LIBRARY 
 
 r TJIK 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 O] 
 
 September ,. ../cV 
 
 Accessions No. ^7^ Shelf No. 
 

DR. CHALMERS' WORKS. 
 
 Complete and Uniform Edition, now Publishing in Quarterly 
 J^olumes, \2rno, Price 6s. cloth. 
 
 ALREADY P U B L I S II E D. 
 
 VOLS, I, II. On NATURAL THEOLOGY. 
 
 These two volumes contain the BRIDGE WATER TREATISE; besides which 
 about one half of them consists of original matter. 
 
 Ill, IV. On the Miraculous and Internal EVIDENCES 
 of the CHRISTIAN REVELATION, and the Au- 
 thority of its Records. 
 
 These two volumes contain the whole of DR. CHALMERS' former work on 
 the Evidences of Christianity ; besides which as will be seen from the 
 Contents about three fourths of them consist of entirely new matter. 
 
 V. Sketches of MORAL & MENTAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 This volume has never before been published. 
 
 VI. DISCOURSES on the Application of Christianity to 
 
 the Commercial and Ordinary Affairs of Life. 
 This Volume, besides the former eight Discourses, contains eight addi- 
 tional Discourses of a kindred character, several of them never before pub- 
 lished. 
 
 VII. DISCOURSES on the Christian Revelation, viewed 
 
 in connection with the Modern Astronomy. 
 This volume, in addition to the former seven Astronomical Discourses, 
 contains seven additional Discourses of a kindred character, some of which 
 h;ive never before been published. 
 
 VIII. CONGREGATIONAL SERMONS, Vol. I. 
 
 This volume contains several new sermons. 
 
 IX. CONGREGATIONAL SERMONS, Vol. II. 
 
 About one half of the eighteen Sermons in this volume are altogether new. 
 
 X. CONGREGATIONAL SERMONS, Vol. III. 
 
 This Volume concludes the Congregational Sermons, arid consists alto- 
 gether of new Sermons, none of which have been published before. 
 
 Volume XI will appear on the 1st of July, consisting of Ser- 
 mons preached on Public Occasions, several of which hare 
 never before be n published. 
 
 ** As many conceive that this new and uniform edition of DR. CHALMERS* 
 WORKS is merely a reprint of his former published Works, the Publisher 
 deems it proper particularly to state, that a large portion of li the vo- 
 lumes have never before been published, and that the whole haw been 
 carefully revised by the Author. 
 
WORKS OF DR. CHALMERS. 
 
 LECTURES ON THE EPISTLE OFPAULTHE APOSTLE 
 TO THE ROMANS. Vol. I, 8vo, 10s. 6d. 
 
 The Second Volume will be Published in July. 
 
 ON THE MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONSTITU- 
 TION OF MAN. Fourth Edition, 2 vols. 8vo, cloth, 16s. 
 
 ON POLITICAL ECONOMY IN CONNECTION WITH 
 THE MORAL STATE AND MORAL PROSPECTS 
 OF SOCIETY. Second Edition, 8vo, cloth, 12s. 
 
 CHRISTIAN & CIVIC ECONOMY OF LARGE TOWNS. 
 
 3 vols. 8vo, cloth, 26s. 
 
 SERMONS PREACHED IN ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, 
 GLASGOW. 8vo, cloth, 10s. 6d. 
 
 SERMONS PREACHED IN THE TRON CHURCH, 
 GLASGOW. Third Edition, 8vo, cloth, 10s. 6d. 
 
 DISCOURSES ON THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION 
 VIEWED IN CONNECTION WITH THE MODERN 
 ASTRONOMY. Eleventh Edition, 8vo, cloth, 8s. 
 
 THE APPLICATION OF CHRISTIANITY TO THE 
 COMMERCIAL AND ORDINARY AFFAIRS OF 
 LIFE. Sixth Edition, 8vo, cloth, 8s. 
 
 SERMONS PREACHED ON PUBLIC OCCASIONS. 
 8vo, cloth, 10s, 6d. 
 
 SPEECHES AND TRACTS. 8vo, cloth, 8s. 6d. 
 
 ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF LITERARY AND EC- 
 CLESIASTICAL ENDOWMENTS. 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 SCRIPTURE REFERENCES, designed for the use of Sab- 
 bath Schools, &c., 18mo, 4d.; or with the verses printed in 
 full, for the use of Parents, Teachers, &c., 18mo, cloth, 3s. 
 
 THE Publisher begs leave to intimate that as the 8vo Editions of several of 
 Dr. Chalmers' Works are nearly out of print, and as some of them will not 
 probably be again reprinted in (he same form, tlx.se who wish to complete 
 their sets of his works in 8vo arc requested to make an early application to 
 their own Booksellers, who will easily obtain them fiom the Publisher, or 
 from his London Agents. 
 
LECTUKES 
 
 ON 
 
 THE ESTABLISHMENT AND EXTENSION 
 
 OF 
 
 NATIONAL CHURCHES; 
 
 DELIVERED IN LONDON, 
 
 FROM APRIL 25th TO MAY 12th, 1838; 
 
 THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D.&LL.D., 
 
 h 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 
 
 AND CORRESPONDING MEMUMMWUYAL INSTITUTE OF FRANCE. 
 
 GLASGOW : 
 
 WILLIAM COLLINS, 7 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET. 
 LONDON: HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. 
 
 1838, 
 
GLASGOW: 
 WILI.TAM COLLINS & CO., PRINTERS, CANDI.F.RIGG COTRT. 
 
PREFATORY NOTICE. 
 
 THESE Lectures were undertaken, and are 
 now published, at the request of the " Chris- 
 tian Influence Society." 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 Statement of the Question respecting a National Establish- 
 ment of Christianity ; and Exposure of the Misconceptions 
 regarding it 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 Vindication of a Religious National Establishment, in Op- 
 position to the Reasonings and Views of the Economists 42 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 Vindication of a National Religious Establishment, in Op- 
 position to the views of those who allege the Sufficiency 
 of the Voluntary Principle - 77 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 On the Circumstances which determine a Government to 
 select one Denomination of Christianity for the National 
 Religion . . . .113 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 On a Territorial Establishment, and the Reasons of its 
 Efficacy . . . . . .140 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 Circumstances which justify a Government, that has as- 
 sumed one from among the several Denominations of 
 Evangelical Protestantism, for the National Establish- 
 ment, in abiding by the Selection which it has made . 166 
 
LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION RESPECTING A NATIONAL 
 ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRISTIANITY; AND EXPOSURE OF 
 THE MISCONCEPTIONS REGARDING IT. 
 
 1. THERE is a felt indisposition on the part of 
 certain religionists to the question of an Establish- 
 ment ; and that just because it appears to them a 
 mere question of machinery. They view it as at 
 best an earthly expedient for the diffusion and 
 settlement of Christianity in the world. It seems 
 with them to imply a distrust in the efficacy of 
 divine grace ; nor can they find room in their con- 
 templation for the respective parts, which belong 
 to the agency of God and the instrumentality of 
 man, in the great work of providing for the re- 
 ligious education of the people. Such is the ho- 
 mage which these men, of strong but unintelligent 
 piety, would render to the supremacy of that Being 
 who rules and actuates and determines all things. 
 In the entireness of their dependence upon Him, 
 they would themselves do nothing as if in things 
 
10 
 
 sacred, and more especially in the affairs of the 
 church upon earth, human skill and human activity 
 were alike uncalled for. 
 
 2. To meet their antipathy in this very general 
 form, it might be perhaps enough to say, that, if 
 acted upon or carried into effect, it were in utter 
 violation of all the analogies both of nature and of 
 providence. In the business, for example, of agri- 
 culture, as well as of seamanship and the arts, do 
 we behold processes of human contrivance, adapted 
 to powers that often, in their principle and mode 
 of operation, are altogether beyond the reach of 
 human comprehension. And certain it is, that 
 the dependence we ought to feel on the Sovereign 
 of our world, for the shower and the sunshine, and 
 the various influences of the firmament above, does 
 not supersede the diligence wherewith we ply the 
 labours, and both devise and prosecute the schemes 
 of our well-arranged husbandry below. Here, 
 then, we have a supernal influence in the hands of 
 God, conjoined with a terrestrial economy in the 
 hands of man. If nature withhold her part, there 
 might be no valuable produce from fields cultivated 
 with whatever skill or whatever strenuousness. If 
 we withhold our part, there might be a hundredfold 
 less of valuable produce from the same fields lying 
 waste and neglected, however genial the seasons, 
 or with whatever benign an aspect the year may 
 have rolled over us. But, instead of this, in the 
 operations of common husbandry, man concurs 
 with nature, and nature concurs with man he 
 
11 
 
 by his unremitting industry, the processes of which 
 are all palpable and known ; she by her ceaseless 
 and mysterious agency, the footsteps of which are 
 recondite and unknown. Man cannot fathom or 
 foretell the courses of nature for, whether in the 
 arcana of our heaving atmosphere, or in the depths 
 of the vegetable physiology, there is in each a labora- 
 tory, the recesses of which we have never entered, 
 and the inner movements of which are alike beyond 
 our cognisance and our control. Yet this does not 
 restrain the confidence wherewith we address our- 
 selves to the culture and management of the soil ; 
 and it is by the patent working of man, super- 
 added to the inscrutable working of nature, or 
 rather of Him who is the author of nature, that we 
 obtain the sustenance of millions from a territory 
 which, if abandoned to nature alone, would yield 
 but a precarious subsistence for the beasts of the 
 field, and a few straggling savages. 
 
 3. Now this holds true, in all its parts, of what may 
 be termed the work of spiritual husbandry. It may 
 be, nay it is by the descent of an influencefrom above 
 that eTery human spirit is reclaimed from the bar- 
 renness, from the deadly blight of nature, and made 
 to abound in the fruits of righteousness. But our 
 entire dependence on God, who giveth the increase, 
 does not supersede the entire diligence wherewith 
 the ministers of the gospel should give themselves 
 to the labour of planting and watering, each his own 
 allotted part of the vineyard. So far from super- 
 seding, it should stimulate, that labour; and affords 
 
the best warrantor vindication which can he given 
 of it. There is a region in South Africa, where 
 the soil is of the best capabilities; but where, from 
 the utter want of rain all the year, vegetation is 
 nearly unknown, or, at least* no human iriv'ustry can 
 obtain a recompense, by any additions which it can 
 possibly make to the produce of it. Here, then, 
 it is not the presence, but the negation, of a ce- 
 lestial aliment, which suspends all terrestrial labour 
 as hopeless and unavailing; and if, in virtue of some 
 physical change, this aliment were restored, or rain 
 were to fall as in other countries of the globe, then, 
 and then only, could there be a meaning or a jus- 
 tification for the appliances of human activity and 
 skill ; and then a busy agriculture, npw unlocked, 
 would find room and encouragement for its various 
 processes. And it is even so in the work of spi- 
 ritual cultivation. For the prosperity of this work, 
 we are taught that there must be a descent of 
 living water from the upper sanctuary. Yet this 
 descent does not supersede it ra'iier calls for a 
 work of preparation on the earth which receives it. 
 The part which God takes in the operation, does 
 not abrogate the part which man oni^lit to take in 
 it. They are the overflowings of the Nile which 
 have given rise to the irrigations of an artificial 
 husbandry in Egypt, for the distribution of its 
 waters. And there is positively nothing in the 
 doctrine of a sanctifying or fertilising grace from 
 heaven above, which should discharge us but the 
 contrary from what may be termed the irrigations 
 
