the great effort of his maturer years, "An Essay on the Profession of Personal Religious Conviction, and upon the Separation of Church and State, considered with reference to the fulfilment of that duty," translated by Mr. C. T. Jones, and published by Jackson and Walford. For depth, for grasp, and for conclusive argumentation, this work is unequalled by any kindred production now extant. It has our most earnest recommendation, while we tender Mr. Jones, the translator, most cordial, because most merited, thanks.

Lives there a man in England, of mind perplexed on the subject of Church and State, and who is sincerely desirous to know the truth?-Let such a man pro

cure Dr. Chalmers on Church Establishments, Vol. XVII. of his Works, and carefully study it; let him then take the volume of Vinet, doing it similar justice, and we will answer for the result. There can be but one issue.

In common with every class of British Dissenters, we have been most deeply affected by the sudden removal of Dr. Chalmers from our midst. To us he has been long an object of affectionate reverence, and of intense admiration. Had not priority of demise claimed priority of notice for Vinet, we had given utterance in our present Number to those views and feelings with which our bosom labours; but which must now be reserved for the ensuing month.

CONFERENCE COLLUSION WITH GOVERNMENT IN CANADA.

TO WESLEYAN METHODIST PATRIOTS.

FRIENDS AND FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN,Civil and Religious Liberty, so alarmingly circumstanced in all our Colonies, from the conduct of your Conference, is at present exposed to special peril in Canada; but the spirit of the Nonconformist portion of the population there seems equal to the solemn emergency. They have just established, at Toronto, a periodical for the special purpose of their own defence, entitled "The Nonconformist," the first Number of which is before

us.

The opening article of that Journal shows that, for very many years, the Church party, through the Government, has been craftily carrying on a systematic struggle for the establishment of Episcopacy; and the result is thus stated:

In the year 1835 Sir John Colborne, a thorough slave of the High Church faction, was recalled from the government of Upper Canada; but prior to his departure, in the teeth of public sentiment and feeling, and with a degree of treachery disgraceful to the representative of the Crown, left the people of this country the sad inheritance of the Fifty-seven Rectories. Thus with violence was the broad and deep foundations of an Established Church then laid in the Colony; and although it was followed with an almost universal burst of popular indignation, which burns in the bosoms of the people to this day, no attempt at redress has even been indicated.

Sir Francis Bond Head succeeded Sir John Colborne in the government of the province, but no real change of policy took place; and the

infusion of new elements into his council, while he repudiated the exercise of their constitutional functions, created only a new and alarming cause of disquietude in the country. The Legislative Assembly remonstrated against his unconstitutional proceeding, and was instantly dissolved. Sir Francis threw himself into the arena of the political conflict which followed, and with the aid of THE UNITED METHODIST INFLUENCE, which had been previously SECURED BY EXECUTIVE GOLD, succeeded in defeating the friends of Civil and Religious Liberty in the electoral contest. It was on this occasion that, with many others, the Honourable Marshall Spring Bidwell, the Speaker of the Legislature-one of the most eminent, worthy, and long-tried friends of religious liberty, and of Methodist rights in particular-was deserted by a peculiarly Methodist Constituency!

Here is another warning to the friends of freedom at home! The "Clergy Reserves," to be afterwards mentioned, signify portions of land comprising no less than one-seventh of the originally "granted lands" in Upper Canada, which was the quantity set apart by the British Act, 31 Geo. III., cap. 31, for the support of "a Protestant Clergy," without specifying what sect or sects was meant. The Episcopalians, however, have already said, "That means us," the People, on the other hand, have said, "It means all Protestants," and have contended for its application to purposes of general education. Meantime the Government stepped forward, a few years back, and sold onefourth of these "Reserves," and put the proceeds into the Military chest. Pity they did not sell the whole!

