comes more reckless in his dealings, and by the discovery of unequivocal frauds is overwhelmed with disgrace, &c. What his future lot may be, no one can predict; but the ranks of our army, the walls of our workhouses, and, alas! the hulks of our convict-ships, could exhibit many a living illustration of this statement.

a

"Another class more extensive :—to begin with stationery reduction, the amount of which we should be ashamed to calculate, enables the epistolary world to save a farthing on every dozen billets they despatch, at the trifling cost of driving to starvation, prostitution, or some summary mode of self-destruction, the succourless young females, whose bread is thus wrested away." pp. 68–73.

"Agricultural Poor. The distress existing among the agricultural poor is great; it is also increasing. . . . . The utter absence of any powerful motive to honest labour, resulting from the fact that nothing to which he puts his hand is or can be his own, . . . is enough to cramp the energies and deaden the feelings of any man. He feels himself a supernumerary on the earth's surface; he has no proprietorship in any thing, save perhaps in a helpless family, whose hunger he knows not how he can appease. He becomes

....

a reckless, if not a demoralized being; and the contrast which he cannot but draw between his own condition and that of the landed proprietor whose soil he tills, engenders feelings of envy, hatred, and a disposition to violence, of which many are eager to take advantage. . . . . Our agricultural poor are wholly and hopelessly dependent on what they can gain by toiling for others; they dwell in hovels, single or clustered, destitute of comfort, cramping the body and depressing the mind. . . . . And thus, as among the other working classes, personal respectability becomes a chimera: they follow the lowest instincts and impulses of animal life, and are perfectly prepared to become the scourges of those orders in society who have trampled them down to so wretched a level."" pp. 81-87. England is one vast mass of superficial splendour, covering a body of festering misery and discontent. Side by side appears, in fearful and unnatural contrast, the greatest amount of opulence, and the most appalling mass of misery. . . . . Where once was sociable and merry England, we have care and caution in the countenance of the rich man, in the working man discontent, in the poor man misery and depression" p. xv. 8.

P See British Critic, No. lxv. pp. 271, 2. article on agricultural labour and wages,' writer whom I am quoting.

Indeed the whole of that very beautiful forcibly illustrates the positions of the

....

It has been most justly and admirably said, that'the Church is the poor man's court of justice. He has no other. It is a saying in the mouth of every one, that laws are made to protect the strong, not the weak. The laws cannot concern themselves with small things. They assert principles, and so are a political testimony to the obligation of justice. They can do little more, as far as the poor are concerned. Nor should we wish to see it otherwise. A multiplicity of particular laws made for the poor, would increase their misery, and be utterly ineffective; for law cannot reach their position, any more than it can the relations of parent and child, husband or wife. Law protects chiefly its own creations, wealth and privilege. Generally speaking, the rights of the rich can be asserted by law; generally speaking, the rights of the poor cannot, because they are matters, not of positive institution, but of nature, of feeling, and of custom. When the moral tone of the country is unchristianized, it is all one whether the poor are serfs by law, or citizens by law. Their poverty in both cases is equally weak, contemptible, and ridiculous. It devolves on the Church, therefore, to assert in her own courts the rights of the poor. She must exhibit a picture of Christian equality, as an edifying lesson to the world; and put her poor and helpless in that honourable position, which shall render any thing which injures or degrades them an obvious offence against the Church, and shocking to the common feelings of Christians.'a

And it is for such reasons, among others, that the Church when free, has ever assigned to Christ's poor a quasi-sacramental character.'b

Truly, this being so, to discuss how an ideal Church would comport herself, if co-existing with such tremendous evils as those just enumerated, involves the same sort of difficulty, which Aristotle notes as to the parallel inquiry, in what manner a perfectly virtuous man would repent. A perfectly virtuous man would have done nothing to repent of; and in like manner, a pure Church could not have co-existed with such tremendous evils. The sufferings of the poor, in (even very corrupt) Catholic times, are at once known and felt by British Critic, No. lxiv. p. 489. bOn Arnold's Sermons,' p. 303.

a

the clergy, and it is their province to proclaim those sufferings in the ears of the evil rulers.'c No one can even plausibly accuse our civil rulers of wanton and deliberate cruelty: neglect and thoughtlessness are all which can be laid to their charge, and are quite enough, alas! to account fully for our present extremity of evil. But such neglect and thoughtlessness could have had no existence, had a pure Church then energized in our country; for a pure Church's heart beats with the most ready and spontaneous sympathy with all the troubles of the poor; and she would with eager and urgent zeal have pleaded, clamoured, threatened in their behalf, to help the fatherless and poor to their right, that the man of the earth be no more exalted against them.'

