whom Providence hath committed to his charge. He may seldom sojourn at the place from whence he draws his pecuniary resources, and on those occasions, the scandal and contagion of his example may infect with immorality the whole neighbourhood. Neither endowed by nature with ability, nor accomplished in useful knowledge by the exertion of his own industry, he may be utterly incapacitated, even were he otherwise disposed, to play the part of a Mentor or arbitrator. "Look you now what follows." The incumbent can only possess his benefice under an official obligation, which he cannot neglect. In provincial obscurity, with punctuality, cheerfulness, and fervour, the christian clergyman will discharge the sublime and affecting duties of his solemn office. But it were to convey a very inadequate idea of his usefulness, to confine it to his efficiency in the pulpit; or, in other respects, to the bare fulfilment of the sacerdotal contract. He is the cynosure from on high, by which all steer their course. By the silent influence of his example, he refines the habits, advances the civilization, and promotes the welfare of the little community, who look up to him as their model. The presence of their village pastor imposes a check on the influx of depravity, allays the beginnings of strife, and sets the affections in right tune. His voice recals the creature to his Maker, proclaims the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, whose Gospel he expounds to a circle of grateful hearers. His preaching is of power to inbreed and cherish the seeds of virtue, to pre-occupy men's minds, and bar out the entrance of spiritual pride and fanaticism. the influence of his practice, he brings God himself, as it were, into request. The spectacle of his life, the goodliness manifest in genuine piety, the beauty which, after long bearing witness, men get to perceive in a calm mind and a sober conversation, furnish the best commentary on his pure, benevolent, and peaceable doctrine. The custom of living well is soon caught up and followed, since men go not quá eundum sed quâ iturthey heed example rather than precept; and thus the silent appeal of the parochial priest, his meekness, simplicity, and loving kindness, present the most eloquent sermon on Christianity. By Such are the germs of a sublime and rational philosophy, planted through the piety of our forefathers in the remotest corners of the British dominions. And where, as it must sometimes turns out, the minister proves unworthy of his sacred functions,... if he discover an inclination to start off the course, he can be deprived, or at least be compelled to fulfil the conditions on which he holds the endowment. His revenues can be devoted to the purposes for which the Church was consecrated, namely, the pastoral instruction, guidance, and education of the people. All abuses can be corrected, his residence on his cure be enforced, and pluralities abolished; whereby the Church might acquire a moral strength, which should resist all danger. If our apostolic ministrations be not efficient, in God's name make them so; but do not, on account of a partial abuse, which may be rectified, take the extreme measure of suspending Divine service; do not cast the spoils of the Establishment a prize into the centre of the ring, to be scrambled for by Papists, who will admit but one faith; by Liberals, who will endure any one; and by Infidels, who will receive none at all: thus closing, as it were, the temple of God against the people, denying them the means of grace, and, so to speak, excommunicating the land. For, trust us, it would soon come to nothing short of that fatal consummation. Even amongst what are called the more enlightened classes of the British public, there is an apathy, a self-complacent vanity, a corruption of the will. "Their good ness is a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away." They disregard the appointments of Heaven, which from primitive times have been imperative upon the faithful, and they are glad of any plea, that will excuse them from attendance on the courts of the Lord. And if this be the melancholy truth with respect to those, whose opportunities ought to have been turned to better account, how would it fare with the decrepit and the blind, the infirm and the aged... the heirs of the next world, but the benighted of this? What would become of them, if their souls had no longer a haven of peace in which to ride in safety? if they had no stated altar to worship at, and no regular priest to perform sacrifice? if they could demand no periodical administration of the sacraments, but such as by their penury, or at least scanty funds, they could make provision for? Sore, indeed, would be the tribulation of the faithful, uninstructed in God's will, and forbidden to look upward; whilst the reprobate would be left to voluntary visitation, that is, without hope and chance of salvation. Men and women, and little children, the remotely scattered agricultural poor, would live and die out of the pale of the Gospel covenant. What were this but to unchristianize the land? a second time to bring to nought the boast of Tertullian, made so long since as the second century, of the light of the Gospel being reflected even on those localities of our isle, which were inaccessible to the Roman arms? What were it but "undoing all, as all had never been?" When the glad tidings of salvation cease to resound in many an obscure hamlet, and the vaunt of Tertullian no longer holds good, the ministration of another St. Augustine would soon be needed to kindle amid the pauper population, dispersed in lonely villages, the dying embers of the Christian faith. And this is the backward rotation, the revolution to which infidelity and radicalism are fast hurrying on our beloved land! Statesmen are all at sea. What should be done to keep off infliction? to avert the judgment of the Almighty? Is there a man in the administration, is there one of our sapient republican reformers who knows himself, or who can define WHAT he drives at ? There is a magnet to direct our voyage in the mist and obscurity of the civil, as of the natural world, if we did but know it. According to its dictates we may be allowed to steer our course, taking care to correct and regulate its fallible prescript, by often making appeal to those celestial lights, whose truth no man can impugn. So qualified, it will be found an admirable auxiliary, and to be mostly in the right. The magnet, to which we should have recourse, is that summary species of logic, which enables us to form a uniform judgment on the ordinary aspect of affairs, namely, the common sense of mankind.