صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

39

sician, nor adviser, if he is none; and where he is found fulfilling the duties of all. This American prelate, dispensing his Sunday Sermon to his city congregation in his fashionable chapel, little knows the life of the measureless majority of the clergy of England; the seclusion in the remote village, the separation from the habitual excitements of life, the humble toil, the unvaried and uncheered consignment to a rank of society from which nothing can be learned but resignation; and all this not merely borne with patience, but turned into the nutriment of mental vigour, and Christian zeal. Men "of whom the world is not worthy, exiled into utter obscurity; the scholar giving up his literary ambition for the labours of his cure; the man of genius thwarting the fine flights of his mind for the nameless and monotonous service of paupers and peasants; and those things often done with the purity, and energy, the solemn sense of obligation, and the inflexible resolution of the apostolic age. If such men are not objects of respect and love, they are not to be won by man. But human nature is neither a stock nor a stone; and such men invariably secure the hearts of their people. In the most revered sense the pastor, and in the most affectionate sense the friend; they are the very "salt of the earth," that preserves the mass from sudden corruption; the true lights of the national mind, when the wisdom of this world is darkness; the secret and solid pillars of the national prosperity, unshaken when the glittering superstructure seems giving way; and, even in the last extremity, forming a mass of strength on which a new constitutional fabric might be planted to the honour of God and the security of the people. Take away the ten thousand parish priests of England, and we leave a great gulph in the national morality, order, and patriotism, which nothing could fill up. There might be attempts at substitution; because the heart of man demands some religion, and because human legislation feels itself powerless to penetrate the depths of society without religion. But all would be false and hollow. We might have some chimerical and vapourous temple of imposture and enthusiasm rising to fill the chasm, some half-visionary, half-revolutionary worship, glittering with the false lights, and pompous with the evil ceremonies of perverted philosophy, some Pantheon, or Pandemonium; but, with the Established Church would have perished, what could find no substitute; that mighty Memorial, not merely of the piety of our fathers, or of their heroic blood, or of their resolute, sincere, and sacred wisdom; that great concentration of the trophies and reliques of our ancient days of constitutional hazard and glory; yet standing before us in the still nobler character of a holy

[ocr errors]

pledge for our future grandeur; erected on our Zion, at once for the gathering of the people, and for the bulwark of the state; a magnificent sign that the glory of our latter day shall exceed that of the brightest of the former, and that "the Lord shall suddenly come to his temple!"

Knowing the habits and impulses of our time, we can feel no surprise at the childish yet bitter hostility with which the Establishment has of late been arraigned. In all ages, the possession of property, knowledge, or rank, is an object of envy; and where the peculiar principles of the possessors make retort and resistance least probable, envy will assume the bolder post of defiance, and start from the whispered insinuation and the sly surmise, into the haughty calumny and the loud voiced and frontless charge. But, in our day the general habit of subjecting the highest things to the lowest discussion; the prone sycophancy of political candidates for the favour of the mob; the fierce and hungry irritability of that, so called, philosophy, which, by defamation, strikes the double stroke of, profit for its pen, and public spoil for its more remote ambition, all combine to make the assault more rancorous and stubborn. The Church is the first object of this hostility; because, to the coward it is the safest, to the public sycophant the most palatable, to the peреriodical pamphleteer the most capable of his easy virulence, dashing postulates, and rhetorical display. A thousand common places will not exhaust the novelty of the subject; nor ten thousand calumnies overload the appetite of the rabble. The libeller is but the dutiful servant of the public, and his conscience must find "ample roof and verge enough" for all.

A curious book might be written on popular convictions, and the arguments by which the multitude were convinced. The old puritans asked "what was prelacy but lawn sleeves, and where were lawn sleeves commanded in Scripture." The argument was irresistible and prelacy was abolished. The French Convention declared that, a "king was nothing but a well bred profligate in a laced coat." The argument was received as an axiom, and the monarch was led to the block. Paine, among ourselves, pronounced that a "king was a decorous gentleman who sat twice a year in a chair at the end of the House of Lords." The country was then in a highly reasoning condition, and the argument was infinitely applauded, though the consequence was escaped. In later days, Napoleon pronounced, "L'etat, c'est moi," and that the "throne was nothing but four boards covered with velvet." It was

NO. VII. VOL. IV.

C

held by the million for irrefragable doctrine. What may be believed by the same profound and dispassionate judges touching the errors of the Church of England, is, perhaps, to be found in some future convulsion; but we may rely on it, that the more extravagant the better, as the more native to the spirit of its calumniators, and the more amusing to the drowsy igno rance that must be fed with some stimulant, or it falls asleep, useless to the grand cause of " subversion all over the world."

