not but revive all the foolish alarms of the one, and the impotent spleen of the other. The far less agreeable office now remains to be discharged, of tracing such attempts to counteract it, as those persons have been making with sufficient openness to meet the eye; for a great part of their machinations has been of a nature to shun the light. This we shall do as briefly as possible; and, where the adversaries of the system have been so ill advised as to betake themselves to argument, we shall probably require all the indulgence of our readers, when we detain them with an exposition, or an answer.

It fell to our lot, upon a former occasion, to record the efforts so strenuously and fruitlessly made by the leaders of this opposition, the late Mrs Trimmer and Mr Archdeacon Daubeny. The press and the pulpit in vain sounded the alarm with which those reverend personages were willing to inspire the Church and the State. The patronage of the King was a tower of strength; Mr Lancaster was not overwhelmed by a cry; and time was given to the good sense of the country, which speedily, and with authority, extinguished the rising flame. Attempts of a different kind were therefore necessary; and it was proposed to wean the Sovereign from his unfortunate predilection in favour of those who wished to diffuse, on the cheapest terms, the most useful kinds of knowledge among his poorer subjects. Persons were not wanting, nor those in the lowest ranks of the church, who volunteered their services on this occasion. But those reverend (we believe we might use the superlative) and enlightened characters mistook the man they had to deal with. They imagined that alarm was the proper engine. To work upon the fears of him who never knew what fear was, seemed to them, in the fulness of their zeal, and out of that abundant knowledge of human nature which their courtly lives had given them, the best mode of accomplishing their object. They remembered the excellent use which had been made of the No Popery cry; and vainly imagining that the King had been the dupe of that delusion-that his royal mind had in good earnest been alarmed for the safety of the Church-they concluded that it was peculiarly accessible to alarms of this description; and they took every means to magnify the dangers which must result from his Majesty continuing to patronise a sectary, who taught reading, and put the Bible itself into childrens' hands, without the safeguards of proper gloss and commentary, and a regular assortment of articles. We are credibly informed, that the utmost effect of these artifices was, to provoke the steady contempt of the exalted Personage in question; and that he never could, by any ef

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forts, be induced to get over the first difficulty which met him, in the finespun Jesuitical reasonings of those ghostly counsellors, -"The evils of being able to read;"-" the dangers of reading the Bible." The tempters soon perceived that they had made. another mistake; and, once more, they shifted their ground. They found, that a prelate of immense revenues, and of munificence becoming the wealth whereof he is trustee for the Church, had, about this very time, by a fortunate concurrence of circumstances, begun to patronize Dr Bell, and had founded a school upon his plan. Here, then, was a fair field for their arts. If the poor must be educated, let them be educated by clergymen of the Establishment. If any thing so unworthy of his station, as patronizing the teachers of ragged beggarHings, must occupy the mind of the Sovereign, let him bestow those favours exclusively on members of the Church. What though Dr Bell's plan is more limited in its efficacy, infinitely inferior in economy, crude and imperfect in many of the most essential parts, still it comes off a right stock, and is wholly in regular, episcopalian hands. Grant that, imperfect as it is, we can scarcely meet with it but on paper; and should find no small difficulty in discovering half a dozen persons, in any part of the island, who had ever seen one of his school rooms ;still the fact is undisputed, that Dr Bell is a churchman, and, though a Scotchman, has received regular episcopal ordination: Whom, therefore, but Dr Bell should a religious monarch, the head of the church, honour with his countenance? Once more the serpent was found more malignant than dangerous: there was the venom and the eye, but there was the rattle too; and he retired to meditate how he might charm more wisely.

The effrontery of the next attempt is more to be admired than its cunning. Finding how vain were all their efforts to work upon the Sovereign, those pious persons, or their coadjutors, bethought them of inflicting upon Mr Lancaster, by the established weapon of falsehood, the very injuries which would have resulted from the Royal patronage being actually withdrawn. They did not scruple to propagate in all quarters the report, that the King had at last opened his eyes to the dangers of the Church, and the merits of Dr Bell, and had given up Mr Lancaster and his system. A lie, however daring, is nothing, without its com→ plement of circumstances. Among other proofs of the charge which had taken place, it was industriously circulated that his Majesty had withdrawn his annual subscription from the fund: And these reports were generously propagated by the holy and loyal characters alluded to, at the moment when indisposition: had made such ravages in the royal mind, as to render a contradiction

tradiction extremely difficult, and, in some measure, to secure them from the dangers consequent upon a detection. The effects of this base contrivance were extremely encouraging to its authors. At last, they had succeeded in reaching the foundations of Mr Lancaster's plan. The subscriptions began to fall off in the most alarming manner; and the scheme might have been utterly ruined, had not an authoritative contradiction to the story been obtained from the Royal Family; which, added to the increased zeal of the Prince Regent for its success, once more entirely frustrated the inventions of its enemics. In one of the papers now before us, Mr Lancaster feelingly describes the immediate effects of this vile artifice; and asserts that, to this present day, so industriously was it diffused, accounts of its appearance in remote parts continue to reach him.

