earl Grey must consult the people, and take counsel of that spirit of the age to which he sometimes affects to do reverence. No one longer asks, What will the Lords do? Their Lordships have made that point so plain, while the Whigs have been spoiling them, that many want the patience even to inquire what they ought to do. How the handful of hereditary legislators, the less than 500,existing as such, by opinion and sufferance, can be made to act in sympathy with the millions, is now a question for persons of remarkable mɔderation only. It is, however, one which involves the very existence of its subjects, as an order in the State. It is in fact of small importance to any part of British society, save themselves; and they must, as an Assembly, either be led gently to apprehend what a few of their body are reluctantly discovering, or Bide their Time. PRINCIPLE AND INTEREST. THERE are two things which regulate men's movements in this life,-Principle and Interest. The first is professed by the few, the last by the million, or, at least, in the ratio of two to one,-as for corroboration,— There were two who dov'd their neighbours' wives, In rank, Principle is a poor, clever, half-fed curate, with L.20 per annum; a house full of smoke, wet clothes, and soap suds; sixteen great and small children, two pigs, a fat wife, and a seedy coat, whose colour the village tailor remembers to have been black, or at least pepperand-salt, when he was a boy! On the other hand, Interest is the fat, portly Vicar of Bray, residing in a "weel stocket farm" and mansion, filled, like himself, with good things; and who, instead of sixteen bantlings, has one sickly boy, My son, sir;" a compound of all the sweets of the adjacent cake shop ;-while, as to the matter of coats, he has more changes of them than the Roman, Lucullus, had of cloaks. "Consistency is my motto," says the curate, as he inks the seams of his diseased garment hebdomadally, every Sabbath morning. "What, the rectory of if I'll change my coat ?" monologues the vicar: "Here it goes then ;" and he turns his sleeves inside outwards, after the esteemed method of little boys when they celebrate their races.-But to proceed: Principle is always on the weak side; catch Interest on any but the strong! Again, Principle really has patriotism, though he obtains no credit for it. But it is Interest who is loud in his professions of it, and who sometimes gets believed, till, in a luckless hour, the money-bag falls from beneath his cloak and discovers the cheat. Principle will uphold his creed, let it be moral or political, in spite of ridicule, persecution, gallows, guillotines, and auto-da-fes, Interest will do nothing so foolish. Principle, too, will adhere in allegiance to his Sovereign, through good and through bad report; never tarrying to inquire whether his private affairs are likely to culminate or depress by his attachment; or whether his King be a tyrant or bigot, it makes no difference to him; feal and leal he will be to the end. Yes, with his last breath, he will do homage to him, and cry, "Vive le Roi!" on the scaffold. In some of these points, Interest will not act dissimilarly. Though he is not such a goose as to follow any one through bad report; yet so far is he alike, that it is not of the least consequence to him whether his Sovereign is a tyrant or not, so long as he is anointed with the oil of place and palms. But should the cruise dry up, and the throne begin to totter,―d la minute, he will cry, “ Vive la Republique !" to the first sans-culotte who has the audacity to unfurl the tri-coloured flag, and clap the night-cap of liberty on his pole. Of yore, Principle, was Fabricius,—was Regulus; while Interest, in every age and clime, was always a Talleyrand. Among nations, Principle is the Jew, whose faith centuries have not shaken; Interest, the Carthaginian, who had never any to shake. "This is all very rare for Principle;" "but mutatis mutandis:" "Who is it that steals the hearts of all the beauteous women?"-Interest!" And has the fat legacies left him?”Ditto, Interest. "What then does poor Principle get ?" Answer, vice versa :-the scorn of all the ugly ones; and, by way of remembrance in the will, permission to lament, like the fellow who, Horace tells us, had "Nil sibi legatum præter plorare." Query,- ." Then has Principle no advantages?" Yes: "He may inflate the indignatory muscle of his mouth, and, ore rotundo,' proclaim Interest to be a turn-coat, an ambidexter, a Jack of both sides, &c. &c. &c."-" Pshaw! But does he obtain nothing for his disinterested conduct ?""No; nothing at all. Yet stay: Yes; broken windows, brick-bats, and pebble stones!" "Hum! this is not a very agreeable prospect for the incipient professor of Principle, it must be confessed." "There you are wrong: Is the honour of the thing nothing? As, take an instance: -Suppose the Tories, at this present hour, extinct, (they will sans doute shortly be so,) and that only a few organic remains are left, who are followed, as they stalk along the streets, in their dreadnoughts and Leripoop shoes, like an Italian with a dancing poodle,-say, would it be nothing to be one of these same organic remains, and to have the opportunity of exemplifying, in your own person, the moral grandeur of knocking down your enemies with one hand, while, à la Sir Charles Wetherell, you hold up your inexcusables with the other? Would it be nothing, too, to possess the blissful privilege of lowering contemptuously on all around whose political tenets are in