LETTER ΤΟ SIR ARCHIBALD EDMONSTONE. MY DEAR SIR ARCHIBALD, We I GIVE you many thanks for the six Letters which you have done me the honour to send to me. differ; and you must allow me to express my opinions in terms as free, and I hope not less kind, than those which you have used towards me and that party to which in my insignificant political life I have always been attached. The tribunal before whom we stand-the Electors-is modern. It is the workmanship of Lord Grey, and it is most delightful to see you address it in terms so affectionate and respectful; for the time is not long gone by, since you Tories told us "that the Reform Bill is the greatest curse that ever was inflicted on Scotland, and fraught with every mischief under the sun." (9th August 1832.) You do not say so now. You tell the base ten-pounders how they must learn to love their native land, and teach their children to be citizens as well as men. To that I say Amen; and with purposes the same as yours, I feel it my duty to guard them against some false lessons you are unwittingly giving them in these letters. My You say that the Whigs look with jealousy to the Crown and the Aristocracy, and hold that the improvement taking place in the intellectual condition of the people entitles them to more weight in the Government. This is your character of the party. notion of a Whig goes deeper. Down to the Revolution, and a little longer, the aristocracy were personally attached to their own prince, and the people, by similar ties, to their respective landlords. In the days of Sir Robert Walpole these ties began to grow slack and fall away, and corruption became the mainspring of Government. This was avowed openly by the Tories of those days, the champions of Government; and when any motion was made to reduce sinecures or pensions, it was answered in plain A terms that it was dangerous, because it weakened Government too much. On such questions and on such grounds there was a constant struggle, and I remember but one occasion when it was carried, and that by a very small majority," that the power of the Crown had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished." Since that the whole system has gone to ruin. Joseph Hume has made sad havoc among the sinecures, and the people in the great manufacturing towns are too numerous even for England's wealth. Such being the fact, the old bonds of personal attachment and corruption having both failed, what are the new to be? how is the State to be held together?—what is to keep united the governors and the governed? I know but two schemes within the power of man. Bind the people to the laws by a representative government, such as will enable every man qualified to think and to act in such matters, to say, This is my constitution, these are my laws; or institute a military despotism, if you can. But you know you cannot: the days are gone by for such a system. Even Russia begins to totter. If, then, the nation is to be held together at all, the Government must have the confidence of the people. Without that confidence, the first misfortune that affects the interests or the feelings of the people must end in uproar and revolution. It is not the Crown, therefore, that the Whigs are afraid of — it is the people they are uneasy about; and they do not desire to see the influence of the people increased, because they have advanced in intelligence; but they desire to see their intelligence- religious, moral, and political cultivated, in order that they may be qualified for the exercise of those rights and that power which they ought to have which they must have, if this empire is to have a stable Government. You Tories surely may know, that the people of these three kingdoms cannot be resisted. From the year 1780, when George III., with a miserably bad grace, gave way to the Irish volunteers, down to May 1832, when the Duke of Wellington retired from office, so rashly taken, and besought Lord Grey to pass the Reform Bill, you have been from time to time yielding to the people, sore against your will. The only question between the two parties is, in truth, whether the people are to express their will by the legitimate organ of their Representatives in Parliament, or by a lawless array of physical force. Your partialities are against Parliament; you are unwilling to take that method of reconciling the people to the constitution of uniting the nation; you would willingly take your chance of another struggle other humiliation-another revolution. The policy of the Whigs, from the days of Charles Fox to these of Lord Melbourne, has been to sustain the constitution, to defend and vindicate the law, and preserve peace, good-will, and good order. You may call yourselves Conservatives, I have no doubt you think so; but - an you are in truth the great abettors of lawless violence and political destruction. You also tell us that Lord Melbourne and the British Cabinet are enemies to old-established institutions - turning their power against the bulwarks of Church and State. Now, Sir Archibald, I will not call you a liberal man the expression might be offensive; but I know you are an honest man a fair man a just man, and yet you persuade yourself that it is right to charge Ministry with such crimes, because you and they differ as to the measures by which the Church and the State are to be defended and sustained. You say the hostility which prevails against the Church is formidable. Lord Melbourne thinks it may be made less formidable-perhaps altogether subdued, by removing from her institutions whatever is unreasonable, unwise, iniquitous, and vexatious, even though it should cross the clergy, and be felt by them in the mean time as á blow against their ascendancy. The Bible says, "Woe to the city that is built in blood and established in iniquity!" The Church is no longer permitted to shed blood; and much has been done to reduce her iniquity; but Ministers think there are still some remnants, the removing of which would bring her without the range of this denunciation, and as near perfection as perhaps any human institution admits of. That you call levelling a deadly blow at the Protestant Religion, and in particular at the Protestant Establishments. It is curious to observe how exactly this language coincides with that held by the same incorporations more than 200 years ago, and on every occasion since, when any human being dared to say that either the one or the other was not perfect, or the clergy not infallible. It is very difficult to believe that each of the two Establishments in England and Scotland is perfect, and each of the clergies infallible; but that difficulty the Church of England got over by obliging the Scots to give way whenever they met. The earlier part of their