13 
 
 of a spiritual husbandry in the world beneath. It 
 is not enough that there be a descent ; there must 
 be a distribution also, or ducts of conveyance, 
 which, by places of worship and through parishes, 
 might carry the blessings of this divine nourishment 
 to all the houses and families of a land. There is 
 nothing, therefore, in the doctrine of the Spirit's 
 agency that should foreclose the question, which 
 still remains to us in all its importance, of the best 
 polity, or the best platform, for a church upon 
 earth. While we acknowledge the celestial de- 
 scent, we must not neglect the terrestrial distri- 
 bution. That there is a co-operation between these, 
 is evident from the single expression of men being 
 fellow-workers with God. But the principle rests 
 not on any single or incidental testimony. It 
 pervades the whole system of the Divine amdinis- 
 tration ; and the neglect of it is a radical and 
 pervading error in Christianity. A machinery is 
 not the less essential upon earth, that the impellent 
 force which guides and animates its movements 
 is from Heaven. There is nothing in this to dis- 
 parage or do away with the paramount necessity of 
 a spiritual influence whatever the apprehensions 
 may be of a mistaken,! should even say a drivelling, 
 though sincere, piety, which greatly underrates the 
 importance of a visible and material economy in 
 things ecclesiastical, and would set it asidea sa mere 
 system of earthly means and earthly expedients. 
 Such an economy may, notwithstanding, in the order 
 of cause and effect, be an essential stepping-stone 
 
to the salvation of millions; and that without 
 the slightest relaxation of essential dependence 
 upon God. The husbandman, after having dressed 
 his field, looketh for the former and the latter 
 rain, without which the cultured territory would 
 be a dreary waste. The Christian governor, after 
 having laid down his parishes and planted his 
 churches thereon, looketh for the descent of that 
 blessing from above, without which the country 
 will abide as hopeless a moral wilderness as before. 
 Its channels of distribution, however skilfully drawn, 
 will, if dry and deserted of Heaven, convey nothing 
 for human souls ; and the goodly apparatus of a 
 throng and thick-set Establishment in the land will 
 neither prevent nor alleviate the curse of its spi- 
 ritual barrenness. 
 
 4. To establish our conclusion the more, let it 
 further be remembered, that when the Spirit does 
 enlighten or impress a human soul, it is generally 
 through the medium of the Word ; or, to express 
 it otherwise, the Bible forms the material path- 
 way for His communications. There is nothing 
 in this doctrine therefore to extenuate, but rather 
 every thing to enhance, the importance of mul- 
 tiplying the Scriptures, and giving universal cir- 
 culation to them over the world. But the appli- 
 cation to our argument becomes still more obvious 
 when we also recollect, that, both at the com- 
 mencement and throughout the successive ages of 
 Christianity, although the Spirit has ever been the 
 great agent in the work of conversion, He makes 
 
15 
 
 choice of His own vehicles, and has always annexed 
 an especial virtue to, or puts an especial honour 
 on, the instrumentality of man. By means of one 
 heavenly visitant, the whole substance and truth of 
 Christianity might have been conveyed with power 
 to the mind of Cornelius. But for this purpose 
 two were employed one preternatural message 
 having been sent to Peter, for the purpose of 
 bidding him go to Cornelius; and another to Cor- 
 nelius himself, for the purpose, not of delivering 
 the gospel to him, but of preparing him to expect 
 the visit of a fellow-mortal, from whose lips he 
 should receive it. And so it was in the act of 
 Peter speaking to Cornelius and to the other mem- 
 bers of his household, that the Holy Ghost fell 
 upon them. The same mysterious agent who gives 
 efficacy to the read, also gives efficacy to the 
 preached, word but preached, not by beings of 
 a higher to those of a lower order, but by men to 
 men. It is the Divine Spirit alone who sends the 
 message with efficacy to the heart ; but still it is a 
 message borne to the ear by human messengers. 
 In other words, they are bibles and ministers that 
 form the two great parts of His main and chosen 
 instrumentality. And, in our capacity as fellow- 
 workers with God, it is for us to set this instru- 
 mentality agoing to see that a bible should be 
 in every house, and that a minister should have 
 access to every family. These form our plain and 
 palpable doings for the furtherance and distribu- 
 tion of that Christianity upon earth, which, never- 
 
16 
 
 theless, but for tiie descent of a heavenly influence 
 from above, could have no being in the world. It 
 is ours to strike out the channels of conveyance, it 
 is for God to fill them. The work which belongs 
 to us in this spiritual husbandry is as patent as 
 that of planting and watering is in common hus- 
 bandry. The work which belongs to God of giving 
 the increase, is, in both, beyond the sight and 
 search of all our faculties wholly inscrutable in 
 the mysteries of grace ; and far from being fully 
 comprehended, whether in the mysteries of the 
 fitful weather above our heads, or in the still pro- 
 founder mysteries of vegetation. 
 
 5. There is nothing, then, in the doctrine of the 
 Spirit to reduce, but everything to enhance, the 
 importance of the gospel being preached and so, 
 therefore, the importance of the question, what is 
 best to be done, that we might secure its being 
 preached to every creature. If there be one eco- 
 nomy, under which there is every likelihood that, 
 with all our strenuousness and care, we shall fall 
 short of more than half the population ; and an- 
 other economy, by which it may be made sure 
 that the calls and lessons of Christianity shajl be 
 brought to every door this, all other circum- 
 stances being equal, forms in itself a strong ground 
 for our preference of the latter over the former. 
 It is our purpose to demonstrate, that this in- 
 valuable property of a full or universal diffusion 
 belongs only to a National Establishment; and to 
 make it palpable, by all the lights of history and 
 
17 
 
 human nature, that it never is, anil never can be, 
 realised either by the Voluntary System, or by 
 what has been termed the System of Free Trade in 
 Christianity. But we must first premise what is 
 meant by a National Establishment of Religion in 
 a country or tell what that precisely is which 
 creates or constitutes such an establishment. 
 
 6. We should assume, then, as the basis of our 
 definition for a Religious Establishment, or as the 
 essential property by which to specify and charac- 
 terise it, a sure legal provision for the expense 
 of its ministrations. It is a question merely of 
 nomenclature or of definition, and not of doctrine, 
 wherewith we are at present engaged. Our single 
 attempt at this moment is, not the statement of 
 our belief, but the settlement of our language 
 that there might be a clear and common under- 
 standing of the terms used by us, in the course of 
 our argument. We are not saying, at present, 
 whether the legal establishment of religion be a 
 good or a bad thing we are only telling what we 
 understand such an establishment specifically to be; 
 and saying, that wherever we have a certain legal 
 provision for the ministrations of Christianity, there 
 we have an Establishment of Christianity in the 
 land. It is this which forms the essence of an 
 Establishment, and, as such, must be singled out 
 from among all the other accessaries wherewith it 
 may happen to be variegated. This idea of an 
 Establishment may or may not imply what is com- 
 monly meant by a connection between the church 
 
 B 
 
18 
 
 and the stale. If it be the state which maintains 
 the church, we admit that there is such a connec- 
 tion whether this maintenance be their ancient 
 and original gift, or a grant renewed every year, 
 and which may or may not be recalled by the civil 
 government. But the truth is, (hat the maintenance 
 may have originated in other sources in the be- 
 quests of individuals, or numerous private acts of 
 liberality, prompted by the affection of the pious 
 for the Christian good, whether of the community 
 at large, or of special districts in various parts of 
 the land. In our eyes it is not less an Establish- 
 ment on this account, than if supported by a direct 
 allowance from the national treasury. To realise 
 our idea of an Establishment, it is enough that 
 there be legal security for the application of certain 
 funds to the maintenance of Christian worship or 
 Christian instruction in a country ; and this in 
 whatever way these funds may have originated. 
 If the church be indebted for its revenues to the 
 benefactions of the rich and the religious in other 
 days, then it may have no more connection with 
 the state than the state has with any other cha- 
 ritable endowments in the kingdom where so 
 much property is destined to certain ends ; and all 
 which the state has to do in the matter is to make 
 good the destinations, or to see that effect and ful- 
 filment be given to the intentions of the original 
 testators. It is in this sense chiefly that we un- 
 derstand the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge 
 to be national or established institutes for the pur- 
 
19 
 
 poses of education. Their status or character, as 
 such, does not depend on the antiquarian origin of 
 the property which belongs to them which, it so 
 happens, they owe, in greater part, not to the 
 liberality of the civil rulers, but to the piety and 
 patriotism of individuals. It depends not on the 
 origin of their property, but on the sureness of its 
 application; the justice of the nation, or the au- 
 thority of the state and of the laws, being engaged 
 in the defence of it, whether against encroachment, 
 or against its application toother objects than those 
 on which it is now expended. 
 
 7. But even although the church should be wholly 
 supported by the state in things temporal, and a 
 connection between them be established thus far, 
 it follows not that this connection should proceed 
 any farther. There might be an entire depend- 
 ence on the state in things temporal, without even 
 the shadow of a dependence upon it in things 
 ecclesiastical. Although the church should receive 
 its maintenance, and all its maintenance, from the 
 civil power, it follows not that it therefore receives 
 its theology from the same quarter ; or that this 
 theology should acquire thereby the slightest taint 
 or infusion of secularity. The state is the dis- 
 penser of things carnal ; and the church, in ex- 
 change for this, is the dispenser of things spiritual : 
 but these things spiritual may retain their purely 
 spiritual character, notwithstanding; and be minis- 
 tered by the priests to the people, without adul- 
 teration or one ingredient of earthliness. The 
 
 B % 
 
20 
 
 church receives from the* state the maintenance of 
 its clergy ; and the clergy, in return, give to the 
 subjects of the state a Christian education, but 
 they might, and do, reserve to themselves the 
 whole power and privilege of determining what 
 that education shall be. For their food and their 
 raiment, and their sacred or even private edifices, 
 they may be indebted to the state ; but their 
 creed, and their discipline, and their ritual, and 
 their articles of faith, and their formularies, whether 
 of doctrine or of devotion, may be altogether 
 their own. Such may be the line of demarcation 
 between the civil and the ecclesiastical that, 
 while the state maintains the teachers of religion, 
 it meddles not with the things that are taught. 
 It may ordain a scholastic establishment, yet leave 
 unfettered the whole determination of the learning 
 to an educational board. Or it may ordain an 
 ecclesiastical establishment, and leave entirely with 
 the church the determination of its own lessons 
 alike unfettered by any dictation or control on the 
 part of the civil authority. By a system of endowed 
 schools, education might be introduced into hun- 
 dreds of districts which, but for this provision, 
 might have remained in unlettered ignorance ; and 
 that, too, a right and pure education. By a system 
 of endowed churches, public worship and religious 
 instruction might be introduced into hundreds of 
 districts which, but for this provision, might have 
 remained in grossest heathenism ; and still nothing 
 else be observed or taught but a pure and scrip- 
 
21 
 
 tural Christianity. An endowment may not dete- 
 riorate the quality either of common or Christian 
 education, while it adds inconceivably to the dif- 
 fusion and the amount of both. 
 