antipodes to your own, while your breast heaves and swells with conscious rectitude and moral dignity, never deigning to vent a sigh, save when memory brings back to you a vision of the good old days of Wellington and Peel, and the dear King, who perpetrated the best bows and worst puns of any man in his three realms? But onwardsPrinciple, if it has its white side, has also, like Pythagoras's relations, (bears,) its black one. a word, it may become ridiculous; as in the case, when some small, "wee" trades-body, with eyes like saucers, full of milk and water, assumes the "atrocem animum Catonis," and outrageously refuses, upon principle, (lege interest,) to deal out his wares to one whose moral or political creed is at variance to his own; or, when in domestic life, an old maid, who, like " our sis In ter" in Euripides, "has been a virgin a long time," cruelly persists upon Principle (lege necessity) not to marry. But here let it not be supposed that we think principle incompatible with any one but a gowned Roman, or that it is out of its sphere in the domestic circle,-far from it. On the contrary, our heart will ever beat in unison with his, who is true to his first love, though that first love's beauty, by time or accident, has faded,—and constant to his friend, though that friend has sunk beneath the " summer's sun" of good report, and, perhaps, is no longer worthy of esteem. Principle, too, like many other stanch, old out-and-outers, is often apt to be left-headed; and then, when he has seized the wrong opinion by the ear, he is as tenacious of it as an eel in a frying-pan; never supposing that the hair which suspended the sword over the head of the voluptuary, was less narrow than the line which separates true principle from its three tributary streams, prejudice, obstinacy, and bigotry. Notwithstanding, however, this perverseness, so incident as an alloy even to the sublimer qualities of our nature, we revere a steady principle, if it is only exemplified in our servant's handing wine to our guests, without saturating their habiliments. And, in accordance with this our veneration to the man of steady principles, we say, "Pursue your virtuous course," waver not; -but then, do not persecute those who differ from you. For is it requisite, because you love cream that you should blaspheme custard? On the contrary, bear in your mind, that man's political as well as his moral creed, is "Between him and his Maker !" and that, if that man's opinions are bad, they will not become a whit better, though you burn, roast, toast, or smoke him! LETTER TO LORD BROUGHAM ON THE QUESTION OF MY LORD, SO Henry Brougham, the man of the age, the man of a European reputation, the man in the vanguard of modern civilization, the very genius of improvement, the man whose name, if not "a tower of strength," at least has been thought " a pillar of light," even this man has consented to fight the battles of the dark ages, -even this man, from an amplitude of fame and honour, enough to gorge the ambition of any twenty of earth's choicest spirits, has consented to Shrink his thin essence into an apologist for the imposition of articles, and the compulsory pay of whatever religion the learning, or the ignorance, the temper or the bile, the passion or the policy of Kings, Priests, and Peers, may have chosen three hundred years ago, to inflict upon the passive and implicit nation ! Such has become the once proud and peerless Henry Brougham! Who, but must laugh, if such a man there be? But beyond the mere pain and mortification of witnessing the fall of a great man, to conscientious voluntaries the thing is of small import,— nay rather, it is cause of gratulation. Moderate, indeed, would the claims of Henry Brougham have been to the respect and admiration of his countrymen, had he not, by his industry, energy, and inspiring example, taught other minds to start onwards in the race of intelligence, and, by discerning what was for their true good, at length to become the teachers of their teacher, the detectors of his fallacies, and the rebukers of his backsliding. When, therefore, so great a master of reasoning as your Lordship is found blundering, when a cause sustained by such advocacy is found wanting, when arguments, imagined to be convincing, are stripped of their con dent verbiage, and their intellectual nakedness | exposed to the land, can it be otherwise than a cause of gratulation to the lovers of truth and freedom, never more earnest in their love than at this hour,—that the strength of that truth is more conspicuously seen in your failure, and the basis of that freedom the more firmly rooted, by the very force which was prepared to overwhelm it? Hitherto it has been not easy to inflict a wound, for our enemies kept beyond the reach of a blow. Assertions we have had, and sic volos, sic jubeos, with unwearied iteration and emphasis, from the Premier to the placeman, from the placemen to the intolerant, through every grade of pensioned or unpensioned bigotry; but hitherto a dexterous, and, to voluntaries, a most perplexing avoidance of all discussion. But at length, “The Lord hath delivered them into our hand;" at length a change has come over their counsels; their camp is broken up, their tents have been struck; and as they show a disposition to come to close quarters, may our right hand forget her cunning, before we forget our duty! Some have been known to exclaim, "Oh that mine enemy would write a book!" we are contented to exclaim, "Oh that our enemy would produce an argument!"