as the lying and blasphemous legends of a fraudulent superstition are by another; but if the former party are more successful in the metropolis and in large towns, the propogandists of the Monkish and Marian* religion have greater facilities for distributing their wares throughout the provinces; and none of that mischief is even attempted there which is carried on throughout these kingdoms by periodical publications, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, and by some or other of these introduced into the remotest parts of the country. There are few towns, however small, in which a knot of scoffers and infidels may not be found in the lower walks of life, disciples usually of some sharp-witted, readytongued, and coarse-minded unbeliever, who has cast off the restraints of duty, and is too ignorant even to suspect himself of any deficiency in knowledge. There is scarcely a village into which opinions hostile to the Church Establishment, and to Christianity itself, are not carried, in the former case insolently, in the latter with more or less disguise, to the alehouse fireside, (Ma * I thank the Jesuits for teaching me that word.' cedo. Divi Tutelares, p. 75.) Fr. Wichmans (a Norbertine, or Premontren, Canon of Tongerloo) addresses his Brabantia Mariana, Lectori Mariano,..a most useful distinction this between the Christian and the Marian faith! by some provincial journal, professedly enlisted in the service of a political faction, but aiming directly at this end. Moreover, there are London booksellers who carry on a trade in blasphemy, and their productions, which are as ignorant as they are impious, are dispersed gratuitously. I have heard of instances in which country tradesmen have received them with their goods; should they be addressed to a person of good principles, who resents such an importation, the plea is, that they had been made use of as waste paper, without any knowledge of their contents; but the desired object is gained if, as is more likely, they fall into the hands of shopmen, or shopboys, who are in a state to receive the infection. Whence the funds are derived for this distribution, and for supporting the frequent prosecutions which have been brought against the publishers and venders of such poisons, has not come to light: but there are amateurs of infidelity in high life; this is one of the ways in which superfluous wealth has been misemployed, and in no way can its misapplication have produced more misery and evil. SIR THOMAS MORE. Misery and evil, indeed, for those who are taken in the snare,..and for those who spread it; for woe to them by whom the offence cometh! But it is not thus that a nation can be made irreligious. Religion is too natural a feeling, too essential to the being, too necessary for the heart of man, for its general influence to be suspended, or even endangered by such means, so long as it shall be seen and known to exist in any part of the community as a living and actuating principle. And this it will ever be in countries where it has once been firmly established, in however corrupt a form. Opinions may be changed, belief may be shaken, institutions modified or subverted, a false system may even prevail over the true; but while men are subject to disease, infirmity, and affliction, and death, the good never will exist without the hopes of religion, the wicked never without its fears. The vulgar retailers of infidelity can never shake this foundation. MONTESINOS. Alas! for human nature, when those hopes and fears are no longer under the regulation of a reasonable faith! When hope and fear break loose from that restraint, men become priestridden or devil-ridden, and yield themselves up to the horrors of the bloodiest Heathenism, or to the loathsome and pitiable extravagancies of the basest Monkery, as frightened horses plunge from a precipice, or dash themselves headlong against whatever opposes their way. SIR THOMAS MORE. You, however, are in a state of society wherein the one of these extremes is impossible, the other not to be apprehended. MONTESINOS. Great and irreparable injury may, nevertheless, be done. Even such miserable labourers loosen the cement of society, while the more skilful engineers of evil are sapping and mining, and preparing the train for an explosion. As yet, however, the mischief has not spread widely in this lower grade; and it is precisely in that grade, also, that the counteracting spirit of fanaticism operates with most effect: and although men pass, as may be expected, from one extreme to the other, it is generally, by God's mercy, toward the better that they gravitate at last. But, in the educated classes, the balance of religious feeling is as much in favour of England, when compared with Roman-Catholic countries, as it may seem to be against it in the inferior ones. True it is that young men, who have just entered upon manhood, if they have an ambitious propensity for intellectual exercitation, and if the foundation has either been neglected or unwisely laid, pass commonly through a stage of scepti cism, or unbelief; presumptuous youth is as liable to it as childhood to the small-pox and measles; the disease, too, is as rife and contagious as either, and sometimes draws after it injurious consequences, which long continue to be felt, sometimes lays fatal hold. True it is that there are circles where dogmatical Atheism struts and crows upon its dunghill;.. that it has laid its eggs in seminaries founded for far other purposes, where its cockatrices are hatched and fostered, and from whence they come into the walks of life, hissing, wriggling, and venomous. True it is that there is an active and influential party in literature and in the state with whom blank unbelief is the esoteric doctrine, and who seek on all occasions industriously to wound and weaken what public opinion, and a regard to their own interest, withholds them from attacking openly. But the great and quiet body of the English gentry walk in the ways of their fathers, and hold fast to that Church for which Laud and his King suffered on the scaffold, and the noble army of our earlier martyrs at the stake. They hold to it with a sober and sedate, but sincere and strong attachment. Even the Dissenters, who rise into this rank, seldom continue in their nonconformity: their views are altered with their station; they see and under |