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THE CHRISTIAN GUARDIAN,

AND

CHURCH OF ENGLAND MAGAZINE.

JANUARY, 1847.

MEMOIR OF THE REV. RICHARD CHAPPLE WHALLEY, B.D.,

LATE RECTOR OF CHELWOOD.*

MR. WHALLEY was the youngest son of the Rev. John Whalley, D.D., Master of Peter House, Cambridge, and Regius Professor of Divinity in that university. His mother was a daughter of Francis Squire, Chancellor of Wells. He was born in the year 1748. His father died while he was an infant. Where he was educated, I have not been able to ascertain; but his attainments, as a scholar, were such as prove that it must have been at some superior seminary.

Mr. Whalley, as he approached manhood, manifested no inclination for any of the learned professions. A passionate love of the fine arts disposed him to visit Italy, and to make painting the object of his peculiar study. It seems to have been, at this time, his ambition to devote himself to it professionally. For this reason, probably, it was, that he did not matriculate at either of the universities. To Italy, therefore, he turned his steps soon after he was of age, and spent several years amidst the great works of art, and the enchanting objects of that classic land. The only picture from his pencil, now

in possession of his family, is a portrait in oil of his wife, painted after his return to England. Mr. Whalley, after pursuing his pictorial studies for some time with much ardour, found his health giving way under the needful confinement, and came to the conclusion that he was incapable of sustaining the requisite application for acquiring eminence as an artist. But though the particular object of his visiting Italy was thus frustrated, he carefully viewed and studied its fine scenery, and its monuments of ancient and modern grandeur. How vividly he caught the spirit of the scenes and objects with which he was thus rendered familiar, will be apparent from the following expressive reference to the features of the Roman Campagna, written to myself in Rome, in the year 1816, after a lapse of forty years since he had beheld them.

"Rome is a place where the scenery is altogether different from anything you have met with before, or that can be met with, I think, anywhere else. Those long tracts of road within the ancient walls in which one may tire oneself amidst varying scenes and ob

*The following Memoir is taken from a very interesting little volume entitled "Memoir of the Rev. Richard Chapple Whalley, B.D., late Rector of Chelwood; illustrated by Select Letters and Sermons. By John S. Harford, Esq., D.C.L." Nisbet, London. 12mo, pp. 250. We strongly recommend the work, especially to the Clergy.-ED. JANUARY 1847.

jects of mutilated, mouldering grandeur; fragments of temples, baths, and aqueducts, interspersed with gardens, vineyards, and groves of cypresses; and every now and then a modern oratory, formed out of some relic of heathen superstition; each stone almost of the walls one walks between, having some stamp of interest upon it;-these things altogether make a strange mixed impression upon the mind; at least, they did so upon mine; an impression of soothing delightful melancholy, which would now be heightened by considerations and feelings which I was then quite incapable of."

Unhappily for Mr. Whalley, he not only plucked the flowers of foreign travel, but imbibed the moral poison which then pervaded the continent. The French infidel philosophy was at this time (about A.D. 1771,) extremely popular. The demoralizing, anarchichal, and destructive tendencies of that philosophy, had not as yet fully developed themselves. It claimed an intimate alliance with reason and liberty; it denounced oppression; it derided the strictness of Christian morality; it offered tempting licence to the sensual passions; and by these means enlisted on its side the wits of the age, and a great portion of the higher classes. Dressed out by the genius and the eloquence of Voltaire, Rousseau, and others, in captivating colours, its flimsy sophistries were hailed as acknowledged truths. Already the fall of superstition, the name by which the infidel school designated not only the corrupt Church of Rome, but even the purest forms of Christianity, was confidently predicted; and the coming glories of the age of reason and liberty were loudly proclaimed. Error seldom makes any great progress, except by entering into alliance with some imposing principles of truth. The despotism which pervaded the monarchical constitution of France, and the heavy burdens and restrictions which it imposed upon the people, but from which the privileged orders were free, furnished a ready, nay, in many respects, a just occasion for the political votaries of that philosophy to enlist the feelings of the masses on their

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side. They were the avowed friends of liberty and the people, and were therefore able to inspire them with a blind confidence in the ultimate issue of their proposed innovations. The crisis at length arrived which was to put all these principles to a searching test. The French Revolution occurred the superstitions of the Romish Church disappeared for the moment, and many an ancient badge of tyranny and oppression; but with them was also swept away all reverence for the fundamental principles of religion and morality, of equity and order. The voice of true liberty, tempered by reason and sobered by experience, was drowned in that of faction. A bloody harvest of crime and anarchy, of confiscation and rapine was reaped, under the name of liberty, amidst the barbarous horrors and proscriptions of the reign of France oscillated for a series of years amidst the maddest excesses of unbridled democracy, and at length settled down into a stern military despotism.

terror.

Mr. Whalley was for a time one of those who partook of the delusion which led to such fatal consequences. He delighted in the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire, and he learnt from them to regard Christianity as another name for superstition. In relating to me this painful portion of his mental history, he manifested feelings of remorse and self-abasement which could not well be exceeded. He felt and acknowledged, that in imbibing these sophistries he had submitted them to no sufficient test, and that they found him culpably ignorant of the various links of that mighty chain of evidence which establishes the truth and certainty of the Christian revelation. The scepticism of many men no less accomplished or gifted than Mr. Whalley, may be traced to the same cause in which his own originated-religious indifference. They have never studied the evidences of Christianity with care and candour, nor the Bible with prayer to God, and with a sincere and anxious desire after truth. They have adopted their creed as a matter of course, in the shape and form in which their education presented it to them. They have

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