-And upon the arguments of most recent authority, if not of most recent invention, I propose to expend a word or two of comment, addressed to your Lordship; convinced as I am, that the more industriously all such arguments are sifted, the more sure will be the triumph of that cause which has heaven for its ally, happiness for its aim, and equity, righteousness, and truth for its demonstrable matter. It is, then, credibly reported, that, on the evening of May 12th, surrounded by the hereditary wisdom of the land, the following proposition found egress from the lips of the intellectual paragon of his times :-That " a dissolution of all hierarchies in England, Scotland, and Ireland would leave seventeen or eighteen, or perhaps twenty millions of his fellow-subjects without being provided with the means of religious instruction." Now it vehemently occurs to me, that if the extinction of these hierarchies would be the cause of from eighteen to twenty millions of the people being thrown out of the means of religious instruction, it must follow, per contra, that their existence is the means of whatever religious instruction those millions are now enjoying that is to say, it is gravely contended that from eighteen to twenty millions of the population of the United Kingdom, are at this moment deriving religious instruction under the endowed hierarchies of England, Ireland, and Scotland. I confess I hardly know how to apply myself to the correction of so enormous an assumption ! It is almost too extravagant for a serious refutation. Will it, however, be too much to affirm, in opposition to this estimate, that of these twenty millions, seven at least are independent, in Ireland, of all State religious instruction; that of the population of Scotland, at least one million Leaving out of the general population of 24,000,000 a balance of only 9,000,000 in England, Ireland, and Scotland, depending for religious instruction on the hierarchies respectively there established. What, then, becomes of the estimate unblushingly imagined to sustain a hopeless and indefensible JOB? and where the grounds for the " alarm and dismay," with which the fictitious result was so piously and painfully predicted? Fifteen millions of people are at this moment dependent for their spiritual sustenance upon the unextorted contributions and religious sensibilities of the respective societies into which they are divided. Will the nine millions which have been hitherto fed from the patrimony of the State, be the only denomination among whom the piety of its members will be inadequate to its exigencies, supposing that patrimony to be withdrawn? If so, what an evidence is here of the soul-destroying tendency of Establishments! But whether or not the fact would be as my noble opponent presumes, at least it is clear to his philosophical mind that it ought to be so: just as clear as it was to the mind of Napoleon, that by the rules of strategical art, the British The number is very considerably greater, but let this pass. The number of Dissenting congregations in England and Wales are 8,000; and taking 300 as the average number of each, the result would be 2,400,000 of actually attending worshippers. But allowing that only one-third of the gross numbers of each denomination attend at public worship, we would then have for the Dissenting po pulation of England and Wales, a total of 7,200,000. And there, for the present, I leave the matter. It has been a boast of the preposterous Tories, (Standard, 1st January, 1834,) that, on the Fast-day in 1832, more than half a million of persons in the metropolis alone, partook of the holy communion, in the several churches and chapels of the Establishment. It so happens, however, that in that same year, the Bishop of London had deposed before a Committee of the House of Commons, that the whole of the churches in his diocese would not accommodate so much as one-tenth of the population. If, then, we estimate the aforesaid half million of Communicants as one-twelfth of the population, (for we must suppose some few to have retired,) we should have, for the whole Church population of London, 6,000,000 of people! But supposing the attendants at worship to have gone only one-half at a time, the result would be 3,000,000 of persons in communion with the Church of England alone, in the City of London,-leaving Dissenters out of the question! Such is Toryism, when it has the luck to be handled by arithmetic. Ever swelling up the numbers, or fibbing down the profits, of the most odious monopoly on earth. which your Lordship, with unaccountable inadvertency, would seem to have wholly left out of calculation. The disposition of the mass of mankind, to attach themselves to religion, in some form or other, has, I would hope, been sufficiently established; and the right to select for themselves, to which of these forms they shall adhere, I do not believe Lord Brougham as yet prepared to withhold from the members of the Christian pale. To what end, then, I ask, the civil endowment of a worship for a people so cir. cumstanced? Will it be said, in order to enable those to participate in its benefits, who are unable to afford the pecuniary means for its support? But how is this effect produced by the system in favour with the high and low Churchmen of the day? True, you offer them a reli. gion which you very liberally endow at their expense, but you give them no previous choice in the matter. You give them a religion cut and dry. You string together a set of