 8. And it is the more necessary to insist on this 
 consideration, that the attempt is so often made 
 to excite the idea of an essential contamination, in 
 every approach which the church might make to 
 the state, and even when with no other object than 
 that of simply holding forth a maintenance to her 
 clergymen. And the church might submit herself 
 so far to the state as to receive this maintenance, 
 and yet abide as spiritual, as holy and independent 
 a church as before only enabled to distribute the 
 waters of life more copiously among the population, 
 while as purely as ever. When a West India planter 
 sends for a Moravian missionary, and maintains him 
 in the work of instructing the labourers on his 
 estate, we have here the little model of an Estab- 
 lishment. The planter maintains the missionary ; 
 and the missionary, in return, teaches on the estate 
 of the planter yet teaches nothing there but his 
 own Christianity. The Bible is as much his foun- 
 tain-head as before truth and holiness as much 
 the objects of his resolute adherence as before. 
 The whole effect of the relation upon which he has 
 entered, is to bring the gospel into contact with 
 hundreds of immortal creatures, who but for this 
 miniature establishment, might have lived in guilt 
 and died in darkness. It may or it may not have 
 been a spiritual impulse on the mind of the planter 
 
which originated the proposal; either a regard to 
 the immortal well-being of his fellow-men, or an 
 enlightened regard to his own safety and advantage, 
 on the principle, that, if his labourers were reli- 
 giously trained, they would be thereby transformed 
 into a submissive, orderly, and industrious popu- 
 lation. With him it may have been a mere calcu- 
 lation of profit and loss ; but, whatever the force 
 was which opened the door, still it was a door of 
 highest Christian usefulness to the missionary 
 and they may have been motives of the purest and 
 highest order, which led him to acquiesce in the 
 proposal. And what is true of the little model of 
 an establishment on this single plantation, may hold 
 true when expanded into the actual machine of a 
 great national establishment of Christianity over a 
 whole empire. It is uncertain whether it was policy 
 or piety which actuated the mind of Constantine. 
 But whatever secularity it may have been which 
 prompted the overture on the one side, it may have 
 been accepted on the other in purest love to the 
 souls of men, and without the surrender or com- 
 promise of one iota of Heaven's high sacredness. 
 When the great autocrat of the Roman Empire, 
 from a persecutor became a nursing father, the 
 church might then have raised her orisons of 
 gratitude to Him who turns the hearts of kings 
 whithersoever He wills ; and, now that, a way 
 was opened to the plenteous harvest of so mighty 
 a population, might have entered on her now larger 
 field with as holy a zeal for her Master's work, and 
 
as lofty an independence throughout all her pul- 
 pits, as in the days of martyrdom.* 
 
 * "Now this very opening was presented to the ministers of Christ when 
 the Roman Emperor, whether by a movement of faith or a movement of 
 philanthropy and patriotism, made territorial distribution of them over his 
 kingdoms and provinces ; and, assigning a territorial revenue for the labourers 
 of this extensive vineyard, enabled each to set himself down in his own little 
 vicinity the families of which he could assemble to the exercises of Christian 
 piety on the Sabbath, and among whom he could expatiate through the week 
 in all the offices and attentions of Christian kindness. Such an offer, whether 
 christianly or but politically made upon the one side, could most christianly 
 be accepted and rejoiced in by the other. It extended inconceivably the 
 powers and the opportunities of usefulness. It brought the gospel of Jesus 
 Christ into contact with myriads more of imperishable spirits and., with as 
 holy a fervour as ever gladdened the breast of the devoted missionary, when 
 the means of an ample service to the Redeemer's cause were put into his 
 hands, might the church in those days have raised to Heaven its orisons of 
 purest gratitude, that kings at length had become its nursing fathers, and 
 opened up to it the plenteous harvest of all their population. There is just 
 as little of the essentially corrupt in this connection between the church and 
 the state, as there is in the connection between a missionary board and its 
 pecuniary supporters. Each is a case of the earth helping the woman ; but 
 whatever of earthliness may be upon the one side, there might be none, and 
 there needs be none, upon the other. The one may assist in things temporal ; 
 while the other may continue to assert its untouched and entire jurisdiction, 
 as heretofore, in things spiritual. There might thus be an alliance between 
 the altar and the throne, yet without the feculence of any earthly intermixture 
 being at all engendered by it. The state avails itself of the church's services, 
 and the church gives back again no other than the purest services of the 
 sanctuary. Its single aim, as heretofore, is the preparation of citizens for 
 heaven; but in virtue of the blessings which Christianity scatters in its way, 
 do the princes of this world find that these are the best citizens of earth 
 and that the cheap defence of nations, the best safeguard of their prosperity 
 and their power, is a universal Christian education. There needs be nought, 
 we repeat, of contamination in this. The state pays the church; yet the 
 church, in the entire possession of all those privileges and powers which are 
 strictly ecclesiastical, maintains the integrity of her faith and worship not- 
 withstanding. She might be the same hallowed church as when the fires of 
 martyrdom were blazing around her the same spiritual it y among her mi- 
 nisters the same lofty independence in all her pulpits. The effect of an 
 establishment is not necessarily to corrupt Christianity, bu tcextend it not 
 necessarily to vitiate the ministrations of the gospel, but certainly to dis- 
 
9. We know that, contemporaneously with this 
 establishment of the Christian religion in the days 
 of Constantine, there was, not the birth, but the 
 progress, of a great and general corruption, which 
 had its commencement in other causes two cen- 
 turies before. There is nothing in the mere dis- 
 tribution of ecclesiastical labourers over the terri- 
 tory of the Roman Empire, each working in his 
 proper vocation, and in return for a right and 
 regulated income ; there is nothing in such an 
 economy that can at all account for that fearful 
 degeneracy of the church which began even in the 
 first century; and which the establishment that 
 took place early in the fourth did not originate, 
 and, as it appears from the actual history, could 
 not arrest. The essence of that corruption lay, 
 not in the ascendancy wherewith an establishment 
 had vested the civil power, giving it an undue 
 influence over things ecclesiastical ; but, diame- 
 trically opposite to this, it lay in the ascendancy 
 wherewith the superstition and ignorance both of 
 princes and people had vested the ecclesiastical 
 power, of which it most unworthily availed itself, 
 to its own enormous aggrandisement in things 
 temporal at once supplanting the rightful autho- 
 rity of God in His Scriptures; and substituting 
 both a doctrine and discipline of its own, by which 
 to blind the souls of men and subjugate them to 
 its sway. Had emperors and kings understood 
 
 seminate these ministrations more intimately amongst, as well as to bear 
 them more diffusively abroad, over the families of the land." Sermon XV, 
 Vol. XI, of the new and uniform edition of Dr. Chalmers's Works. 
 
OP THP! 
 
 their own place, and resisted every encroachm 
 by the hierarchy on their own proper and legiti- 
 mate functions there was nought whatever in 
 the system of endowed churches, for the universal 
 spread of a Christian education, that could have 
 given rise to a despotism of priests ; any more than 
 a system of endowed seminaries for the spread of 
 a common or literary education, could have given 
 rise to a despotism of schoolmasters. The truth 
 is that influences were at work, which, either with 
 or without an establishment, would have landed 
 Christendom in the terrific Popery of the middle 
 ages the product, not of that economy for which 
 we are contending, and by which, in return for 
 their legal maintenance, the ministers of the church 
 would, each in his own district, have given forth 
 the lessons and performed the services of the gos- 
 pel for their respective populations ; but the pro- 
 duct of an enslaving superstition, that enabled an 
 ambitious priesthood to riot at pleasure over the 
 consciences and fears of their deluded votaries. 
 Their enormous wealth was the fruit of voluntary 
 offerings made by the people ; and their enormous 
 power, in its first beginnings at least, the fruit of 
 voluntary concessions made by princes, who par- 
 took in the debasing fanaticism of the times. The 
 effect of a regulated establishment might have been 
 to regulate and restrain the characteristic excesses 
 of that period ; and to those who, unable to dis- 
 criminate, are ever sure to confound the adjuncts 
 or the accidents with the causes of certain great 
 
26 
 
 and complex phenomena, we would propose for 
 contemplation the ecclesiastical state of Presby- 
 terian Scotland on the one hand, and Catholic Ire- 
 land on the other the first with an establishment, 
 the second under the entire ascendancy of the 
 voluntary principle ; and then ask, in which of the 
 two countries it is, that a corrupt and a domineering 
 priesthood are doing most to vitiate the pure doc- 
 trine of the apostles, or to injure the peace and 
 virtue of the commonwealth? 
 
 10. It is fortunate that the reformers knew, 
 how, in this matter, to make distinction between 
 the machinery and the men ; and that, instead of 
 destroying the machinery of the establishment in 
 their respective countries, they only placed it in 
 other and better hands ; and so had it worked by 
 men of another doctrine and another principle than 
 before. An establishment, in fact, with its univer- 
 sities and its parishes, might be the best and most 
 effective instrument of conveyance in a land, either 
 for good or for evil, either for a corrupt or a scrip- 
 tural theology. And so they went intelligently to 
 work. They did not, with blind and headlong zeal, 
 demolish the old apparatus of distribution. They 
 substituted the true gospel for a false one ; and sent 
 forth its now amended and purified lessons alongthe 
 old pathways of conveyance. The establishment, 
 in the days of Popery, made sure of a pulpit and a 
 minister in every little district of the country. The 
 Reformation did not destroy this arrangement. It 
 kept up the same fountain-head as before in the 
 
27 
 
 colleges, and the same rills of distribution in the 
 parishes and throughout the churches of the land : 
 and maintaining, as was done most strenuously by 
 Knox and all enlightened reformers every where, 
 the necessity of a settled provision for the teachers 
 of Christianity it but changed and new-modelled 
 the system in respect of the things that were 
 taught. Whatever the scholarship may be, whether 
 common or general, wherewith you want to charge 
 and innoculate the population of a country, if you 
 desire that it shall be universally spread, you cannot 
 but desire an effective mechanism for the full and 
 ready diffusion of it. The lessons may be good or 
 they may be bad ; say that they are bad, and then 
 the question is, whether shall we change the lessons, 
 or take down and so demolish the machinery ? 
 The obvious thing, we should imagine, would be 
 to do as the reformers did to change the les- 
 sons ; and if, after this, they be the lessons now 
 of a pure and wholesome theology, we ask, in the 
 name of common sense, where lies the wisdom of 
 destroy ing the machinery kept up, it would appear, 
 so long as it subserved the propagation of corruption 
 and error ; and now that this evil is transmuted 
 into good, proposed to be taken down when it 
 might enhance the propagation of righteousness 
 and truth ? Is this the treatment, we would put 
 the question, which the government of a country 
 or if it be a popular government, at the bidding of 
 the collective mind or will of the community at 
 large is this the treatment which the society of 
 
28 
 
 that country ought to bestow on the respective 
 elements of good and evil? After having for ages 
 furnished the evil with all facilities, for its rapid 
 march and full circulation through the families of 
 the land then, when the evil has been made good, 
 is that the time when these facilities should be taken 
 away ? So long as the religion taught was a moral 
 poison, by which to vitiate the hearts and habits of 
 the people, it had the prerogative of an establish- 
 ment, by which access was made for it through 
 every district and into every door. Strange, if 
 when the religion, from a deadly virus has become 
 the water of life that we should then dispense 
 with those aqueducts of conveyance, by which it 
 might be spread abroad for the healing of the 
 nation. It is well that the venerable fathers of 
 our Protestant church, making distinction between 
 the things which differ, felt and judged otherwise 
 from the headlong innovators of the present day. 
 They medicated the quality of the thing that was 
 circulated j but they let alone the apparatus of cir- 
 culation. In their achievement we behold the 
 wisdom and the principle of genuine reform. The 
 other achievement is by men of a different spirit 
 done, it may be, in the name of reform ; but 
 marking the very crisis, and having in it all the 
 characters of a revolution whether it be the act 
 of a legislature, which lends itself, either to the 
 cupidity of the nobles, or to the outcries of the 
 multitude ; or an act of pillage by the multitude 
 themselves, broken loose from the ancient holds of 
 
29 
 
 authority, and borne waywardly and uncontrollably 
 along on the surges and amid the uproar of wild 
 insurrectionary violence. 
 
