what power of restraining to an uniformity of doctrine is maintained over even its own members by a church which is suffering within itself an almost mortal schism, in an utter contrariety of opinion on the most important of its doctrines, between the larger portion of its clergy, and that smaller, but increasing one, which is growing so much in favor with the people; not to mention those recent wildest extravagances and novelties of which the church has had a much greater share than all the dissenting sects together.

Thus far, sir, I find no way out of that "perplexity" which I began by confessing to you. But this is only half my difficulty. I now turn from the dissenters directly to the church itself, in the inquiry after the consequences of its supposed downfall; still meaning by that term its reduction to the equal ground with the other religious parties, of maintaining its ministry by the voluntary support of those who approve it. That event being supposed, what am I to expect would follow? Would the clergy, thereupon, all in a body renounce their vocation; would they, with one consent, refuse to preach? Would they, in word and act, declare that, since the Christian religion is no longer established and endowed as a part of the national constitution, they care nothing about it; and that, as to the people, they are not worth preaching to? Should we see one church, and another, and another, shut up in solitary gloom ; and hear the passing townsman, or villager, or rustic, saying, “Dr. (or

Mr. —), has told us he has no more to say to us; we may go to what he calls the conventicle, if we like, or, if we like it better, to the alehouse; and the parson is off-we don't know whither?" Am I seriously required to believe the clergy so indifferent to the sacred calling to which they have been "moved by the Holy Ghost," and to the welfare of their flocks? No, it will perhaps be replied, they would be willing and most desirous to continue their ministrations, but how could they be supported when the income was gone? They could not preach and starve. Now I must confess my amazement at hearing such language. Do they ever take one minute's trouble to think how so numerous a dissenting ministry can subsist, in communities who have besides, the expense of building, enlarging, and keeping in repair their places of worship, with all the additionals of schools, &c., &c.? Or have they ever heard of such a thing as the Catholic priesthood of Ireland? The adherents of the church possess the far greater share of the wealth of the nation; they affirm, that they are the vastly preponderant body in every way; they profess a zealous and affectionate attachment to the venerable institution for its spiritual excellence; and they have on their side the main strength of the hereditary prejudices of the people. What then are we really to understand, that, in spite of all this, a voluntary support of their clergy is a desperate thing to be calculated on or thought of? Is it, when the truth is known, come to this, that the supporters and adherents of the church do not, after all, care enough about religion, or for the Christian services of their clergy, to maintain a Christian ministry

in the same manner as the dissenters are doing? Is that an example of pious liberality and zeal far above their imitation? What! come to them for money in support of their religion, and there's an end of it! Sacred in their eyes as is their church, more sacred still are their coffers and their purses! But then is it not extremely remarkable, that the dissenting cause should have found out, and drawn to itself, extracted, as it were, from the community, just that portion of it which does care enough about the matter, which is willing to be at the expense of a Christian ministry; leaving the rest under the imputation, the just imputation, on the above supposition, as far as I, in my simplicity, can see, of setting a lower value on their souls, or, at least, on the means of their instruction and salvation?

I have heard it alleged, that however it might fare with the people in the towns and the districts, thickly inhabited, the rural tracts, with a scanty population, would be left in a total destitution of religious advantages. Did the foretellers of this consequence ever traverse any considerable part of Wales, where they would see an almost endless succession of meeting-houses, in tracts where a few humble-looking habitations, scattered over a wide neighborhood, give immediate evidence of a thin population and the absence of wealth? And, if I am not much misinformed, such proofs of the productive activity of the "dissenting interest," as it is called, have begun to appear in scores, or rather hundreds, of the thinly-inhabited districts of England? a representation confirmed by the frequent complaints of clergymen in such localities, that their parishes are becoming deformed by such spectacles—“ nuisances,” in the language of some of them; "schism-shops" is the denomination I have oftenest heard. The means for raising these edifices have been contributed by the liberality of dissenting communities at a distance, for the most part, from the places themselves. And, according to my information, the religious services, in many of them, are kept up gratuitously, in consideration of the poverty of the rural attendants, by the extra labors of ministers in the nearest situations, assisted by zealous and intelligent religious laymen, possessing and cultivating a faculty for public speaking.

