It is allowed us to emulate the example of men who are of superior talent to ourselves, although we may follow them haud passibus æquis; and as every one who has been engaged in any course of study which connects him with some of the various branches of literature, or places him in the path of professional reading, must necessarily have made acquirements that add to his own store of knowledge, so is it just to expect that, when time has matured his judgment, and experience has substantiated the validity of his opinions, he should reflect that posterity has a claim upon his attention, and that no selfish reserve ought to induce him to withhold whatever communication he may find himself able to make to wards increasing the aggregate of general intelligence. For my own part, I assume to myself no pre-eminence of authority, no privilege of dictate, nor any extraordinary resource of information, farther than what I may be entitled to by the experience of a long series of years passed in the unremitting toil of my ministerial labours, and in rather an extensive intercourse with many of my cotem poraries in the Church, who have justly been ranked among its most able supporters. To this I may add, that it has been my chance to be thrown into a sphere of general association with a large portion of the laity of this metropolis, both Churchmen and Dissenters. Nor have I suffered the various opportunities to escape me which presented themselves, of making such observations upon that diversity of character which the various shades of human nature always display to the eye of the contemplative mind. It has indeed sometimes happened, that both among the ecclesiastical and Jaical departments of society, I have too frequently been compelled to witness the truth of the poet's remark, decipimur specie veri ; -and have bad many occasions to wonder at the success of the simulation. I am now travelling onwards to the grave in my half centenary, which, according to the calculation of some traveilers through the rugged paths of this existence, is just that period of being in which a man is said to be at the top of the Hill of Life. In my progress upwards, have passed over the last earthly home Europ. Mag. Vol. LXXIV. Sept. 1918. I of many who set out in the world at the same time with myself. Some have fainted by the way, exhausted by the impetuosity of their career, and some have fallen under the heavy burthens of premature calamity; whilst others have made their way, under the covering shield of their own consummate self-possession, through a host of obstacles at which many of more merit and modesty have been abashed and disheartened. I have seen some pass by me, but I have marked the inconsiderate swiftness of their step; -I have heard their shouts of exultation, but I have afterwards listened to their groans of disappointment;-I have witnessed the unexpected impulse which some have received in their journey, but I have also borne testimony to the weakness that has demonstrated their inability to keep pace with the accelerative force with which they have been carried forwards. I am conscious that I am now going down the hill, and I have no expectation of being able to stop by the way whenever I may choose-certain it is, also. that I have no reason to suppose myself likely to be more fortunate in my descent than I have been in my ascent. If I have struggled through many difficulties in my way to the summit, I have still to continue the same fatiguing efforts to preserve myself from being prematurely precipitated to the bot tom by the overbalancing weight of adverse circumstances. In my first outset, I enjoyed the consolatory support of parental anxiety and affectionate sympathy. Too soon I lost these beloved participators in my happier hopes, who lived but to bewail the bitter failure of them all, and died. Within my heart's deepest recesses of recollection I cherish their memory; and often when the afflictive conflicts of unpropitious fortune have nearly subdued my fortitude, I have called to mind their instructive admonitions, and have revived. They knew the world, and had ample occasion to appreciate its wayward caprice, and its deceitful promise. To their son they imparted the lesson they had been themselves complied to learn. Short was the interval, alas! between their experience and that of their son, ere he was called upon to apply the lesson to griefs of his own. From these, how. ever, his reminiscence shrinks, and wounded peace has long sought a reD d medy more efficacious than the opiate of Time, he seeks it in his prospect of another and a better world. Short may be the intermediate space which I have to traverse of my path in this lower condition of things; and while I turn my view back upon that thorny maze through which I have already passed, I would fain avert my eye from those spots on which the most oppressive of earthly tribulations had well nigh brought down my strength in my journey. In the occupation of my professional engagements, I have sought relief from the obtrusive evils which I have had to encounter; and from many of those unhallowed moments of injury and wrong which have violated the retirement of my repose, I have sought to beguile my memory, by the avocations of my pen. At this instant, while tracing the course of my metropolitan progress, I anxiously adopt the same transient hope. Wisely has it been observed by a Grecian moralist, that "he who cannot find resource in himself, both of fortitude and consolation, in the day of his sorrow, will in vain hope to derive it from