 11. And here may we pause on the instructive 
 contrast between the ecclesiastical reformers of the 
 past and present day. It is on the high walk of 
 theology and sentiment that we meet the former 
 it having been their aim, not to destroy the esta- 
 blished church, but to animate it with another spirit ; 
 or to give it other doctrines and other principles 
 than before. In these times, again, the hands of 
 our reformers are differently employed taken up 
 chiefly, not with the internal but the external with 
 what may be termed the economics of the church, 
 its rights, its revenues, the number and pay of its 
 office-bearers ; and were their sole aim a better 
 distribution of its wealth, instead of the abridg- 
 ment or the alienation of it, this, though a humble, 
 might yet prove an innocent, nay, even a salutary, 
 undertaking. The real object of the first reform 
 by Luther and his contemporaries was to mend 
 the church's faith. The professed object of the 
 second reform is to mend the church's framework 
 though often the obvious effect of the at- 
 tempted changes, as in Ireland, were to mutilate 
 and weaken, and ultimately to destroy. In former 
 times, it was a high war of intellect and principle, 
 and many of the best heads and noblest hearts of 
 England were engaged in it when the lore of 
 her profoundest students, and the testimony of her 
 sainted martyrs, and the outraged moral sense of a 
 
30 
 
 now awakened community, were all enlisted on the 
 side of Scripture, and of a pure scriptural minis- 
 tration throughout the parishes of the kingdom. 
 Altogether it was a nobler controversy, and main- 
 tained on a nobler field, than that which now calls 
 forth the championship both of priests and of par- 
 liament-men. The struggle then related to the 
 quality of that nourishment which should be given 
 to the souls of the people ; and the noble result 
 was, that it should be the pure bread and water of 
 life, taken at once from the repositories and foun- 
 tain-heads of inspiration ; and not adulterated, as 
 before, by the mixtures of a corrupt and super- 
 stitious Popery. The struggle now relates, not 
 to the kind or quality of this spiritual nourishment, 
 but rather to the kind of apparatus that should be 
 maintained for the distribution of it. It is a ques- 
 tion, not of theology or of morals, but of ma- 
 chinery ; and many are the economical and the 
 arithmetical reformers of our age, who feel them- 
 selves abundantly qualified for the entertainment 
 of it. We cannot but remark the total difference, 
 both in character and aim, between the two re- 
 formations. If the one were a doctrinal or moral, 
 the other perhaps may be termed a mechanical 
 or, as the sure effect were not to mend but to 
 demolish altogether the framework of the establish- 
 ment, it may best of all be styled a machine-break- 
 ing reformation ; and of course its advocates, or 
 rather its instigators and its agents, are the ma- 
 chine-breaking reformers of the present day far 
 
31 
 
 more mischievous in their higher walk, but hardly 
 more intelligent, we do think, be they in or out of 
 Parliament, than the machine-breakers of Kent, 
 the frame-breakers of Leicestershire, or the in- 
 cendiaries of a few years back in the southern and 
 midland counties of England. It was by strength 
 of principle, or strength of argument, that the 
 venerable fathers of nearly three centuries back 
 achieved their reformation it will be by strength 
 of hand, or a sort of sledge-hammer energy, that 
 the coarse utilitarians of the present generation, in 
 a period of frenzied delusion on the part of the 
 multitude, or by a wayward exercise of power, un- 
 intelligent and unknowing on the part of the legis- 
 lature, will ever be able to accomplish theirs. If it 
 be the consecrated title of reformation which is to 
 avail them in this day of conflict, if by its means, 
 as with the magical influence of a watchword, they 
 are to enlist in their favour the passions and pre- 
 judices of men then never was there more ex- 
 emplified the omnipotence of words or sounds over 
 the human understanding never did conjurers in 
 any walk, whether of politics or of fortune-telling, 
 operate with such success on the credulity of the 
 world, or practise a grosser delusion in the use and 
 by the prostitution of a venerable name. 
 
 12. In this age of distempered speculation, we 
 gladly look back, and that with affectionate re- 
 membrance, to the more excellent way of our 
 forefathers. Knox new-modelled the faith ; but 
 he did not, in spite of all the violence that has 
 
32 
 
 been ascribed to him he did not demolish the 
 pulpits of the Catholic establishment. He did in- 
 finitely better he took possession of them. He 
 did not destroy a good machine, because of the 
 bad working of it. He did what was a great deal 
 wiser he dismissed the workmen, and committed 
 the machine into other hands. Fury is often blind; 
 and, if ever there was a provocative to its wildest 
 excesses, it was at that time, when the accumulated 
 wrongs of many ages had at length aroused an 
 indignant community, against the profligate and 
 the persecuting ecclesiastics who so long had lorded 
 over them. Between the cupidity of the nobles 
 and the indiscriminate rage of the multitude, the 
 establishment itself might have been swept off as a 
 moral nuisance from the face of the country. But 
 our great reformer interposed in its defence ; and, 
 making his resolute stand for the churches and 
 stipends of the clergy, he transmitted the material 
 framework, not without hurtful molestation, but 
 still as entire and uninjured as he could, for the 
 use of future generations. The truth is, that, 
 without such an apparatus, he could not have pro- 
 pagated, with the speed and facility which he did, 
 the doctrines of his own reformation which went 
 like lightning over the land, not on the wrecks of 
 the establishment, but through the numerous path- 
 ways, which the establishment, as far as preserved 
 and upholder), had still left open to him. But for 
 this, he might have found a lodgment, on the 
 naked strand where he alighted, yet found the 
 
33 
 
 country at large an impenetrable forest; and which 
 he only entered and pervaded by the old channels, 
 through which now, and by numerous rills of in- 
 tersection, he sent forth the pure water of life, the 
 lessons of his sound and scriptural theology, among 
 all the parishes. And accordingly all that remains of 
 Popery in Scotland is in those Highland fastnesses 
 where there might be said to have been no parishes, 
 or these so large and impracticable, as to have been 
 left without the benefits of an establishment. And 
 so, amid the stormy agitations of that period, when 
 there was a general effervescence in all spirits, 
 his views were calm and enlarged and philoso- 
 phical. He may have looked indulgently on, 
 when the edifices were pulled down, which har- 
 boured the most corrupt and powerful of the old 
 hierarchy; but he protested against all the vio- 
 lence that was offered, and certainly with too much 
 effect, on whatever of the establishment was really 
 serviceable, or could be turned into use either 
 for the instruction of the clergy, or the instruction 
 of the people. He denounced the shameful ap- 
 propriations that were then made, of the wealth 
 which should have gone to the better and more 
 frequent endowment both of churches and colleges. 
 His was the inspiration of lofty principle ; but 
 there was a regulating as well as impellant power in 
 his mind there was the guidance of profoundest 
 wisdom along with it. 
 
 13. That corruption and error have been spread 
 
 abroad by the organ of an establishment is no more 
 
 c 
 
34. 
 
 an argument for the destruction of the establish- 
 ment, than that infidelity and licentiousness have 
 been printed is an argument for the destruction of 
 printing-presses. The way is to preserve and to 
 extend both making the one the instrument for 
 a full diffusion of Bibles, and the other for a full 
 diffusion of Bible-preaching and Bible-sentiment 
 through the land. To do otherwise, were as if a 
 physician, to get quit of some disease in the blood 
 of his patient, should, instead of operating on the 
 quality of the liquid, so mangle the apparatus by 
 which it finds its course through the corporeal 
 framework as to stop the circulation of it. Were 
 the water of London to take on a deleterious tinge 
 from the accession of some impurity the way 
 surely is to purge it of this, or, if possible, to bar 
 the ingress of it, rather than make insensate attacks 
 on the subterranean machinery, by which distribu- 
 tion is made of it through the streets of the city 
 and into the houses of the citizens. Yet this last 
 is in the style of our modern reformers. They 
 would suppress parishes ; or, by at least a partial 
 destruction, keep back the water of life from cer- 
 tain parts of the territory. Or they would abolish 
 church-rates ; and no longer enforce those con- 
 tributions from the wealthy, by which access and 
 accommodation are provided for the supply of 
 gospel instruction to the families of the poor. 
 Their war is not against any system of theology 
 for about this they are mainly indifferent, as if 
 all systems were alike in their eyes; but their 
 
35 
 
 war is against the machinery set up in other 
 days, and preserved to our own times, for the cir- 
 culation of its lessons a machinery effectual then 
 for the spread of a deadly superstition, and so for 
 the subjugation of all spirits to its sway ; but 
 which might be as effectual now for the spread of a 
 pure and undefiled Christianity, and so for the 
 healing of the nation. The days were, " when a 
 man was famous, according as he had lifted up axes 
 upon the thick trees, or according as he gave of 
 materials or money for the building and the 
 endowment of churches. But now they would 
 break down the carved work thereof at once with 
 axes and hammers. They have said in their hearts, 
 Let us destroy them together : they would burn up 
 all the synagogues of God in the land." 
 
