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Towards the close of the pamphlet, the question of a separation of the Episcopal Church is met with the same explicitness, and in a spirit equally enlightened by scriptural piety.

The true state of the question is, whether an ecclesiastical establishment has, or has not, a tendency to extend, strengthen, and propagate the influences of true religion. We believe it possesses no such tendency; but that, on the contrary, the secularity and formalism to which an alliance between Church and State must necessarily give birth, and has always done so, cannot but prove injurious, in the highest degree, to the spiritual interests of mankind. Jesus Christ has declared his kingdom not to be of this world: an establishment directly contravenes that declaration; and ours proclaims an earthly sovereign the temporal head of the Church in these realms. To what does our prelacy owe its origin, but to that very alliance thus deprecated by our Saviour, and yet adopted by numbers amongst his professed followers? From what source are derived church rates, intolerance towards dissenters, patronage, pluralities, clerical hirelings, the intrusion of worldly affairs into our holiest services, the flaws in our liturgy and formularies, the state of our universities, and the acknowledged absence of discipline, as to church communion? Was the revival of doctrinal and practical vitality amongst ourselves fostered in its infancy by the clerical order, or even our influential laymen; or did it break forth, and illuminate, and warm the three kingdoms, amidst their obloquy and persecution; allowing only for individual exceptions? And what could have induced the Establishment thus to discountenance real religion, if it were not that carnal spirit, engendered through a connexion condemned by the sentence of the Son of God, and found detrimental in every day's experience.' pp. 60-61.

'That good government can never be placed upon a foundation distinct from true religion we allow; and we admit with our opponents the justice of Plutarch in his observations, quoted by the late Dean Milner, on this subject: "A city seems more capable of being built without foundation, than a polity of receiving a system, or having received one, of preserving it, if sentiments of religion be entirely removed." But the fallacy lies in confounding two distinct things together; namely, religion and an establishment; for it never could have been the Dean of Carlisle's real intention to affirm, with a living military hero, that the one cannot exist at all without the other. The former is from above, the latter from beneath; the former is a divine revelation, a reflection" of the light which no man can approach unto" in any other way; the latter is a human invention, posterior to the grand triumph of christianity over heathenism, and altogether distinct from those revivals and reformations in religion which have benefited and blessed mankind. But an establishment is also conceived, though not by very wise men, to act as a preservative against enthusiasm and fanaticism. It may be simply recorded in reply, that the most celebrated and popular fanatic of our times has drawn ninetenths of his followers, if not ninety-nine hundredths, from the clergy and congregations of our national church.

In fine, it is an undisputed fact on all hands, that as things now exist in the Church of England, she is without the power of exercising effective discipline: a sacrifice of that power, having occurred through her connexion with the state. Now discipline, it must be recollected, is the soul of order; on which the apostle to the Gentiles so largely insists in his epistles, and which he also illustrated in the whole outline of his conduct. St. John, his brother in tribulation, has done the same with regard to love; that spirit of holy communion with all " who follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth:" towards which spirit, notwithstanding, the establishment in spite of its professions, has never manifested a friendly aspect. Its basis being exclusiveness in principle, it was unreasonable to expect expansiveness in practice. Then are not these two facts, the loss of discipline and the absence of love, most startling and astounding? Can an alliance which has conducted us, as an ecclesiastical society of five or six millions, to such tremendous results, be analogous or agreeable to the divine mind and will? "Every plant, that my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up," said our Redeemer and we both confidently believe that the hierarchical establishment of our native land is fast approaching its termination. It has been weighed and found wanting. Why not then remove it without delay? To which my answer as a churchman would be, that to preserve the life of a patient, in whom a disease of very long standing has subsisted, the means used for a cure, to be safe, must be gradual. It would communicate too great a shock to the associations of an imperfectly informed people, to destroy at once what has been the growth of ages. Taking a practical rather than a theoretical view of the question, bearing in mind the many temporal interests which ought not to be forgotten, so that we may be strictly just as well as searching in our reforms, a judicious unravelling of so tangled a skein, which has become interwoven with the property as well as the prejudices of our countrymen, will be far preferable, as it strikes me, to cutting the Gordian knot at any given instant, although the last would be the least troublesome procedure.

