University of Virginia Library

Angli suos ac sua omnia impense mirantur; cæteras nationes despectui habent. —Barclay (as quoted in one of Dryden's prefaces).

England began very early to feel the effects of cruelty towards her dependencies. “The severity of her government (says Macpherson) contributed more to deprive her of the continental dominions of the family of Plantagenet than the arms of France.” —See his History, vol. i.

“By the total reduction of the kingdom of Ireland in 1691 (says Burke), the ruin of the native Irish, and in a great measure, too, of the first races of the English, was completely accomplished. The new English interest was settled with as solid a stability as any thing in human affairs can look for. All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression, which were made after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were not at all afraid to provoke.” Yet this is the era to which the wise Common Council of Dublin refer us for “invaluable blessings,” &c.

It never seems to occur to those orators and addressers who round off so many sentences and paragraphs with the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, &c., that most of the provisions which these Acts contained for the preservation of parliamentary independence have been long laid aside as romantic and troublesome. I never meet, I confess, with a politician who quotes seriously the Declaration of Rights, &c., to prove the actual existence of English liberty, that I do not think of that marquis, whom Montesquieu mentions , who set about looking for mines in the Pyrenees, on the strength of authorities which he had read in some ancient authors. The poor marquis toiled and searched in vain. He quoted his authorities to the last, but found no mines after all.

Liv. xxi. chap. 2.

The chief, perhaps the only advantage which has resulted from the system of influence, is that tranquil course of uninterrupted action which it has given to the administration of government. If kings must be paramount in the state (and their ministers for the time being always think so), the country is indebted to the Revolution for enabling them to become so quietly, and for removing skilfully the danger of those shocks and collisions which the alarming efforts of prerogative never failed to produce.

Instead of vain and disturbing efforts to establish that speculative balance of the constitution, which, perhaps, has never existed but in the pages of Montesquieu and De Lolme, a preponderance is now silently yielded to one of the three estates, which carries the other two almost insensibly, but still effectually, along with it; and even though the path may lead eventually to destruction, yet its specious and gilded smoothness almost atones for the danger; and, like Milton's bridge over Chaos, it may be said to lead,

The drivelling correspondence between James I. and his “dog Steenie” (the Duke of Buckingham), which we find among the Hardwicke Papers, sufficiently shows, if we wanted any such illustration, into what doting, idiotic brains the plan of arbitrary power may enter.

Tacitus has expressed his opinion, in a passage very frequently quoted, that such a distribution of power as the theory of the British constitution exhibits is merely a subject of bright speculation, “a system more easily praised than practised, and which, even could it happen to exist, would certainly not prove permanent;” and, in truth, a review of England's annals would dispose us to agree with the great historian's remark. For we find that at no period whatever has this balance of the three estates existed; that the nobles predominated till the policy of Henry VII., and his successor reduced their weight by breaking up the feudal system of property; that the power of the Crown became then supreme and absolute, till the bold encroachments of the Commons subverted the fabric altogether; that the alternate ascendency of prerogative and privilege distracted the period which followed the Restoration; and that, lastly, the Acts of 1688, by laying the foundation of an unbounded court-influence, have secured a preponderance to the Throne, which every succeeding year increases. So that the vaunted British constitution has never perhaps existed but in mere theory.

