the Church of England has never recovered, and it is quite visionary to suppose that it ever can recover. Though still the Established, yet, it never can be in fact the national Church. The evangelical ministers within its pale, do not now number so many as were madly and wickedly ejected from her communion; and if they were twice as numerous, the population has since become treble what it then was, and, of the great mass of the nation, a very large proportion has become irreclaimably attached to Dissenting communities. Almost all that distinguishes England as a religious nation in the eyes of foreign countries, originated with Dissenters, or is mixed up with Dissenters; so that the Episcopal Church can never be considered in future as any thing more than what Mr. Middelton aptly styles it, the ascendant division of Chris

tianity' in this country. The ascendancy, the precedence, and the civil deference which it claims on the ground of its connexion with the State, Dissenters cheerfully concede to it; but they hold themselves to form a section of the nation rather too considerable to allow of their being put quite out of sight by the designation applied to that ascendant division, of the national Church. The nation does not go along with the Church of England; and that Church must submit to many modifications, before it shall be able to overtake and re-absorb the vast portion of the community which has departed from it. It has not the power of Aaron's rod to swallow up the other rods. It must always be indebted to those whose alliance it repels, and whose assistance it disclaims, the Dissenters, to meet the religious wants, and to maintain the social order of the community.

It is well known to have been the anxious wish of John Wesley, especially in the beginning of his career, to prevent a total separation from the Episcopal Church. And there are individuals of the Wesleyan body, who still affect to speak of themselves as Church of England men, while they worship every Sunday in a conventicle, and their recognised ministers take out licences under the Toleration Act. We have never been able to understand the consistency or the uprightness of such pretences. Occasional communion with the Church of England, was not scrupled by the most decided and exemplary Nonconformists, till the Test Act made the Sacrament a picklock to a place.' This, therefore, though it may qualify for office, does not make a man a churchman. The Church is generally understood in the sense of the clergy. We do not say that this is the proper sense, but, in point of fact, the people go with their clergy, and are characterized by them.

Had Wesley been able to procure the ordination and sanction of the Church of England for his preachers, (which he always did whenever he could,) he would never have separated from the Church; and the consequence would have been, that the great body of the Wesleyan Methodists would have been retained, in connexion with their preachers, within its pale. But it is the preaching of the Dissenters, the Methodists, and the evangelical clergy, which the policy of the Establishment leads its rulers especially to discountenance. And while this is the case, it can never be a national or a popular church. The people ask for teachers; they will flock to hear energetic, impassioned, evangelical preachers. They will follow such men into the Church; they will follow them out of the Church. The Church which does not recognise or employ ministers of this description, will find herself presently deserted by the people. The revival which has taken place within the Church of England, has been chiefly brought about by means of such preachers, who have risen up among her parochial clergy. Now the probabilities with regard to the growing prosperity of the Church, or the increase of Dissenters, may be summed up in this; whether that effective pulpit instruction which is found to lay hold of the attention and affections of the people, and to outweigh the considerations respecting minor differences, is ever likely to be identified with the pulpits of the Establishment; or, if not confined to them, to prevail in them, so as to characterize the Church, and give it an eminence over other divisions of the religious world. Any plan of comprehension which should have this effect, would give a death-blow to Dissent, considered as a party interest, though its principles would remain as true and as important as ever. But such an expectation we should deem very chimerical. It is to keep out and keep down this preaching, that the Act of Uniformity is continued; and while this policy is persevered in, the growing population must fall chiefly into the ranks of the Dissenters.

And yet, there are good men who speak of this Act of Uniformity, and of the still more iniquitous Test Act, as the magna charta and palladium of the Church. Acts which, judging from those who have got into the Church, have never sufficed to keep any wicked man out of it, but have excluded thousands of learned and pious men, and were meant to exclude them, these Acts are the pillars of the Establishment, the safeguard of all that is venerable and apostolical in our constitution ecclesiastical! In these her ministers glory, of whom it may be truly said, that, in this instance, they glory in their shame. Mr. Middelton, after giving an account of the failure of the clerical petition for relief from subscription in 1772, and

noticing the deliverance of the Establishment from that formidable blow aimed at the ecclesiastical regulations,' the motion for a repeal of the Act for observing the 30th of January; proceeds to speak of the bold measure' of the Dissenters in petitioning for a repeal of the Test Act.

The hardships imposed by the law on Protestant Dissenters,' he says, were represented as contrary to the generous principles of the British Constitution, and their cause was ably and eloquently pleaded. It was replied that the penalties were never enforced, as the Dissenters were not called on to subscribe; that the hardship was rather in letter than in fact; that the continuance of a test was necessary; for, if abolished, all the barriers raised by the wisdom of our ancestors in defence of the Church would be destroyed, and religious teachers might promulgate the most obnoxious doctrines without possibility of restraint or fear of punishment.'