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Conceiving then all these things to have come to pass, (and none of them need to be despaired of) in what circumstances and position will our beloved church remain? We are both ready to answer ;-in precisely that position, in which we desire her to be found. Every reduction of her secularity will prove an augmentation of her spiritual character. Curst no longer with a superabundance of loaves and fishes, persons thrust into sacred offices for worldly purposes, will drop from her shadow like untimely figs. Insulting and oppressing none of her sister churches, they will learn to love what so many of them have already admired. She will in all probability lose something in nominal numbers; but gain by that very loss, in real and effective strength, beyond calculation. The attachment of her remaining members will be decupled from the force of early predilections within, and the compression of external circumstances without. Her imagined trial will be her noblest triumph. The shinings of the furnace will illustrate the truth of her principles. No longer sitting as a queen in scarlet, her innate virtues will shine forth with a lustre they have never yet been suffered to display.'

We will neither apologize for the length of these extracts, nor weaken their force by a single observation. The Lord of the Church raise up many more such Church-reformers as Mr. Bridges, and pour out a similar spirit upon the representatives of the British people!

Art. VII.-1. On the Temper to be cultivated by Christians of different Denominations towards each other. A Sermon preached at the Monthly Meeting of Congregational Churches and Pastors, Oct. 9, 1834. To which is annexed, a Letter to the Rev. Samuel Lee, D.D., &c., &c., Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, in Reply to that Gentleman's Letter to the Author, entitled, "Dissent unscriptural and unjustifiable." By John Pye Smith, D.D. 8vo. pp. 92. London, 1835.

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Y common consent, the party who, in a dispute, loses his temper, is generally deemed to have the worst of the arguWere the merits of the controversy between the advocates of Establishments and their opponents to be determined by this test, Dissenters would assuredly have no reason to fear the issue. Of the temper which ought to be cultivated by Christians of dif ferent denominations towards each other, the learned Preacher to whom the illustration of the subject was fitly entrusted, is himself a happy exemplar, both in his writings and in his deportment. Nothing can be more mild and courteous than his able exposure of the strange misapprehensions and futile reasonings of the Cambridge Regius Professor of Hebrew. Sometimes the very courtesy of the learned Dissenter may seem to be covert sarcasm; as when he says:

If my humble recommendation, or my soliciting it with the utmost earnestness as a personal favour, could induce you to read carefully LOCKE's Letters on Toleration, I feel confident that you would derive more advantage to all your future reasoning upon these subjects, than I have any words to describe.' p. 49.

Is it then supposable, that Dr. Lee never read Locke's work, -and that he ventured to dogmatise upon the subject without consulting what may be considered as a text-book of sound principles? Again, at p. 71, Dr. Smith thus mildly, but firmly rebukes his learned friend.

6 As your Letter indicates throughout an extreme want of acquaintedness with facts concerning the history and circumstances of Dissenters, I am the less surprised, though not the less grieved, at your strange way of writing in relation to the manner in which our churches and all our institutions are supported. (pp. 63, 68, 71, &c.) You properly call it "a continual system of contribution." But you de

