sanctity, and relied implicitly on its efficacy,-that the youthful tribe of neophytes were rightly prepared by the ministry of their respective pastors, and possessed the simple credence of past ages to give vitality to the office then, indeed, might it be in fact what it can now only appear for an instant. We feel, moreover, taking yet lower ground than this, that were the clergy a body filled with the zeal of their calling, they possess in this ceremony a means of powerful influence. But I have hitherto spoken only of its poetical and picturesque effect, and that effect endures not a step beyond the church-doors. At that point the habitual apathy of the clergy converts this rite into one of the most awful and hideous of mockeries. The bishop charges the recipients to return home in soberness and decorum; but he should charge their respective clergymen to conduct them thither. But where are the clergy? They are gone to dine with the bishop, or their clerical brethren; and what are the morals of the youth to good dinners? They have turned the children over to the clerks. And where are the clerks? They have some matters of trade to transact;

-some spades, or cårt-saddles, or groceries to buyand what is the health of the children's souls to spades, and cart-saddles, and groceries ?-they have turned the lambs of the flock over to the schoolmasters. And where are the schoolmasters? They, like their clerical lords, are gone to dine with their brother dominies of the town, having reiterated the injunction of the bishop with a mock-heroic gravity, as highly, but not as well, assumed as that of the bishop himself, and with as little effect. While they sit and discuss the merits of the last new treatise of arithmetic or spelling, the work of some new Dilworth or Entick, their charges have squandered into a dozen companies, and each, under the guidance of some rustic Coryphæus, have surrounded as many ale-house fires. They are as happy as their betters. The loaf and

cheese melt like snowballs before them; the stout ale is handed round to blushing damsels by as many awk

ward, blushing swains. Hilarity abounds-their spirits are kindled. The bishop, and the church, and the crowd all vanish-or rather, their weight is lifted from their souls, which rise from the abstracted pressure with a double vivacity. Already heated, they set forward on their homeward way. At every besetting ale-house the revel is renewed. Over hill and dale they stroll on, a rude, roistering, and disgraceful rabble. For the effects of this confirmation let any one inquire of parish overseers, and they will tell him, that it is one of the most fruitful sources of licentiousness and crime. The contagion of vice spreads, under such circumstances, with the fatal rapidity of lightning. Young and modest natures which otherwise would have shrunk from it and been safe, are surprised, as it were, into sin, and shame, and misery. Instead of a confirmation in Christianity, it becomes the confirmation of the devil. And this clergymen know; and yet with the same apathy whence the evil has sprung, they continue to suffer its periodical recurrence; and thus, for want of a little zeal, and a little personal exercise of the good office of a shepherd, they convert one of the rites of their church into one of the worst nuisances that afflict our country.

246

PRIESTCRAFT

CHAPTER XX.

RETROSPECTIVE VIEW OF PRIESTCRAFT.

Moral and Political Lessons taught by it-Corruption of the Clergy proverbial-Necessity of Reform.

Yet thus is the church, for all this noise of Reformation, left still unreformed. Milton.

THUS have we traversed the field of the world. We have waded through an ocean of priestly enormities. We have seen nations sitting in the blackness of darkness, because their priests shut up knowledge in the dark-lanterns of their selfishness. We have seen slavery and ignorance blasting, under the guidance of priestly hands, millions on millions of our race, and making melancholy the fairest portions of the earth. We have listened to sighs and the dropping of tears, to the voice of despair and the agonies of torture and death; we have entered dungeons, and found their captives wasted to skeletons with the years of their solitary endurance; we have listened to their faint whispers, and have found that they uttered the cruelties of priests. We have stumbled upon midnight tribunals, and seen men stretched on racks; torn piecemeal with fiery pincers; or plunged into endless darkness by the lancing of their eyes; and have asked whose actions these were-and were answered the priests! We have visited philosophers, and found them carefully concealing their discoveries, which would suddenly have filled the earth with light, and power, and love,—because they knew the priests would turn on them in their greedy malice, and doom them to fire or gibbet. We have walked among women of many countries, and have found thousands lost to shame, rolling wanton eyes, uttering

hideous words; we have turned from them with loathing, but have heard them cry after us, as we went, "Our hope is in the priests, they are our lovers, and defenders from eternal fire." We have entered for shelter from this horror the abodes of domestic love, and have stood petrified to find there all desecrated— purity destroyed-faith overthrown-happiness annihilated; and it was the work of priests! Finally, we have seen kings, otherwise merciful, instigated by the devilish logic of priestcraft, become the butchers of their people; queens, otherwise glorious, become tyrants and executioners; and people, who would otherwise have lived in blessed harmony, warring on each other with inextinguishable malice and boundless blood-thirstiness; and behold! it was priestcraft, that, winding among them like a poisonous serpent, maddened them with its breath, and exulted with fiendish eyes over their horrible carnage. All this we

have beheld, and what is the mighty lesson it has taught? It is this-that if the people hope to enjoy happiness, mutual love, and general prosperity, they must carefully snatch from the hands of their spiritual teachers all political power, and confine them solely to their legitimate task of Christian instruction. (Let it always be borne in mind, that, from the beginning of the world to this time, there never was a single conspiracy of SCHOOLMASTERS against the liberties and the mind of man: but in every age, the priests, the SPIRITUAL SCHOOLMASTERS, have been the most subtle, the most persevering, the most cruel enemies and oppressors of their species. The moral lesson is stamped on the destinies of every nation,—the inference is plain enough to the dullest capacity Your preachers, while they are preachers alone, are harmless as your schoolmasters; they have no motive to injure your peace: but let them once taste power, or the fatal charm of too much wealth, and the consequent fascinations of worldly greatness, and, like the tiger when it has once tasted blood, they are henceforth your cruellest devourers and oppressors,

We may be told that there is no such pernicious tendency now in our establishment that it is mild, merciful, and pious: our attention may be turned to the great men it has produced; and the number of humble, sincere, and exemplary clergymen who adorn their office at the present day.

Much of this I intend not to deny ; but if it be said, there is no evil tendency in the church, I there differ. The present corruption, the present admission, even of the clergy, of the necessity of reform, is sufficient refutation; and if it does not now imprison, burn, and destroy, we owe it to the refinement of the age, as the history of the past world amply shows. Human nature is for ever the same; it is the nature of priestcraft to render the clergy tyrants, and the people slaves; it always has been so; it always will be; the only preventive lies in the general knowledge of the community. That the church has produced great men, who will not admit, that remembers that Plato of preachers Jeremy Taylor, Tillotson, Hooker, (and others? but that it would have produced far more such men, had it been more thoroughly reformed, placed on a more broad and Christian basis, is equally certain.

That there are numbers of excellent clergy I readily admit. I honour and love the good men who, in many an obscure village in the midst of a poor and miserable population, spend their days with no motive but the fulfilment of their duty; cheerfully sacrificing all those refined pleasures,-that refined society which their character of mind, and their own delightful tastes, would naturally prompt and entitle them to. Who do this, badly paid, worse encouraged; compelled by their compassion to despoil themselves of a great part of their meager salaries, to stop the cries of the terrible necessities by which they are surrounded; who do this, many of them, at the expense of remaining solitary, unallied individuals; unmarried, childless: or if husbands and fathers, expending their wives' comforts, their children's education on the poverty which the wealthy incumbents neither look on nor relieve. (When