The monarchs of Great Britain can never be sufficiently grateful for that accommodating spirit which led the Revolutionary Whigs to give away the crown, without imposing any of those restraints or stipulations which other men might have taken advantage of so favourable a moment to enforce, and in the framing of which they had so good a model to follow as the limitations proposed by the Lords Essex and Halifax, in the debate upon the Exclusion Bill. They not only condescended, however, to accept of places, but took care that these dignities should be no impediment to their “voice potential” in affairs of legislation; and although an Act was after many years suffered to pass, which by one of its articles disqualified placemen from serving as members of the House of Commons, it was yet not allowed to interfere with the influence of the reigning monarch, nor with that of his successor Anne. The purifying clause, indeed, was not to take effect till after the decease of the latter sovereign, and she very considerately repealed it altogether. So that, as representation has continued ever since, if the king were simple enough to send to foreign courts ambassadors who were most of them in the pay of those courts, he would be just as honestly and faithfully represented as are his people. It would be endless to enumerate all the favours which were conferred upon William by those “apostate Whigs.” They complimented him with the first suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act which had been hazarded since the confirmation of that privilege; and this example of our Deliverer's reign has not been lost upon any of his successors. They promoted the establishment of a standing army, and circulated in its defence the celebrated “Balancing Letter,” in which it is insinuated that England, even then, in her boasted hour of regeneration, was arrived at such a pitch of faction and corruption, that nothing could keep her in order but a Whig ministry and a standing army. They refused, as long as they could, to shorten the duration of parliaments; and though, in the Declaration of Rights, the necessity of such a reform was acknowledged, they were able, by arts not unknown to modern ministers, to brand those as traitors and republicans who urged it. But the grand and distinguishing trait of their measures was the power they bestowed on the Crown of almost annihilating the freedom of elections,—of turning from its course, and ever defiling that great stream of Representation, which had, even in the most agitated periods, reflected some features of the people, but which, from thenceforth; became the Pactolus, the “aurifer amnis,” of the court, and served as a mirror of the national will and popular feeling no longer. We need but consult the writings of that time, to understand the astonishment then excited by measures, which the practice of a century has rendered not only familiar but necessary. See a pamphlet called “The Danger of mercenary Parliaments,” 1698; State Tracts, Will. III. vol. ii.; see also “Some Paradoxes presented as a New Year's Gift” (State Poems, vol. iii.).

See a pamphlet published in 1693, upon the King's refusing to sign the Triennial Bill, called “A Discourse between a Yeoman of Kent and a Knight of a Shire.”— “Hereupon (says the Yeoman) the gentleman grew angry, and said that I talked like a base commons-wealth man.”

The last great wound given to the feudal system was the Act of the 12th of Charles II., which abolished the tenure of knight's service in capite, and which Blackstone compares, for its salutary influence upon property, to the boasted provisions of Magna Charta itself. Yet even in this Act we see the effects of that counteracting spirit which has contrived to weaken every effort of the English nation towards liberty. The exclusion of copyholders from their share of elective rights was permitted to remain as a brand of feudal servitude, and as an obstacle to the rise of that strong counterbalance which an equal representation of property would oppose to the weight of the Crown. If the managers of the Revolution had been sincere in their wishes for reform, they would not only have taken this fetter off the rights of election, but would have renewed the mode adopted in Cromwell's time of increasing the number of knights of the shire, to the exclusion of those rotten insignificant boroughs, which have tainted the whole mass of the constitution. Lord Clarendon calls this measure of Cromwell's “an alteration fit to be more warrantable made, and in a better time.” It formed part of Mr. Pitt's plan in 1783; but Pitt's plan of reform was a kind of announced dramatic piece, about as likely to be ever acted as Mr. Sheridan's “Foresters.”

------ fore enim tutum iter et patens
Converso in pretium Deo.
Aurum per medios ire satellites, &c.
Horat.

It would be a task not uninstructive to trace the history of Prerogative from the date of its strength under the Tudor princes, when Henry VII. and his successors “taught the people (as Nathaniel Bacon says) to dance to the tune of Allegiance,” to the period of the Revolution, when the Throne, in its attacks upon liberty, began to exchange the noisy explosions of Prerogative for the silent and effectual air-gun of Influence. In following its course, too, since that memorable era, we shall find that, while the royal power has been abridged in branches where it might be made conducive to the interests of the people, it has been left in full and unshackled vigour against almost every point where the integrity of the constitution is vulnerable. For instance, the power of chartering boroughs, to whose capricious abuse in the hands of the Stuarts we are indebted for most of the present anomalies of representation, might, if suffered to remain, have in some degree atoned for its mischief, by restoring the old unchartered boroughs to their rights, and widening more equally the basis of the legislature. But, by the Act of Union with Scotland, this part of the prerogative was removed, lest Freedom should have a chance of being healed, even by the rust of the spear which had formerly wounded her. The dangerous power, however, of creating peers, which has been so often exercised for the government against the constitution, is still left in free and unqualified activity; notwithstanding the example of that celebrated Bill for the limitation of this ever-budding branch of prerogative, which was proposed in the reign of George I. under the peculiar sanction and recommendation of the Crown, but which the Whigs thought right to reject, with all that characteristic delicacy, which, in general, prevents them when enjoying the sweets of office themselves, from taking any uncourtly advantage of the Throne. It will be recollected, however, that the creation of the twelve peers by the Tories in Anne's reign (a measure which Swift, like a true party man, defends) gave these upright Whigs all possible alarm for their liberties.