scribe it in terms which I can account for, only on the admission of a profound ignorance of things which lie open to any man's easy investigation; an ignorance in which (though that would be to me no consolation) you have many exalted associates. In the Parliamentary debates, and by various other utterances of mind, dukes and bishops, ministers of state, and University representatives, have talked on these matters, with an absence of correct premises, and a weakness of argumentation, which, if displayed on any topic of ordinary politics, would have covered them with derision. And are there not in your Alma Mater, from whom nothing but the Lux et pocula sacra should be dispensed, men who would be deeply sorry to be found deficient in acquaintance with the statistics of Athens in the time of Pericles, or with the rise and mutations of the Greek comedy; but who, in relation to a party of their own contemporary countrymen, so numerous as to exceed one half of the whole number throughout our land of persons professing serious religion, know little more than they do of the inhabitants of Formosa ? Yet from you this deficiency was little to be apprehended. Your active mind, your excursiveness of investigation, your laboriousness and success in many difficult studies, your facile apprehension, and your firm retention of acquired knowledge, ought to have placed you far above the weakness of inferior minds. But, be the causes what they may, you have really drawn pictures of the nature and operation of that which is the life's blood of the dissenting cause, (considered in its human instrumentality,) its support by the VOLUNTARY contributions of its adherents, pictures the most remote from truth. Far indeed I am from pretending that in this, or in any thing else, we are perfect. There are, as in relation to all the duties of the Christian life, among all denominations, defects and deplorable inconsistencies to be found here and there and there are ill-informed accusers, and even malignant calumniators, who assert shameful falsehoods against us. On this we are not much disturbed; for a little time and patience will bring the truth to light. But your descriptions, conjectural and imaginative as they evidently are, have raised alarming ideas before your eyes, at which, when you come to be better informed, you will smile in the dissipation of your fears, not without regret for having entertained them. The orthodox Protestant Dissenters of England and Wales consist principally of the middling and the working classes: the proportion among them of wealthy families is small, and from the communal aristocracy and the nobility of the land we have scarcely a slender twig belonging to us: what offerings we can bring to the altar of sacred beneficence come mostly from hard earnings: and our power is not a little cramped by the pressure (in ways which appear to us mean, as well as flagrantly unjust) of your rich hierarchy. Yet, observe what I say, and let it sink into your profoundest meditation;—your church does not supply the half of the scriptural, evangelical, and effective instruction which is dispensed to the English population; but more than the half is the offspring of VOLUNTARY contributions and actions from Dissenters and Nonconforming Methodists.' pp. 71-3.

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There are two portions of His Majesty's dominions, of which we may easily possess an accurate knowledge; Wales and Ireland. through the former, and you find a population poor, yet industrious,

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cheerful, patient, kind; and their general virtue and morality such as have drawn expressions of admiration from the circuit-judges; and this is the land of Dissenters, and of Methodists who are Dissenters practically, and thousands of them from well understood principle too. In their deep poverty the riches of their liberality have abounded, in many admirable ways, for the honour of God and the good of mankind. These are the effects of the voluntary principle; and Ireland shall tell us those of the compulsory. There the richest of establishments, backed by the wealth and power of the State, and of by far the more opulent and powerful part of the nobility and gentry, has been the least effective of its avowed purposes; it has not been able to keep its own ground: it has allowed Protestantism to decline and Popery to increase, to such a degree as fills our bosoms with distress and alarm. Which way soever we look, what scheme of pacification soever our imaginations may invent, the prospect is dreadful: and it cannot, I apprehend, be denied, that the existence of the Protestant Church Establishment, under its lamentably peculiar circumstances, is the Gordian knot which defies the efforts of all our statesmen to untie it with safety. In the mean time, those measures which, within the last twenty years, have been eminently favoured with the Divine blessing in reclaiming the poor Irish from ignorance, wickedness, and misery, have proceeded, not from the Establishment, (which rather presents the melancholy fact of an enormous weight in the counteracting scale,) but from Voluntary Societies, and the voluntary labours of Methodists and Dissenters. Do not Wales and Ireland furnish each an experimentum crucis?' pp. 74, 75.

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We scarcely know which Dr. Lee will find the harder task; to quarrel with a man of Dr. Smith's candour and amiable spirit, or to evade the keen force of his arguments.

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The learned Writer frankly avows his belief, that the connecting of the Church of Christ with the Civil Government, in any way of dependence and subjection to influence,' is a de"grading, an enslaving, a desecrating of the Church;'-that the union (improperly so called) of Church and State is productive of the most irreligious and mischievous effects; '--and that the liberation of the Church from this Babylonish bondage, would be no pulling down, but a setting up of the Episcopal Church it'self. Towards the close of the Letter, he brings into broad contrast, by means of parallel columns, the two ecclesiastical systems. This is coming to close quarters with his opponent; and Dr. Lee will perhaps repent of having commenced the attack. At all events, Dissent, in the hands of Dr. Smith, is fully justified.

We think that Protestant Dissenters may be fairly congratulated, both upon the present state of the ecclesiastical controversy, and upon their improved political position. If the Church has not become more tolerant, the State has become more wise. If a bishop can be found to give his sanction to a pub

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