greatest possible inclination to be merry at their expense. I understand that even Mr Brougham is exceeding ly ashamed of thein, and his late abstinence from exertion in the House, arises not from any meditations about changing his politics-a report which some of the very lowest of the Libe rals were the most industrious in disseminating-but merely through disgust at the folly of the party with which he has been connected, which operated upon him like sea-sickness whenever he went into the House. It is probable, however, that a little time will wear this off. Alas! for Huskisson, and his dolorific strains upon the pertinacious" misunderstanding" of the Duke-" præcipe lugubres cantus, Melpomene." Yet no; you have al ready given him his due, and he may now rest in quiet upon his pension, happy if his leisure will give him time to contemplate the real effect of the commercial policy he has pursued, and that contemplation lead him to assist in undoing the mischief he has done. The world has now excellent authority for believing that Mr Huskisson is a "man of sense;" if he use that sense, he must soon perceive what a vast deal of mischief he has done, and in his declining days, when a better system shall have taken place of his, it would be pleasant to hear him speak ing, like Æneas from his lofty couch, commending the return to the old prosperous rules, and contrasting the consequences, with the state of things which he in his error had brought about "Quæque ipse miserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui." As to the Stanleys and Normanbys the Preston Woods and Dover Thomp sons, and such like small fry, who put themselves in a passion, and endeavour to talk big in opposition-I really know not what to say of such sour skimmed milk. Hume has more sense than they, and magnanimously puts his objections to the candour of Ministers, protesting he has more confidence in them than in the House (of course he means that part of the House who do not vote with the Ministers.) I am sorry that poor Joseph brought upon himself the castigation about the palaces; he does not himself perceive the gross impropriety of the things he says, and there fore I think it would be but common humanity to receive his animadversions with some grains of allowance. I arrived in time to hear the debate on Mr Michael Angelo Taylor's motion about the I..250,000 which the Treasury lent out of the surplus of the money the French sent us at the close of the war, to the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, for the purpose of proceeding with Buckingham House improvements. There were grand hopes formed about this affair. It was considered quite a mare's nest by the Opposition, and mis-statements the most outrageous were flying about the town. The solemnity with which Mr Angelo Taylor opened the matter was extremely edifying; his pauses and his cadences gave fearful note of the dreadful tale he was about to communicate, and which at length he did communicate in a manner so tedious and so Why has not the old gentleman some one to take care of him, and put him to bed early? He is doubtless a pleasant enough person at home, but it is too bad that the House of Commons should be so taken up. Well, the whole affair was the least worthy of a fuss that could possibly be. Parliament had by one act recognised the expenses of Buckingham House, and appropriated indefinite funds towards it. Parliament had also recognised a surplus of the fund sent here by France to pay English claims, and had expressly provided in the act that the surplus should be at the disposal of the Treasury. The funds appropriated to the repair of Buckinghain House were found insufficient, and the Treasury, in pursuance of the act of Parliament, which they recited in their warrant, did dispose, as they were therein authorized. to do, of a part of the surplus fund sent here to defray English claims on France, in the way of loan to the Commissioners whose funds had been appropriated by Parliament to the repairs of Buckingham House. It is clear then that the Treasury did nothing but what Parliament had plainly authorized them to do; and if the thing were wrong, it was the error of Parliament in giving the permission, and not of the Treasury in acting under the permission. A good deal was said about the violated principle of no money being applied to any purpose without the consent of Parliament; but every one knows that this principle applies to the monies which have been raised by the consent and authority of Parlia❤ ment, and that this is the full extent to which the constitutional principle goes. Now this surplus money never was raised from the people by the authority of Parliament, and therefore the principle does not apply to it at all, and accordingly the Parliament had placed it at the discretionary disposal of the Treasury, without appropriation to any particular service. It is easy to give a false colouring to any matter by only stating part of a case, and as it is not regular to meet a public charge by any official statement till it is made in Parliament, an advantage is thereby gained for a time, which, as in the present case, is completely overthrown when the Parliamentary statement comes round. One excellent effect of the late changes, is, that Mr Peel seems to meet the impertinences of the left side of the House, with more vigour and spirit, than in the early part of the Session. I mentioned in a letter to you early in the year, that he was doing wrong, in dealing softly with