With regard to the generous fit about his prerogative which seized so unroyally the good king George I., historians have hinted that the paroxysm originated far more in hatred to his son than in love to the constitution. This, of course, however, is a calumny: no loyal person, acquainted with the annals of the three Georges, could possibly suspect any one of those gracious monarchs either of ill-will to his heir, or indifference for the constitution.

Historic. and Politic. Discourse, &c. part ii. p. 114.

Coxe says that this Bill was projected by Sunderland.

“They drove so fast (says Welwood of the ministers of Charles I.), that it was no wonder that the wheels and chariot broke.” (Memoirs, p. 35.)—But this fatal accident, if we may judge from experience, is to be imputed far less to the folly and impetuosity of the drivers, than to the want of that suppling oil from the Treasury which has been found so necessary to make a government like that of England run smoothly. Had Charles been as well provided with this article as his successors have been since the happy Revolution, his Commons would never have merited from him the harsh appellation of “seditious vipers,” but would have been (as they now are, and I trust always will be) “dutiful Commons,” “loyal Commons,” &c. &c., and would have given him ship-money, or any other sort of money he might have fancied.

Among those auxiliaries which the Revolution of 1688 marshalled on the side of the Throne, the bugbear of Popery has not been the least convenient and serviceable. Those unskilful tyrants. Charles and James, instead of profiting by that useful subserviency which has always distinguished the ministers of our religious establishment, were so infatuated as to plan the ruin of this best bulwark of their power, and, moreover, connected their designs upon the Church so undisguisedly with their attacks upon the Constitution, that they identified in the minds of the people the interests of their religion and their liberties. During those times, therefore, “No Popery” was the watchword of freedom, and served to keep the public spirit awake against the invasions of bigotry and prerogative. The Revolution, however, by removing this object of jealousy, has produced a reliance on the orthodoxy of the Throne, of which the Throne has not failed to take advantage; and the cry of “No Popery” having thus lost its power of alarming the people against the inroads of the Crown, has served ever since the very different purpose of strengthening the Crown against the pretensions and struggles of the people. The danger of the Church from Papists and Pretenders was the chief pretext for the repeal of the Triennial Bill, for the adoption of a standing army, for the numerous suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, and, in short, for all those spirited infractions of the constitution by which the reigns of the last century were so eminently distinguished. We have seen very lately, too, how the Throne has been enabled, by the same scarecrow sort of alarm, to select its ministers from among men, whose servility is their only claim to elevation, and who are pledged (if such an alternative could arise) to take part with the scruples of the King against the salvation of the empire.

Somebody has said, “Quand tous les poëtes seraient noyés, ce ne serait pas grand dommage;” but I am aware that this is not fit language to be held at a time when our birth-day odes and state-papers are written by such pretty poets as Mr. P---e and Mr. C*nn*ng. All I wish is, that the latter gentleman would change places with his brother P---e, by which means we should have somewhat less prose in our odes, and certainly less poetry in our politics.

“It is a scandal (said Sir Charles Sedley in William's reign) that a government so sick at heart as ours is should look so well in the face;” and Edmund Burke has said, in the present reign, “When the people conceive that laws and tribunals, and even popular assemblies, are perverted from the ends of their institution, they find in these names of degenerated establishments only new motives to discontent. Those bodies which, when full of life and beauty, lay in their arms and were their joy and comfort, when dead and putrid become more loathsome from remembrance of former endearments.” —Thoughts on the present Discontents, 1770.

Juvenal. Sat. x. v. 92.

The senate still continued, during the reign of Tiberius, to manage all the business of the public; the money was then and long after coined by their authority, and every other public affair received their sanction.

We are told by Tacitus of a certain race of men, who made themselves particularly useful to the Roman emperors, and were therefore called “instrumenta regni,” or “court tools.” From this it appears, that my Lords M---, C---, &c. &c. are by no means things of modern invention.

There is something very touching in what Tacitus tells us of the hopes that revived in a few patriot bosoms, when the death of Augustus was near approaching, and the fond expectation with which they already began “bona libertatis incassum disserere.”