 14. The desirable church reform, then, whether 
 for England or Scotland, is not certainly to destroy 
 the machine not even to mutilate or abridge, but 
 rather, as we shall afterwards state, to repair and 
 strengthen, and greatly to extend it. There may, 
 besides, beother external or even economical changes 
 that should be honoured with the name of im- 
 provements; but mainly, the great reform is that 
 which, leaving the framework of the Establishment 
 untouched, would infuse into it another spirit, or 
 make it the vehicle of a more powerful and scrip- 
 tural ministration than heretofore. In short, the 
 thing wanted is an internal reform ; and, for carry- 
 ing this into effect, we do not require a change in 
 the theology of either of the churches none at 
 
36 
 
 all in their creeds a very little, perhaps, in their 
 service-books though at all times, for the effi- 
 ciency of any church, even of the best and purest 
 theology on earth, we are dependent, and that 
 most essentially and vitally, on the conscientious 
 and disinterested and well-principled exercise of its 
 patronage. It is not enough that we have a good ma- 
 chinery we must have good men for the working 
 of it. Even when they had the worst of men, the 
 reformers of other days, with a wisdom and dis- 
 crimination which do them infinite honour, kept 
 up the machinery ; and only, after they had sub- 
 stituted the Protestant for the Popish doctrine, 
 committed the working of it into other hands. 
 What an emphatic condemnation is held out by 
 their example, on the headlong reformers of the 
 present day who, without the provocative of a 
 more corrupt or incompetent priesthood than hereto- 
 fore; but in the face of a most palpable amelioration, 
 and that in all the three kingdoms, on the general 
 worth and devotedness and personal Christianity of 
 the clergy, would seize on this as the time for 
 destroying, and so wresting from their hands the 
 most effective of all instruments for the religious 
 education of our people. To speak of our own 
 Scotland, there cannot be imagined a wider contrast 
 and dissimilarity than that which obtains between 
 the long past and the now proposed reformation. 
 The former made good by the resolves and the 
 prayers, and at length sealed by the blood of their 
 dying martyrs who fought, not for the demolition 
 
of their kirks, but for the free use of Scripture, 
 and the setting up of a pure ministry within their 
 walls. The latter reformation, even that of the times 
 in which we live, borne along, as if permitted to 
 take effect it most assuredly would be, on a wild 
 career of sweeping and destructive violence, and 
 amid the hosannas of a multitude, as unlike, as 
 east is distant from the west, to those holy wor- 
 shippers who, to hide them from their perse- 
 cutors, assembled round their pastors in mountain- 
 solitudes, and sat down to their sacraments, under 
 the naked canopy of heaven. Such were the 
 reformers of these golden days ; and they bear not 
 one feature of resemblance to the reformers of the 
 age in which we live those impetuous and bust- 
 ling agitators, in whose breasts politics have en- 
 grossed the place of piety; resolved at all hazards 
 upon change; and prepared to welcome, with 
 shouts of exultation, the overthrow of those altars, 
 which, in holier and better times, upheld the faith 
 and devotion of our forefathers. 
 
 Though at the hazard of detaining you a great 
 deal too long, I cannot resist the inclination I feel 
 to crave from you the indulgence of ten minutes, 
 while I read a few extracts from the writings of 
 one, alike characterised by great power and great 
 prejudices ; who saw clearly how to distinguish, 
 when treating of the Church of England, between 
 the machine and the working of it having at 
 once the highest possible value for the one, and 
 the worst possible opinion of the other. I speak 
 
38 
 
 of William Cobbett, whose shrewd discernment at 
 least will be admitted by all ; and who, speaking 
 of the church as a machine or apparatus, expresses 
 himself in the words that we subjoin.* 
 
 * "An Established Church, a church established upon Christian principles, 
 is this that it provides an edifice sufficiently spacious for the assembling of 
 the people in every parish ; that it provides a spot for the interment of the 
 dead ; that it provides a priest, or teacher of religion, to officiate in the edi- 
 fice, to go to the houses of the inhabitants, to administer comfort to the dis- 
 tressed, to counsel the wayward, to teach the children their duty towards 
 God, their parents, and their country; to perform the duties of marrying, 
 baptizing, and burying, and, particularly, to initiate children in the first prin- 
 ciples of religion and morality; and to cause them to communicate, that is 
 to say, by an outward act of theirs, to become members of the spiritual 
 church of Christ: all which things are to be provided for by those who are 
 the proprietors of the houses and the lands of the parish ; arid, when so pro- 
 vided, are to be deemed the property or the uses belonging to the poorest 
 man in the parish as well as to the richest." 
 
 Then follows his opinion of the actual working of this church in the hands 
 of its actual clergymen, in which opinion I do not sympathise; and shall 
 endeavour to qualify his conclusion, by a few closing sentences of my own. 
 " This is an Established Christian Church; and this you, the parsons, 
 will tell the people that they actually have; and you will tell the people who 
 have no house and land, that, in calling for the abolition of tithes, they are 
 in fact calling upon the rich to take from them, the poor, the only property 
 that they have in the country. Alas ! you will tell them this in vain. They 
 kno\v that the church is not this thing now to them ; they know that you fio 
 not visit their houses and comfort them when they are sick, except in instances 
 so very rare that they hardly ever hear of them; they know that you. do not 
 tiMch their children, and that, though the churchwardens annually certify the 
 l>ishop that the children communicate, hardly a workman in the kingdom 
 ever saw or heard of such a thing being done; they know that you are fre- 
 quently on the bench, perched up as justices of the peace; they know that 
 you frequently sentence them to punishment without trial by jury, and sen- 
 tence to transportation for what is called poaching. This is the capacity in 
 which they now know you ; and to induce them to stir hand, foot, or tongucf 
 in defence of this Establishment, is no more possible than it is to induce a 
 Jew to give up a farthing of his interest." " I was a sincere Churchman" 
 "because it was reasonable and just, that those who had neither house nor 
 land, and who were the millions of the country, and who performed all its 
 useful labour?, should have a church, a churchyard, a minister of religon, 
 
39 
 
 Our distinct object, is to demonstrate the power 
 and the properties which belong to a National 
 Establishment of religion, viewed as a machine ; 
 
 and all religious services performed for them, at the expense of those who 
 did possess the houses and the land. In a word, in the church and its pos- 
 sessions, I saw the patrimony of the working people, who had neither house 
 nor land of their own private property. For these reasons I was a friend, 
 and a very sincere friend, and able to he a very powerful friend of the Church 
 Establishment. 
 
 " But," &c Cobbett's Political Register, December 21st, 1833. 
 
 " Ought we to ham any Establishment at all ? In answering which for our- 
 selves, it is our owr, opinion, that this nation has been much more religious 
 and happy under the influence of the Protestant Established Church, than 
 it is ever likely to be in case that church were abolished. To make the ques- 
 tion still more close, let it be this, whether it be reasonable t fiat anyone should 
 be called upon to contribute towards the maintenance of a church, the tenets of 
 which he dissents from? This is making the question as home as it can well be. 
 And we do not hesitate to say, that there is to us nothing so outrageously 
 unreasonable in the idea. One thing is certain, that if all are not to remain 
 liable to pay for the church, it is no established, or at least no national, church. 
 Reasons are not wanting, to show the benefits of a national religion, or a 
 mode of worship, or some religious establishment, the peculiarities of which 
 are under the especial patronage and peculiar favour of the government. 
 In judging of such a matter, we can only be guided by experience; and ex- 
 perience is not less wisdom here than in all other things." "It does not 
 follow that because an institution has been abused it should be done away 
 with, if the institution itself be necessary or beneficial. Even kings may 
 require now and then to be driven from their thrones; but that does not 
 prove the necessity of doing away with the throne." "If it be allowed (and 
 we think it ought to be), that an establishment is desirable for such a pur- 
 pose, the dissenters cannot well object to paying the clergy of a different 
 persuasion. An establishment cannot consist of all creeds, or the Quakers 
 themselves would have a right to form a part of it. As we have before 
 said, the church is not national unless all be taxed towards its support; and, 
 for the sake alone of preserving decency for religion, it appears to us to be 
 no more unjust than it is impolitic towards the community in general, to 
 require the aid of all in maintaining that in which all are equally inter- 
 ested." Cobbett's Political Register, April 20th, 1833. 
 
 " But then come the just and charitable principles of the Christian religion ; 
 and they say this to the owners of the land and the houses, ' The land and 
 the houses are yours, but not in such absolute right as to exclude your work- 
 ing and poorer brethren from all sha e. There shall be a church in each 
 
40 
 
 and, in regard to the working of it, we may at 
 least state, as our triumphant confidence, that, not- 
 withstanding the exaggeration of its enemies, the 
 
 parish, and a priest for the teaching of religion ; there shall be a church- 
 yard for the burial of the dead ; there shall be sermons, and prayers, and 
 marriages, and baptisms and these shall form the possessions of the inhabi- 
 tants, the property of those who labour.' " Polit. Register, Sept. 14, 1833. 
 
 "Go upon a hill, if you can find one, in Suffolk or Norfolk; and you 
 can find plenty in Hampshire, and Devonshire, and Wiltshire; look to the 
 church steeples, one in about every four square miles at the most on an 
 average imagine a man, of small learning at the least, to be living in a 
 genteel and commodious house, by the side of every one of these steeples, 
 almost always with a wife and family; always with servants, natives of the 
 parish, gardener, groom at the least, and all other servants. A large farm- 
 yard, barns, stables, threshers, a carter or two, more or less of glebe and of 
 I. rming. Imagine this gentleman having an interest, an immediate and 
 pressing interest in the productiveness of every field in his parish being 
 probably the largest corn-seller in the parish, and the largest rate-payer 
 more deeply interested than any other man can possibly be in the happiness, 
 harmony, morals, industry, arid sobriety of the people in his parish. Imagine 
 his innumerable occasions for doing acts of kindness; his immense power in 
 preventing the strong from oppressing the weak; his salutary influence 
 coming between the hard farmer, if there be one in his parish, and the feeble 
 or simple-minded labourer. Imagine all this to exist close alongside of every 
 one of these steeples, and you will at once say to yourself, hurricanes and 
 earthquakes must destroy the island before that church can be overthrown. 
 And when you add to all this, that this gentleman, besides the example of 
 good manners, of mildness, and of justice, that his life and conversation are 
 constantly keeping before the eye of his parishioners when you add to all 
 tiiis, that one day in every week he lias them assembled together to sit in 
 silence; to receive his advice, his admonitions, his interpretation of the will 
 >f God as applicable to their conduct and their affairs; and that, too, in an 
 edifice rendered sacred in their eyes, from their knowing tliat their forefathers 
 assembled there in ages passed, and from its being surrounded by the graves 
 of their kindred when this is added, and when it is recollected that the 
 children pass through his hands at their baptism, r! at it is he alone who 
 celebrates the marriages, and performs the last sad service over the graves 
 of the dead when you think of all this, it is too much to believe that such 
 a church can fall. Yet fall it will," &c. 
 
 "This settles the matter as to the church as it now stands; and then the 
 next question is, Can it be restored to what it ought to be 9 Jf it could be, that 
 is the thing that ought fo be dene because, though people in great towns 
 
41 
 
 evidence is every day growing, of its vast practical 
 importance to the moral well-being of our nation. 
 If it be an undoubted truth, that there is a distinct 
 and a decided improvement in the personcl of the 
 Church of Scotland ; if in England, the mighty 
 instrument is passing into the hands of a more 
 efficient clergy than before; if in Ii eland, per- 
 secution, with its wonted influence, is begetting a 
 resolute and high-toned spirituality in the devoted 
 ministers of that deeply injured hierarchy is this, 
 we ask, the time to wrest from the hold of its now 
 more faithful and energetic agency, that engine 
 which would enable them to operate with tenfold 
 effect on the families of the land ? The work of 
 reformation was prosecuted more wisely in other 
 days; when, notwithstanding the provocative of 
 a grossly immoral and tyrannic priesthood, they 
 but changed the agency and preserved the engine. 
 And, with our present agency, I trust we shall, 
 by the blessing of Heaven, be enabled, not only to 
 preserve but to perfect the engine; and that, with 
 enough of energy and conscientiousness and de- 
 voted zeal on the part of their ministers, all the 
 menace and agitation by which they are sur- 
 rounded will only rivet the three churches more 
 firmly on their bases, and rally more closely around 
 their common cause, the wise and the good of our 
 nation. 
 
 do not perceive it, it is a serious change to the country a serious change to 
 the 465 parishes of Devonshire, for instance, to the 629 parishes of Lincoln, 
 the 731 parishes of Norfolk, the 411 parishes of Kent a serious change to 
 take away one little gentleman out of every one ol these parishes. " Cobbett's 
 Political Register, February 22d, 1834. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 VINDICATION OF A RELIGIOUS NATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT, 
 IN OPPOSITION TO THE REASONINGS AND VIEWS OF 
 THE ECONOMISTS. 
 