* In the pure abstract, indeed, it is an imperfect agent, and can hardly be brought to bear upon "the conduct and manage of our actions," because it obviously requires some direct material, or at least some analogy, to give it effect. But unless the beacon of experience be needlessly meant to reflect some broken rays of light upon the troubled swell of time that is no more, instead of her lantern, as is taken for granted, being hung aloft from the prow of the vessel of the State, to illuminate the breakers ahead, and indicate the rocks and shoals that threaten her, as she tacks on either side to intercept the gale, the card of history, blurred with the recorded abominations of rebellion and schism, will furnish abundance of data for the common sense of mankind to proceed on. Why then should we decline to apply her lessons to the painful subject we have in hand, and at once open our eyes to the perils with which we are encompassed? The welfare of our beloved country is jeoparded by the sway held by inept and impious men (sensu politico) over her destinies. We cannot stay much longer under their malign yoke without utter ruin. Yet here, spell-bound, as it were, by some horrid phantasma, are we rooted to the earth, and blindly and stupidly await our punishment. The power, that suspends the avalanche by a thread * Ένδοξα δὲ, τὰ δοκοῦντα πᾶσιν, ἢ τοῖς πλείστοις ἢ τοῖς σοφοῖς. ARIST. TOP. l. i. c. 1. Ταῦτα δὲ ὁ Ἕλλην λέγει καὶ ὁ βάρβαρος λέγει, καὶ ὁ ἠπειρώτης καὶ ὁ θάλαττιος καὶ ὁ σοφὸς καὶ ὁ ἄσοφος.-Max. TYR. Dis. i. Una in re consensio omnium gentium lex naturæ putanda est.—CIC. i Tusc. Multum dare solemus præsumptioni omnium hominum: apud nos veritatis argumentum est, aliquid omnibus videri, &c. &c.-SEN. Ep. i. 17. 66 more subtle than the gossamer, is not estimated till He leave the devastating mass to fall. The restraints of Him, "who holdeth the winds in his fist," are seldom perceived till he quits his grasp, and gives them all their fury;" and by a like fatuity are we standing on the brink of a crater as unconcerned, as if we had never heard or at least were unmindful of the workings of that volcano, which not two centuries since, and again not half a century past, vomited destruction upon temples and palaces, and "all that they inherit." "Ecce recens mugire fragor, confligere turres, -vibratis radicibus-" As in the time before us, the smouldering flames and lava ever and anon find issue from the yawning gulf, and give note and warning of the approaching marvel; low and minatory reverberations, like thunder, rumble within the hidden furnace of the earth. The good seem paralysed, "and their hearts fail them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming; " while those members of the commonweal, who, during periods of agitation, and in the advent of danger, emerge from their natural obscurity, and make the public visitation a cover for their guilt, gather themselves together in clubs and convocations: they salute, as it were, the earthquake; and we might almost say, in the language of Scripture," Men have heard the thunder, and they have shouted back in return." Such are the signs and tokens of the moral tempest, which we see cause to apprehend. But as birds of obscenity, and the noxious and unutterable reptiles which whisk and flutter at the rising of a tropical hurricane, are liable to mistake the prognostics of the elements, so it is to be hoped that the ill-omened crew of destructives may be too sanguine in their conclusions, and that they have prematurely brought their sacrilegious designs into the light of day, for the loathing and execration of all good citizens. Still the gratulatory stir, from all quarters, of these unwholesome birds of the same featherless pinion, is a phenomenon of baleful augury for the public tranquillity. "But fiends to scourge mankind so fierce, so fell, And these are the monsters who pounce down upon, only to pollute the feast of reason, and by their inauspicious intervention render the mental acquisitions of the community more baneful than ignorance itself to its best interests. They, whose lawless tempers, and the suggestion of whose unprincipled selfishness feel rebuked in some degree by the influence of settled society, are prepared to abandon themselves, on that restraint being withdrawn, to the impulses of their own evil hearts. The truth should be widely spread, that Infidelity, and Liberalism, and Popery, are federate for our destruction. Already do they inculcate on the lower and semi-informed classes, with the zealous activity of incipient treason, opinions the most hostile to established institutions. The soil is in good condition, and every where sown with the dragon's teeth, and the armed myrmidons of civil war only await the stamp of Pompey on the earth to spring into life and action. The tainted vapours which well up from the seething of a superficial press, make a meet atmosphere, wherein the genius of evil and infidelity may stretch her wings. We have fallen upon times, when men sip an adulterate "hell broth," and with "the folly of fools" rely on unhallowed charms. The shallow world bows down to pretension, puffery, and cant; and every one, wanting understanding to see the direct way to his end, sets up on his own peculiar stock, in opposition to his neighbour. In the language of political economists, there seems a general combination to delude and play the knave, effected by a division of employments. Never was there a greater mistake than that, which is now so common, of offering to the active malformations of the intellect the honours and the deference due only to that wisdom, which experience and a kind heart have sublimed and exalted out of the materials of knowledge. Indeed, it has been long since observed, with an acumen characteristic of the philosopher, who perpetuated his knowledge of the fact, that learning, without discipline, is a blind thing: Τὸ μὲν γράμμα ἄνευ μαθήσεως τυφλόν.* This is a deep truth, since of bookish learning however extensive, or however profound, it is not easy to predicate any thing one way or the other, unless we be instructed in the bias of the scholar, and are told the uses to which his intellectual illumination is to be applied. It may prove only an unholy glare flashed around the understanding, to hide the natural obliquities and imbecilities of the fabric, and not a stream from the blessed daylight, to pierce the innermost depths and crannies of the soul, and in its effulgence to dissipate prejudice and scruples. Alas! not seldom it happens, that these illusions, which strike a partial ray upon the angles and prominences of the dark chambers of the mind, instead of lighting up the whole story, minister to the vanity of the possessor, inflating his understanding with a flattering notion of its powers, and precluding improvement, by holding it in a most consolatory state of unconsciousness as to its inherent weakness. De Liberis Educandis. Plut. Oper. tom. ii. Edit. Franc. 1620. |