According to Ferguson, Cæsar's interference with the rights of election “made the subversion of the republic more felt than any of the former acts of his power.” —Roman Republic, book v. chap. i.

Andrew Marvell, the honest opposer of the court during the reign of Charles the Second, and the last member of parliament who, according to the ancient mode, took wages from his constituents. The Commons have, since then, much changed their pay-masters. —See the State Poems for some rude but spirited effusions of Andrew Marvell.

The following artless speech of Sir Francis Winnington, in the reign of Charles the Second, will amuse those who are fully aware of the perfection we have since attained in that system of government whose humble beginnings so much astonished the worthy baronet. “I did observe (says he) that all those who had pensions, and most of those who had offices, voted all of a side, as they were directed by some great officer, exactly as if their business in this House had been to preserve their pensions and offices, and not to make laws for the good of them who sent them here.”—He alludes to that parliament which was called, par excellence, the Pensionary Parliament.

According to Xenophon, the chief circumstance which recommended these creatures to the service of Eastern princes was the ignominious station they held in society, and the probability of their being, upon this account, more devoted to the will and caprice of a master, from whose notice alone they derived consideration, and in whose favour they might seek refuge from the general contempt of mankind.—Αδοξοι οντες οι ευνουχοι παρα τοις αλλοις ανθρωποις και δια τουτο δεσποτου επικουρου προσδεονται.—But I doubt whether even an Eastern prince would have chosen an entire administration upon this principle.

“And in the cup an Union shall be thrown.” Hamlet.

Among the many measures, which, since the Revolution, have contributed to increase the influence of the Throne, and to feed up this “Aaron's serpent” of the constitution to its present healthy and respectable magnitude, there have been few more nutritive than the Scotch and Irish Unions. Sir John Packer said, in a debate upon the former question, that “he would submit it to the House, whether men who had basely betrayed their trust, by giving up their independent constitution, were fit to be admitted into the English House of Commons.” But Sir John would have known, if he had not been out of place at the time, that the pliancy of such materials was not among the least of their recommendations. Indeed, the promoters of the Scotch Union were by no means disappointed in the leading object of their measure, for the triumphant majorities of the court-party in parliament may be dated from the admission of the 45 and the 16. Once or twice, upon the alteration of their law of treason and the imposition of the malt-tax (measures which were in direct violation of the Act of Union), these worthy North Britons arrayed themselves in opposition to the court; but finding this effort for their country unavailing, they prudently determined to think thenceforward of themselves, and few men have ever kept to a laudable resolution more firmly. The effect of Irish representation on the liberties of England will be no less perceptible and permanent.

The infusion of such cheap and useful ingredients as my Lord L., Mr. D. B., &c. &c. into the legislature, cannot but act as a powerful alterative on the constitution, and clear it by degrees of all troublesome humours of honesty.

From Aratus (v. 715.) a poet who wrote upon astronomy, though, as Cicero assures us, he knew nothing whatever about the subject: just as the great Harvey wrote “De Generatione,” though he had as little to do with the matter as my Lord Viscount C.

The magician's shield in Ariosto:—

Cant. 2.

We are told that Cæsar's code of morality was contained in the following lines of Euripides, which that great man frequently repeated:—

This is also, as it appears, the moral code of Napoleon.

The following prophetic remarks occur in a letter written by Sir Robert Talbot, who attended the Duke of Bedford to Paris in 1762. Talking of states which have grown powerful in commerce, he says, “According to the nature and common course of things, there is a confederacy against them, and consequently in the same proportion as they increase in riches, they approach to destruction. The address of our King William, in making all Europe take the alarm at France, has brought that country before us near that inevitable period. We must necessarily have our turn, and Great Britain will attain it as soon as France shall have a declaimer with organs as proper for that political purpose as were those of our William the Third ------ Without doubt, my Lord, Great Britain must lower her flight. Europe will remind us of the balance of commerce, as she has reminded France of the balance of power. The address of our statesmen will immortalise them by contriving for us a descent which shall not be a fall, by making us rather resemble Holland than Carthage and Venice.” —Letters on the French Nation.