The settled determination of Canadian

Churchmen seems to be to establish a branch of the Episcopal Church with the revenue of these lands; and hence, to pave the way, they have been gradually preparing the public mind, and, at the same time, withering the arm of the popular power, by bribing the more influential bodies. "For some years past Government gratuities have been given, from public funds, to the Wesleyan Methodist Church and to the Scotch Kirk; the other Christian communities either refusing such gratuities or not being offered any;" the consequence of which will be, that when the last tug of the war of principle comes, the voice of Methodism and of Scotch Presbytery will-must be silent! You are already, indeed, fairly committed by your mysteriarch, Dr. Alder, who, in his testimony before the Select Committee of the House of Commons, said, "If the Reserves be appropriated to the sole use of the Church of England, we shall offer no objection." Very generous, or very cunning; the logic amounts to this. "If the lands be appropriated solely to us, we shall offer no objection to the measure of final settlement;" for in the course of his examination, as will afterwards appear, he contrived to place on record the following significant allegation:-" I should wish to state, that we consider ourselves as a branch of the Church of England at home and abroad." What say you, what will your British brethren say to this? What do ye, the People," consider" yourselves as being? Is it so, that hitherto there has been among you but little consideration at all on this subject? If so, is not the time arrived when it has become your solemn duty both to "consider" and to act? May not the time past suffice for culpable neglect of the high duties you owe to the community, and for selfdegradation? Is it not now time to act as men, as freemen, as Englishmen, as men living in the Nineteenth Century? The new Journal above mentioned concludes another article on the same subject in the following terms:

But the same principle is lamentably displayed in the case of all religious teachers who, directly or indirectly, become the pensioners of the State, and was never more clearly displayed than in the case of the leading preachers among the Methodists in Canada. No sooner was the first union between the British Wesleyan Conference and the Canada Conference effected, and the gold of the Civil Government began to flow into the treasury of the latter, than its political character and bearing became immediately changed! From being "a noble vine, wholly a right seed," it became "the degenerate plant of a strange vine." From

being the stern opponent of the adulterous union of Church and State, it bowed with pusillanimous submission to the dictation of its new ally-the avowed upholder of a National Ecclesiastical Establishment!!!

Are the friends of religious freedom in Canada, particularly the friends of religious liberty among the Methodists, prepared to entail upon themselves and their children after them, for ages to come, the evils of a State Establishment of Religion, a few only of whose bitter fruits we have enumerated above? If you are not prepared to become the slaves of an Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, resist by every means in your power, resistthe annihilation of your liberty and independence as a people; for this is clearly determined by the articles of the proposed re-union between the two Conferences. Let the acknowledgment of Mr. Alder before the Committee of the House of Commons in 1828, as to the position occupied by the British Wesleyan Conference to the National Establishment, and as to the position which the Canada Conference by such a re-union must necessarily occupy, be engraven indelibly upon every mind-namely, "I SHOULD WISH TO

STATE THAT WE CONSIDER OURSELVES AS A BRANCH OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND BOTII AT HOME AND ABROAD !!" "THE BRITISH WESLEYAN CONNEXION IS ACCOUNTABLE TO THE GOVERNMENT FOR THE GOOD BEHAVIOUR OF THEIR MISSIONARIES!!!"

Methodist Reader! Are you prepared to become part of the Tail of the Beast? Are you willing to become the ally of your High-Church Tory oppressors?

brought to light some curious facts, but Time, the great revealer of secrets, has more serious than curious, concerning Methodistic movements in Canada, which, we trust, will not be lost upon the people of England, and especially upon the liberal portion of the Methodist community. From an elaborate statement made by the Canadian Examiner, it appears that, for about a quarter of a century, the emissaries of the English National Church Establishment have been labouring to thrust a branch of this politico-ecclesiastical engine of corruption upon the colony, and that no means on the part of the Imperial Government and the Provincial Executive, have been left untried to accomplish this purpose. The mixed denominational character of the population, the numerical strength of Nonconformists, and the very moral atmosphere of the continent, were found to be unfavourable to success in this political enterprize. The religious denominations whose numbers and influence embodied the greater proportion of the inhabitants, had no feeling of affinity with the religious systems created by statesmen. The emigrant from the parent state, whose hard earnings had been wrung from him by the Tithe Proctor, rejoiced in his release from the bondage of a State priesthood. The natives of this province, and the emigrants from

