Church: For what part of this provision can be left to the wandering impulses of the multitude; to the profligate, who deny all religion; to the penurious, who refuse all contribution; to the thoughtless, who shrink from all memory of the graver duties of life; or to the Jacobin, who, on system, rejoices in the general blackening of all its obligations? Leave the support of religion to the caprice of the crowd, and it is either perverted by furious fanaticism, or lost by frigid neglect; it becomes the reflection of ignorant, presumptuous, and erratic minds, or it is famished out of the land. But place it under the protection of the State; give it the solidity of that public pledge to its continuance; give the community the assurance, that their sons, destined for the service of the altar, will not be cast loose on the precarious charity of the people; that the doctrines which they honour as the truth, will not be suddenly exchan ged for the ravings of fanaticism, or the sullen sophisms of infidelity, and you will have a succession of educated men, prepared by their knowledge, by their principles, and by the example of their predecessors, for the religious teaching of the people. You will have a great Institute, to which the pious look up with reverence for its sacredness, and the poor with gratitude for its benefaction, a noble rectifier of the wanderings of human opinion, by continually presenting to man a standard of the highest of all truth; and a noble safeguard of all Government, by consecrating the state, spirit, and body to Heaven.

society will follow it, from the pinnacle to the foundation.

By this faction has the Bill been received with shouts of exultation and revenge, as if over the corpse of an enemy. It has been instantly hailed by the whole body of traitors to your Majesty and the State. It forms the triumphant theme of those Political Unions which are already the tyrants of the multitude, and of more than the multitude. The Irish assassin, reeking from the murder of his countrymen, receives it as a boon; the Irish Jacobin, insulting the British Legislature, receives it as a boon; the grim Atheist in his closet, the furious agitator in the streets, every avowed hater of order, joins in a common shout of victory. They regard the measure as only a preliminary, a promise of fiercer innovation, sure and soon to come; in their own jargon, it is but a means to an end." Their " All hail," but the first welcome to a shape of blood and ruin, a prediction of its consummated career in the highest places of the land.

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The question of the uses of an Established Church is perfectly clear. When the nation already has a Church, and has to choose a government, it naturally chooses a Government friendly to its opinions. Where it has a Government, and has to choose a Church, that duty, like all the other leading duties, devolves on the Government. The State chooses the Church fittest for the support of society, which is the first purpose of all Government. And that Church it sustains by its bounty, by its patronage, and by its power. If the nation have not already possessed a religion, the most necessary act of Government is to give it one; for without a religion no Government can be secure. Fear may produce a temporary submission. But the only solid foundation of obedience to Kings is homage to the Deity. This homage the State must take upon itself, for it cannot be left to the way wardness of the human heart. The forms of this homage must be prescribed, the support of these forms must be provided for, a class of fitting Ministers must be appointed for the service of the altar, and the instruction of the people. In other words, there must be an Established

With an Established Church, England has risen from a feeble and distracted country into the full vigour of empire; has passed from darkness into light; has made the most magnificent accumulations of wealth, European influence, commanding literature, unalloyed liberty, and pure religion. In polity, she has risen from a field of civil blood into the solid security of a legitimate and balanced government. In learning, from a rude borrower of the elements of knowledge from foreigners, into the foremost possessor of all that bears the name of intellectual distinction; and, in religion, she has torn the sullen robe of Rome from

her limbs, and stands forth the champion of Christianity to the world.

America is governed without an Established Church. But are we to compare the ancient and massive fabric of the British government with the fluctuating and fugitive shelter under which American legislation thrust its head? or the prescriptive majesty of our national worship with the rambling sectarianism of religion in a country where the pulpit is only the more foul and furious conduit of every absurdity of the brain, or paroxysm of the passions; the land of camp-meetings and convulsion naires, of corruption under the name of conversion, and of political raving under the name of Scriptural illumination? We might as well compare the forest wigwam with the palace, or its tenant with the sages and statesmen of Europe.