The king-deposing doctrine, notwithstanding its many mischievous absurdities, was of no little service to the cause of political liberty, by inculcating the right of resistance to tyrants, and asserting the will of the people to be the only true fountain of power. Bellarmine, the most violent of the advocates for papal authority, was one of the first to maintain (De Pontif. lib. i. cap. 7.), “that kings have not their authority or office immediately from God nor his law, but only from the law of nations;” and in King James's “Defence of the Rights of Kings against Cardinal Perron,” we find his Majesty expressing strong indignation against the Cardinal for having asserted “that to the deposing of a king the consent of the people must be obtained”—“for by these words (says James) the people are exalted above the king, and made the judges of the king's deposing,” p. 424.—Even in Mariana's celebrated book, where the nonsense of bigotry does not interfere, there may be found many liberal and enlightened views of the principles of government, of the restraints which should be imposed upon royal power, of the subordination of the Throne to the interests of the people, &c. &c. (De Rege et Regis Institutione. See particularly lib. i. cap. 6. 8. and 9.)—It is rather remarkable, too, that England should be indebted to another Jesuit for the earliest defence of that principle upon which the Revolution was founded, namely, the right of the people to change the succession.—(See Doleman's “Conferences,” written in support of the title of the Infanta of Spain against that of James I.)—When Englishmen, therefore, say that Popery is the religion of slavery, they should not only recollect that their own boasted constitution is the work and bequest of popish ancestors; they should not only remember the laws of Edward III., “under whom (says Bolingbroke) the constitution of our parliaments, and the whole form of our government, became reduced into better form;” but they should know that even the errors charged on Popery have leaned to the cause of liberty, and that Papists were the first promulgators of the doctrines which led to the Revolution.—In general, however, the political principles of the Roman Catholics have been described as happened to suit the temporary convenience of their oppressors, and have been represented alternately as slavish or refractory, according as a pretext for tormenting them was wanting. The same inconsistency has marked every other imputation against them. They are charged with laxity in the observance of oaths, though an oath has been found sufficient to shut them out from all worldly advantages. If they reject certain decisions of their church, they are said to be sceptics and bad Christians; if they admit those very decisions, they are branded as bigots and bad subjects. We are told that confidence and kindness will make them enemies to the government, though we know that exclusion and injuries have hardly prevented them from being its friends. In short, nothing can better illustrate the misery of those shifts and evasions by which a long course of cowardly injustice must be supported, than the whole history of Great Britain's conduct towards the Catholic part of her empire.

The “Sella Stercoraria” of the popes.—The Right Honourable and learned Doctor will find an engraving of this chair in Spanheim's “Disquisitio Historica de Papâ Fœminâ” (p. 118.); and I recommend it as a model for the fashion of that seat which the Doctor is about to take in the privy-council of Ireland.

When Innocent X. was entreated to decide the controversy between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, he answered, that “he had been bred a lawyer, and had therefore nothing to do with divinity.”—It were to be wished that some of our English pettifoggers knew their own fit element as well as Pope Innocent X.

Not the C---md---n who speaks thus of Ireland:— “To wind up all, whether we regard the fruitfulness of the soil, the advantage of the sea, with so many commodious havens, or the natives themselves, who are warlike, ingenious, handsome, and well-complexioned, soft-skinned and very nimble, by reason of the pliantness of their muscles, this Island is in many respects so happy, that Giraldus might very well say, ‘Nature had regarded with more favourable eyes than ordinary this Kingdom of Zephyr.’”

The example of toleration, which Bonaparte has held forth, will, I fear, produce no other effect than that of determining the British government to persist, from the very spirit of opposition, in their own old system of intolerance and injustice; just as the Siamese blacken their teeth, “because,” as they say, “the devil has white ones.”

See l'Histoire Naturelle et Polit. du Royaume de Siam, &c.

