THE

FREETHINKER'S MAGAZINE,

AND

Review of Theology, Politics, and Literature.

Oceans of ink, and reams of paper, and disputes infinite might have been spared, if wranglers had avoided lighting the torch of strife at the wrong end; since a tenth part of the pains expended in attempting to prove the why, the where, and the when certain events have happened, would have been more than sufficient to prove that they never happened at all.-REV. C. C. COLTON, A.M.

No. 7.]

DECEMBER 1, 1850.

THE PROTESTANT PANIC.

[PRICE 2d.

On the Feast of All Saints (if our readers happen to know when that notable occurrence happens), in the year 1834, was laid the groundwork of the ecclesiastical agitation now setting man against man, and brother against brother, in the British islands. In the justly celebrated Oxford Tracts then commenced, are to be found the springs of action and motion that gave birth, fostered, promoted, and brought to maturity what we now know as the Popish aggression upon the Protestant rights and privileges of Britons. These tracts were penned by men who believed that vital Christianity had become almost obsolete in the great body of the episcopalian clergy, and who held that those who tolerated the modern doctrines actually knew better, but from interested motives kept back the real state of their minds, as to church belief and government, from the gaze of the vulgar. They held, owing to her union with the state, that she was tempted to lean upon the arm of the flesh instead of what they deem to be her divinely-invented discipline-hence arose the schism that has rent the English church, and by these teachers and writers, imbued with the tractarian sentiments, have been engendered all the subsequent difficulties with which the hierarchy has had to contend. Their opinions led them naturally, if not involuntarily, to a closer affinity with the practices, if not principles, of the Roman church; in fact, excepting an acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Sovereign, there was little or no difference. The new party called themselves the Catholic party; they believed in auricular confession, acknowledged the importance of saints and holy-days, if not, too, an implied belief in the effi cacy of prayers addressed to them. They introduced forms and symbols, red stripes, white gowns, black gowns, bowings and noddings, chauntings, and prominently absolution to those who sinned, and consequently were identically, for all practical purposes, similar in spirit, if not in letter, to that

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church whose revenues they absorbed at that period usually known as the Reformation, but which it should never be forgotten was brought about by a vicious monarch because the Catholic church, then dominant, opposed a divorce from the woman to whom, according to church law, he was indissolubly united. The Catholic church, in this particular, suffered in the cause of virtue, and the Anglican church triumphed through the support they lent to this crowned Blue Beard, and to the present day call the head of the church, who is the Sovereign for the time being, defender of the faith, which said title was conferred by the Pope upon the said king as a reward for a work directed against Martin Luther, the originator of this very glorious reformation. So much for their consistency. Time wore on, churches and synods were held to discuss whether the priest at communion should wear white or black, whether he should face the east or the west; dissension arose about the duties of the ministerial commission, ide as arose about alterations in the Liturgy and the thirty-nine articles; the actual apostolical succession was questioned by some and as hotly supported and maintained by others. The records of the church, Anglican and Roman, were scrupulously raked through, and the Epistles of Ignatius to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, Roman Philadelphians, and others, with the tale of the apostle John and the robber; and the ideas of Irenæus on faith, with fifty other equally authentic documents, were raked from the obscurity of ages and endeavoured to be foisted upon mankind as rules of faith and practice in the utilitarian age of the nineteenth century. Some bishops thunder out their charges against such innovations, but a large number, both of bishops and clergy, conceiving the intelligence of the age too progressive for priestcraft, and seeing its union with the state necessitated the interference of the state with its doings and its misdoings, were divided into another two parties. The one honestly advocated disunion from the state, at once throwing up its advantages as well, the other under the rose having the same object, but striving to retain its preferments and dignities, and to make itself independent of the state by denying the state's authority in any shape or form. In this complicated position of affairs, the Gorham controversy brought matters to something like a crisis. His views, in the opinion of his bishop, were not consonant with the Christian code. Christian proceedings were commenced against Gorham by his bishop, and of course the Ecclesiastical Court ruled for the stronger party. Gorham being one of the children of this generation, naturally wiser than the children of light, appealed to a lay tribunal, which, though saving Gorham's living, yet, as regards a decision on the main question, actually did nothing, for it ruled both parties were right and both wrong-of course after diving amongst all kinds of musty and antiquated authorities. But a case did arise which did settle the question thus far, that as long as the union existed between the church and the state, the latter was determined to assert its paramount im