Now, after such statements, can I hear without mightily marvelling, that on supposition that the church, as an endowed establishment, were to fall, the whole resources of its present immense community, the combination and co-operation of all their opulence, education, and religious zeal their myriad of accomplished clergymen's (not a few of them, by-the-bye, men of independent property) ascendency in many ways over the minds of the people—and their possession of all the churches, clear of that incumbrance of debt, which I am told lies heavy on many of the dissenting meeting-houses; that all this together would still leave the church party in hopeless inability and despondence of supporting a Christian ministry in the poorer districts, to save the people from barbarism, practical atheism, or the fanaticism which they think would be nearly as bad?

In my next letter I shall suggest a few considerations, more especially applicable to that party in the church denominated evangelical.

CLXXXIV. TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING CHRONICLE.
[The Evangelical Clergy.]

Oct. 3, 1834.

SIR-In my former letter, the bearing of my observations was directed to the church party generally and collectively considered, as all concurring in the solemn protest against the supposed change; and I have but slightly noticed a certain distinction and division within that body; the distinction marked by the appropriation to a portion of its clergy and other members of the epithet evangelical, by assumption on the one side, and derisive concession on the other. The number of the clergy so designated I have seen estimated, I think, in some of the publications in their interest, at as many as one-seventh or one-eighth of the whole. They are for the most part, I am informed, quite as zealous as any of the others for upholding the establishment, and affected with equal horror at the idea or the omens of its fall. I hope to be pardoned for directing the argument, before I conclude, specially and respectfully to them.

If such a thing could happen as my being in a company of them, on terms that would admit of a reference to the subject without discourtesy, I can imagine myself addressing them to some such effect as the following:-Very greatly, gentlemen, honoring your piety, sincerity, and diligence, I yet do not assume to be theologian enough to pronounce on the difference of religious faith which marks you off in such prominence and insulation from the great majority of your clerical brethren; but, allowing that you may be in the right, I have then to suggest a consideration or two, somewhat ad hominem, respecting your anxiety and alarm for the permanence of the establishment. You say, and I would believe you, that your great concern, for yourselves and the people to whom you minister, is religion itself, as an affair between the soul and God, consisting in the knowledge and efficacy of divine truth; that, as to any ecclesiastical institutions, framed and established by the government of a nation, you value them no otherwise, and no further, than as they are adapted to promote among the people that grand interest, by a pure faithful ministration of religious truth; and that, therefore, your attachment to the existing establishment is from a deliberate conviction that it is in some way or other so adapted. You will, I doubt not, allow me to add for you, that any such institution which, on a great scale, and during a long tract of time, practically fails of operating effectually to this its great and only purpose, must bring its adaptedness deeply in doubt. Either its constitution must be unsound, or its administration most unfortunate. And if the vice which appears in the administration be but the natural result of the constitution, then the whole contrivance falls under a fatal

conviction. Nobody has to learn that every institution, however excellert in theory, is liable, from human folly and depravity, to perversions in its administration. But if the practical working of an institution be generally, predominantly, through successive ages and all the change of times and circumstances, renegade from the primary intention, this would seem to betray that there must be, in the very construction itself essentially, a strong propensity and aptitude to corruption; that a good design has been committed to the action of a wrong machinery for making it effective; that the instrument intended for the use of a good spirit, is found commodiously fitted to the hand of a darker agent.