One of the unhappy results of the controversy between Protestants and Catholics, is the mutual exposure which their criminations and recriminations have produced. In vain do the Protestants charge the Papists with closing the door of salvation upon others, while many of their own writings and articles breathe the same uncharitable spirit. No canon of Constance or Lateran ever damned heretics more effectually than the eighth of the Thirty-nine Articles consigns to perdition every single member of the Greek church; and I doubt whether a more sweeping clause of damnation was ever proposed in the most bigoted council, than that which the Calvinistic theory of predestination in the seventeenth of these Articles exhibits. It is true that no liberal Protestant avows such exclusive opinions; that every honest clergyman must feel a pang while he subscribes to them; that some even assert the Athanasian Creed to be the forgery of one Vigilius Tapsensis, in the beginning of the sixth century, and that eminent divines, like Jortin, have not hesitated to say, “There are propositions contained in our Liturgy and Articles, which no man of common sense amongst us believes.” But while all this is freely conceded to Protestants; while nobody doubts their sincerity, when they declare that their articles are not essentials of faith, but a collection of opinions which have been promulgated by fallible men, and from many of which they feel themselves justified in dissenting,— while so much liberty of retractation is allowed to Protestants upon their own declared and subscribed Articles of religion, is it not strange that a similar indulgence should be so obstinately refused to the Catholics, upon tenets which their church has uniformly resisted and condemned, in every country where it has independently flourished? When the Catholics say, “The Decree of the Council of Lateran, which you object to us, has no claim whatever upon either our faith or our reason; it did not even profess to contain any doctrinal decision, but was merely a judicial proceeding of that assembly; and it would be as fair for us to impute a wife-killing doctrine to the Protestants, because their first pope, Henry VIII., was sanctioned in an indulgence of that propensity, as for you to conclude that we have inherited a king-deposing taste from the acts of the Council of Lateran, or the secular pretensions of our popes. With respect, too, to the Decree of the Council of Constance, upon the strength of which you accuse us of breaking faith with heretics, we do not hesitate to pronounce that Decree a calumnious forgery, a forgery, too, so obvious and ill-fabricated, that none but our enemies have ever ventured to give it the slightest credit for authenticity.”—When the Catholics make these declarations (and they are almost weary with making them), when they show, too, by their conduct, that these declarations are sincere, and that their faith and morals are no more regulated by the absurd decrees of old councils and popes, than their science is influenced by the papal anathema against that Irishman who first found out the Antipodes,—is it not strange that so many still wilfully distrust what every good man is so much interested in believing? That so many should prefer the dark-lantern of the 13th century to the sunshine of intellect which has since overspread the world, and that every dabbler in theology, from Mr. Le Mesurier down to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, should dare to oppose the rubbish of Constance and Lateran to the bright and triumphant progress of justice, generosity, and truth?

Strictures on the Articles, Subscriptions, &c.

Virgilius, surnamed Solivagus, a native of Ireland, who maintained, in the 8th century, the doctrine of the Antipodes, and was anathematised accordingly by the Pope. John Scotus Erigena, another Irishman, was the first that ever wrote against transubstantiation.

In a singular work, written by one Franciscus Collius, “upon the Souls of the Pagans,” the author discusses, with much coolness and erudition, all the probable chances of salvation upon which a heathen philosopher might calculate. Consigning to perdition without much difficulty Plato, Socrates, &c. the only sage at whose fate he seems to hesitate is Pythagoras, in consideration of his golden thigh, and the many miracles which he performed. But, having balanced a little his claims, and finding reason to father all these miracles on the devil, he at length, in the twenty-fifth chapter, decides upon damning him also. (De Animabus Paganorum, lib. iv. cap. 20. and 25.)—The poet Dante compromises the matter with the Pagans, and gives them a neutral territory or limbo of their own, where their employment, it must be owned, is not very enviable—“Senza speme vivemo in desio.”—Cant. iv.— Among the numerous errors imputed to Origen, he is accused of having denied the eternity of future punishment; and, if he never advanced a more irrational doctrine, we may venture, I think, to forgive him. He went so far, however, as to include the devil himself in the general hell-delivery which he supposed would one day or other take place, and in this St. Augustin thinks him rather too merciful—“Miserecordior profecto fuit Origenes, qui et ipsum diabolum,” &c. (De Civitat. Dei. lib. xxi. cap. 17.)—According to St. Jerom, it was Origen's opinion, that “the devil himself, after a certain time, will be as well off as the angel Gabriel”—“Id ipsum fore Gabrielem quod diabolum.” (See his Epistle to Pammachius.) But Halloix, in his Defence of Origen, denies strongly that this learned father had any such misplaced tenderness for the devil.

Mr. Fox, in his Speech on the Repeal of the Test Act (1790), thus condemns the intermixture of religion wih the political constitution of a state:—“What purpose (he asks) can it serve, except the baleful purpose of communicating and receiving contamination? Under such an alliance corruption must alight upon the one, and slavery overwhelm the other.”