theological dogmas, comprising, if I remember aright the ought to have been beaten on the plains of Waterloo. What then are the rules which have guided your Lordship's judgment on the point in question? Why, they are these: That "there were some things, such as hunger, thirst, &c., which the animal constitution of their nature would prompt men to provide for, but it was otherwise with the wants of the more refined parts of our constitution; for the more ignorant the people were, and the less they knew the use of learning, the less they would bestir themselves to obtain the means of religious instruction." And yet, your Lordship, conspicuous as you once were for zeal in the cause, has consented, up to the last session of Parliament, when the first feeble step was reluctantly taken, to resign to this same indolence and ignorance, the task of providing by its voluntary efforts, for its educational wants: intermeddling, and dictating where human intrusion is least to be endured, and forbearing to organize, forbearing to aid, urge, insist, where the secular and palpable interests of the nation are so plainly and pro-analysis of Paley, some two or three hundred very minently implicated ! "Go, my son," exclaimed another Chancellor," and see with how little wisdom this world is governed!" But passing this by, I am prepared to contend, that if there be any one fact in the history of our race, more firmly established than another, it is this-That in all ages, and nations, the mass of mankind have been eminently prone to some or other modification of religion. So much so, that this fact has not unfrequently been resorted to-injudiciously, I admit-as an argument in favour of the existence of the Deity, who it was supposed had thus universally conveyed some intimation of himself, by imprinting it on the original constitution of man. Be this as it may, assuredly it was nothing peculiar to Athenian habits, which rendered that people, in the language of St. Paul, "Very much disposed to a reverence for superhuman powers" for so the epithet, dur danove Origovs, has been more correctly understood, among others, by the present distinguished Metropolitan of Dublin: nor do we see any reason to doubt that intelligent and most useful writer, when he says that "man, except when unusually depraved, retains enough of the image of his Maker, to have a natural reverence for religion, and a desire that God should be worshipped.' It is a remark of Adam Smith, in the course of an argument which might have rendered even your Lordship less confident in your views on this subject, that " Almost all religious sects have begun among the common people, from whom they have generally drawn their earliest, as well as their most numerous proselytes." Assuming then such to be the fact, I désire to know what more can be wanting to assuage the "dismay" which so unaffectedly oppresses the heart of your Lordship? Yes! there is one thing more, which is essentially wanting, and • Errors of Romanism, traced to their origin in Human Nature. By Archbishop Whately. Ch. 2. §. 2. debateable propositions. You point to "the Princes, the Governors, and the Captains, the Judges, the Treasurers, the Counsellors, the Sheriffs, and all the rulers of Provinces," who are, every soul of them, ready to swear to them all. You array before their wondering eyes, a regiment of Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, Deacons, Deans, Arch-Deacons, Convocations, Chancellors, Treasurers, Precentors, Prebendaries, Canons, petty-Canons, Rectors, Vicars, Curates, Chaplains, Choristers, Organists, Parish Clerks, Vergers, Sextons, &c., &c., &c.; and, having adjusted a creed for them, according to the length and breadth of your own belief, or, perhaps, a little beyond, you straightway command them to fall down and worship. Now, one of two things must hereupon follow. Either they implicitly comply, and, with all the good nature of dancing-dogs, and the precision of puppets, gesticulate according to the word of command,-prostrating, kneeling, and rising,— professing and believing, as they are enjoined, -or else, with the martyr spirit of the captive Jews of old, they retort," Be it known unto thee, O Chancellor, that we will not have thy creed, nor worship before the golden stalls which thou hast set up! But should the former be the case, we have yet to learn wherein religion is advanced-wherein the souls of men are one atom advanced, except to be debased-wherein they cease to be idolators, worshipping "the work of men's hands,”— or in what way a thing altogether so gross, mechanical, and earth-born, can presume to claim affinity with a system, whose distinguishing and exalting characteristic it is, that every man living "shall be fully persuaded in his own mind;" and whose undying declaration we have, that "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is LIBERTY." If, however, the latter alternative should result if it should happen that men, distinguishing their duty to Cæsar and to God, should forbear to accept of the proffered religi ous instruction, and should tell their civil rulers, that, while in reference to all outward obedience, they are willing to be subject, "not only for wrath, but for conscience' sake;" they reserve, under God, for their own exclusive regulation and control, the things pertaining to the Spirit, as holy ground, on which it is profane for any earthly power to tread. What, the friends of the voluntary principle desire to know, is to become of your Lordship's " Provision for