the United States, knew nothing experimentally of this mighty wrong, perpetrated in the name of Christ's religion, and were jealous of their native rights. Presbyterians frowned upon the insolent assumptions of Prelacy, remembering the days of darkness and of blood, the days of Claverhouse and Dundee. The Methodists scorned at that time any recognition of a system essentially earthly, corrupting, and ruinous. The Baptists and Congregationalists were far removed from the centralized ecclesiastical despotism of Diocesan Episcopacy, and stood at an immeasurable distance from the antichristian invention-a State church. The Quakers-those noble sufferers in the cause of religious liberty in every agepresented their meek protest against the transplanting of the national upas tree to this fair colony. In short, the great mass of the population were then, in 1826, and are now, the enemies of a State hierarchy in all its forms,-believing it to be, both in design and tendency, the mere instrument of political poweressentially anti-christian as to its constitution-subversive of the interests of civil liberty and as the strongest barrier against the progress of religious intelligence and moral order in the world.

These complicated difficulties were determined, however, to be surmounted. The Government resolved that its golden image-its instrument of coercionshould be reared; and, like the heathen craftsmen of old, said one to another, "Be of good courage. So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smote the anvil."

To accomplish its purposes it had two courses to pursue

1. Either to convince the people that a State priesthood was for the public good, and should therefore be gratefully received;-or,

2. To impose it upon them by violence, through the influence of its patronage and power, whether they approved of it

or not.

As to the first of these means, no government was ever so foolish as to attempt it with any hope of success, except in an age of extreme mental darkness. The religiously intelligent have in every age revolted at the prostitution of religion, to be the mere instrument of State craft; and have resisted the unholy alliance of crafty politicians and wily priests, not only because it must be destructive to the peace, welfare, and liberty of mankind, but be

cause it has always been found the most powerful means of corrupting Christianity itself, and spreading heartless formalism and infidelity throughout the world. Even its own friends have been shocked at its fearful corruptions, and have lifted up their voice against it in every age.

But, secondly, the course which governments have adopted, from the days of the emperor Constantine until now, have been to employ the strong arm of power, or the influence of its patronage, to force submission to State religion. The sword -the state-the gibbet-the bootskinsthe thumbscrew-the prison and the cell -have been sufficient, in the ages preceding the invention of the printing press -that "king of terrors" to wicked rulers; but since the revival of letters, and the consequent progress of liberty, other and gentler means have been employed to compel the masses to bow their necks to receive the chain. In Canada, the clergy reserves, embracing, as already stated, one-seventh of our whole territory, have been held out by the Government like carrion to the vultures; and the priests of "the Church" have fought desperately for the whole carcass,-while the lesser birds of prey have been fed by Government with smaller morsels from the public chest, under the specious name of Mission Grants, or Grants for Religious Education. The application of the Regium Donum in Canada began, we believe, first with the Scottish Presbyterian clergy, whose clamour at first was loudest against the wrongs which were then inflicted by the Episcopal priesthood: they received from an early time in our history a douceur from the Government; and when the reserves were finally apportioned by law, they obtained a secondary share. The next body of religious teachers which the Government reduced to subjection by similar means, was the old and formerly respectable and independent body known as "the Presbytery of Upper Canada:" it was soon subsidized, and became lost in the Kirk of Scotland. One of this body, old Mr. Jenkins, of Markham, the first Presbyterian teacher we are told who administered the sacrament of the Lord's supper in Upper Canada, could not be bought over by the gold of the Executive. Some curious anecdotes are related of his stern resistance to the artifices of the High Church party. The crafty Archdeacon of York met him in the street one day, and particularly remarked that his coat was looking very thread-bare. The old vete

