times, these remonstrants further urge, made addresses highly inexpedient; for his Majesty's ministers evidently wanted to strengthen their hands by raising a political alarm, and to excite a cry of danger to the throne, in order to drown the prevailing cry of danger to the constitution: they have succeeded; and to the addressers we may partly attribute the measures, which our children will rue, of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act and thereby abolishing Trial by Jury in the most important causes, and of preventing the people from meeting, according to the provision of the Bill of Rights, for the expression of their grievances, except under restrictions, which will constitute public meetings a trap for the unwary.

The Edinburgh Reviewer penned his paragraph before the ministers and deputies drew up their addresses: he cannot therefore refer to these; nor do we know to what he refers, unless it be to some of the sermons of Dissenting ministers upon the late successive enlargements of Toleration, which are, to be sure, quite as loud in praise of the administration as such compositions could be, their authors at the same time retaining their sincerity. The gratitude of individuals may have been excessive; religious liberty is not a boon to be implored at the hands of a fellow-mortal, it is a right to be asserted, and if it be lost to be reclaimed: such is the opinion and feeling of Dissenters at large, who do not consider themselves bound by personal obligations to support the Lords Liverpool, Sidmouth and Castlereagh. Some of the Nonconformists addressed James II. rather flatteringly on his assuming the dispensing power in their favour; but the mass of them united to bring on the glorious Revolution of 1688, and to prepare the way for the accession of the Brunswick family to the British throne.

The candour or rather the justice of the Reviewer deserves praise, in his acknowledgment that the "Crown has no immediate connection with the Dissenting priesthood." It would be captious to remark that the last word of the sentence is not legitimatized among Dissenters; they have no priests; they make their ministers, who are no longer their ministers than whilst they render them service and who never cease to be brethren amongst brethren: it is the people's

voice that gives Holy Orders. Passing this,the Reviewer is correct in absolving the Dissenting ministers from the suspicion of "immediate connection" with the Crown; but he needed not to qualify the phrase; there is no connection whatever, mediate or inmediate: even the Regium Donum is no bond of connection; that has become a parliamentary grant, a mere bounty to poor Dissenting ministers; and the character of the principal receiver and distributor is a pledge of the fairness of the distribution. It may be otherwise with the Regium Donum in Ireland; but in England it answers no political purpose. It is not at the option of the minister of the Crown to grant or to refuse it; it is part of the establishment of the government: the vote is never preceded by inquiry or accompanied by remark: this is not one of the public expences upon which any reformer wishes to put the finger of retrenchment: it is the establishment by Parliament of Nonconformity amongst the poor, the endowment of Dissenting worship in villages and hamlets, the appointment of a class of religious teachers for those whose ignorance or whose consciences bar them from the oldest established worship: the bounty is voted equally by Whigs and Tories, by ministry and opposition, and neither party gets or loses election-influence by it. Some have doubted whether it be consistent and manly in the Lay Dissenters to suffer any rank of their teachers to lie under this apparent obligation to the state, which is, as far as it goes, an alliance between church and state, and a contradiction of the favourite principle of the more sturdy Nonconformists: but this scruple implies more than is commonly expressed, for on the very same principle that it is proposed to refuse the Regium Donum, there ought to be a rejection of other immunities, which Dissent ing ministers enjoy without any res luctance of conscience, such as ex emption from the militia, from pa rochial offices and from serving on juries. These too are boons from the state, granted to the Noncon forming teachers on the ground of their religious character, and though they are not money, they are, as every man in a civil capacity knows by experience, money's worth.

"The practical lenity of the test

laws" has had no such effect as the Scotch Reviewer imagines: it has indeed allowed the admission of a great body of Dissenters into our corpora tions; but the Dissenting corporations, witness Nottingham, Bridport, Coventry, and we believe we may add Norwich and Portsmouth, are of all others most favourable to the cause of the people, as distinguished from that of the government. The Corporation of London was never more decided than at present in its anti-ministerial politics, and we believe that the Common Council never before contained so many Dissenters. But "the practical lenity" in question, has had one certain evil effect upon the Dissenters; namely, that of seducing their richer and more aspiring members into the worship of the Established Church. Common Councilmen need not qualify by the sacramental test, but Mayors, Aldermen, Town-Clerks, and Recorders must: and it is surely an evil to both the Church of England and to the Dissenters and to religion itself, when men, professedly religious, sacrifice their principles for the sake of power, and join in worship which they do not approve that they may thus rise to official dignity. Honest Churchmen have at least as much reason to complain of this practice as conscientious Dissenters. To all lovers of truth and integrity it must, one would think, give pain to see a Dissenter, perhaps an Unitarian, stoop his neck to a chain, be it a golden chain, which ties him up from worshipping with the church of his deliberate choice, and binds him, victim-like, to the horns of an altar, on which he believes that superstition has kindled strange fire. This is a real and a moral evil, the consideration of which should arouse all religious men to the duty of praying the legislature to repeal the test laws, which are insufficient to keep Dissenters out of municipal government, but equally insufficient to convert them into honest Churchmen. The agitation of the Catholic question during the present session of Parliament with more likelihood of success than heretofore, enforces this subject upon the attention of the public and especially of the Dissenters. If the Dissenters be not included in the next grant of religious liberty, their state is hopeless: for the Catholics are

now, as aggrieved dissidents, in fa vour of Protestant Dissenters; but should they obtain special relief their influence may be expected hereafter to be thrown into the scale of intole rance. Persecution has made Catholics the advocates of toleration; but their principles are not tolerant, and let them gain their private ends and the pressure and constraint of which they complain be removed, and the bent bow will fly back in a contrary direction and new force be thus given to High-Church and Tory sentiments.