Religious Instruction," designed, as it is, by the form of the existing Establishment, for the spiritual wants of one single sect only? It may, indeed, perfectly accord with the complexion of some men's minds, to draw satisfaction, and to augur security to themselves, from the spectacle of a people in the bonds of mental no less than of bodily subjection; and it may even suggest itself as partaking of arrogance no less than of mischief, that, when so many of their betters exhibit an alacrity first to decide and then to judge, first to subscribe and then to examine; when so many of the grave and the great, the rich and the learned, are ready to "believe everything, subscribe to everything, and vote for everything," the ignorant and subject many should presume to have a will or an opinion of their own. Now, we grant that all this would be well, and these reflections in perfect consistency, were it only a little more frankly revealed, that the "religious instruction" of our bewildered and semi-liberal rulers-if any meaning it have-meant only, after all, a something in aid of the civil police, a sort of succedaneum to the Home Office, an expedient solely to keep the People in order. But until this be declared, and until we shall be called distinctly to discuss so interesting a theory, we consent to understand your Lordship in the popular meaning of your phrase. And in the strong conviction of the truth, stronger from every assault it encounters, we tell you, and your parti-coloured allies, Whig, Whigling, and Tory-the politician, the worldling, and the bigot,-the sticklers for systems, the hunters for preferment, the sycophants for place, and the dreamers over creeds,that MIND has a living, salient principle within it, which scorns to be bound down to any number or description of theological tenets ever yet devised by Prince or Parliament; that a thinking people, and a religious establishment so constructed, are incapable of existence together; that in speculative truth, the conclusions of one age will not be those of the next; that a people, all external unanimity to day, so soon as the privilege of communicating and publishing thought shall have been conceded, will split (for a time at least) into interminable diversities, and unanimity be no more; and that, such being the incurable tendency of mind, dur ing the period of its probationary process, and installed in its native freedom, the ruler who proposes to arrest it by the intervention of a -- We quote from a memorable speech of the excellent and honoured Bishop Shipley on the repeal of the Test Act. chartered creed, is about as efficaciously employed as if he were to undertake to send a river up a hill, or to stop an avalanche in its fall. Either, therefore, your Lordship's "religious instruction" must confine itself within the pale of the Establishment, and therefore fail to meet the wants, because it will be incommensurate with the religious denominations of the people; or else it must conform itself to the exigencies of the case, and find its way to the people, under the auspices of an Establishment no longer confined to the temporal luxury, or spiritual behoof, of a single favoured sect. Whenever so great and salutary a modification of the principle advanced by the Parliamentary advocates of a religious establishment, as it now exists, shall have been embraced, we will admit that much, indeed, has been achieved for the peace, happiness, and good order of society. But we do not disguise from our opponents, that even such a concession would not satisfy the principle for which we contend; and that the necessity and the right of the intervention of the State, even to the extent which the modification supposes, would still remain to be proved. For the present, I would content myself with observing that, taking into consideration the alacrity with which the expense of voluntary religious instruction is at this moment sustained, recollecting that from the hamlets of Devon to the plains of Leicester-from the valleys of Wales to the teeming sectarianism of the north, and its still more prodigal exhibition in the metropolis,-there is evidence not to be lightly laid aside, of the over-shadowing influence of the multitudinous rivals of the Parliamentary sect, I do not think it too much to affirm, that they who have hitherto incurred, in the exercise of their liberty of prophesying, the expense of maintaining two sets of ministers, could hardly be expected to shrink from the minor burden of contributing to the comfortable subsistence of one. Look where we will, and inquire where we may, at home or abroad, whether we regard their colleges, their chapels, their schools, or their missions, everywhere the fruits of the Voluntary principle, the inexhaustible energy of sincere, howet er mistaken belief, in its numerous and ofter con tradictory forms, arrest the attention, an / ins' ruct us in the practical lesson of leaving this selfworking process to its own support. For the present, I have done with your Lordship. The friends of the Voluntary principle feel that you have gained no triumph; and with all your aberrations and occultations, we feel too respectful a recollection of the luminous career you have hitherto run, to desire any triumph over you, any further than you may be found,— accidentally we would hope, and for no long time, opposed to a change a inevitable as the sun of to-morrow; and indispensable, we devoutly believe, to the happiness, repose, and advancement of the human race. A VOLUNTARY. |