In England, of all countries, we must be prepared to expect those attacks. Our vast and restless population, the trade of the pen, the habit of party, the general struggle and conflict for life, arising out of the public pressures; the very crowding of a multitude twice the number of the whole population of the United States, in an island not exceeding one of its provinces, must engender an immense quantity of that heated and perilous spirit which endangers the quiet of society. There will be many discontented with fortune, and not a few desperate against the law. Possession without labour is the great revolutionary prize, and the tickets will never want claimants. There will be many to whom religion is a dead letter; and some to whom it is a scorn; many who wish for change through mere restlessness, and some who contemplate secure revenge and profitable plunder. Among those the banner of revolt will never want followers; but the direct attack on the Constitution is hazardous, and the scaffold lies in the way. To lead the "Federes" against the Church is a safer warfare, and it is equally sure of reaching its true point at last, the Crown. Sap the great, antique circumvallation of the state, and the open assault is not far off, the march will be easy over the ruins, and the triumph will be final. But, besides the random politicians and the obscure philosophists, there are those who hate religion for its own sake; a banditti of deplorable and sullen outcasts, blinded to the perception of truth, and leagued by a sworn hostility to the hope of a hereafter. Shall we presume that those who would trample out the slightest seed of Faith, should reverence the spot where its protected verdure makes the glory of the land? Satan roaming round the wall of Eden, might as soon hold compact with its guardian spirits for its security.

It had been our purpose when we began these pages to give some general view of the principles and constitution of the establishment. But other matters make it now impossible. The time for that too will come. The subject is extensive; but none can be more cheering, clear, or important to public

6

knowledge. We have adverted to Dr. Hobart's errors necessarily, but reluctantly. His profession, his place in that profession, the very name of Episcopacy' would have of themselves made us anxious to receive him with the right-hand of fellowship. We have not lost sight of the feeling; but there was imposed upon us the stronger duty of defending the truth.

Here is one of yourselves, even a Bishop, loading you with accusation," must be the language of the first libeller. It was essential to shew that the accuser was mistaken, or prompted by the impulse of an unwise popularity. But no man can be more easily answered out of his own mouth. What are we to think of the consistency of his opinions, who thus winds up his censure of the Establishment.

"In her doctrines, in her ministry, in her worship, she is all glorious within; and thanks to the sound and orthodox and zealous Clergy, who have been faithful to her principles, she is still the great joy and the great blessing of the land. It would be impossible to sever the Church from the State, without a convulsion which would uproot both, and thus destroy the fairest fabric of social and religious happiness in the European world." P. 35,

We e can easily pardon native partialities. Yet we have never met a tourist so resolutely determined to discover every perfection of all countries in his own homestead as the Dr. He absolutely urges this to the highest point of human endurance. He travels through the finest countries of Europe, and after some lines given "to radiant skies, and breezes that bear health and cheeriness to the decaying and languid frame," nay, after the compulsory acknowledgment, that it would be "absurd in America to urge à superiority over these lands, or altogether an équality with them," he turns to comfort the men of New York, the denizens of the yellow fever and ague, with "all is less adverse to our own claims than I had supposed." He thus proceeds, plucking away the feathers of Switzerland, &c. &c, to cover the naked wing of the "States." If they have alps, the States have ridges of hills, if they have "stupendous castles crowning mountain passes," "interesting ruins," large and imposing edifices of religion, splendid palaces filled with works of genius; magnificent libraries, &c.; Let America still console herself: she has something that may remind her of them all; she has a state prison, and a philosophical hall, and a landscape cut out into square inches, with every ploughman a lord of the soil. If she have not "the public squares, or fountains, or magnificent Cathedrals of Europe," she may feel with becoming

pride that she can build as spruce a Chapel as any of them, and that no Ebenezer in the City Road does more honour to modern bricklaying than the Ebenezer of New York. Our readers will forcibly feel how far the "Natale Solum" can fill up a man's comprehension; when this patriot, after his Swiss, French, and Italian ramblings, with Lausanne, and Naples, and a hundred others before his memory, writes down, that, "perhaps no city can boast of a promenade superior, if equal, in point of prospect, to the battery of New York!" P.9.

Dr. Hobart came to England under peculiar circumstances. We must acknowledge that, whatever may be the labours or the learning of the Episcopal Church in New York, it had hitherto much escaped notice in England. Whatever may be the merit of its virtues, it had lost none by a too ambitious publicity. We hear a good deal in the Dr's. pamphlet of the literary education of its pastors. But their literature had confined itself to the modest but doubtless meritorious cultivation of the native mind; and content with fame on one side of the Atlantic, it apparently scorned the clamorous competitions of European theology. Dr. Hobart was an invalid, a man of pleasing manners, and, above all, an Episcopalian clergyman. Through the introduction of the amiable and active individual named in the preface, he found easy and ge-. nerous access to the English divines, and even received personal attentions of a marked nature from some of them, whose high public occupation considerably precludes those things. We had no secrets to conceal; he looked about him freely, and at length took his departure under many declarations of respect and grateful remembrance.

[ocr errors]

We can assure this gentleman that it is with much more pain for him than for ourselves, that we have at last his own evidence of his employment while here.

Of all trades that of an abuse-hunter is the surest to enjoy employment. The determination to find things wrong can never be disappointed. The Jew salesman is not surer of finding every thing convertible into his traffic: the gipsy is not more expert at deciding on the property of all that can be turned into possession. An eye thoroughly yellow will see the world yellow from the sky to the ground. Investigators of this order are to be met with in all countries; we have them. among us in abundance, accurate and investigating as the fly on the pillar in St. Paul's, shooting out their minute feelers on every thing, and finding all roughness, intricacy, and decay. The grandeur, the proportioned beauty, the awful magnifi

« السابقةمتابعة »