ran replied, that he was quite aware it was so, but that he was not yet disposed to turn it! The Archdeacon had turned his coat long before, and had become rich and great-that is as to this world. The next and most formidable body to be subdued by the artifices of the High Church party, through the Government, was the Methodists. No direct attack upon the leaders of the community could be made at that time with any hope of success. Egerton Ryerson was then the star of the denomination, and the young champion of civil and religious liberty, the strong opponent of High Church usurpation, while many of the old men, the veterans in the service, were unpurchasable; they could not be bribed. About the year 1826 a small secession took place in the body, under Elder Ryan and some of his friends, who had become dissatisfied with the management of Conference affairs. This new body assumed the name of the "Canadian Wesleyans;" and no sooner was the division effected, than the vigilant eye of Dr. Strachan, a churchman, seized the opportunity to fan the embers of discord into a flame, which it was hoped would have spread weakness, if not ruin, into the whole body. John Fenton, the clerk of the Episcopal Church in this place, a British Wesleyan Methodist withal, was despatched, we were told at the time, with the material of war to the first meeting of the Dissenters at Cape Town; and subsequently Government furnished the party with a kind of field battery, in the shape of a printing press, or at least with funds to procure it. (They received upwards of £950 sterling from Government, according to the testimony given by John Wilson, of Saltfleet, before the Select Committee of the Provincial Assembly on Religious Grants.) This, however, was a failure. There was a want of talent among the leaders in the movement: the very receiving of a bribe from Government destroyed their moral influence; and their numbers rendered their antagonism quite ineffective to subserve the ends of the Government and High Church party.

Wesleyan leaders in 1827, which is now hastening to a crisis in 1847. THE GO

VERNMENT THEN OPENED UP A COMMUNI

CATION WITH THE BRITISH WESLEYAN LEADERS, FOR THE PURPOSE OF OBTAINING A SUPPLY OF MISSIONARIES, to supersede or supplant the liberal Methodist preachers then in Canada; and THE BRITISH WESLEYAN LEADERS APPEALED TO THE GOVERNMENT FOR MEANS to enable them to carry on the war. But to satisfy the most incredulous upon this point, we shall give some extracts from the minutes of evidence given before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1828, commonly called "The Canada Committee," before which the hero, who now makes so prominent a figure in the attempt to consummate this crafty political scheme of re-union between the Conferences of both bodies (Dr. Alder), gave his testimony:

1st July, 1828.

The Rev. Robert Alder called in and examined. Are the Methodist congregations in Upper Canada under the direction of the Missionaries sent out by the British Conference?

They are not: hitherto they have been under the direction of the Methodist Conference of the United States; that connection, however, is now dissolved, and we expect an arrangement will soon be made, by which the Methodists of Upper Canada will be brought TO ACT UNDER THE BRITISH CONFERENCE, as the Methodists of Lower Canada have done for several years.

Is there any point of difference, either in doctrine or discipline, between the British and American Conferences ?

Not of any importance. We consider ourselves to be one body; but we do not deem it right that the Methodists of Upper Canada should be under the jurisdiction of a foreign ecclesiastical body.

Then, are the Committee to understand that there would be no objection on the part of those congregations, provided you had the means of furnishing ministers, to receive those ministers sent by the British Conference fully as readily as those sent by the Conference of New York? The Conference of the United States does not now send any ministers to Upper Canada. people are very anxious to be supplied with ministers from this country; and we have the most pressing petitions sent to us annually for English ministers.

The

By whom has the supply of Wesleyan ministers from the United States been prohibited? By an agreement between the Methodists of Upper Canada and the Methodist Conference in the United States?

Then you consider that it is the desire of the Methodists in Upper Canada rather to have ministers furnished by the British Conference than by the Conference of the United States?

Yes, I have reason to believe that is the case. And that it is from the wish of the people themselves that the Methodist ministers of the United States are now prevented from coming into Upper Canada?

Yes, from the influence of British feeling.

Do you conceive that the Colonial Government in Upper Canada has manifested any desire for the extension of the British Wesleyan Methodists in that province?