portance as the head, the absolute dictator to the church. The case alluded to is that of Dr. Hampden. The lickspittle church has a pleasant fiction that the dean and chapter of a diocese have the power of electing their bishop or head. The fact being the dean and chapter, through taking state pay, are only made state tools, and under the pains and penalties of premupire must elect, or choose, or confirm even the enemy of souls, should the state direct them to use their suffrage in favour of that best friend to the Christians.

Thus it was in the celebrated Hereford instance. Dr. Hampden was most obnoxious, most hateful to the brethren who were pleasantly supposed to elect him as being their dearest, their best beloved elder brother in the Lord. All men know that this was not the fact, although the why and the wherefore he was sent to the diocese is not now the question. Certain is it he held opinions heterodox to church opinions; certain it is a large portion of the bishops threatened some awful ulterior measures did the government persist in their nomination of such a latitudinarian; and equally certain it is they did persist, and the result was all the clerical thunder escaped in words, for they not only did nothing, but Dr. Hampden, the heterodox state nominee, was elected almost without a dissentient, except perhaps by the dean, who, it is said, bad for years spent best part of his income in beautifying the cathedral in full expectation of being its next bishop.

But beneath the surface the venom was rankling in the priestly bosom. Harry of Exeter will receive no applicants whose characters are vouched ▸ by his spiritual lord, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Charles James holds aloof, endeavouring to cast a prophetical eye into futurity, and, as the vulgar would say, endeavouring to discuss which way the cat is likely to jump, until plump upon him comes the Papal rescript, which makes the learned prelate in alarm spring a mine that in its effects will be very likely to demolish the reverend bishop and that church system which, at the eleventh hour, he tells the world he will stick by unto death, and which it always has been the most cherished wish of his heart to support and consolidate. The more is the pity he has not acted as if he then felt for the last ten years. So that we have on the theological stage-first, the parties in the church who wish a separation in Church and State from conviction-secondly, those who wish it because State interference is distasteful to them-thirdly, those dissenters of all classes who feel church domination to be an usurpation and a tyranny-and fourthly, the large and increasing body of Roman Catholics, who were the parties from whom the church plunder and revenues were originally diverted. Such was the state of the belligerent parties of Christians when Pope Pius IX. threw his hand grenade-his late Bull-amongst them. Its first effect was naturally to make the religious bodies scud about like a flock of sheep among whom a restless terrier had been suddenly introduced. Time for reflection there was none. Fear, surprise, and with some

indignation, real or pretended, had so excited them that they were incapable of reflection. At the first bang of the explosion, Charles James of London at once had his cue, undecided no longer when a probable abstraction of loaves and fishes loomed in the distance. He put himself at the head of the no popery faction, and in his late celebrated charge to its clergy hounded them on to slaughter and vengeance on the devoted heads of Roman Catholics in general and Cardinal Wiseman in particular. But what says the State -or rather Lord John Russell, its present head-to all the uproar? Why just this: when a deputation waited upon him to know the intentions of the government, he replied, 'Her Majesty, as at present advised, intends to do nothing.' In the meantime, the rabid cry of the interested, marshalling to battle the deluded maniacs whose intellect priestcraft has abstracted, is heard through the breadth and length of the land. Clergymen who till then had scorned to put forth the hand of fellowship to ministers of the various dissenting bodies, now were hand and glove with them when bigotry required a union of the nondescript and ill-assorted allies. Dissenters forget they had for years groaned under the iron and despotic rule of that very ecclesiastical corporation for whom they were now about to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard. Dissenters were oblivious of the fact that their own principles disowned equally the supremacy of the Anglican with the Roman hierarchy; and High Church and Low Church forgot, when they scented afar off the savour of strife, that for years they themselves had been at each other's throats. Where now was the consistency of the Anti-State-Church party? Thrown like soap bubbles to the wind; and, in their fiery and newborn zealousness and valour, they stand prepared to do battle, shoulder to shoulder, by the side of their ancient, hereditary, and natural enemies against a rival sect, whose crime against dissent at least was not a thousandth part as great as that of the episcopalian church.