the sympathy of others the tale of his sufferings may indulge the curiosity of those who listen to it, but will seldom excite an inclination to administer relief. The glory of bearing alone, therefore, what thousands impatiently endure, or make the subject of querulous complaint, gives a dignity to grief, which elevates the soul to a nobility of feeling far above all the triumphs of joyous success." It is this firmness that restores the mind to its natural elasticity, and gives the heart a more buoyant action in the breast; the consequence of which is-such a complacency diffuses itself over all the thoughts, as resists the impressions of impatience. This quiet of the soul leaves the intellectual faculties in full possession of their powers, and in the application of them to pursuits abstracted from all intervention of its personal miseries, prevents these from finding a season of vacancy in which they may absorb the reflections and compress the spirit within the painful grasp of their melancholy influence. The great essayist of our country has a passage in his " Rambler," which I quote as improving this idea to its utmost extent. "This calmness will be more easily obtained as the attention is more powerfully withdrawn from the contempla made thee Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine Spring up, and lay strong hold on him who Thy gloom is scattered,sprightly spirits flow: Tho' withered is thy vine, and harp unstrung. Certain it is, that no sooner has adversity convinced us that the world is not what we fondly pictured it to be to the inconsiderate anticipations of our earlier days, but we set about considering what it really is; we no longer suffer ourselves to be led away from the more wary and prudential cautions which we have received from the experience of others, but we check the airy step of expectation by the more deliberate calculations of probable disappointment, and we exchange our former overweening confidence for the wiser mistrust of appearances, and the more just apprehension of contrary realities. Nor is this the only fruit of so salutary a conviction; we then cease to take for granted the opinions of others, and begin to calculate upon our own: --we judge not of men acording to the outward semblance of their condition in this world, or of things as they seem to be constituted in their extrinsic relation to that condition; but we learn to contemplate the one in the secret springs of action, and the other in the remote causes from which they originate, as well as in the important results of which our previous observation forewarns us. -I would persuade myself that such has been the knowledge which I have gathered; not like the savage, who in his summary mode of seizing the produce cuts down the tree that bears it, but rather like the anxious cultivator, who would preserve the stock, and render it still more productive, in grateful recollection of the fruit with which it has rewarded his labours. If this knowledge is experience, and this fruit the application of it to facts, I deem it an obligation that I owe to the venerable Establishment in which I have made the acquisition of both, to acquit myself of what every man ought to consider as a claim on the part of that community with which he is associated to designate those facts, and to consult those interests which they peculiarly tend either to promote or deteriorate. This is indeed a duty which he ought to fulfil, not only towards his cotemporaries, but those also who may follow him; by both he is alike called upon to add to the general aggregate of information those views and those ideas which have occurred to him in that path of life through which he has passed. It may be that such a thought, and such a plan as it suggests, will be regarded by many as the gratuitous and unrequired effort of a vain mind, that thinks itself qualified to teach others, only because it has itself been taught Not so-1 would ward off this accusatory suspicion of my motives-1 would rather be understood as drawing my conclusions from a higher source than what the vanity of buman opinion opens to my use. This I would humbly endeavour to correct, instead of applying it to my purpose-and Non tali auxilio eget, may be truly said of every man who makes experience the ground of those sentiments which he insists upon, in opposition to that dogmatical judgment which self-importance boldly pronounces on men and things, without allowing itself one deliberative moment to contemplate the true nature of either. My chief object in publishing these recollections is to speak of others rather than of myself, whenever I can do so without implicating the truth of the narration; and to remark upon facts which refer more to the conduct and character of the Church to which I belong, than of those circumstances of its ministration in which I have myself been engaged. But in this, I would not have it supposed that I have the remotest intention of gratifying the ever-erect ear of the vacant mind with scandalous detail or defamatory allusion; I have no such food to offer to its salacious appetite-but I would draw a faithful portraiture of our National Establishment and its Ministry, as I have viewed them both in this metropolis during the last eighteen years; and I would mark the dependencies of both, as they have been preserved or neglected by the exertions or the supineness of its friends: at the same time, I do not mean to turn my back upon the various arguments with which it has been attacked by its enemies. While 1 trace the former with an