these people. That is a part of the conciliation trash, and will never do; they must be scourged, for their respect is always very nearly allied to fear. The impertinences, however, are only troublesome for the instant, and not in the least dangerous; but there is another and quite an opposite line of tactics adopted by the outs, which is really dangerous, and which should be vigilantly guarded against. It is that "insidious eulogy" of which your last Maga speaks, which is nothing but a vile method of crawling into confidence; it succeeded before, and it will be tried again, but it ought, and I trust it will be scornfully repelled. If Mr Peel, or if any other Tory Minister, find any of these people crawling about his feet, creeping like adders out of their dunghill, I hope they will be used like adders, which the startled husbandman perceiving, strikes with his fork, and dashes them against the wall in anger and disgust. Mr W. Horton has been again at his emigration. This matter is now treated by the House as an “ amiable weakness" of the Right Hon. Gentleman. It is certain that he means well, and if upon this particular subject, he seems a little out of his right mind, it is but courteous to let him down easy, and in this respect I shall imitate the example of the Honourable House. There was, however, VOL. XXIV. something interesting to a man who reads reviews in the speech with which Mr Horton favoured the House. It is not quite new to the House to allude to these publications, but there was some novelty in regular citations, as authorities, from three of them. That Mr Horton should quote the Quarterly, and particularly an article which is, I believe, correctly attributed to Mr Southey, is very reasonable, on account of the high character of the reviewer, and the great attainments of the author of the particular article, which must both deserve and obtain respect any where. To the Edinburgh, too, some respect is due ; nor would I now, in the weakness of its declining years, seek to deprive it of the weight which its bygone vigour and early talent obtained for it in the world of letters. But I cannot conceive what Mr Horton expected to gain in the House of Commons by quoting "The Westminster." He might as well, when he was about it, have quoted the various dead walls, and beplastered gates about the me tropolis, where, in company with the celebrated names of Mr Hunt and Dr Eady, may be found, "Horton and Emigration," in good chalk characters, which I suppose must be taken as a succinct expression of admiration of the Emigration System, and its champion. For my own part, I should consider these same eulogies of the wall and gate, much more important, more read, and more influential, than those of The Westminster. However, Mr Horton has had the credit of its approbation in the House, of the which I wish him much joy. Up to this date, every thing goes on in the most satisfactory manner that a good Tory could desire. The King is in excellent health and spirits. The quarter's revenue presents a most favourable aspect. The divisions, night after night, in the House of Commons, shew the overwhelming strength of the Tories in that assembly. The weather is most propitious for the harvest; and altogether we get on most amazingly well. Long live the King to reign over us, and the Duke of Wellington to be his Prime Minister! Ever, my dear North, London, July 7, 1828. We live in an age which pre-eminently affects the title of philosophic, inquiring, and enlightened, and proceeds to establish its claim by sixpenny treatises on science, unworthy of even the sixpence; by insolently scorning and traducing every principle and institution valuable to our country; and by putting out the lights of moral experience with the one hand, and the lights of religion with the other. Who are the heroes of popularity among us now, and what are their expedients for fame? The men who run from the public assembly to the hovel, looking only for the means of public convulsion in both; turning with the speech of party-contumely and convicted baseness on their lips, to inflame the paltry irritations of the poor against their betters, into furious vindictiveness against the whole constitution of civil society who cannot plan a Mechanics' Institution, with out publicly applauding themselves on having prepared a new bed of riot and disordered dreams for the populace; nor harangue their audience of boors and blacksmiths, defrauded as they are of their time, money, and understanding, in listening to this nonsense, without telling them, in the gall of the most livid Jacobinism, that "their toe shall tread upon the heel of the noble." But the great object of their attacks is Christianity; and this they attack through its most perfect form among ourselves. The hideous superstitions of Popery, that compel man to shut up his Bible, bow down to a stock or a stone, and be the slave of a priest, adverse as all such restraints are to the vaunted love of universal freedom in the mouths of those traitors, become instantly entitled to their protection, when, through them, they can shake the Protestant Church. To shew by what struggles that church was erect ed, we shall give, from time to time, brief narratives of some of the found ers of the Reformation. The Apostles were commanded to go forth, not in the strength of human powers, not relying upon genius, eloquence, or authority, but in the strength of the gospel; and they conquered, where the noblest powers of man would have been but as