But what is the actual object of the faction? Is it the purification of the Church? This they scorn to assert. They have the candour of the full sense of power. They have found no such word in their Gallic code as renovation. Their object, open and declared, is to destroy the Church. They have a further object,-partially withheld, but on which their determination is fully formed. The outcry against the Church is only the covering of their warfare against the Constitution. They will use the ruins of the Establishment to fill up the ditch, and having broken through the grand outwork, they will have nothing more to do than to sit down before the citadel. Upon your Majesty's decision may depend interests that will dispose of the empire.

I shall not enter into the details of the Bill. My business is with its spirit. It is a twofold seizure of Church property; the one a perpetual tax on the clergy, from five to fifteen per cent; the other a perpetual alienation of the Bishops' lands;-the former, a burden galling the neck of the clergy from, year to year for ever; the other a sweeping spoil, a seizure of property given for the exclusive support of the Church, holding by a title as sacred as that of your Majesty's crown, and much more ancient; -both confiscation, without the shadow of a crime; property torn away which was consecrated to God, and totally incapable of being converted

to the secular purposes of individuals or the State, without bringing down the heavy curse of God. This I shall prove as I proceed.

The question is disengaged from all difficulty by the open nature of its provisions. There might be some speciousness in the proposal of changes of form in the Church, of more or fewer dignities, or of the equalization of incomes. On all these points a wise legislator, aware of the hazards of all changes in ancient things, would feel himself bound to pause before he fairly planted his foot on the perilous ground of public innovation. But the fondest enthusiast for the golden age of change cannot be deceived now. If he tread, it is at his peril. The pitfall lies open before him. Those two clauses are sufficient to lay bare the whole transaction. They are a declared seizure of property, which no legislature can have a right to touch, except under those circumstances of public extremity which subvert all rights alike. In the utter famine of the State, men may eat the bread from the altar. In the final battle of the State, they may turn the ruins of the Church into a rampart for their bodies. But those hours of terrible paroxysm are not more remote from the healthful and peaceful existence of empire, than those fierce rights of despair from the present plunder of the old and legitimate institutions of the empire.

On this point I demand, where is the public necessity? Where is ruinous defeat and the national bankruptcy, or even the failing harvest? Where any one of those public calamities that might serve as a pretext for public plunder? I see none. I look round the horizon, even to the extremities of Europe-all is quiet. I hear your Majesty's speech pronouncing that you are on friendly terms with all nations. I see commerce as usual pushing its branches through all the channels of enterprise in the world. I see England covered daily with canals, railways, and all the fine inventions that imply at once individual capital and public spirit. The bounty of Heaven has given us the most exuberant harvest within memory. And it is at this time, when the country is hourly congratulated by men in authority

on her increasing strength, that we are called on to consummate an act which could be justified by nothing but the worst sufferings of the worst times, which, even in those times, could be safely done, only with a solemn determination to restore the sacred things the moment that the necessity had passed by, and render unto God the things that are God's. I can see nothing in the natural impulses of your Majesty's Ministers, to account for an act which must revolt their feelings as gentlemen, regretting the privations of gentlemen like themselves. I can see nothing but the one fierce and bitter faction which has grown into fatal power in the State; which, contempt ible in its individual members, has been suffered to become formidable as a mass; and which now by a system of perpetual scorn of the law, perpetual defiance of principle, and perpetual appeal to all the bad passions, carries the rabble with them, and floods the land with revolution.

nothing but prophecies that all men disregard; and that their only distinction is to be more conspicuously spurned.

This faction, the representative of the ignorance of Ireland, comes over with it to confound the wisdom of England; rouses Ireland to madness, to make the madness a charge against England; covers Ireland with civil war, and then bids England turn her ear to the sound; points to the conflagration, lighted by its own hands, in a country of superstition, barbarism, and revolt; and then bids us see, in the reddening horizon, the example of our " own funeral pyre." Can it be a question, whether we are to resist or to yield? Are we to commit the criminal absurdity of protecting our civil existence, by joining in a conspiracy against all civil right; or attempting to save Protestantism in England, by throwing Irish Protestantism to be mangled and trampled in their advance to national ruin?