The deputies and ministers of the Three Denominations and even the two classes of Methodists would do well to take this matter into serious and early consideration. They may, indeed, be doubtful as to the effect which would be produced in their denominations by the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts. More of their wealthy members might be se duced into the world by an enlarged political licence and the offer of new temporal dignities. But those only would go out from them that are not properly of them, and their secession would purify whilst it thinned the several Dissenting communions. Their influence as Dissenters tends to secu larize the Nonconforming churches. The loss would be only that of unsound members; and would in all probability be made up by the acces sion of dissatisfied Churchmen, who are retained within the pale of the Establishment by mere political ties. At any rate, the abrogation of the Test laws would be a clear gain to religion, to good morals, to freedom, to the English constitution and even to the Dissenters; for they are less grievous as a restraint than as a stigma: they imply that Dissenters are disaf fected to their country and cannot be trusted, and the erasure of them from the Statute Book would be an acknowledgment by the nation that the insinuation is false, that there is neither reason nor justice in treating an immense body of Britons, exemplary for both religion and good morals, as Helotes in the midst of a free people, and that the state would acquire reputation, which is strength, by taking off the yoke from the necks of millions of the population, whose incapacity of civil usefulness is created by the law itself and whose distinc tion amongst their fellow-countrymen

No. CCXCVII. Curious Introduction of a Sermon. The following is the Exordium of a Sermon, published in 1757, with this title, "A Sermon preached at the Parish of Wn, in Gloucestershire, on the Fast Day. Now published to vindicate the author from several late cruel and unjust assertions on the occasion. 8vo. Price 6d. Scott." (See Crit. Review, III. 168, 169.)

1 Cor. vi. 10, For ye are bought with a price.

The words of this text, though taken from an obsolete and long since exploded book, are still to be found in the closets of some antiquarians; to whose particular curiosity, ingenuity, or vanity perhaps, we are obliged for the preservation of the whole.

The whole volume, consisting of two distinct books, by name the Old and New Testament, was wrote for the instruction of mankind in general, when in the dawn and infancy of their understanding. As they grew on to riper years and maturer judgments, there was no necessity for the legislature to condemn, censure, or lay it aside; for it naturally dropt of its own self, when they wisely thought there was no further occasion for its assistance.

The odds at Arthur's and other such excellent academies of science, are, that there is no such being as a Providence or God; this can be no match, as the cant word is there, among themselves, for they are all of one mind in an house, and never will suffer any strangers to mingle with them: and come abroad into the less poite world, how little chance is there of an alteration of thinking or acting there, where manners and fashions equally descend from the great to the small for what the nobleman begins, the peasant generally ends.

But (says our author) to the words of my text, ye are bought with a price. The bribed returning officer first buys the poor voter, by money, promises, or threats; the wealthy candidate next

buys the returning officer; the minis. ter buys the member, and the minister at last is bought himself. Fathers sell their sons, mothers sell their daughters, friends sell one another. Ye are all sold and bought with a price.

"Tis true indeed, (says this comical divine), that certain maximis contained in this obsolete book, are still retained amongst us. Thus the visiting the sins of the father unto the third and fourth generation, is still visible in the practice of a late my, who never forgave even the god-son of a father, though he was no relation, if ever that god-father voted against their pernicious and destructive measures. But not only persecution was a favourite and adopted virtue of theirs; patience and humility, though not entirely the same as recommended in the obsolete book, is highly in practice among the people in general. of this kingdom, particularly the upper rank of them. They have the patience daily and hourly to be dunned by their tradesmen and creditors, without returning one evil word at all; they have the patience to hear a whole kingdom's voice against their corrupt and illicit practices, without changing countenance in the least; and they have the further patience, forbearance and long suffering, to wait for pensions, places, sinecures, and victualling or other beneficial contracts, till in the dirty pursuit of them they very patiently sink what little fortunes their fathers and honest ancestors bravely and honourably laboured to give them.

If a private unbeneficed clergyman, for instance, marries or injures the fair reputation of a great man's daughter, in order to marry her to more advantage, and of a sudden we see him raised to splendid dignities and golden honours, what can we say? but that in spite of all heresy, oaths of simony and other trifles of that nature, as they certainly are now-a-days, the preferment he enjoys is bought with a price; as without this lady's kind as-sistance, or the family's lucky pride, to preserve her tender and unblemished, because unknown reputation, a secret, he might still have remained on his usual pittance in Wales of 10 a year, exclusive of his other benefices the tap and his cremona, those ever faithful friends to the clergy of that * glorious principality.