the dust of the balance. The command was given for all times, as well as for the apostolic age. While it declared, that the great work of God was not to owe its triumph to any vanity of man, it declared, that simplicity, sincerity, and moral courage, qualities that may be found in every rank of man, however divested of the more showy gifts of nature or fortune, are enough to achieve the hallowed and immortal successes of the Gospel. No Christian can be suffered to shelter his indolence under the pretext, that he has not the brilliant faculties which influence the world. The mightiest changes that the earth has ever seen, were made by men whose chief talents were love of truth, love of man, and love of God. The life of the first Reformer of Switzerland is an illustrious example. Ulric Zuinglius was the son of a peasant of the Swiss valley of Tockenburg. He was destined for the church, and was sent successively to Basil, Bern, and Vienna, where he acquired the meagre literature usual in the fifteenth century, in the eighty-fourth year of which, on the 1st of January, he was born. After four years residence at Basil he was ordained by the Bishop of Constance, on being chosen by the burghers of Glaris as their pastor. From this epoch commenced his religious knowledge. It occurred to him, still in the darkness of Popery, that to be master of the true doctrines of Christianity, he should look for them, in the first instance, not in the writings of the doctors, nor in the decrees of councils, but in the Scriptures themselves. He began to study the New Testament, and found, what all men will find who study it in a sincere desire of the truth, and in an earnest and humble supplication to the God of all light and knowledge for wisdom, that in it was wisdom not to be taught by man. In this study he pursued a system essential to the right perception of the Scriptures. He was not content with reading over the text, he laboured to investigate its difficulties. He studied it in the original, and with so much diligence, that, to render its language familiar to his memory, he wrote out the entire Greek of St Paul's Epistles, and crowded the margin of his ma nuscript with notes of his own, and observations from the Fathers. As his knowledge grew, he was astonished to find, that some of those doctrines of the Romish Church, which he conceived fixed as fate, were not discoverable in the New Testament. To clear up his perplexing doubts, he peculiarly examined the texts on which the Canon of the Mass was declared to be founded; but by adopting the natural rule, of making Scripture its own interpreter, he convinced himself of the feebleness of the foundation. He now passed from discovery to discovery. He examined the writings of the primitive Fathers, the immediate followers of the apostolic age, and ascertained, that they differed in a singular degree from the prevalent doctrines of Rome. From the Fathers he passed down to a general study of the later theologians, and found in some, denounced by Rome as heretics, the very opinions which he had been taught by his solitary labour of the Scriptures. In the works of Bertram on the Eucharist, he found opinions in the ninth century opposed to those of the Papacy. In Wickliffe's writings he found fatal arguments against the Invocation of Saints, and Conventual Vows; and in those of Huss the Martyr, open and resistless reprobation of the tyranny of the Papal power, and the temporal ambition of the Romish priesthood. To eyes once opened by the Book of all holiness and wisdom, the delusion rapidly gave way on all sides. From seeing that the doctrines of the Romish Church were grounded on perverted interpretations or imperfect knowledge, he turned to its practices. In unaccountable contrast with the inspired denunciations of the worship of idols, he saw the people bowing down to images, and attributing the power of miracles to pictures, statues, and fragments of the dead. He saw the Scriptures, on one hand, proclaim ing ONE MEDIATOR, and one alone. He saw Papacy, on the other, proclaiming hundreds and thousands in saints, statues, and bones. One sacrifice, once offered for all," without money or without price," was the language of inspiration. A thousand, a million sacrifices every day, and for the individual who purchased them, was the act of Popery. "Be not lords over God's heritage," were the dying words of the Apostle. "Be kings, conquerors, rulers of all nations," was the maxim of those who declared that they held their right in virtue of St Peter's supremacy. "The servant of. the Lord must not strive," said the Scriptures. "The servant of the Lord must strive, and hunt down, and chain, and massacre those who will not believe that he is the Supreme Depository of the Wisdom of God, the Vicar of God on earth, the Spiritual Lord of mankind, the Opener of the Gates of heaven, the Sentencer of Eternal Misery to whom he will." It is one of the most admirable features in the character of Zuingle, that nothing could urge him into precipitancy. Those truths were irresistible, yet he knew the hazard even to truth from rashness. He had a double distrust, first of his own mind, next of that of the multitude. He felt, that the eagerness to throw off prejudices has sometimes been itself a prejudice; and he determined to abstain from all public declarations of his sentiments until they were unchangeable. To try them by every test, he kept up a private theological correspondence with a large circle of learned men; but in his