This faction began with Ireland. There they found the soil prepared by a giddy Government, and a profligate superstition; they sowed the seeds of bloodshed, and left them to the natural care of those sure influences. The crop has duly followed; and Ireland, at this hour, presents a scene of misgovernment and misery, unequalled in the globe. The sanguinary despotism of Turkey has nothing like it; the barbarism of Russia is civilized to it. The roving Arabs exhibit a more reverent respect for life and property. The dweller in an Indian forest, or a Tartar wilderness, is safer in his house, than the Irish landlord, living under the safeguard of the British laws; and even fortified within a circle of British bayonets. That faction has been imported among us. The pilots who steered that vessel of ill-omen, are now loudest in their remorse, for a service, at once the basest, the most disastrous, and the most marked by retributive justice on their own heads, of any act within record. They now resist, and point to the coming ruin. But they have stripped themselves of the alliance of all honest men, and they declaim to the winds. The Cassandras, who part with their virtue for their knowledge, will find that they have purchased

Your Majesty is not ignorant that this faction hates you,-hates your name,-your principles, and your house;-is stung with the most furious malice at your Sovereignty ;hates you and yours as a Protestant, as a Brunswick, as a man, and as a King. That it has sworn on its altars never to rest, until it rooted the last branch of the House of Hanover out of the Empire; and that, for this purpose, it is resolved to compass heaven and earth. That it will swear to all parties, or betray all; lick the feet of all Ministers, or menace them; lean down to the follies of all gatherings of the rabble, or stir their passions into frenzy; if it can but carry its point-and that point the downfall of the Protestantism of England;-and as its preliminary, the expulsion of the Protestant line from the English throne. That it will be totally indifferent whether this be accomplished by force or fraud; and whether its results be to send your dynasty across the Channel, or through the grave.

At this moment it is exulting in the snare which it had laid for entrapping your Majesty's Ministers into acts, which, if suffered to succeed, it boasts, must strip authority instantly of its whole strength in Ireland, startle every Protestant in Eng

land, make loyal men examine the grounds of their attachment to the Throne, make religious men shrink from a cause which seems voluntarily to abandon the path of all that they have hitherto honoured; and even, in the most worldly point of view, must unsettle every feeling that belongs to reliance on ancient right, acknowledged property, blameless conduct, and legitimate posses

sion.

The question narrows itself to the single point of plunder. The Church may be a fit subject of regulation, like every thing else; but regulation is for improvement; robbery is for weakness, confusion, extinction. This is beyond the power of law, for no law can authorize injustice, as no scheme of improvement can succeed by ruin. The rule is the simplest of all principles. Purify as we will, cut off excrescences, but do this only to return the sap of the tree to the trunk ;-do not lay the axe to the root. A wise legislator, instead of beginning his change by the rash operation of extinguishing the Irish Bench, would have considered what he could do for the increase of Christian knowledge among the people; he would have tried what was to be done by some more fitting distribution. His last expedient would be the destruction of any thing. He would have considered, whether, in a land, overrun by her hideous crimes, and impurities, and Popery, it was not a matter of Christian wisdom to strengthen and multiply the outposts of Protestantism; to fix as many able men, with means and authority in their hands, as he could find; for the express purpose of maintaining the religion of truth and loyalty, he would discover, in the depth of that Pagan darkness, a reason, not for extinguishing his lamps, but for enlarging and extending their illumination.

The State has the power of reforming the Church, but not of destroying. The rapacity which alienates the property of the Church to the uses of the State, will be brought to a bitter account for its crime. This is the testimony of history in all lands and all times. I shall look only to the annals of England: Henry VIII. seized the Church revenues, and divided large portions

of them between the Crown and the nobles. The Church which he had overthrown was impure. He had done a great act of national good in its overthrow. But his rapine sullied the whole merit of his reform.Cranmer, and the leading clergy of the Protestants, supplicated to leave for the works of God what had been consecrated to God. It had been given originally by holy men for holy purposes. Its abuse by monks and Romish priests, could not justify its alienation from the works of mercy, knowledge, and virtue. But the courtiers were craving, the ministers were worthless, and the King was rapacious. Passion and prodigality rioted in the spoil; and the noblest of all opportunities was thrown away, the opportunity of spreading religious knowledge to every corner of the realm. The offence was soon and terribly avenged. From 1543 to 1547, Henry had continued his system of confiscation. Yet it was not total. He had given up a part of his plunder, from time to time, for the uses of the purified Church; he had even established six new Bishoprics; added Deaneries and Chapters to eight already existing; endowed Professorships in both the Universities; and erected Christ's Church and Trinity Colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. But he had alienated a vast portion; his nobles had grown rich by the poverty of the Church. The same system was pursued under the Protector Somerset, in the minority of Edward VI. Somerset himself seized on a Deanery, with four Prebendal stalls. In 1553, the punishment began.