 BEFORE entering on the positive and direct argu- 
 ment in favour of a National Establishment of 
 religion, I endeavoured in my last lecture to do 
 away this initial objection, or rather this initial 
 prejudice against it as if the connection between 
 church and state which is implied by it, implied 
 also a secularization of Christianity, to which it is 
 not equally exposed under all other methods either 
 for extending or maintaining the gospel in the 
 world. In these days of fierce partizanship, we 
 cannot expect much of cool and clear discrimina- 
 tion when men are borne along as if by a sort of 
 gregarious impulse, and under the influence of a 
 popular and prevailing cry. In Edinburgh, a few 
 years ago, at one of those public meetings, where 
 the connection between church and state is no 
 sooner spoken of than it lights up an instant and 
 sensitive antipathy in the hearts of assembled thou- 
 sands, there was a speech delivered by an Ameri- 
 can clergyman of the Presbyterian denomination, 
 who happened to be an acquaintance of my own. 
 The multitude whom he addressed were every one 
 of them enraptured, at hearing from his lips, that 
 
48 
 
 the idea of any such connection was held in per- 
 fect abomination all over America. I afterwards 
 ventured to make the whole controversy a subject 
 of conversation with him ; and my first question 
 was, whether if a Christian philanthropist, seized 
 with a strong affection for a district in Maryland, 
 were to bequeath ten thousand pounds for the 
 erection of a church and ministerial dwelling- 
 place, and for the maintenance of a clergyman, 
 providing at the same time that this clergyman 
 should be of the Presbyterian denomination, and 
 that, in things ecclesiastical he should be wholly 
 under the control of his own Presbyterian judica- 
 tories in America whether such an endowment 
 would be rejected by their General Assembly or 
 Supreme Court of Management, as an unscripturai 
 and unchristian thing, or be accepted by the body 
 as an accession to the means of religious useful- 
 ness. There could be but one answer to this 
 question, which was, that an endowment thus 
 destined, and thus placed under the guardianship 
 of what he deemed to be a pure and scriptural 
 church, would be welcomed and encouraged to 
 the uttermost. I then asked whether, if these en- 
 dowments were so multiplied as that the whole 
 state of Maryland should be covered with them 
 still adhering to the supposition that the theology 
 of all these Maryland clergymen was in no sub- 
 ordination whatever to the will of the testators, 
 but only to the will of their ecclesiastical superiors, 
 the Presbyteries and Synods and General Assembly 
 
44 
 
 of America, whether such an arrangement, ad- 
 mitted by him to be desirable and good in reference 
 to one small territory, whether the character and 
 effect would be at all changed, if the benefit of 
 it were multiplied several hundred times, and 
 spread over the whole of Maryland. It of course 
 was most readily admitted, that just as one apple, 
 multiplied by 750, does not land you in 75t) oranges 
 but in 7^0 apples so one moral and religious be- 
 nefit multiplied by the same number, does not land 
 in 750 evils, but in 750' most unquestionable and 
 most desirable benefits. After this the transition 
 was not a difficult one, from the single state of 
 Maryland to the whole United States of America ; 
 and then the only adjustment betwixt us which 
 remained to be made was, whether such a great 
 and general endowment that would have so de- 
 lighted all their hearts, if coming from the hands 
 of so many thousand generous individuals, whe- 
 ther, if it had come down to them as the fruit of 
 an endowment that had been instituted many hun- 
 dred years ago, and was therefore so firmly based 
 on a separate and proprietary right of its own, that 
 no one individual could honestly affirm of himself, 
 that he was injured by its existence in any thing 
 that belonged to him whether, as he and his 
 brethren would rejoice in the coming on of such 
 an endowment, whether they would willingly con- 
 sent to the taking of it offal the clamorous outcry 
 of men who represented it, not only as a bane and 
 a burden on the commonwealth, but as an un- 
 
4,5 
 
 Christian abomination in the midst of their land. 
 The rejoinder upon this was a very memorable 
 one. If all you mean by an Establishment is an 
 organized provision for a clergy, we should rejoice 
 in it. If this be the whole amount of the con- 
 nection between church and state if maintenance 
 and nothing else come from the one quarter, and 
 an unfettered theology from the other, without 
 contamination from the authority of man, but sub- 
 ject only to an ecclesiastical judgment, grounded 
 on a principle of deference to the Word of God 
 a simple arrangement of this sort is truly a different 
 thing from what we understand by a Religious 
 Establishment. The thing we deprecate is the 
 authority of the civil magistrate in matters of reli- 
 gion ; but we should be thankful to him or to 
 any one else, for giving us what he termed an 
 organized provision for clergymen. Now this 
 organized provision is truly all that we contend for. 
 It is just, in other words, a legal provision for the 
 support of a Christian ministry an arrangement 
 which might truly be gone into, and which actually 
 is gone into, without the slightest infringement on 
 the spiritual prerogatives of the church, or on the 
 ecclesiastical independence of her clergymen. It 
 is obvious from all this, that the indignation of our 
 transatlantic friend, was directed against a wrong 
 object ; and that he failed in making the re- 
 quisite distinction between the act of a govern- 
 ment in giving food and raiment to ministers, and 
 iue act of a government in assuming a lordship 
 over the creed and the consciences of ministers. 
 
46 
 
 But it is not amid the din and uproar of public ac- 
 clamations that men can be expected to distinguish 
 very clearly between the things which differ. When 
 an orator denounces the connection between church 
 and state, the effect is instantaneous on all those 
 who, without logic, and without discrimination, 
 are carried along by the deafening outcries, and no 
 less deafening plaudits of an assembly, amid the 
 noise and excitement of which, the small still voice 
 of truth is overborne.* 
 
 * In respect of this ecclesiastical independence, I am not aware of any 
 serious practical obstacle to the exercise of it in England ; and, at all events, 
 "we know of nothing more perfect in this respect than the constitution of 
 the Church of Scotland. There is, to each of its members, an independent 
 voice from within ; and from without, there is no power or authority whatever 
 in matters ecclesiastical. They who feel dislike to an establishment do so, in 
 general, because of their recoil from all contact and communication with the 
 state. We have no other communication with the state than that of being 
 maintained by it, after which we are left to regulate the proceedings of our 
 great home mission with all the purity, and the piety, and the independence 
 of any missionary board. We are exposed to nothing from without which 
 can violate the sanctity of the apostolical character, if ourselves do not violate 
 it. And neither are we exposed to aught which can trench on the authority 
 of the apostolical office, if ourselves we make no surrender of it. In things 
 ecclesiastical we decide all. Some of these things may be done wrong, but 
 still they are our majorities which do it. They are not, they cannot, be 
 forced upon us from without. We own no head of the Church but the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. Whatever is done ecclesiastically, is done by our ministers 
 acting in His name, and in perfect submission to His authority. Implicated 
 as the church and the state are imagined to be, they are not so implicated as 
 that, without the concurrence of the ecclesiastical courts, a full and final 
 effect can be given to any proceeding by which the good of Christianity and 
 the religion of our people may be effected. There is not a clerical appoint- 
 ment which can take place in any one of our parishes till we have sustained 
 it. Even the law of patronage, right or wrong, is in force, not by the power 
 of the state, but by the permission of the church, and with all its fancied om- 
 nipotence, has no other basis than that of our majorities to rest upon. It 
 should never be forgotten that, in things ecclesiastical, the highest power of 
 our church is amenable to no higher power on earth for its decisions. It 
 
47 
 
 But we must now pass on to the proper subject of 
 tliis lecture which is the vindication of a Religious 
 National Establishment in opposition to the rea- 
 sonings and views of the economists. 
 
 1. By the system of a free trade in commerce, 
 its various exchanges are left to the pure operation 
 of demand and supply ; and the two, it is thought, 
 should be permitted, without interference, to re- 
 gulate and to qualify each other. When the de- 
 mand for any particular commodity increases, it 
 will be the interest of the dealers to provide it in 
 larger quantity than before ; or, when the demand 
 is lessened, it will be their care to reduce the supply 
 
 can exclude, it can deprive, it can depose, at pleasure. External force might 
 make an obnoxious individual the holder of a benefice; but there is no ex- 
 ternal force in these realms that could make him a minister of the Church of 
 Scotland. There is not one thing which the state can do to our independent, 
 and indestructible church but strip her of its temporalities. Nee tamen con- 
 sumebatur, she would remain a church notwithstanding as strong as ever 
 in the props of her own moral and inherent greatness- and, though shrivelled 
 in all her dimensions by the moral injury inflicted on many thousands of 
 families, she would be at least as strong as ever in the reverence of her 
 country's population. She was as much a church in her days of suffering as 
 in her days of outward security and triumph ; when a wandering outcast, with 
 nought but the mountain breezes to play around her, and nought but the 
 caves of the earth to shelter her, as now, when admitted to the bowers of an 
 establishment. The magistrate might withdraw his protection, and she 
 tvase to be an establishment any longer but in all the high matters of sacred 
 and spiritual jurisdiction, she would be the same as before. With or with- 
 out an establishment, she, in these, is the unfettered mistress of her doings. 
 The King by himself, or by liis representative, might be the spectator of our 
 proceedings ; but what Lord Chatham said of the poor man's house, is true 
 in all its parts of the church to which I have the honour to belong " In 
 England every man's house is his castle not that it is surrounded with 
 walls and battlements. It may be a straw-built shed. Every wind of heaven 
 may whistle round it; every element of heaven may enter it, but the King 
 cannot the King dare not." Sermon XV, Vol. XI, of Dr. Chalmers 
 Works ; New and Uniform Edition. 
 
4-8 
 
 accordingly so as that the market shall not be 
 overstocked with any article, beyond the extent to 
 which it is sought after. It admits, we hold, of 
 the clearest demonstration, that it is unwise to 
 interfere with this law of action and reaction or 
 as it may be termed, with this natural law of po- 
 litical economy. The supply rises and falls just 
 as the demand rises and falls. Government should 
 make no attempt to restrain the supply beneath 
 this point by means of a prohibition, or to encourage 
 it above this point by means of a bounty. Such 
 an interference is an offence to all wise and en- 
 lightened economists ; and resented by them as a 
 disturbing force, that would violate the harmonies 
 of a beautiful and well-going mechanism. 
 