I am not, you will observe, expressing any opinion on the abstract question of the necessity or possible advantage of a religious establishment, but commenting on the actual church establishment of this country. Now, then, I would say to you, with deference, take an impartial view of the English church, through a duration of nearly two centuries, and at the present time. You well know that, with all its amplitude of powers and means—its many thousands of consecrated teachers, of all degrees— its occupancy of the whole country-its prescriptive hold on the people's veneration—its learning, its emoluments, and its intimate connection with all that was powerful in the state-it did, through successive generations, leave the bulk of the population, for whose spiritual benefit it was appointed, in the profoundest ignorance of what you consider as the only genuine Christianity.

But this is greatly understating the case: for it not only did not teach what you so consider; it taught, and effectually taught, in spite of its creed on paper, what you esteem to be not genuine Christianity; what you regard, if I can at all understand the strain of your preaching, as fatal error. Why did it so, if it really was adapted to do just the contrary? And this it did in undisturbed continuance, under the sanction of the combined secular and ecclesiastical authority, in whose judgment it did not by all this forfeit its claims. It was held to be a good and inviolable institution, the best model of a Christian church notwithstanding.

Such was, for incomparably the greater part, its administration. Now since all this while it possessed no intrinsic power in its constitution to redeem itself from being thus made an instrument of fatal mischief, you will pardon me for doubting whether that constitution itself was not corrupt.

You gladly retreat from this point of review; and take your stand on the present state of the church, in which you say that a better spirit is at last arising; and therefore you would regard its supposed fall as a dreadful calamity, involving little less than ruin to the cause of religion in the land. By this better spirit, I must understand you to mean, that many ministers like yourselves are appearing in the church, who inculcate religion in that form which has fixed on you and them, for praise and opprobrium, the distinctive epithet evangelical. I believe you all

insist on the vast importance of exhibiting religion in that form; declaring the doctrines so distinguished to be of the very essence and vitality of Christianity; insomuch that the contradiction or suppression of them radically vitiates a minister's religious teaching. But now let me remind you what a small minority, notwithstanding all the recent accessions, you form of the ministers of the church; and seriously ask you what you can deliberately think of the principle and tendency of an institution under the appointment and sanction of which, perhaps six-sevenths or more of the religious instructors are, as in your judgment they must be, misleading the people in respect to infinitely the most momentous of their concerns. Are you never, in your pulpits, when solemnly enforcing the evangelical principles, intruded upon by the image of the many thousands of congregations listening, at that very hour, to doctrines virtually or avowedly opposite to your's, in churches which they attend in the undoubting confidence that the religious ministration in an institution sanctioned by venerable antiquity, and all the authority of the realm, must be right? On retiring, you have to strike the balance between the good and evil effected on the self-same Sunday by the institution which you extol.

You will not accuse me of exaggerating the opposition and alienation under which you stand for your religion's sake, when you think of the various, numberless, and often bitter manifestations of antipathy on the part of the majority: how you are declaimed against as enthusiasts, inflating some of your hearers with spiritual pride, turning others of them gloomy and sometimes mad; how you are described as a mischievous sect within the church, and betraying it; and what controversial labors of the clerical pen there have been to explode your tenets and pretensions. And all this, in spite of your earnest, reiterated declarations of devoted fidelity to the church; declarations sedulously endeavored to be verified in many instances, as I am told, by a careful avoidance of communication with dissenters, who hold and preach the very doctrines for which you are thus spurned and defamed by your own brethren.

Now, such being the disposition of the far greater part of the church, with regard to what you esteem as exclusively the evangelical and saving faith, what are those consequences which you anticipate with such dismay, on the supposition of its fall? In the first place, as to yourselves, the evangelical party, would you thereupon cease to preach? Surely, it may be assumed that instead of abandoning your vocation, you would become even still more zealously intent on prosecuting its grand object; and you would have a much enlarged scope and freedom, by the breaking away of canonical restrictions: but how to be supported? I may answer that you say, or it is said by your friends, that your congregations are generally speaking more numerous, more pious, and more personally attached, than in the other portions of the church. Would all their warm feeling shrink into niggardliness? would they betray that, after all, they are only worshippers of mammon, as soon as there came upon