Let us suppose, however, an ideal Church to be suddenly placed in charge with a country, in which such a state of things had been allowed to grow up unchecked. What a scene presents itself to the imagination! How careful at once her inquiry, what may be those branches of labour in which, whether from the kind or the amount of toil, the leading of a Christian life would be impossible; and how stern the prohibition, enforced by all spiritual sanctions, against any of her children engaging in those branches! In less extreme cases, how loving and considerate her tenderness to the poor sufferers! with what profound wisdom would an early education be imparted, which might prepare them for the life to which they are destined; with what urgency and care would such holy practices be taught them, as might protect them against the spiritual dangers which surround them on all sides! with what zeal and thoughtfulness would such religious services be prepared for their one day of rest, as might cheer, soothe, and refresh them! Religious ceremonial, in other cases but an accessory, (though a most important one,) becomes in these an absolute essential; for in what other way can religious truths be possibly impressed deeply on those whose minds are worn down by unceasing anxiety and care, and whose bodies are exhausted with severe and protracted toil? Then what employment would she not make of her spiritual censures, in directing them against the op

On Goode,' p. 79.

pressors of the poor! what loud and clamorous appeals to our civil rulers! what addresses to those of her own children who are influential in a worldly point of view! Such a sketch may suffice as a faint outline of the picture, and a means of suggesting to the reader numberless points of detail.

6. From the poor we proceed to the rich. And here, when we bear in mind the appalling denunciations against wealth which we read in Scripture, how marked and authoritative an attitude should we not expect such a Church to assume, in her dealings with this class of her children! how urgent and impressive her admonitions to them, to 'place no trust' in those riches, but live as 'poor in spirit'!

A careful and accurate observer of men and things in their secular phase, I should say the most so of any contemporary English writer, I mean Mr. John Mill, gives us the following result of his experience :

'There has crept over the refined classes, over the whole class of gentlemen in England, a moral effeminacy, an inaptitude for every kind of struggle. They shrink from all effort, from every thing which is troublesome and disagreeable. When an evil comes to them, they can sometimes bear it with tolerable patience (though nobody is less patient, when they can entertain the slightest hope that by raising an outcry they may compel somebody else to make an effort to relieve them). But heroism is an active, not a passive quality; and when it is necessary not to bear pain but to seek it, little need be expected from the men of the present day. They cannot undergo labour, they cannot brave ridicule, they cannot stand evil tongues; they have not hardihood to say unpleasant things to any one whom they are in the habit of seeing, or to face, even with a nation at their back, the coldness of some little coterie which surrounds them. This torpidity and cowardice, as a general characteristic, is new in the world; but, modified by the different temperaments of different nations) it is a natural consequence of the progress of civilization, and will continue until met by a system of cultivation adapted to counteract it.'s

And what is to supply such a system except the Church? So capital an evil, so enfeebling us in all our efforts to benefit d London and Westminster Review, April 1836, p. 13.

D

the poor or spread the Gospel, so crushing to all growth of Christian perfection, nay, so contradictory to the elementary idea of the Christian character, which is, to fight Christ's battle here on earth, will not long continue uncontrolled, when a pure Church confronts it. Bringing from her treasure things new and old, she will be at no loss for a remedy; nor will she be, from respect of persons, lukewarm or hesitating in its application.

The same accurate and dispassionate observer remarks :

"As civilization advances, . . . the only motive to action which can be considered as any thing like universal, is the desire of wealth; and wealth being in the case of the majority the most accessible means of gratifying all their other desires, nearly the whole of the energy of character which exists in highly civilized societies concentrates itself in the pursuit of that object. . . . Thus it happens that, . . . particularly among ourselves, the energies of the middle classes are almost confined to money-getting, and those of the higher classes are nearly extinct." p. 12.

...

And 'the love of money is the root of all evil!' With what unremitting urgency and intentness of purpose, by what varied machinery, by sermons, by personal addresses, by the exhibitions of voluntary poverty, by setting forth the claims of the poor, by putting forward other pursuits as objects for this energy, which thus does far worse than run to waste, will not an ideal Church oppose herself to this most baneful and anti-Christian tendency?

7. Having mentioned the upper classes of society, let us consider the Church's dealings with them, as being the educated classes; and first let us conceive an ideal Church, which should virtually possess a control over the whole education of those classes. We should find in such a Church, united with a profound appreciation of the very important place in mental culture held by the study of heathen literature and philosophy, a very keen sense also of the spiritual dangers thence accruing. I speak not only of peril to that, almost highest of all graces, the perfect purity which consists in the absence of the power to realise practically what is sinful and corrupt:

e See Newman's Parochial Sermons, vol. vi. p. 287.