impartial distinction, I shall not shrink from the evidence of the other, by meauly compromising the truth, in order to avoid the odium of their aspersions,-or to secure to myself their applause for a spurious liberality which submits the right of a cause to misrepresentation, rather than hazard the loss of the good will of those who tolerate nothing that they choose to think is beneath their own standard of what is true, and worthy of good report. As opinions, by whomsoever advanced and maintained, have no surer criterion of their justice and propriety than what the testimony of events affords, this will be the basis of my reflections; and those incidents which have come within my personal observation, will accompany the opinions they have produced. It will be seen, from this slight delineation of the plan on which these papers have been drawn up, that nothing can be farther from my contemplation than to follow the examples of those writers who have recently given themselves an unwarrantable latitude in their evil-minded misrepresentations of our National Church and its Ministry. My principal aim will be in positive opposition to that direction which their efforts have taken. I have watched their progress for more than 18 years, and without any breach of Christian charity, I may be allowed to hold their sentiments in utter abhorrence;-for, with very few exceptions, I have found them to be men who, in consequence of their atrocious want of principle, have been shunned by the virtuous part of society-and who, stung to madness by their merited rejection, have bired out their hatred to some malcontent and disaffected agitator of the public mind, who scruples not, for the purpose of keeping his press in action, to employ this malevolent herd of hireling scribblers. These, in their turn, are satisfied with eating the bread of infamy, procured by their indiscriminate abuse of the holy cause of Gop and man; and their main object is to live upon the characters of others, because they have none of their own. Contemptible as these agents of invidious selfishness may be in themselves and their writings, they are not more to be despised than the editors who employ them to fill up their columns of dissention and defamation. These consist, for the most part, of persons who have either failed in the more respectable departments of trade, or who have been impoverished by the penalties in flicted upon their libellous productions, and are at their wits end to obtain the means of subsistence; their minds, soured by disappointment, vent their spleen in blaming every one but themselves; and they seek the co-operation of similar victims of their own improvident misapplication of what slender talents they possess. Many such instruments are found ready at hand to take advantage of the worst passions that can influence the public feeling, and to seize upon any prominent character among the Clergy, whom they may make the object of their obliquy, and sacrifice to the envious despight of some, and the capricious distaste of others. No sooner have they marked down their prey, which is usually some one that has the misfortune to be popular, than his good qualities are thrown into the shade of suspicion-those talents underrated which have hitherto commanded respect, and have been the fruits of laborious cultivation- his honest efforts of duty, his pious sincerity, and his faithful service, are placed in a questionable shape, or ascribed to interested motives and puerite vanity-the acceptability of his efforts is ridiculed, and the whole tenor of his ministry vilified and degraded. By such revilers the man and his ministration are at once subjected to the arbitium of their prejudices, and with them "Service is no service, as being done, SOAKS. But as it is allowed." It is indeed, matter of wonder that the trash which is thus so industriously and by such infamous means circulated throughout this metropolis, and hence finds its way into the country, should be read by any class of people; but, unfortunately, such is the corrupt taste of thousands, who read without study and decide without judgment, that the very idleness of the reader is made the medium through which the calumnious falshoods and profane revilings of these defamers of the religion of their country secure their circulation. The breakfast tables, the reading rooms, the sofas and boudoirs of the fashionable lounger; the porter clubs. the tavern taps, the gossipping shops of the dissolute idler, are the sources of patronage, of sale and profit for all those periodical papers and journals by which the venom is diffused. For alas! too true it is, that an ungenerous sarcasm, or a dishonest imputation, if clothed in impudent assertion and seasoned with prurient insinuation, is accepted, by both the great and the vulgar admirers of the falshood, as a proof of a liberal spirit and an unintimidated genius; while it delights them to see those individuals who have long enjoyed what they themselves can never hope to at tain, the favorable opinion of the wise and good, degraded, no matter how unjustly, to their own debased level of ignorance and empty pretension. Such pests as these to every well constituted community may, indeed, boast themselves as the author of evil, that they can do mischief; for certain it is, that they spread an influence over the reflections of the laity, which of late years has shewn itself in much adverse and impudent distrust of their pastors in their exercise of both their spiritual and temporal functions. Prejudices are formed upon