I believe there are documents in the Colonial office addressed to Earl Bathurst and Mr. Huskisson, from Sir Peregrine Maitland, which will show that His Excellency is very anxious that the number of British Methodists should be increased as far as possible in Upper Canada; and I understand that he wrote home a short time ago recommending that PECUNIARY AID might be allowed us for that purpose.

Do you consider that under the 31st of the late king the Wesleyan Methodists have any claim, according to the letter of the statute, to any share of the Clergy Reserves? or are they only desirous of obtaining a portion of them in case the statute shall be altered in that point?

There is a difference of opinion amongst us upon this point; but the general opinion of our ministers in Lower Canada, I believe, is this: that if the revenues be appropriated to the sole use of the Church of England we shall offer no objection to it; but that if the Presbyterians are to have any part of those Reserves, then we conceive that we have at least an equally good claim with them, and we should be very much dissatisfied if our claims were disallowed.

Suppose there were an alteration to take place in this respect, by which you were enabled to make good your claim to any portion of the Reserves, upon what principle would you exclude other denominations of Protestant Dissenters ?

Do you conceive that if the Wesleyan ministers were withdrawn from the townships (of Canada East) the Church of England would be capable of supplying them with clergy?

No, I think not; and this is the opinion of the Governor-General, from whose letter to me, which I received a few days before I left the province, I beg permission to read an extract:"We all know (his Lordship observes) that THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH cannot provide clergymen at all places where they are required and desired. In that difficulty the Wesleyan ministers have rendered most valuable services, and I think they are qualified and capable to render much greater services UNDER THE PROTECTION AND ENCOURAGEMENT WHICH THEY DESIRE FROM HIS MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT."

You have stated that the Wesleyan Methodists in Canada would be dissatisfied if any portion of the Clergy Reserves should be applied to the Presbyterians; are you not of opinion that they stand upon a different footing with yourselves, seeing that they are one of the churches established and recognized by law?

We know nothing of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland as an established church out of

Scotland: we view it as a strictly local establishment, and we think that its ministers have no right to enjoy any peculiar privileges in any of His Majesty's Colonies, because they belong to the Church of Scotland.

Do you consider it as confined to Scotland? Yes.

In what light do you view the Presbyterian Church that is established in Ireland?

I am aware that there are a few Presbyterian churches established in the North of Ireland, but I am not aware that the Presbyterian Church is established in Ireland generally.

Are you aware that at one time they had possession of the tithes in Ireland?

Yes; but they never were in possession of such a privilege in Canada, nor in any of the North American Colonies; it would be felt as a grievance to have two Ecclesiastical Hierarchies in the Colonies.

Are there any of your persuasion in either of the Legislative Assemblies ?

There are in the Lower House of Upper Canada.

Are any of them in the Legislative or Executive Councils?

I believe not.

Are there any Presbyterians in either Council? I do not know: I wOULD WISH TO STATE, THAT WE CONSIDER OURSELVES AS A BRANCH OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, AT HOME AND ABROAD.

It was upon the misrepresentation then made by the character, and political tendency of the labours of the Methodist and other non-episcopalian ministers that the Government was induced to enter into negotiations with the English Wesleyan Conference for assistance to subjugate the Methodists of Canada to its power, and through it to the High Church party.

Dr. Strachan, in his evidence before the Committee, when pressed with the undeniable fact, that the majority of the Methodist preachers then in the Province were British subjects, or U. E. Loyalists, although he had represented them as being natives of the United States, and as exercising an influence opposed to British Institutions, remarked:

"But in AS FAR AS THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH IS CONCERNED I think the Methodist preachers (of the Canada Conference) are not friendly, but the Preachers from England are friendly," i. e., to the building up of a branch of the State Hierarchy in the Colony; this was, in fact, the disloyalty of the former!

Now, to promote the accomplishment of this "loyal" object, the erection of a State Church in Canada, the British Conference was hired in 1831 or 1832, with A SPECIAL BRIBE OF ONE THOUSAND

POUNDS, payable to their Missionary Committee from the Casual and Territorial Revenues of this Province; and when