Cities, boroughs, counties, parishes, all join the hue and cry against our Catholic fellow-men; and as Lord John now considered the apple ripe, and as his political capital required replenishing, he-the last man who should have been hail fellow well met' with bigotry-joins the hunting party, and writes his celebrated letter to the Bishop of Durham. And what is the value of the letter? It merely evidences, if evidence were wanted, that no artifice, however base, mean, or contemptible, is ever overlooked, or passed by, by a Whig. Had the descendant of the real Russells been honest in his professions of veneration for Protestantism, why did he not throw himself into the breach and speak out like a man, when the first rumour of this so-called Papal aggression reached this country? Then was the time for honest zealots and conscientious though erring fanatics to take up the Papal gauntlet when there was some risk in so doing; but to wait till the ecclesiastical drum and hierarchal trumpet's blast had awakened those bitter sectarian passions that it now appears only slumbered, and were not eradicated from

the public breast, is the act of a cur-a contemptible huckster and trader on public ignorance-a thimble-rigger, who throws the wet blanket on professions, honour, consistency, morality, and virtue, and lends himself, like a truckling pander, to hound on mankind (both equally wrong, it may be granted) to take each other by the throat-and all, it is clear, merely for the sake of saving Whiggery from political bankruptcy.

Lord John will come in once more for London, because he has lent himself, like another Samuel, to hew in pieces the Agag of Roman Catholicism, after the latter had fancied the pangs of death were past. Such Judases to correct principle ought to be scouted from society, and those should be called in to manage the affairs of a great nation who would be above, for mere gain and political claptrap, abusing and insulting a large class of our fellow-men, who, whatever we may think, or all mankind may think of their theological delusions, ought not to have their ordinances and ecclesiastical observances called 'mummeries' by the first Minister of the Crown.

As to the tactics of the clergy of the Establishment, they are comprehensible and clear, and say logical. They obtained their revenues, every shilling of it, from this very body, the Roman Catholics, therefore whenever they dare to raise their heads and claim a right or a privilege, which, were they wise, they would use without asking at all-then the Anglicists have visions of restitution ever floating before, behind, above, and below them, and, like Dives, they tremble and groan and bluster at the mere contemplation of disgorging their ill-gotten prey.

When the enemy (their enemy, that is) was afar off the locusts, the idlers, and theorisers, split even their own party into infinite sects, and their insolence, tyranny, and ruffianism, drove hundreds and thousands into the more kindly communion of Romanism. It is the rebound of their own vile tyrannies that makes the church, like robbers conscience-stricken, fancy each bush an officer, and conclude that Romanism, if allowed free ecclesiastical liberty, will ultimately undermine their rotten, shattered, worm-eaten, and, by ninetenths of the people, despised system. This quarrel is not that of the people, it is a quarrel of the wolves amongst themselves as to which party shall be dominant-which sect consume, tear, rend, and victimise most sheep, as they love thus to designate their flocks.

Priestcraft and priestly domination are always the same-the rabbi, the bouze, the mufti, the bishop, the priest, are identically the same vile, designing, persecuting, dissimulating, soul-destroying monsters. Look at the meeting at Islington a few weeks since, when, without even hearing what Mr. Miall had to say, two stalwart clergymen, followers and imitators of the meek and lowly Jesus, seized him round the waist and threw him, without notice, headlong into the body of the meeting. This is the true spirit of priestcraft-the praise-the-Lord-but-keep-your-powder-dry sort of argument of force which they are always ready to use on the instant they find canting