That a number of things were urged on that occasion against the measure, untrue in point of fact, and inconclusive in point of reasoning, is certain and notorious; although this brief summary of the debate will not be accepted as a very adequate one. But we suppose, from Mr. Middelton's selecting the reasons here assigned, that they are such as appeared to him the most forcible. The first is a curious argument: the Bill is too bad to act upon; it is a dead letter, being never enforced; therefore its repeal would endanger the Church. The assertion, however, was incorrect. Dissenters had been, and were, long after that period, called on to subscribe; and it was but so recently as 1767, that the decision of the House of Lords rendered them not liable to be compelled to serve corporate offices. The other argument proceeds upon a blunder. The Test Act never was designed to operate as a restraint upon the promulgation of obnoxious doctrines: it can have no such effect. Mr. Middelton must surely be mistaken in representing that so silly a reply was given. Weak enough, the arguments doubtless were, and accordingly, they had no weight in the House of Commons. Notwithstanding these representations,' says our Memorialist, the Bill for relief passed the Lower House, and was carried up to the Lords, where it was re'jected on the second reading by a large majority.' He does not give us the numbers, but he states who were the leading speakers in the debate when it came before the Lords. The Bill was supported by the Duke of Richmond, and Lords Chatham, Shelburne, and Lyttleton: it was opposed by Lords Bruce and Gower, and the Bishops. Mr. Middleton complacently adds:

'Such was the determination of the British aristocracy on the ma

terial question of liberty of conscience, after an able discussion of the rights of nonconformists, and at a time when even the sentiments of the government were in their favour............ The condition of dissidents from the national communion may therefore be considered as having undergone the fullest investigation; and acquiescence in the result of that investigation seems to be the part of modesty and candour.'

This is amusing. After the recorded opinion of the ablest and wisest statesmen of this country, that the Dissenters are entitled to the relief they prayed for,-after the decision of the House of Commons in their favour,-after the able discussion and full investigation of their rights had terminated in procuring for them this emphatic acknowledgement of their unquestionable nature,-modesty and candour, we are told, require them to rest satisfied with the decision of a majority in the House of Lords, half made up of dumb and passive proxies, and chiefly determined by the Bishops, who form no part of the British aristocracy, and are never known to dissent from the Minister, but when he wishes to do some act of justice.

From these specimens, our readers will infer that Mr. Middelton is not precisely qualified to be the impartial ecclesiastical historian of the period he has undertaken to review. The causes which led to the decline of religion in this country, and the means of the astonishing revival of the spirit of piety which has since been witnessed, he does not attempt to explain or to illustrate. He confines his review entirely to the state of religion in the Church of England, which the style of his occasional references to the Dissenters leaves us no room to regret. But how the Church of England came into the state in which he describes it to have been lying at the accession of George III., and by whom the cause of truth was upheld, the tenets of the Reformation maintained, and an evangelical ministry perpetuated in this country, before the days of Mr. Romaine, he does not think it worth while to inform his readers. The rise of the Methodists, from which the revival of religion in the Established Church may be dated, is classed by our Author, together with the attacks of infidel writers and the restlessness of sectaries,' among the circumstances which were tending more or less to disturb the foundations of the throne, and 'loosen the stones of the national altar.' That the foundations of the throne were in danger of being disturbed by the rise of Methodism, is a gratuitous calumny. The national altar' is another matter, and the obscurity of the metaphor renders it more difficult to meet the assertion. If Mr. M. means by the national altar, the religion of altars, that was a little shaken by the rise of Methodism. If he means the religion of Christ,

that was not in any danger. If he means the Church of England, the tithes were as duly paid after the expulsion of the six young men from Oxford as before; and not the curl of one Episcopal wig was singed by the wild-fire of enthusiasm. What can Mr. Middelton mean, then, by the loosening of the stones of the national altar? The fire had gone out on the altar he speaks of, and the Methodists, without disturbing a single stone of it, quietly built up another on which the fire is burning still.

The following is our Author's account of the state of the Church of England at this period.

The Bishops, in their corporate capacity, were not conspicuous for evangelical purity of sentiment or attachment to the distinguishing tenets of the Reformation, as expressed in the Articles of the religious community over which they were destined to preside. They drank too much into the spirit of the fashionable theology. Occa sionally, indeed, the sound sense and pious convictions of certain individuals of their number, led them to remonstrate with their clergy on the necessity of adopting a more Scriptural strain of preaching than generally prevailed. Occasionally too, they set the example, in their own discourses, of a departure from the dry method of ethical exhortation, and fortified the lesson of obedience by the powerful sanction of Revelation, or enlightened their audience by an exhibition of the holy verities of the Gospel. But the doctrine of justification by faith alone was in general inadequately and imperfectly stated; the corruption of human nature was spoken of in qualified terms; and salvation was too often represented as the possible attainment of mortal exertion, and the legal reward of a religious and virtuous conduct. As if the shades of those heretical and schismatical characters who figured in the disgracefal scenes that followed the decapitation of the first Charles, perpetually haunted their imagination, they viewed what were termed Methodistical tenets" with a sort of instinctive horror; and seemed to lose the power of discriminating between that zeal for the honour of his Saviour, and compassion for perishing sinners, which led the preacher to proclaim with appropriate energy and in familiar terms, the fullness and freeness of the everlasting Gospel, and a covert design to court popularity, and ultimately effect the overthrow of the Church. With most of the dignitaries of the day and their ordinary associates, fervour was denominated cant, watchfulness hypocrisy, and abstraction from worldly society unnecessary strictness. Connected with the first families by birth, alliance, or circumstance, their criticisms on the belles lettres too often usurped the place of Scriptural information; what was elegant in conversation was more esteemed than what was edifying; and among the higher orders of the clergy, the unction of humility which flowed from the silvered temples of a Beveridge down to the skirts of his garment, and the glow of holy zeal which animated the breast of a Reynolds or a Hopkins, seemed to be exchanged for courtly aspirations after prefer