Thus foiled in every quarter (for we may safely presume that the junto have used no small portion of their accustomed activity and address upon the Prince Regent also) they appear to have thought an interval of repose their best policy; and resolved to wait for events, as politicians say when things wear an unsatisfactory aspect-or to leave things to Providence, as Bubb Doddington used to do when he had failed in some pitiful intrigue-they remained inactive during the first months of the Regency. The probable recovery of the King, and their absolute certainty that returning health would exhibit to them once more the hated spectacle of his steadiness to an honest purpose, prevented them from taking any steps towards exciting an alarm, which they well knew the Monarch would discourage. What they can have seen in the Prince, to induce a contrary expectation with respect to his conduct, we are at a loss to fancy. In warmth of attachment to the new system, the son has even gone beyond the father; and we will venture to predict, that, with his crown, he inherits such a portion of that most royal virtue, steadiness towards his friends, as will bring to a still greater shame than they have even yet experienced, the artful intriguers whose conduct we are unwillingly obliged to contemplate. But whether it is, that the season of political change and uncertainty is reckoned favourable to church cabals; or that some enemies of the Prince have so far traduced his character, as to inspire those designing men with hopes; or that they are desperate, and resolved to take their chance, aware that they cannot fall lower:-certain it is, that the cry of danger to the Church has once more been raised, and in a far louder note, and in much more important quarters, than during any former part of the controversy.

The

. The Daubenies, Trimmers, and Spries, with the strange mystical personage who lectures against education at our Institutions, being now found quite unequal to the office of raising this alarm, recourse has been had to the greater engines of the Church:And first appears Mr Professor Marsh-a person adorned with various and weighty titles, and occupying the Divinity Chair in one of the Universities-celebrated too, we have no doubt, for his attainments in science, which have placed him in the Royal Society-distinguished, it may be presumed, among his reverend brethren, for a peculiar devotion to the duties of the clerical character and the service of the Church, whose dangers seem uppermost in his thoughts, but, unquestionably, a good deal better known to the world as the author of a bulky ministerial pamphlet in defence of the war, than in any of his other capacities. This very circumstance, however, of his political services, the noted fact of his being a favoured writer in the interests of the court, and, consequently, of his belonging to the class of safe and flourishing politicians,-pointed him out as the proper person to begin this new charge. A sort of dignitary of the Church-one designated for its most snug, if not most splendid gifts-a Prebendary, if not a Bishop elect-would not only lead the cry with authority, but would show the way to others, inducing them to fill up the concert, by setting before them the edifying example of a flourishing man devoted to this work. When Mr Professor Marsh walks in this way, it is safe to follow-is a thought that has probably passed already in the mind of many a score in our universities and parsonages.

From this quarter, therefore, hath proceeded one sermon, preached of course in St Paul's, and sundry letters, forming a little volume-besides whatever he may have contributed, in private, to the columns of the Treasury Journals. For, these respectable and enlightened publications no sooner heard that a new cry of the Church in danger was abroad, than, probably without waiting for instructions, they took it to be clear that it was in favour of their employers, and must needs turn to some account. To the sermon, however, we now confine our attention,-observing only, that it contains whatever the other dealers in clamour have got up for the present occasion; and that the best and most moderate of these, is certainly Mr Bowyer. We must now beg our readers not to be alarmed at the notion, that we are going to plunge into a theological controversy, for which we have neither the learning nor the gall!--nor let it be thought that we are disposed to treat irreverently any thing which comes from the ministers of religion in the discharge of their holy office. When the pulpit is kept pure by the teachers

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of the Gospel, and the people only receive from it the blessings of religious instruction, we behold them with reverence, and approach with dread the combined sanctities of the place, the persons and the doctrines. But when it is perverted to common secular purposes, (a prostitution become almost habitual since the French revolution) ;--when we find it made a mere rostrum from whence the vulgar effusions of political faction may be distributed, under the disguise of Christian homilies, and the mul titude cajoled with the jobs of a party, by its emissaries in the pious garb of spiritual pastors ;-then we view the ground as no longer holy; the gods are evoked; the priests are gone; and there remains only an ordinary political theatre, filled with the noisy passions of the forum,-but more ignoble, from the falseness of the arts with which it is thinly covered over.

The sermon of Professor Marsh is intended as a recommendation of Dr Bell's plan in preference to Mr Lancaster's, on this single ground, that Dr Bell is a churchman, and Mr Lancaster #sectary. This consideration comprises the whole of the superiority which he claims for that reverend person. He enters into no comparative statement of the efficacy or economy of the two systems, in teaching children the different branches of education. He does not pretend that Mr Lancaster's is incompatible with every additional article taught by Dr Bell's. He cannot affect to think, that schools might not be arranged on Mr Lancaster's, where the Creed, as well as the Bible, should be taught. He cannot hold out Dr Bell's plan as having any sort of superiority in teaching the Liturgy, any more than he can maintain that it has a nonopoly of prayer-books. His whole objections, therefore, are really extrinsic to the two systems and their merits;-they est simply on the admitted fact, that the author of the one is a Quaker, and the author of the other a person in holy orders. We have said, that schools might be established in every parish on Mr Lancaster's plan ;-we may add, established by the Committee of the New Institution; and that, in every such school, the Liturgy of the Church of England may be taught. But, suppose the question respected Mr Lancaster's own school, in which, as a dissenter, he cannot teach the Liturgy-It is not pretended that he teaches any thing else; he gives his boys no creed of his own: How, then, do his pupils receive injury in their spiritual concerns? Such of them as belong to Episcopalian families learn to read their prayerbook; such as belong to dissenting parents learn to read their hymn-book; while all of them learn Christianity by reading constantly their Bible. This is true, unless Professor Marsh shall be able to prove, that a child taught to read all the words