 2. This prepares us to understand what is meant 
 by the system of a free trade in Christianity. 
 Under its hands the article of religious instruction 
 is left to the same treatment, and to the operation 
 of the same laws, with an article of ordinary mer- 
 chandise according to which Christian instruc- 
 tion should be provided for a community, to a 
 greater or less degree, just as there is a demand 
 for it ; or, in other words, is left to be regulated 
 by the laws, and of course to be limited by the 
 extent of the market. At this rate the supply, 
 whether as respects its amount upon the whole or 
 the proportion of it in various places, will be made 
 to suit the taste of the customers. It will betake 
 itself to those places where there is, what econo- 
 mists term, an effective demand for it that is, 
 
where there is wealth enough and will enough, to 
 ensure a remunerating price for the expense of its 
 preparation. A free trade in commerce, only seeks 
 to those places where it can make out a gainful 
 trade ; but it is sure tp avoid or to abandon those 
 places, where, whether from the languor of the 
 demand or the poverty of the inhabitants, it would 
 be exposed to a losing trade. By a free trade in 
 Christianity, let the lessons of the gospel follow 
 the same law of movement ; and these lessons will 
 cease to be taught in every place, where there is 
 either not enough of liking for the thing, or not 
 enough of money for the purchase of it: Or that 
 religion, the great and primary characteristic of 
 which was that it should be preached unto the poor, 
 must be withheld from those people, who are un- 
 able by poverty to provide a maintenance for its 
 
 teachers. And the teachers of this religion, whose 
 
 * 
 
 office it is, after the example of its great founder, 
 to seek and to save those who are lost, must 
 make no attempt tp awaken from their slumbers, 
 
 those who have no value, and will therefore give 
 
 'i<- 
 
 no price for their ministrations because lost in 
 the apathy of a deep and settled unconcern, and 
 sunk in the indifference of spiritual death. 
 
 3. This brief and bare statement, one might 
 think, of the effects of a free trade in Christianity, 
 should be enough to condemn a system which 
 seems to carry its own signal refutation along with 
 it. But we ought to understand what the precise 
 distinction is between Commerce and Christianity, 
 
50 
 
 which calls for such a difference of treatment be- 
 tween the two as that for which we are contending 
 so that while the one prospers to the uttermost 
 under the system of free trade, and reaches by its 
 means the greatest possible diffusion of its blessings 
 and benefits through the world ; the other, under 
 the same system, would shrink into narrower di- 
 mensions, and be limited to a small fraction of the 
 human species. If there be a diversity in the two 
 cases, there must be a reason for it, which admits 
 of being distinctly stated, and which may be dis- 
 tinctly apprehended. When Turgot and Smith 
 and others proposed to assimilate the one to the 
 other, so as to leave them both to the pure ope- 
 ration of demand and supply ; and without the 
 artificial encouragement, whether of bounties or 
 endowments if there be error in the proposition 
 of these economists, they must have been misled 
 by the light of some false analogy, which surely 
 is capable of being exposed. In other words, 
 there must be some intelligible principle, capable 
 of being propounded and put into language ; and 
 on which the system of free trade, so applicable to 
 the one case, is not alike applicable to the other 
 also. 
 
 4. The following then is our explanation. Gene- 
 rally speaking, there is, by the very constitution of 
 our nature, a sufficient intensity of desire, and con- 
 sequently of demand, for the articles which com- 
 merce deals in, and so as to call forth an adequate 
 supply of these articles, or a supply commensurate 
 
,51 
 
 to all the exigencies of human society. There is 
 no such intensity of desire or of demand for the 
 article of Christian instruction. When it is af- 
 firmed, in regard to the goods of ordinary mer- 
 chandise, that they might, with all safety, be left 
 to the operation of demand and supply, it is always 
 presupposed of the one element, that it is suffi- 
 ciently strong to stimulate and call forth the other. 
 And so it usually is. The longer a man is in want 
 of food, the keener will become his appetency of 
 hunger till at length he would give any price, 
 or make any sacrifice, in order to obtain it. And 
 so it is of other sensations, which impel him to 
 seek after other necessaries of existence : as the 
 cold which makes it indispensable to his comfort, 
 that he should be clothed and lodged, as well as 
 fed. Even when the necessaries of life are refined 
 into exquisite and high-wrought luxuries, there is 
 a sufficiently spontaneous and wide-spread desire 
 after these, to ensure a sufficient demand for them, 
 in the physical sense of taste and the vanity of 
 man or his natural love of distinction the one 
 disposing him to the . gratifications of the table 
 the other, though at the expense of all he can give 
 away, to the decorations of his person and. equipage 
 and household establishment. Man's natural liking 
 for these things, affords a powerful enough guar- 
 antee, either for that part of his labour which he is 
 willing to put forth, or for that part of his wealth 
 which he is willing to give up, in order to acquire 
 them. Between the love of gain on the one hand, 
 
52 
 
 and thfe love of enjoyment on the other, there is no 
 danger but the wheels of commerce will move with 
 velocity enough and in the very direction, too, 
 that is most suited both for the needs of customers 
 and the prosperity of dealers. It seeks no other 
 aid at the hands of the legislature, than the en- 
 forcement of justice between man and man. The 
 bounties wherewith a misjudging government would 
 seek to encourage it, but serve to displace or to 
 embarrass its movements which, by the voice of 
 all experience and all philosophy, might be left 
 with the utmost safety and the best possible ad- 
 vantage, to a self-going mechanism of its own. 
 
 5. Now the very reverse of all this holds of 
 Christianity* or rather of Christian instruction, 
 viewed as an article which is beneficial to man ; 
 and which should therefore be distributed, to all 
 the extent that is good or desirable to mankind, 
 throughout the mass of society. It is not with 
 man's intellectual, or his moral, as it is with his 
 animal nature. Although it be true, that the 
 longer he has been without food, the more hungry 
 he is, or the greater anfd more urgent is his desire 
 of food yet the more ignorant a man is, not the 
 greater, but generally speaking, the less is his 
 desire of knowledge. And this converse proposi- 
 tion is still more manifestly true of his moral than 
 of his intellectual wants. The more immersed a 
 man is in vice or in voluptuousness, not most cer- 
 tainly the greater, buT beyond all doubt the less, is 
 his desire of virtue or his desire of holiness. There 
 
is no natural hungering or thirsting after righteous- 
 ness ; and before man will seek that the want 
 should be supplied, the appetite must first be 
 created. The less a man has, whether pf religion 
 or righteousness, the less does he care for them, 
 and the less will he seek after them. It is thus 
 that nature does not go forth in quest of Chris- 
 tianity ; but Christianity must go forth in quest of 
 nature. It is, on the one hand, the strength of the 
 physical appetency ; and, on the other hand, the 
 languor of the spiritual, the moral, or the intellec- 
 tual appetency, which makes all the difference. 
 The law of our moral and intellectual is not the 
 same, but reverse or contrary to the law of our 
 physical wants. With the physical, the intensity 
 of the desire is directly proportional to the -want ; 
 with the intellectual and moral, it is inversely pro- 
 portional, or the less he has of these the less he 
 cares for them. The strength of man's natural 
 craving, guarantees an effectual demand for food 
 or raiment, or all that might contribute to tbe 
 shelter and convenience of the house that is over 
 his head which, rather than want, he will go if 
 he can to the most distant market, and with the 
 full price in his hand for them. But though we 
 may trust to his natural longing, for the goods 
 which are to be had in a market, there is no such 
 natural or universal longing for the good to be had 
 in a church, or in a college, or even in ; ,a school. 
 Apd never, therefore, was there a more unfortunate 
 generalisation tha,n that by which our economists 
 
5* 
 
 have placed on the same footing, the articles of 
 ordinary merchandise with the articles whether of 
 common or Christian education ; or by which, 
 because they are demonstrated of bounties for the 
 one that they were unnecessary or even mischievous 
 they therefore contended against endowments 
 for the other, as bein, in their operation, alike 
 mischievous or alike unnecessary.* 
 
 * As far back as 1817, I had occasion to publish a sermon which I preached 
 on the 9eath of the Princess Charlotte, wherein I adverted to the want of 
 < -hurdles in Glasgow; and subjoined an appendix, in which there occurs my 
 first exposition of this argument. The following is a brief extract. 
 
 " Dr. Adam Smith, in his Treatise on the Wealth of Nations, argues against 
 religious establishments, on the ground that the article of religious instruc- 
 tion should be left to the pure operation of demand and supply, like any article 
 of ordinary merchandise. He seems to have overlooked one most material 
 circumstance of distincton. The native and untaught propensities of the hu- 
 man constitution, will always of themselves secure a demand for the commo- 
 dities of trade, sufficiently effective to bring forward a supply equal to the real 
 needsof the population, and to theirpowerof purchasing. But the appetite for 
 religious instruction is neither so strong nor so universal as to secure such 
 an effective demand for it. Had the people been left in this matter to them- 
 selves, there would, in point of fact, have been large tracts of country without 
 a place of worship, and without a minister. The legislature have met the 
 population half-way, byproviding them with a church and a religious teacher, 
 in every little district of the land ; and by this arrangement have increased, 
 to a very great degree, the quantity of attendance and the quantity of actual 
 ministration. In point of fact, a much greater number of people do come 
 to diurch, and do come within the application of Christian influence, when 
 the church and the preacher is provided for them, than if they had been left 
 to build a meeting-house, and to maintain a preacher themselves. There is 
 a far surer and more abundant supply of this wholesome influence dealt out 
 among the population under the former arrangement, than under the latter 
 one; and it is this excess of moral and religious good, which forms the only 
 argument for a national establishment that I shall now insist upon. 
 
 " The argument of Dr. Smith goes to demonstrate the folly of a national 
 establishment, either of meal-sellers or of butchers, or of any national esta- 
 blishment for supplying the people with the necessaries and the comforts of 
 life. But the peculiarity already adverted to, renders it totally inapplicable 
 to thcquestion of a national establishment for supplying the people with the 
 lessons of Christianity." 
 
55 
 
 6. These principles are in full accordance with 
 the facts, both of past history and of present expe- 
 rience. With many, there is a confused imagina- 
 tion, that, previous to the establishment of Chris- 
 tianity, the whole ministry of. the gospel was con- 
 ducted on the system of free trade. On a closer 
 view, however, and a proper discrimination of the 
 things which differ, it will be found, that what 
 actually took place was the very reverse of this. 
 It is true, that, in all ages, the lessons' of thegospel 
 behoved to be paid for by some one, because the 
 teachers of the gospel behoved to be maintained. 
 But the whole system hinges upon this who paid 
 for these lessons? We know by whom it is, that, 
 in the exchanges of ordinary business and on the 
 principles of free trade, the payments are usually 
 made. They are the customers or users of the 
 commodity that is purchased, who, generally 
 speaking, pay its price and its whole price. It 
 were in violation of the system of free trade, if 
 
 This argument I have been incessantly repeating since, on numberless occa- 
 sions, and in a variety of forms; but it strikingly marks the slow progress where- 
 with a principle before unheard of makes way in society that for at least 
 fifteen years any testimony I could lift upon the subject was like the voice of 
 one crying in the wilderness. It is now more familiar to Scotland since the 
 extension of our church, no longer a matter of mere speech or speculation, 
 has become a living and practical concern. I believe that in this part of the 
 world, it is chiefly indebted for any currency it might have, to the important 
 circumstance of its having been adopted by Lord Brougham some years ago, 
 who, in a speech in the House of Peers, made use of the very consideration) 
 and propounded it, almost in the very words which' I ha*ve now uttered in 
 your hearing after which it expanded into full notoriety, when this par- 
 ticular reason for an established church, instead of lying hid in so many para- 
 graphs of obscure authorship, went forth over the whole length and breadth of 
 England under its far more influential title of the Lord Chancellor's argument. 
 
