patris Varvicensis; who, by the fact of selecting the pieces, is to be understood, as he observes in the preface, as giving " a proof that his own mind was not unfavourably impressed with the propriety of the matter or the graces of the style." The reader will naturally inquire how the reverend Editor has acquitted himself, on the same subjects, in his own person. In the extract from the preface to Bellendenus, very properly placed at the head of this series of "characters," Philopatris has purchased a kind of license to exert his ingenuity in the character of apologist, by first pronouncing a decided censure in the character of moralist. In his letter of nearly a hundred and forty pages, which follows the "selection," he adverts to Mr. Fox's religious principles in one interesting paragraph which we shall transcribe. "Of Mr. Fox's religious tenets, I cannot speak so fully as, from motives not of impertinent curiosity, but of friendly anxiety, you may be disposed to wish. But I have often remarked that, upon religious subjects he did not talk irreverently, and generally appeared unwilling to talk at all before strangers or friends. When we look back to the studies, and indeed the frailties of his youth, it were idle to suppose that he was deeply versed in theological lore. Yet, from conversations which have incidentally passed between him and myself, I am induced to think that, according to the views he had taken of Christianity, he did not find any decisive evidence for several doctrines, which many of the wisest of the sons of men have believed with the utmost sincerity, and defended with the most powerful aids of criticism, history, and philosophy. But he occasionally professed, and from his known veracity, we may be sure that he inwardly felt, the highest approbation of pure and benevolent precepts. Upon these, as upon many other topics, he was too delicate to wound the feelings of good men, whose conviction might be firmer and more distinct than his own. He was too wise to insult with impious mockery the received opinions of mankind, when they were favourable to morality. He preserved the same regard to propriety, the same readiness to attend to information, when it was offered to him without sly circumvention, or pert defiance, the same respect to the virtues and attainments of those who differed from him, and the same solicitude for the happiness of his fellow creatures. Thus much may be said with propriety, because it can be said with truth; and glad should I be if it were in my power to say more upon a point of character, which, in such a man, could not escape the observation of the serious, the misconceptions of the ignorant, and the censures of the uncharitable.""—p. 219. its Ought we to pretend to be at a loss as to the real meaning of this statement? and when we find it followed by what we sincerely wish we could call by any other denomination, than an apology for religious scepticism? The apology is indeed conditional, the benefit of it being restricted to those who "are too discreet to proclaim their speculative scruples, and too decorous to disseminate them.' This propriety being preserved inviolate, "perhaps," says our learned divine, " in many cases it is for the Searcher of all hearts alone to determine either the merit of assent, or the demerit of suspense;" the import of which observation the reader had better not examine, if he is resolved that a Christian Minister shall not be understood to insinuate, that we may disregard those parts of divine revelation which declare positively that no man to whom that revelation is presented can with innocence and impunity withhold his acceptance. This reference to the "Searcher of hearts" in behalf of scepticism, in contempt of his own unequivocal denunciations of the guilt and punishment of unbelief, is with consistency enough, and without much further dereliction of Christian principles, followed, towards the close of this eloquent essay, by a direct invasion of that awful secret office of judgment which had just been pretended to be left to his own sovereign authority; for that sovereign secret judgment is invaded, when the decision. is here boldly assumed; and the decision is here boldly assumed in the case of the deceased statesman, the "demerits," and therefore the consequences, of whose scepticism were, as we understood, to have been left to the sole judgment of the "Searcher of hearts." There is no sign of the trembling awe which would naturally accompany such a reference and the uncertainty respecting the result, when our author says, "In the bosoms of those who attended him in his last moments, it" (the complacent character of his death) "must excite the most serious wishes, that their own end may be like his,' and to himself, we trust, it was, in the language of Milton, 'a gentle wafting to immortal life.'" But as if doubtful, nevertheless, of the propriety of expressing the confidence in a form liable to be brought to the test of revelation, our divine adopts the words of Tacitus concerning Agricola, "Si quis piorum manibus locus, si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguuntur magnæ animæ ; placide quiescat," &c. No religious reader of the series of extracts given in the last few pages, can fail to be struck with the reflection to what an unknown extent the mischief may be too reasonably apprehended to reach, which is done by a character in which superlative talents and some unquestionable virtues are combined with vice and the absence of religious principles, when it is seen that even the teachers of religion are by such a character seduced to betray it. It is obvious how powerful the depraving influence is likely to be on other men, who