Locke, too, says of the connection between church and state, “The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immoveable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in every thing, perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other.” —First Letter on Toleration.

The corruptions introduced into Christianity may be dated from the period of its establishment under Constantine, nor could all the splendour which it then acquired atone for the peace and purity which it lost.

There has been, after all, quite as much intolerance among Protestants as among Papists. According to the hackneyed quotation—

Even the great champion of the Reformation, Melanchthon, whom Jortin calls “a divine of much mildness and good-nature,” thus expresses his approbation of the burning of Servetus: “Legi (he says to Bullinger) quæ de Serveti blasphemiis respondistis, et pietatem ac judicia vestra probo. Judico etiam senatum Genevensem rectè fecisse, quod hominem pertinacem et non omissurum blasphemias sustulit; ac miratus sum esse qui severitatem illam improbent.”—I have great pleasure in contrasting with these “mild and good-natured” sentiments the following words of the Papist Baluze, in addressing his friend Conringius: “Interim amemus, mî Conringi, et tametsi diversas opiniones tuemur in causâ religionis, moribus tamen diversi non simus, qui eadem literarum studia sectamur.” —Herman. Conring. Epistol. par. secund. p. 56.

Hume tells us that the Commons, in the beginning of Charles the First's reign, “attacked Montague, one of the King's chaplains, on account of a moderate book which he had lately composed, and which, to their great disgust, saved virtuous Catholics, as well as other Christians, from eternal torments.”—In the same manner a complaint was lodged before the Lords of the Council against that excellent writer Hooker, for having, in a Sermon against Popery, attempted to save many of his Popish ancestors for ignorance.—To these examples of Protestant toleration I shall beg leave to oppose the following extract from a letter of old Roger Ascham (the tutor of Queen Elizabeth), which is preserved among the Harrington Papers, and was written in 1566, to the Earl of Leicester, complaining of the Archbishop Young, who had taken away his prebend in the church of York: “Master Bourne did never grieve me half so moche in offering me wrong, as Mr. Dudley and the Byshopp of York doe, in taking away my right. No byshopp in Q. Mary's time would have so dealt with me; not Mr. Bourne hymself, when Winchester lived, durst have so dealt with me. For suche good estimation in those dayes even the learnedst and wysest men, as Gardener and Cardinal Poole, made of my poore service, that although they knewe perfectly that in religion, both by open wrytinge and pryvie talke, I was contrarye unto them; yea, when Sir Francis Englefield by name did note me speciallye at the councill-board, Gardener would not suffer me to be called thither, nor touched ellswheare, saiinge suche words of me in a lettre, as, though lettres cannot, I blushe to write them to your lordshipp. Winchester's good-will stoode not in speaking faire and wishing well, but he did in deede that for me , whereby my wife and children shall live the better when I am gone.” (See Nugæ Antiquæ, vol. i. pp. 98, 99.)— If men who acted thus were bigots, what shall we call Mr. P*rc*v*l?

In Sutcliffe's “Survey of Popery” there occurs the following assertion:—“Papists, that positively hold the heretical and false doctrines of the modern church of Rome, cannot possibly be saved.”—As a contrast to this and other specimens of Protestant liberality, which it would be much more easy than pleasant to collect, I refer my reader to the Declaration of Le Père Courayer;—doubting not that, while he reads the sentiments of this pious man upon toleration, he will feel inclined to exclaim with Belsham, “Blush, ye Protestant bigots! and be confounded at the comparison of your own wretched and malignant prejudices with the generous and enlarged ideas, the noble and animated language of this Popish priest.”— Essays, xxvii. p. 86.

Sir John Bourne, Principal Secretary of State to Queen Mary.

By Gardener's favour Ascham long held his fellowship, though not resident.

“La tolérance est la chose du monde la plus propre à ramener le siècle d'or, et à faire un concert et une harmonie de plusieurs voix et instruments de différents tons et notes, aussi agréable pour le moins que l'uniformité d'une seule voix.” Bayle, Commentaire Philosophique, &c. part ii. chap. vi.— Both Bayle and Locke would have treated the subject of Toleration in a manner much more worthy of themselves and of the cause, if they had written in an age less distracted by religious prejudices.