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be equally on the side of order and of strong government, their principles would be less exposed than at present to suspicion, and would seem to the people dictated rather by the sacred spirit of peace, than by the oligarchical and worldly influence of temporal connexions. And thus, sir, by a far-sighted and prophetic sagacity, thought the early patriarchs, and mighty men, of the Reformation. It is they who complained that general zeal and diffused learning would cease to be the characteristics of the clergy, exactly in proportion as the church should become more an established provision for the younger sons of the great. It is they who predicted that when the people saw none of their own order officiating in the ministry, the divine sympathy between flock and preacher would decay, and the multitude would seek that sympathy elsewhere, in schisms and sects. The lethargy of the Established Church is the life of Dissent.

But if the true benefit and natural influence of our Establishment be thus thwarted and diminished, let us seek to remedy and not to destroy it. It is a singular circumstance, that the two ablest defenders of an ecclesiastical Establishment have been a Dissenter and a Deist; the first yourself; the second David Hume; a fact that may induce the philosophers of the day to be less intolerant in their accusations of those who support the expediency of an endowed church. Hume's aphorism, that where the support of the ecclesiastic depends wholly upon the people, he stimulates their zeal by all the quackeries of fanaticism, is, to my mind, amply borne out by the experience of America; it is not that religion is lost for want of an Establishment, but that it splits into a thousand forms, each vying with the other

great divines, who are the light and galaxy of our own church. From what descent came the bold virtue of Latimer? What hereditary blood animated that unfaltering tongue which preached chastity to the Eighth Henry, and was eloquent with courage at the stake? Latimer was a yeoman's son! From whom came the studious thought, and the serene charity, and the copious verve of Barrow? Barrow was the son of a London trader. What progenitor claimed the subtile mind of Clarke, the champion of God himself? A plain citizen of Norwich. To the middle class belonged the origin of the sturdy Warburton; of the venerable Hooker; of the gentle Tillotson, once the standard of all pulpit persuasion. From amongst the ranks of the people rose Taylor, the Milton of the church, whose power and pathos, and “purple grandeur” of eloquence, beautified even piety itself. In fact the births of our great divines may be said to illustrate the principle of every powerful church which draws its vigour from the multitude, and languishes only when confining its Social influences to a court.

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in heated and perverting extravagance. For the people never abandon a faith that flatters and consoles them: they are too apt, on the contrary, to carry it to excess. A mild and tolerant Establishment presents to the eye a certain standard of sober sense; and sectarianism thus rather forsakes the old abuses, than wanders with any wide success into new. I hold, that an abolition of our ecclesiastical establishment would, in this country, be followed up by a darkening and gloomy austerity. For nearly all sectarianism with us is indisposed to the arts, and the amusements that grace and brighten existence; and were the church no more, one sect vying with the other in religious zeal, the result would be an emulation of severities, and of mutual interference with the sunny pleasures of life. So that exactly the disposition we ought the most to discourage (in England especially, too prone to it already), we should the most strengthen and unite. The church, with all the failings it inherits from à too violent and therefore incomplete Reform at first, and a too rigid resistance to reform subsequently, has still, in England, been å gentle, yet unceasing, counterpoise to any undue spirit of fanătical hypochondria. With all its aristocratic faults, too, we may observe, that in the rural districts it has often helped to resist the aristocratic ignorance of the country gentry. More enlightened than the mere squire, you will find the clerical magistrate possessing a far clearer notion of the duties of his office than the lay one; and nine times out of ten, wherever the Poorlaws have been well administered by a neighbouring magistrate, that magistrate is a clergyman. I leave, sir, your admirable argument untouched. I leave the reader to recall to his remembrance how wisely you have defended the establishment of churches, upon the same broad principle as that on which we defend the establishment of schools, viz., that mankind do not feel the necessity of religion and of knowledge so pressingly as they feel that of clothing and food; and the laws that regulate the physical supply and demand are not, therefore, applicable to those that regulate the moral; that we ought to leave men to seek the one, but we ought to obtrude upon them the other, What I insist upon is this-that an established church and sectarianism operate beneficially in each other; that a tolerated, instructed sect, incites the zeal of the establishment; and where that lies oppressed beneath abuses, it directs the Christian pub