doings is not universally known, and accounts for, and explains in a great measure, the spirit which now pervades that Church. The Church of Rome had a Liturgy, containing the prayers that were to be said, the particular passages of the Four Gospels and the Epistles which were to be read for every day in the year; containing also the Psalms that were to be sung. The Church of England thought it prudent to keep as close to Popery as possible, and she too had her Liturgy, containing either the same or similar excerpts from the Bible, with her prayers, and with the whole of the Psalms as they stood in the Bible, a prescribed portion to be read or chaunted at every service. There is also a table of directions prescribing what they call Lessons for every day in the year; that is, readings, the most of them out of the Bible; some of them out of the Apocrypha. King James, it is well known, appointed a commission of pious and learned men who made a new translation of the Bible. This was universally adopted by the Presbyterians and all denominations of Christians but two. The translators say they have been “ maligned and traduced by Popish persons at home and abroad; and by self-conceited brethren who run their own ways, and give liking to nothing but what is framed by themselves, and hammered on their own anvil." By these two parties, these pious learned men were so traduced, and their work was pronounced to be a heavy blow against religion. Still the new translation having been received by the majority of the Church, it seemed a matter of course that the Liturgy should be corrected accordingly; and it does appear, that in the next edition the new translation of the Gospels and the Epistles was adopted; but the old Psalms were retained; so that there remained one version of that most precious of all the Old Testament books,—justly said by one of the earliest fathers of the church, to compose a complete system of divinity for the use and edification of the Christian people, in the Bible, and another, miserably inferior, in the Prayer Book. Still there always was in the Church a considerable number of pious learned men, who were sorry to see this blemish in a Liturgy which is in many other points excellent and beautiful. These individuals had at the same time their doubts and their feelings as to the lessons out of the Apocrypha, and could not persuade themselves that Susanna and the Elders was a fit companion for Isaiah. In these circumstances, the House of Lords (1641) granted a commission to the Archbishop of Armagh, the Bishop of Lincoln, Dr. Prideaux, Dr. Ward, Dr. Brownrigg, Dr. Featly, Dr. Hacket, and others, to consider the matter. These divines agreed that the Liturgy should be amended—that great portions of the Bible which had been left out should be substituted in place of the Apocryphal lessons, and the new translation of the Psalms, as it stood in the new Bible, adopted in place of the old. Such was the order of the Church, down to the Restoration, when Charles the Second, who had agreed to give the High Church Episcopal party their will over all the religion of the three kingdoms, met the Convocation in London, and reversed everything. The new translation of the Psalms was scored out, and everything that was old resumed. "So very nice and exact were the High party, that they would not so much as forbear the lessons of the Apocrypha; insomuch, that after a long tugg at the Convocation. House about that matter, a good doctor came out with great joy, that they had carried it for Bel and the Dragon!" (Calamy's Life of Baxter.) In the same year (1661) the national vow and covenant was burned in the street by the hands of the common hangman. These are your own predecessors, Sir Charles, the Conservatives of the good old times; and the consequences were just what must follow your policy, if you have your will,—which God forbid ! - some An Act of Parliament was passed, commanding all England to worship God according to this Liturgy. A great proportion of the ministers and the people refused. The ministers were then told, that if they persisted they must leave the church. They protested, and, among other reasons, for the following: Because "They must consent to read Apocryphal Lessons in the public churches, which they could not agree to, because of such fabulous legends of Tobit and his Dog, Bel and the Dragon, Judith and Baruch, &c. These they found were not only to be read wholly and entirely, morning and evening, for two months together, but all of them also under title and notation of Holy Scriptures. For in the whole lump together they are styled in the Order, without any note of discrimination to make a distinction between one and the other. In the same Order, as appears by the Calendar, some books of the Sacred Canon (Scripture) are wholly left out, and never to be read, some of them within a very little, of them but half to be read; - and many of them mutilated and curtailed as to several chapters." (Ibid.) Further—“The Psalter (the Psalms) is particularly mentioned in the verbal declaration required of every incumbent. It must be assented and consented to as having nothing in it contrary to the word of God. To this they could not agree, because they found several mistranslations in the old version of the Psalms, which were indeed more accommodated to the Septuagint* than to the original Hebrew." These are the words of Dr. Edmund Calamy, a man of piety and learning, and of inflexible integrity. Charles the Second offered to make him Bishop of Litchfield, if he would only consent to teach this confusion of writings, sacred and profane; but no earthly consideration would move him to remain in a Church, which had removed itself so far from the truth, as well as the simplicity of primitive Christianity. He would not, and he, along with about two thousand more ministers, were driven from the Church, and cast upon the benevolence of their flocks. Still the Conservatives were not satisfied. They insisted on flogging some of their brethren from end to end of London, others had their ears cut off, and their noses slit up. Laws were passed for punishing by fine and imprisonment any one who presumed to attend any place of worship out of the Establishment; and Judge Jeffries went about. sometimes sober, oftener drunk condemning men and women by scores. The same policy was followed in Scotland; but the infatuated Church gained no ground. The blood that was shed produced what Sir Walter Scott very happily calls a "fierce thirst for innovation." When a family saw the father taken out of his own house, bound hand and foot, and shot before the summer-seat in his little garden when they heard the gallant fellow who presided ask the mother what she * A very slovenly Greek translation |