Nations must be punished in this world, for they have no future. The Reformation was suddenly stopped. The whole career of vigour, personal freedom, and public prosperity, to which every man in England looked forward, was covered with clouds. The fires of persecution, which seemed to have been extinguished for ever, were suddenly lighted. The old religion returned in ferocious triumph; every step that it trode, was in the heart's-blood of England. Nine thousand of the clergy were deprived of their benefices; eleven bishops were degraded; crowds of the most learned men of England were driven into exile; and, by Lord Clarendon's

account, nearly eight hundred people, of all ranks and professions, suffered martyrdom. The Reformation was thus vitiated by the crimes of its founder, and the participation of his people. Its career from that hour was a struggle for fifty years. The poverty of the Church deprived it of the power of being a public benefactor. Education languished. The people, left by the scanty revenues of the Church to the chance liberality of the country, lost the knowledge which the Church would have rejoiced to give, had it been enabled to more than exist. Even the princely spirit of Elizabeth was forced to seek in severity an expedient against the evils that followed the confiscation of the Church Estates and the Establishment. Instead of being the great support of the poor, the founder of hospitals, the munificent mother of the whole system of national charity was stricken into pauperism.

The punishment was not yet complete. Out of the pauperism of the Church grew Puritanism. The Established clergy, ground to the dust by the difficulties of life, were unable to overthrow this new and violent incursion, alike on the Church and the Government, and the new republicanism of religion prevailed. If the ancient revenues had been left, England, three hundred years ago, would have been the most learned, intelligent, and powerful nation that the earth has seen. The Church would have planted a college in every county, would have endowed foundations for the support of learning in its earlier stages, and have made provision for the continued support of those learned men, who have been for the last three hundred years driven to perish in obscure heartbreaking labours for their daily bread. Germany at this hour owes almost the entire of her literary distinctions to those numerous little annuities and provisions attached to her courts and cathedrals for learned men; provisions totally wanting in England, except in the Fellowships of her Colleges, scanty and few as they are. The Establishment, undespoiled, would have built a place of worship in every parish, with a residence which would ensure the presence of a clergyman. All that is evil in pluralities would have been

at an end, for pluralities have grown out of the want of habitation for the clergy. The people would not have had to traverse miles across the country to find a place of worship, or not worship at all. They would have had a church at their doors. We should not have seen an Establishment, in which three-fourths of the clergy are little above the peasants round them, or four thousand livings under a hundred pounds ayear, with deductions for taxes and fees, diminishing even that pittance by a fourth. We should not see a crowd of the orphans of those gentlemen daily driven to find their common education in public charities, and scattered through the most obscure and menial employments of the most obscure trades, instead of emulating the attainments of the class in which they were born, and giving the contribution of their hereditary learning and piety to the nation.

The Puritans appealed to the popular passions. The King, in his extremity, appealed to the Established clergy. They were loyal, but they were now powerless. As Mary had been raised to scourge the Reformation, Cromwell was raised to crush the throne.

In all lands, the confiscator has been punished. The scourge may have been laid on by different hands, but the blood has alike followed the blow. Fifty years ago, Joseph the Second of Austria confiscated the lands of some of the monasteries in the Austrian Netherlands; the revenues were applied to the service of the state. The monasteries may have been useless, indolent, or even impure, but their wealth was not criminal; and its first and last designation should have been to the service of Heaven, by giving knowledge and teaching virtue. It went to clerks and secretaries, to squadrons of horse, and battalions of infantry. The crime was instantly smitten. Politicians, in their shortsightedness, can see nothing but what lies on the ground at their feet. To other men, the Heaven is spread above their heads, and they see in its signs the shapes of vengeance for the guilt of men. A furious insurrection arose in the Netherlands; not a monkish tumult for monkish injuries, but a Jacobin determination to abjure all