sermons he avoided all dis pute, and by a course which is perhaps, after all, the true way to shake error from its strongholds, the simple preaching of the uncontradicted and essential doctrines of Christianity, he gradually softened the repugnance, and purified the corruption, of the public mind. In this course he continued for ten years. But his career was at length to receive a more vigorous and defined direction. It would be presumptuous to conceive, that Providence always overrules the common chances of life in favour of its distinguished servants; but the chief circumstances of Zuingle's life were among the most fortunate that a preacher of the Gospel could have chosen. The direction of the opulent and highly privileged abbey of Ginsie deln, in the canton of Schweitz, had been lately given to Theobald, Baron of Geroldseck, a man of noble birth, who, after receiving an education more fitted to the noble and the soldier than to the churchman, had become a monk. He brought with him from the world ideas superior to the cloister, and one of his first purposes was to make his community entitled to literary distinction. Zuingle's charac ter for intelligence and study reached him, and he offered the pastor of Glaris the preachership of the convent. Its opportunities of knowledge and literary association were so obvious, that Zuingle accepted the offer, though the people of Glaris were so much attached to him, that they kept their pulpit open for two years, in the hope that he might change his mind and return. At Ginsiedlen, Zuingle found all that was still necessary to invigorate and accomplish his mind for the great work that lay before him. The library contained the chief theological labours of the church, a large collection of the Fathers, and the volumes of the leading restorers of learning in Germany. Among the monks were some active and zealous minds, whose names are still distinguished among the Reformers. And at their head was a candid and high-spirited noble, who, in an age of papal violence, had the manliness to encourage their inquiries, the sincerity to follow the truth, and the singular intrepidity to reduce it to practice. Zuingle had no sooner proved that it was unscriptural to believe in the pardon of sins for money, than Geroldseck ordered the effacing of the inscription over the Abbey gate, "Here plenary remission of all sins is to be obtained." It was no sooner proved to him that the worship of relics was unholy, than he ordered the relics to be taken from the altars and buried. The nuns had hitherto read only the Romish liturgy; he ordered that they should be supplied with the New Testament. Their vows had hitherto been irrevocable; he ordered that all conventual license should be strictly restrained, but that every nun should be at liberty to leave the walls, and marry if she so willed. Under such a governor, prudence alone was necessary to solid success, and prudence was one of the finest attributes of Zuingle. In his twofold office of preacher and confessor, a rash or ambitious spirit might have had great means of disturbing the general peace by irritating public opinion. He wise ly abstained from this hazardous and fruitless course; left the prominent superstitions to be detected by the increasing intelligence of the people, and holily laboured to convince them only of righteousness, temperance, and judg ment to come. Thus, without offending their prejudices, he enlightened their understandings, and having disclosed the pure and visible beauty of the truths of God, safely left his hearers to sentence for themselves the humiliating observances, groundless doctrines, and tyrannical assumptions, of Rome. With the force of his clear and sincere mind turned to the great subjects of Christianity, he must have been in a constant advance to a more vigorous conviction of the errors of the Popish system; and the time must arrive when that conviction would declare itself. But the piety of Zuingle was the direct reverse of the desire of exciting popular passion. It has been remarked, by one who knew human nature well, that a reformer who seeks only improvement, applies to the higher ranks; but that he who seeks only innovation, applies to the lower. By the course of society, all benefi cial reform must be transmitted from the possessors of property, knowledge, and public experience, to their inferiors; with the educated the instrument must be reason, with the unedu cated the instrument is always violence. The first appeal of the Swiss Reformer, was to his ecclesiastical superiors. His addresses to the Bishop of Constance, and the Cardinal of Sion, pointed out for their correction the errors which it was in their power safely to extinguish, but which could not, without public danger, be left to be extinguished by the people. "The revival of letters," said some of those manly documents, "has lessened the popular credulity. The people begin to blame the idleness of the monks, the ignorance of the priesthood, and the misconduct of the prelates." "If care be not taken, the multitude will soon lose the only curb capable of restraining its passions, and will go on from disorder to disorder." "A reformation ought to be begun immediately, but it ought to begin with superiors, and spread from them to their inferiors. "If bishops were no longer seen to handle the sword instead of the crosier; and ecclesiastics of all kinds to dissipate in scandalous debauchery the revenues of their benefices, then we might raise our voices against the |
