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at least in the larger towns, that many refined persons, especially of the mercantile and manufacturing aristocracy, would leave the parish churches altogether, and set up exclusive places of Sunday pastime, as they have exclusive resorts of week-day dissipation.

The connection of Infidelity with plebeian disaffection, and hostility to established orders, would probably prevent them from entirely discontinuing the forms of public worship; and the imputed vulgarity of dissent, would cause the highly-born and their emulators, to prefer a building where the Liturgy was read, and the minister might be presumed to be a college gentleman. But they would have him more dependent on themselves than on the Church, and would rather admire and criticise his accomplishments, than revere his function. The result would be, an imperium in imperio, a rent within the Church much more injurious than a bona fide separation from it. The deformity must be tolerated till it shall please God to send forth His spirit, in such measure as shall make every congregation as one family, and all congregations as one Church. When this comes to pass (and every Christian may help to accelerate it), the real grounds and meaning of Christian equality, and Christian subordination, will be clearly perceived, and neither jacobinism, nor aristocratism-rather say, neither democratic nor aristocratic jacobinism— will obstruct the edifying of the temple to a faint type of the temple not built with hands.

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DUTIES OF A GOVERNMENT, AND RELATION TO THE CHURCH.*

We must not expect more from positive institutions than God intended they should produce. You cannot make men moral, enlightened, or religious by law law has done its best when it prevents the evildisposed from being mischievous with impunity, and leaves no pretext for any man to take the law into his own hand. The first, not highest, duty of a Government is, to constitute and maintain the State, to defend the national existence and the public honour; the second, to keep the peace at home, to give security to person and property, and to protect religion and morality from insult or oppression; the third, to promote the healthy circulation of property by a wellregulated taxation, and, as far as may be, to prevent individuals from growing rich by making or keeping others poor; to see that private wealth is not increased without a proportionate increase of public wealth. These I hold to contain the sum and substance of the duties of a State-out of which duties arise the just prerogatives of a State, and the just obedience of the subject. No individual, no multitude or combination of individuals, be their rank, education, or usefulness what they may, have any right to set their private will, interest, convenience, humour, or opinion against the will of the State embodied in law; but then law should never represent the will, inclination,

*Extracted from a letter to a friend.

or interest of any individual, or any class, but should be the passionless exponent of practical reason. As to the distribution of powers and functions, it is plainly absurd to lay down any general rule, or to assert the absolute unconditional right of any man or number of men to a legislative voice; but certainly, that does appear to me to be the best condition of society, in which the citizen is never wholly merged in the subject, which gives to every adult, not, indeed, direct political power, but a political existence, a public character-which attributes to every man a something beyond his bare human being. It seems to me a great solecism to allot political privileges or franchises to any man from which others of equal rank, property, adaptation, and education are excluded, the effect, by the way, of the blundering ten-pound qualification, about the worst that could have been devised. You will understand that I allude to privilege and franchise emanating from and refering to the central government, not to the chartered rights of self-governing bodies, as the Universities and the Church ought to be. With regard to these, it is sufficient that their privileges do not infringe on the common rights of citizenship, far less intermeddle with the imprescriptible duties-duties subjective, and therefore rights objective—of men to their own pure reason and their immortal souls, which are called, I admit, by a very ineligible phrase, the rights and liberties of conscience. Prerogatives may, and must be, given to certain bodies and certain persons—perhaps are most conveniently given to an

hereditary first magistrate and an hereditary peerage; but these prerogatives should always be correlative to duties; should be no larger than the efficient performance of the necessary duties requires. To aristocratic privileges, apart from legislative or conservative functions, I am a decided enemy. In his private capacity the rich man should have nothing more than the poor man, but what he pays for. Sumptuary laws, which confine certain luxuries of dress, diet, amusement, to certain classes, are hateful—they break down the sanctity of home if strictly executed, and if, as in our Universities, they are generally suffered to sleep, they are incentives both to extravagance and to deceit. They degrade and demoralise the trading class, and introduce a hungry, cringing, impudent race of contraband dealers. You yourself would hardly defend privileges which entitle a nobility or clergy to exemption from the common operation of law, which allow, and in a manner encourage, the aristocracy to oppress, wrong, and defraud their inferiors. I believe the odious privileges of the French nobility and clergy to have been a great cause of the ferocity of the French revolution. Little of this kind exists in England. The exemption of the clergy from military service and onerous civil offices, of course, is perfectly right, and the personal irresponsibility of the King is, perhaps, essential to the monarchy; but the exemption of real property from the payment of debts seems to me a dishonesty which no experience can justify; and I see no reason that a peer should be believed on his honour, while

a commoner is impiously required to wager his soul. I rejoiced with the angels in heaven to find that my revered parent thoroughly sympathised with my abhorrence of the present system of administering oaths. I hope all oaths—at least, all but the oaths of witnesses in criminal cases- -will be speedily abolished. I hold that no private individual is entitled to disobey or evade a law, simply because he finds it inconvenient to obey it, or because he thinks it unwise or unnecessary, or because he was not himself consulted in the making of it; so long as it does not enjoin what is sinful, or prohibit positive duty, or compromise the natural rights of parents, husbands and wives, &c., or forbid what, though not an absolute duty to all, may be necessary to many, as marriage. But then the law, to claim obedience, must respect matter that is the proper subject of legislation,matter, in fact, terrene and secular. I am as decidedly for an established and well-endowed Church as you are; but I would have it an independent establishment, a complete self-government,-assoiled from all earthly business, save the care of its own property. I would have the Church polity purely spiritual, the State policy merely and absolutely secular. I am far enough from a Radical: there is only one point (a mighty one to be sure) in which I do agree with the Radicals,—that religion should never operate as a political disqualification,— that no act of the Church, or any Church, should require a civil sanction, and no act of the State a religious sanction,-that marriage for civil purposes,

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