IN ALL AGES.

1

249 I observe them do this, and all the while see their parishes drained by some fat pluralist, or sinecurist, who scorns to take the cure of souls whom he never goes near, except to take the living, and appoint his journeyman-when I see them look on wealth, dignities, and preferments showered on the well-born, well-allied, or well-impudenced, while there is a gulf between themselves and their attainment as impassable as that between Dives and Lazarus, then do I indeed love and honour such men; and it is for such that I would see the church reformed; and the road to greater comfort and more extensive usefulness thrown open. I would not, as the bees do, appoint a killing day for the drones, but I would have no more admitted to the hive.

There are many excellent men; but are the multitude such? We shall undoubtedly be told so. The whole body will be represented as the most disinterested, holy, beneficent, industrious, wonder-working, salvation-spreading body imaginable. In their own periodicals and pamphlets, they are so represented.Whether they be so or not, let one of the greatest intellects of the age, and one of their own warm friends, testify

The sweet words

Of Christian promise words that even yet

Might stem destruction, were they wisely preached,

Are muttered o'er by men whose tones proclaim
How flat and wearisome they feel their trade :
Rank scoffers some; but most too indolent
To deem them falsehoods, or to know their truth.
COLERIDGE.

And let one great truth be marked.-The prevalent character of a public body stamps itself in the public mind as faithfully as a man's face in a mirror. There may be exceptions to a body, and they may be considerable but when that body becomes proverbial; when it is, as a whole, the object of the jokes, the sarcasms, and contempts of the people, that body is not partially, but almost wholly corrupt. Now such is the character of the Church of England clergy, (in the

mind of the British people. We may be told it is the vulgar opinion, and the vulgar are wrong. In judgments of this kind the vulgar, as they are called, are right. They always were so; but this too will be denied. A body in its corruption never did, and never will, admit it; its only feeling will be anger, not repentance. When the Romish church was utterly corrupted,-when its priests and monks were the scandal and the scorn of all men, did the church admit it? Did it reform them? When Luther's artillery was thundering against it, and shaking it to its foundations, did it admit the justice of his attack? No! it only turned in rage, and would have devoured him, as it devoured all other reformers. When he had knocked down many of its pillars, blown up many of its bastions, laid bare to public scorn and indignation its secret fooleries and horrors, it relaxed not an atom of its pretensions, it abated not a jot of its pride, it stayed not its bloody arm, shunned not to proclaim itself still holy, invulnerable, and supreme. While Dante and Boccacio laughed at its errors, or declaimed against its abuses in its own territories; while Erasmus in the Netherlands, Chaucer in England, and Sir David Lindsay, the Chaucer of Scotland, were pouring ineffable and everlasting ridicule on its monks, its priests, and pardoners, they were told that theirs was but the retailing of vulgar ignorance and envy but what followed? (Time proclaimed it TRUTH. The corrupted tribes were chased away by popular fury and scorn, and have left only a name which is an infamy and a warning.

From age to age, the great spirits of the world have raised their voices and cried, Liberty! but the cry has been drowned by the clash of arms, or the brutish violence of uncultured mobs. Homer and Demosthenes in Greece, Cicero in Rome, the poets and martyrs of the middle ages, our sublime Milton, the maligned but immoveable servant and sufferer of freedom, who laid down on her altar his peace, his comfort, and his very eyesight, our Hampdens and Sidneys, the Hofers and Bolivars of other lands, have, from age to age, cried,

Liberty! but ignorance and power have been commonly too much for them. But at length, light from the eternal sanctuary of truth has spread over every region; into the depths and the dens of poverty it has penetrated; the scholar and the statesman are compelled to behold in the marriage of Christianity and Knowledge the promise of the establishment of peace, order, and happiness,the reign of rational freedom. We are in the very crisis in which old things are to be pulled down, and new ones established on the most ancient (of foundations, justice to the people. To effect safely this momentous change requires all the watchfulness and the wisdom of an intelligent nation. The experience of the world's history warns us to steer the safe middle course, between the despotism of the aristocracy and the mob, between the highest and the lowest orders of society. The intelligence, and not the wealth or multitudes of a state, must give the law of safety; and to this intelligence I would again and finally say-be warned by universal history! Snatch from your priesthood all political power; abandon all state religion; place Christianity on its own base-the universal heart of the people; let your preachers be, as your schoolmasters, simply teachers; eschew reverend justices of the peace; very reverend politicians; and right reverend peers and legislators, as you would have done the reverend knights, and marquises, and dukes of the past ages. They must neither meddle with your wills, nor take the tenth of your corn; they must neither tax you to maintain houses in which to preach against you, and read your damnation in creeds of which no one really knows the originnor persecute you, nor seize your goods for Easter offerings and smoke-money. The system by which they tax you at your entry into the world, tax you at your marriage, tax you at your death, suffer you not to descend into your native earth without a fee, must be abolished. The system by which you are made to pay for every thing, and to have a voice in nothing not even in the choice of a good minister,

252

PRIESTCRAFT IN ALL AGES.

or the dismissal of a vile and scandalous debauchee; by which you are made the helpless puppet of some obtuse squire, and the prey of some greedy and godless priest, must have an end.

On this age, the happiness of centuries-the prosperity of Truth depends; let it not disappoint the xpectations and mar the destinies of millions!

APPENDIX.

BY THE AMERICAN EDITOR.

I. THE HEBREWs. Chapter IX.-Mr. Howitt in some places exhibits a want of discrimination between that priestcraft which was the invention of corrupt men and the theocratic establishment among the Israelites which was appointed by God. It is proper, therefore, to remember the defects which Mr. Howitt, as a theologian, has incidentally betrayed. The comparison between Sinbad's "old man of the sea," and the abuses which were perpetrated by the Jewish priesthood, and the Christian ministry in their legitimate and restricted offices and duties, called the "old man of the church," is not analogous: Mr. Howitt's poetry is preferable to his divinity. The sentiment also that "one design of the Almighty" by the appointment of the Jewish priesthood was "to show how radically mischievous and prone to evil an ecclesiastical order is, under any circumstances," borders upon impiety. The apostacy of Aaron, the profligacy of Eli's sons, and the treason of Caiaphas and his associates had no natural connexion with the Jewish priesthood, or rather were direct violations of all its holy institutes. Infidel sentiments of this kind are mischievous; and being irrelevant to Mr. Howitt's object, it is astonishing that a writer of such high-toned morality and integrity should have permitted his dislike to priestcraft to have blinded his eyes to such a palpable confusion of objects totally distinct.

II. COUNCILS. Chapter XI.-The great evils with which ecclesiastical councils, in all their varieties of name, have desolated the Christian church, might profitably have been displayed. These nuisances still exist, and in a minor degree yet unfold all their pestiferous machinations. It is also among the

remarkable features of human infatuation, that while the Roman pontiff dares not to summon a popish council, and the British government were obliged to decapitate the Episcopal convocation; these pernicious assemblies are now only perpetuated among those denominations of Christians who boast of their progress in reformation towards the perfect purity of the gospel. In the United States at this day, some of the councils, but more generally known by other modern appellatives, are dangerous excrescences not only to the church but to the republic; and like all other institutions which originated in