have not the information, the convictions, or the responsibility, implied and involved in the sacred profession, and who are perhaps half vicious and half sceptical already, if that influence is so strong as to make one most learned Christian divine, in a work intended and expected to go down to a future age, confidently dismiss to those abodes of the blessed which Christianity only assures its disciples, the person whom he has just confessed (we cannot honestly interpret the passage in any other sense) to be not a believer in the truth of that religion;-if the influence is so strong as to make another divine proclaim with triumph that "he died with the blessed hope of a Christian ;"—if it is so strong as to make a third divine declare his exaltation "above yon azure vault of blazing stars;"—and so strong as to make a fourth pronounce him "one of the most religious men of the age," and scout, in highly laboured sentences of contempt, the ill-natured moralists, or the hypocrites, who would describe some of the most pernicious vices in any other terms than" passing the limits of discretion." There was evidently no need of the assistance of these reverend * Unless indeed our divine believes, according to Tacitus and his "sapientes," in the existence of some elysium, some other happy state of spirits, distinct from that revealed in the New Testament, in the existence of which he also believes. gentlemen, to make the influence sufficiently extensive and mischievous; and how it may comport with the sacred profession, the grand object of which is to urge the infinite importance of the religion of Christ, to act as auxiliaries of that influence, much be left to their own consciences. We must also remark how ungenerous it is to the memory of the great statesman, thus to force his character before the public in the precise form, and as if for the precise purpose, of a palliative of vice and religious indifference or unbelief. His pretended friends, when they might have maintained the continuity of their encomium by avoiding to advert to these points, choose formally to recognise them as parts of a character, which, notwithstanding these very serious evils, having still many excellencies, and being great and imposing, they can hold up with an air of malicious triumph that seems to say, "Now brand these vices, and denounce, with your godly illiberality, this disregard of Christianity, if you dare; for in so doing you will attack one of the greatest geniuses and sincerest patriots of the age; you will insult the revered memory of the illustrious Fox." It is the old military stratagem of protecting the front from attack, by covering it with persons accounted privileged or sacred. The religious critic is reduced to the alternative, of either letting these reverend gentlemen have every thing their own way with respect to the slightness of the harm and final danger of gaming, libertinism, and scepticism,-or incurring the imputation of illiberality, perhaps malignity, towards the splendid qualities of Fox; which, in these eulogiums, are artfully disposed for throwing their rays across the deep moral and religious shades of the character, and thus giving them a deceptive appearance of extenuated evil. This imputation can be averted by no professions of admiration of his stupendous talents, of his zeal and labours in the cause of freedom and peace, and of his kind and ingenuous disposition; professions which, if they were not a most needless tribute to a character so pre-eminently rich in fame, we should make with a sen VOL. I. P timent rather more cordially emphatic, we think, than the most pompous and sonorous of these congregated rhetoricians. They are many of them too fine, and too much occupied with themselves as being so fine, to reach the pitch of our regret that the nation has now no such man to place at the head of its affairs; and we perceive such momentous interests, as scarcely ever occurred to the thoughts of these panegyrists, involved in those doctrines of freedom of which Fox was so noble an advocate. But all this will avail us nothing with a certain class of people, unless we accede to a suspension in his favour of the obligations of Christian morality and Christian faith. We must, however, take the consequences of venturing to assume, against such persons in general, and against some of these reverend gentlemen in particular, that, if the Christian religion be true, the vicious squandering of great pecuniary means of doing good, and the revels of almost boundless libertinism, followed by an illicit connexion protracted to a late period of life, are great crimes in any man; and that they acquire an aggravation, instead of a diminution, of their turpitude, by being connected with an exalted intellect; and we must endure as well as we can the contempt of the Rev. Philopatris, the Rev. Mr. Fellowes, &c., for the fanaticism of doubting whether a sceptical indifference to Christianity is exactly the proper state of mind to constitute a man "one of the most religious men of the age," or to authorise the confidence which, after he is departed, assigns him to the company of the spirits of the just. If the junta of panegyrists had carefully abstained from whatever would interfere with the laws of religion, and confined themselves to a display of Fox's character as a statesman, an orator, a scholar, and a gentleman, it might have been no compulsory duty of serious critics to remind the reader, that the possession of the specific excellencies appropriate to these characters cannot transfer the individual into a distinct economy from that in which the Divine Being has placed the rest of the species, with regard to religious obligations and the |