two hundred years ago, Rudyard, one of the most eloquent of its members, rose up and expressed himself to the following effect: It is well known,' he observed, that disturbance has been brought into our country and the established church through vain and petty trifles. The whole realm is distracted about where to place a metaphor or how to fix an altar. We have seen ministers worried to death, against law, against conscience, against compassion. Episcopal inventions have become sieves to winnow the best men-an occupation most suitable to Satan. They have a mind to oppress preaching, for I have never heard of any but diligent preachers that were vexed with these and the like devices. They would fain evaporate and dispirit the power and vigour of true religion by drawing it out into solemn and specious formalities-into obsolete and antiquated ceremonies. Let them not say that these are the perverse or malicious interpretations of some factious spirits amongst us: while a Romanist has boasted in print that the face of our church begins to alter, the language of our religion to change; and that if a synod were held, and puritans excluded, our articles and theirs might be soon made to agree. They have so brought it to pass, that under the names of puritans (and he might have added, ultra-protestants), our whole religion is branded; and under cover of a few hard words against catholics, all popery is countenanced. Whoever would be governed by common usage is a puritan, according to them; their great work being to exhibit all persons not of their way of thinking, as people to be suspected! The effect of these ill-judged procedures is weakness and division on every hand! Never surely was an historical coincidence of times and circumstances more palpably striking. We owe an apology to our readers for not having before called their attention, in these pages, to the superb drama of confusion now agitating the establishment, which describes itself in every Bidding Prayer as 'that pure, apostolic, and reformed branch of Christ's holy catholic church maintained in these kingdoms!' There are two bishops, more particularly notorious, who have been politely compared by the leading journal of Europe' to 'the two tai's of smoking fire-brands, Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah :" thousands of clergy and laity having already denounced them as neither more nor less than ecclesiastical incendiaries. peace of society, throughout extensive districts, has been sacrificed to the freaks of these factious and cowardly prelates. We use the latter epithet with deliberation, although entirely without anger. Like those cunning quadrupeds of the brush, they have effected their mischievous purposes, and then skulked away! Charles James of London, after the vagaries of Ware,

The

Ilford, Shoreditch, and Tottenham, has laid down his ears, and withdrawn his regulations for the term of twelve months! What a caricature of papal usurpation and pusillanimity. Henry of Exeter, all but falling into hysterical convulsions, because some poor curate, on a Sunday during the bitter cold weather of December last, was said to have preached in a great coat, which proved not to have been a correct report, has now withdrawn his surplices from the pulpit altogether. The white and the black officials are henceforward to do duty as they have hitherto done for several generations. But who shall heal the breaches and heart-burnings which these attempts at paltry innovation have made? Who are contending for these bagatelles, but those who have shown themselves the bitterest enemies of vital godliness! We are reminded of a worthy clergyman who once offended Archbishop Laud by declaring that he opined the evening of the world must certainly be at hand, as the shadows were growing so much longer than the substances which projected them!' Since the Reformation, or at least the Restoration, we doubt whether the Church of England has ever been in a more pitiable condition than it exhibits at the present day.

Indeed her state is such, that compassion should swallow up indignation in the bosom of every right-minded spectator. Were some wandering spirit from another sphere to alight on Shooter's Hill or Dartmoor, his eye could not fail to be caught by the incessant excitement and turmoil amongst all the inhatants of this island. Our harbours would strike him as crowded with vessels, our markets as overflowing with prosperity, our soil as teeming with fertility, our civilization as ripening into the most marvellous refinement. The cancer of pauperism might possibly be just at first concealed; but the hubbub of public meetings scarcely so. Yet, what is it all about,' would be his inquiry as a stranger, or at least some such internal query would flash through his mind. His surprise must surpass description, to be told that the subject matter was, in a certain sense, rather less than the mote in a sunbeam! When further informed, moreover, that the entire fons malorum, out of which, one single drop had scalded and exasperated millions of sensible people, was an institution professedly maintained for the purposes of promoting national edification, would he not answer, Why, then, is not the whole affair altered; why not dry up altogether a fountain of such bitter waters; why not let the River of Life wend its own way through this otherwise happy land: I cannot understand it?" Nor does the problem admit of a very easy or superficial explanation. It is an anomaly all over; one vast, endless, labyrinth of perplexities; an enormous fraud upon mankind. That so holy and blessed a system as the

gospel of the Redeemer, originated from the fathomless mercy of Eternal Love, illustrated by the life of its Divine Author, and sealed with his own blood, should ever have fallen into the hands of secular men at all, to be by them corrupted and rendered a bane to that world, over which one day it is to reign in the plenitude of its power, is to ourselves an almost inconceivable mystery. Within these realms, however, this phenomenon is still to be witnessed. We possess an hierarchy seated on about fifty episcopal thrones, throughout England, Ireland, and their colonies. Immense revenues are showered into its lap, extensive powers are wielded by its hands, about twenty thousand ordained clergy, bound by oaths and subscriptions, wait upon its will, or rather upon the will of its secular superior. Now, strange to say, amidst infinite pomp and grandeur, it has neither head, heart, nor hand of its own. The premier nods, and this proud prelacy must obey! Either he, or his predecessors, placed every mitre upon the brow that wears it. In these islands, to adopt a favorite figure, the church is married to the state; and an iniquitous husband the latter makes her. Richard Hooker, and his followers, consider the limits of the one as also the limits of the other. Those who deny such doctrines are without the pale; and what is to become of them hereafter, let no man say. But just at present, our attention is imperatively called to the sublunary circumstances of this said church of England: we shall glance for a few moments at the parties within the establishment, then at its internal and external position, and lastly at its future prospects.