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lic to those abuses themselves: that, on the other hand, the sober and quiet dignity of an Establishment operates as a pressure upon the ebullitions of sectarian extravagance. Every man sees the errors of our Establishment, but few calculate the advantage of an Establishment itself. Few perceive how it carries through the heart of the nation, not only the light of the Gospel, but a certain light also of education-how it operates in founding schools for the poor, and exciting dissenters to a rivalry in the same noble benevolence-how, by emulation, it urges on the sectarian to instruct himself as well as others-how, by an habitual decorum of life in its members, it holds forth to all dissenters a steadfast example, from which they rarely swerve and how a perpetual competition in good works tends to a perpetual action of energy and life in their execution. If this be the principle of an ecclesiastical establishment, we have only to preserve, by purifying, the principle. And if I have rightly argued, that it is from too unmixed an aristocratic composition, owing to individual patronage, that most of the present failings of the Establishment arise, we have only to transfer, as far as we safely and prudently can, the patronage of the Establishment from individuals, to the state. In a free state, ever amenable to publicity, the patronage of the state, rightly administered, will become the patronage of the people; but free from the danger that would exist were it dependent on the people alone. Public opinion would watch over the appointments; they would cease to be family concerns; they would cease to be exclusively aristocratic. A more wise and harmonious mixture of all classes, from the higher to the lower, would ensue; and the greater openness of general honour to merit, would encourage zeal, but not the zeal of fanaticism, Pastors would cease to be brought in wrangling and hostile collision with their flocks; and, with a more rooted sympathy with the people than exists at present, the clergy would combine the sway of a serener dignity. In the church, as with education, and with the poor-laws, the most efficacious administration of a complicated machinery is the energy of a Free State.

Theological error of the Puritans-Over-restraint produces Over-looseness→→ The Preservation of the Sabbath regarded in a legislative point of viewTwo Causes of Demoralization connected with its infringement - How amended-Amusement better than Idleness, the French Boor and the English-Instruction better than Amusement-Rope-dancer and PhilosopherRidiculous Questions of the Sabbath Committee-Two Deductions to be drawn from it—The Evidence before it-Corroboration of the Principle of this Work.

THE keeping holy the Sabbath-day is a question which does not seem to me to have been placed upon fair and legislative grounds of consideration. That the Sunday of the Christian is not the Sabbath of the Jews is perfectly clear; that in the early ages of the church, it was set apart as a day of recreation, as well as of rest, is equally indisputable; the first reformers of our English church continued to regard it in this light, and upon that cheerful day games were permitted to the poor, and tournaments to the rich. The spirit of puritanism, distinguished from that of the established church, was mainly this-the former drew its tenets and character principally from the Old Testament, the latter from the New. The puritans, therefore, by a gross theological error, adopted the rigid ceremonial of the Hebrew sabbath, which our Saviour in fact had abolished, and for which, all His earlier followers had substituted a milder institution. The consequence of overstraining the ceremonial has, in England, invariably been this-as one order of persons became more rigid, another class became more relaxed in their observance of church rites and worship. When it was a matter of general understanding that the fore part of the day was set apart for worship, and the latter part for recreation, if every body indulged in the latter, every body also observed the former. But when one class devoted the whole

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day to ritual exaction and formal restraint, and this too with an ostentatious pedantry of sanctification-by a necessary reaction, and from an unavoidable result of ridicule, the other class fell into an opposite extreme. Political animosities favoured the sectarian difference, and, to this day, there are two classes of reasoners on the sabbath, one asking for too much, and the other conceding too little. Perhaps nothing has more marred the proper respect that all classes should pay to the sabbath, than the monstrous and absurd propositions of Sir Andrew Agnew.

But putting aside the religious views of the question, the spirit of good legislation requires that if any gross and evident cause of demoralization exists, we should attempt to remove it. It appears (and this is highly satisfactory) by the evidence on Sir A. Agnew's committee, that the sabbath is generally observed by all orders except the poorest,* that churches are filled as soon as built, and that even those seats reserved for the working classes are usually thronged. The poorer part of the working classes are in large towns alone lax in their attendance we inquire the cause, and we find it nearly always in the effects of habitual intemperance. Now having got to the root of the evil, for that only ought we to legislate. There are two causes that favour intoxication on the Sunday; these we may endeavour to remedy, not only because they injure the holiness of the sabbath, but because they taint the morality of the state.

There are two causes: the first is the custom of paying wages on a Saturday night; a day of entire idleness ensuing, the idler and more dissipated mechanic, especially in the metropolis, goes at once to the gin-shop on the Saturday night, returns there on the Sunday morning, forgets his wife and his family, and spends on his own vices, the week's earnings that should have supported his family. Now if he were paid on Friday night, and went to work on Saturday morning, he would have

The greater part of the more "respectable" metropolitan tradesmen are anxious for an effectual prohibition by law, of Sunday trading, but I suspect not so much from piety as from a jealousy of the smaller shopkeepers, who, by serving customers on Sunday, either lure away the customers on Monday also (supposing the greater tradesmen rigidly decline "to oblige" on the sabbath), or by compelling the "more respectable" to do business also, prevent their running down to their country villas and driving their own gigs.