false preposessions-our church is attacked through a reviled ministry-her authority is traduced, and their rights disclaimed, and both contended against with an asperity as remarkable for its insolence as for the hypocrisy of the pretexts with which it is vindicated. Hence the higher ranks are shamed out of their stedfastness of profession, and the lower classes are gradually encouraged to give up the religious discipline of their youth, and to scorn the earnest instructions of their spiritual teachers. In the indifference of the higher classes, and in the altered conduct of the lower, there is ample evidence of these melancholy results. And, although it may justly be said in the ab stract, that the sacred claims of religion upon the reverence of mankind are too firmly grounded in the power and wisdom of Gop's eternal word, to be subverted by the infidel doubts and profane scoffings of the philosophizing sceptic; yet experience convinces us that the acknowledgment of that power and wisdom, and the adoption of the great truths which that word substanti. ates, is much discouraged and impeded, by such causes, and the religious sense of Christian obligation proportionately weakened and perverted. To this consequence of such unworthy endeavours as I have mentioned, I have long had the sorrow to bear witness, and I am well aware that to them it may be largely ascribed: I should add solely, were I not compelled to admit that, there do appear to exist causes which, however they may have been overcharged beyond their real bearing, by the adversaries alluded to, must be regarded by every true friend to the National Church, whether ecclesiastic or laical, as ill calculated to repel the accusatory spirit with which it has been assailed. There is a scrutinizing malignity in this spirit, which is ever vigilantly alive to every real or imaginary failure in the high pretensions of our Sion; and the more elevated these pretensions are the more are they exposed to the envious eye of those by whom they are disallowed, in consequence of the distance at which they place them from a participation in certain privileges and immunities. Norisit to any particular body of men that this subtlety is to be attached; it is taken up as a principle of opposition, by one general communion of hostility in all who, by any pretext, dissent from the National Church. However divided in doctrine; however separate in worship; however segregate in profession, it is not to be denied, that all denominations of dissenters have thus far set themselves in Sectarian array against our Sion: and it is unhappily as little to be contradicted, that this evil has increased and is increasing, by what pleas, by what means, and by what engines, I hope to show in the course of these papers, and I pledge myself, that the justice or injustice of such instrumentality shall be as impartially discussed, as the sources of vindication shall be anxiously explored and applied. Should it be asked, who is this that assumes to himself the importance of obtruding this pledge upon the public attention? I answer, he is one who, how ever imperfectly he may have laboured, has not been an idle labourer in the vineyard who in that part of it through which his path has lain, has been called upon to undertake many arduous duties-whose time and health have been devoted to the fulfilling of them-one who has seen some things that he has disliked-many things that he has approved of-and a few things that he humbly thinks might be made more worthy of the approbation of all men. Inadequate as he may be to the task which he has imposed upon himself, and imperfect as may be his exertions to perform it, he undertakes it as a work which his conscience dictates, and which he ardently desires to accomplish, that the commonweal of the cause which he espouses may be promoted and upheld. While the accustomed circumstances and the ordinary dependencies of any condition of things keep their usual course, we are generally disposed to presume, that all is well; and with this vague idea, we are are apt to rest satisfied that every thing will continue to go on so. This is a dangerous presumption at all times; but in the present age, it is a persuasion of peculiar hazard, when the ties of social order seem to be universally loosened, and the common bonds of regulated restraint are reluctantly submitted to. When every obligation of subordinacy is lost sight of in captious petulance and insolent intolerance of superior authority-and when the agitated surface of society warns us that some powerful agency of perturbation is at work underneath, and exerting all its strength to undermine those superstruc tures of religion, morality and law, which we have long been in the habit of considering as the strongest bulwarks of individual confidence and national welfare. At such a period, when the peril demands the co-operative resistance of all who justly estimate the valuable interests at stake, the feeblest hand may be usefully employed. Weak, therefore, as mine may be, it takes up the pen with a sincere desire to contribute to the prevention of the increasing evil; and, powerless as may be my single voice, i would use it to call the attention of my compeers to that warning anoun. ciation of the gathering storm with which the gust of disaffection breaks at intervals upon the ear. It is time that those who have reposed in unsuspecting security should be awakened: it is high time that they should be made sensible of the acumulating danger which besets them. In these recollections of eighteen |