None will deny that the members of the church of England constitute an exceedingly numerous, and important portion of our body politic. What their precise numbers may be, it is perhaps difficult to determine; but probably she baptizes into her communion a large third of our European fellow subjects. Of these, there is an immense mass whom, for the sake of convenience, we shall call the conservatives. They are mostly men, women, and children, who may just be estimated as so much flesh, bone, and sinew. To the vital realities of religion they are utter strangers. Their affections, except so far as mere associations arising out of education and habit may go, are all sent another way. Less than a century since, the church of England consisted of little else than such materials. Let the admirable Samuel Walker, of Truro, be referred to as a witness, himself so attached to his ecclesiastical mother, that neither fire nor sword could separate him. He thus solemnly records the results of a widely extended investigation:-'What I see has given me much concern. I see the number of real christians small. I see that the form of godliness has been thrusting out

the power of it, till that itself is well nigh lost in licentiousness. I see the generality dead in sin, and securely sleeping in a profound ignorance of the truth of the gospel. I see our ministry in general, long ago fallen into a dry moral way of preaching, that can neither reach the disease of the hearers, nor has the promise of the Spirit to accompany it. And I earnestly wish I saw none of those, who have undertaken that sacred office, so engaged in ambitious and self-interested pursuits, that they have neither leisure, nor inclination, nor ability to go through their ministerial duties. In general, I see God forgotten, Christ neglected or despised, and the kingdom of darkness extensively established.' We have copied the words of one of his most serious documents, which, from time to time, he accustomed himself to draw up with all the carefulness of a philosopher, and the piety of a thoroughly upright and conscientious mind. Let Messrs. Venn, Grimshawe, Berridge, Scott, Romaine, Adams of Wintringham, be appealed to for similar testimony. When we add to these the celebrated Hervey of Weston Favel, we have gone far towards enumerating nearly every name at all prominent during those times, for genuine godliness in the establishment. The nation might have become perfectly heathenized, had it not been for these worthies, acting as they did in conjunction with, or strengthened by, the methodists and nonconformists. Matters are somewhat altered now; and yet it must be admitted, that conservatism still constitutes the basis and bulk of the building. It is, after all, a cold though a somewhat colossal affair. The metropolitan cathedral is the very type of it; with its Grecian and graceful porticoes, its ample nave and aisles, its aspiring dome, the insignia of the state all over it, its marble monuments, and its paucity of genuine worshippers! The revenues of its reverend chapter are perhaps equivalent to the privy purse of the pope of Rome; whilst, as to fervour of devotion, it is just out of the question; one would as soon look for tropical productions in the polar regions. Taking the number of regularly ordained clergy at from sixteen to twenty thousand; and calculating from the subscribers to the Church Missionary Society, as well as kindred institutions, that six thousand may be considered evangelical in their sentiments; then allowing from fifteen hundred to two thousand more for the followers, or at least favourers of Pusey and Newman; there will be found left about a myriad of priests and deacons, out of whose ranks we grant that the foxhunters and turfmen are gradually dying off, but whose mighty mass still remains; mole suá immobiliter stat! It forms a mountain platform of pharisaical formalism. It supports an ecclesiastical fabric, to which ignorance, and fashion, and bigotry resort upon the Sunday; where decency ministers

at a fireless altar, and a political creed wears the garb of external religion during the hours of stated service. But godliness always catches cold by going there. It is a temple of mammon to all intents and purposes. It evangelizes no souls. It glories in no cross. It wears and wields a sword,-but not that of the Spirit. It assorts well with the pageantry of scarlet gowns, beadles, maces, wigs, powdered menials, and the other gaudy gewgaws of a lord mayor's day. But it is a synagogue of Satan, in which he obscures the realities of another world, by mingling them with the phantasmagoria of this. It is a wonderful part of his grand vanity fair, to which all ages and both sexes are invited and allured when the theatres are closed, when balls and routs are suspended, when pleasure itself wants a change, and the best opera dancers are out of town!

Next to the conservatives, in the church of England, we must take the evangelicals; a class once promising to become an army of confessors,-a host of the 'precious sons of Zion.' But how is the gold become dim, and the fine gold changed! Would not their very progenitors be ashamed of them; those who refused large preferments, that they might fight unencumbered against still larger abuses; those who co-operated with nonconformists, that they might arouse their own brethren; those that could, in an apostolic sense, became all things to all men, that by all means they might save some? Alas! where is the liberality, which once brought the great episcopal commentator to Bristol, on a visit to the respected Principal of a Baptist Academy?-which united John Owen to the Hughes, and Hardcastle, and Clayton, of his day; or at an earlier period consecrated the friendship of the good curate of Truro, with Risdon Darracott, of Wellington? Have not the present evangelical clergy grown conformed to the present world, instead of becoming transformed in the renewal of their minds? We do not, of course, mean to say, that they frequent Drury Lane or Covent Garden, or that they dance the Polka, and play at cards. But what we intend to affirm is this,-that their entire spirit is opposed, not so much to the professions, as to the practices and conduct of their illustrious predecessors. Their general bearing has degenerated into the assumption of sacerdotal usurpation. They have ceased to be men of selfdenial and unimpeachable disinterestedness. What the Edinburgh Review has propounded respecting them is too true,that they obtain the best preferments, wed the prettiest wives, marry the richest fortunes, exhibit the handsomest equipages, and give themselves the greatest airs, of any class of gentry in the country. Their pretensions to more scriptural doctrine, and greater external holiness of life, than their tractarian and