. 
 
 government paid any part of that price in the shape 
 of a bounty. And it were an equal violation of 
 the same system, from whatever quarter that bounty 
 should come whether from the state, or from 
 any body of associated philanthropists, or from 
 private individuals. It is the doctrine, and we 
 hold it a sound one, of the economists, that 
 an article should no longer be brought to market, 
 if the price, which purchasers are willing to pay 
 for it, do not remunerate the cost of its prepara- 
 tion ; or if, to help out that price, advances must 
 be made by any party distinct from the purchasers 
 themselves. For in this case it were a losing 
 trade; and so miich of the capital of the country, 
 it is argued, would be thrown away on a profitless 
 or hurtful investment. And one of the foremost 
 articles in our modern, and, as we think, enlight- 
 ened creed, is, that the supply of all those goods 
 should cease, for which there is not an effective 
 demand, that would cover the whole expense of 
 bringing them to market that the whole matter 
 of demand and supply, in fact, should be left to 
 find its own adjustment, in the free choice of the 
 two parties concerned in it; or should be made to 
 hinge exclusively on the price which the one party 
 are willing to give, and the profit which the other 
 party are willing to receive. Let these two 
 elements act and react at will on each other, and 
 so as to make out between them a self-going 
 mechanism, that would only be put out of order, 
 as if by the violence of a disturbing force should 
 

 V*OP 
 
 57 
 
 the intervention of any third patty toe ttdtaftfc^ 
 for the purpose either of help or of hindrance. In 
 other words, the economists contend, and with our 
 entire acquiescence, for the establishment of a 
 perfect freedom in the world of trade, as being 
 the condition of things, in which the best and 
 most beneficial result, the greatest good or maxi- 
 mum of commercial prosperity is realised when 
 dealers on the one hand are most profited, and 
 customers on the other are most pleased. 
 
 7. Now let us consider whether this is the foot- 
 ing on which the world ever is, or ever can be, 
 supplied with its Christi'anity, or rather with its 
 Christian instruction, in the way that is best for 
 the moral interests of our species. It was not so 
 at the first introduction of Christianity, in virtue, 
 not of a movement from earth to heaven, but of a 
 movement from heaven to earth ; and the expenses 
 of which, throughout the infancy and boyhood 6f 
 the Saviour, were certainly not defrayed by those 
 for whose welfare the mission was Undertaken. It 
 was not so during the time of His public ministry, 
 when three or four women ministered to Him of 
 their substance, as He travelled from place to place 
 over the land of Judea; and so He was maintained 
 at the cost of the few for the benefit of the many. 
 It was not so in the journeyings of His disciples, 
 two by two among their countrymen who, when 
 they entered a city, fixed their residence in some 
 particular house, and were supported by the hos- 
 pitality of one individual for the good of the ge- 
 
58 
 
 neral population. It was not so when the apostles 
 went forth after the resurrection ; and receive.d 
 their maintenance from such as Simon the tanner, 
 or Lydia the seller of purple, or Stephanus and 
 Fortunatus, and Achaicus, and others of those Scrip- 
 ture worthies who harhoured and entertained the 
 men of God, while they held out the bread of life, 
 without money and without price, to the multi- 
 tude at large. It was not so when the last, but 
 not the least of the apostles, provided with his 
 own hand for his own necessities ; and the wages 
 of Paul the tentmaker, enabled Paul the apostle, 
 to labour in his sacred vocation without wages. It 
 was not so when he received from other and dis- 
 tinct churches, that, in the church of Corinth, the 
 gospel might not be chargeable to any ; and he 
 would suffer no man to strip him of this boasting 
 in the regions of Achaia. And, to come down 
 from the age of the New Testament, it generally 
 could not have been so, that the extension of 
 Christianity was carried forward during the three 
 first centuries. The men who were not yet Chris- 
 tians did not, in those days, send to the apostolic 
 college for men who might give them the lessons 
 of the gospel ; but, by a reverse process, teachers 
 went forth among the yet benighted countries of 
 the earth ; and their expenses, at least in the first 
 instance, behoved to be borne, not in the shape of 
 a price by those who received the benefit, but in 
 the shape of a bounty by those who dispensed it. 
 In all these instances, contrary to every law or 
 
character of pure trade, the expense was borne 
 either totally or partially by one party, and that 
 for the good of another party. It was not as in the 
 ordinary exchanges of commerce. The receivers 
 were not the purchasers ; and what they did re- 
 ceive was not a thing by them bought, but a thing 
 to them given. It is an utter misconception that 
 when Constantine set up in his dominions a na- 
 tional establishment of Christianity, he made the 
 first infringement on that sytem of free trade by 
 which the prosperity of this religion had been here- 
 tofore upholden ; for, from its very outset, Chris- 
 tianity stood indebted, for almost every footstep of 
 its progress, to a system and a policy directly the 
 opposite of this. When he came forth with his great 
 imperial bounty or benefaction, he only did on the 
 large scale, what thousands of benefactors had pre- 
 viously, and for hundreds of years, done on a small 
 scale before him. When he became the friend and 
 nursing father of the church, he did for the whole 
 territory of which he was the sovereign, what, times 
 and ways without number, the friends of the church 
 had already done, each for the little district in which 
 he himself resided, or for the introduction and the 
 maintenance of Christian worship in some chosen 
 locality of his own. With his great national endow- 
 ment, he but followed in the tract of those private 
 and particular endowments which, sometimes tem- 
 porary, and sometimes perpetual, had multiplied 
 beyond all reckoning, during the preceding ages of 
 Christianity ; and in virtue of which it was, that 
 
60 
 
 churches innumerable were raised, and congrega- 
 tions were formed ; but chiefly in the large and 
 flourishing cities of the Roman empire. The 
 peasants, or they who lived in the country and vil- 
 lages, inhabitants of the pagi, and hence called 
 Pagans, were, in the great bulk of them, still un- 
 converted insomuch that Paganism in those days 
 became synonymous with heathenism ; or, in other 
 words, the great majority of the rustics or country- 
 men of that period, notwithstanding the strenuous 
 and apostolic exertion of many thousands of Chris- 
 tian missionaries for about three centuries together, 
 were still adherents to the old superstition and 
 idolatry of their forefathers. The universal endow- 
 'ment, by which a ministry was provided for every 
 little section 6f the territory, or the whole was broken 
 itlto parishes, opened a way to the moral fastnesses 
 that were still held and occupied by the countless 
 millions whom all the efforts of by-gone generations 
 had not reached ; and so brought a whole host of 
 gospel labourers into contact with the wide and 
 plenteous harvest of the general population. 
 
 8. But, instead of looking to the distant past, of 
 which the history is far from perfect, the same 
 lesson might be drawn from the observation of 
 present or modern times. Certain it is, that the 
 introduction of Christianity into .any new land, 
 proceeds by a very different method from the 
 introduction thereinto of any of the goods of 
 ordinary merchandise. The commercial adven- 
 turers look for the remuneration of their expenses, 
 
61 
 
 to the priee or equivalent given by the natives 
 themselves. The missionary adventurers are up- 
 held in their expenses, not by a price, but gene- 
 rally in whole, and almost always in part, by a 
 bounty the bounty of those who employ and 
 send them forth in full equipment for their high 
 enterprise of charity. In this process, that law of 
 equal and reciprocal barter, between them who 
 bestow and them who receive the benefit, which 
 the advocates of a free trade contend for, is aliQr 
 gether unknown. Rather than want the teas of 
 China, the families of Britain do, in effect, send 
 for them along half the circumference of the globe, 
 and defray the whole cost of the expensive ,and 
 distant voyage by which they are brought to ow 
 shores. But who paid for the outfit and all the 
 other charges of that first missionary vessel, which 
 first wafted the gospel to the remote island of Ot*u 
 heite? Not the natives themselves, who shoulcj 
 have wanted the blessings of Christianity for ever, 
 had we waited for their effective demand ; or not 
 moved but in the expectatioD of ja safe and profit- 
 able return from their hands, for the cost of this 
 great undertaking. The undertaking originated 
 with us ; and was defrayed to the last farthing, out 
 of a missionary fund raised from the benevolent of 
 our own land. It is generally thus that all mis- 
 sionary work is upholden paid and provided for, 
 not by the receivers of Christianity, but by its 
 dispensers, or rather by those who maintain the 
 dispensers. So that, at least in the extension of 
 
62 
 
 Christianity, we do not sell the gospel, but offer it : 
 we do not calculate on a price, as in the operations 
 of commerce, but have recourse to a bounty, that 
 dread and deprecation of all the economists with- 
 out which, whatever the effect might be on the 
 continuance of Christianity in old countries, the 
 propagation of it, at least in new countries, were 
 altogether hopeless. Some may contend, that, on 
 the principles of free trade, Christianity could be 
 perpetuated wherever it is already planted ; but 
 few will have the hardihood to affirm, that, on 
 these principles, its first settlement could have 
 been effected in any land. 
 
 9. But though Christianity were indebted to the 
 operation of a bounty, for every footstep of its pro- 
 gress from one region to another, this is far from 
 being decisive of the controversy. For properly 
 the question relates, not to the methods by which 
 Christianity is introduced, but to the methods by 
 which it might be maintained in any land. It 
 might be very true that the taste, and consequently 
 the demand for this religion, must first be created 
 among those people to whom it is at present un- 
 known ; and that therefore anterior to this, instead 
 of waiting till it be sought after, it must be offered 
 to their acceptance, or be carried to their doors, 
 and taught to their families, not at their own ex- 
 pense, but at the expense of others beside them- 
 selves. It is even thus that commerce sometimes 
 obtains a footing for itself in particular countries. 
 Before the natives can have a liking for certain of 
 
63 
 
 its articles, they must first have a sight and a trial 
 of them ; and so instances can be given, where 
 dealers have adventured their goods into places, 
 where, instead of finding a market, they had first 
 to form one at their own hazard, therefore, or 
 even expense in the first instance, and not at the 
 expense of customers. But though it was thus at 
 the commencement of the trade, it could not possi- 
 bly be thus that we can explain the continuance 
 of the trade. The same people, who would not 
 send for the commodity at the first, might, when 
 once made to know and to relish it, rather than 
 want, be abundantly willing to pay for it after- 
 wards. And might not Christianity be sped in like 
 manner? Though introduced at the expense of 
 others, might it not, when the appetite for its 
 lessons is excited, be maintained by themselves 
 afterwards; and that not by certain of the nation 
 for the benefit of the rest, but entirely and exclu- 
 sively by those who receive the benefit ? It might 
 be very true that missionaries, at the charge and 
 bidding of those who are Christians, must be em- 
 ployed for the conversion of those who are not 
 Christians ; but may it not also be true, that, after 
 their conversion has been effected, then a native 
 demand will be set agoing; and ministers be em- 
 ployed at their own charge and their own bidding, 
 for keeping up this religion from generation to 
 generation ? 
 
 10. There is a great semblance of probability 
 for this, in much that might be seen, "both through- 
 
64 
 
 out our own teno} anpl in the various countries of 
 Christendom. In Britain, there are many huo,- 
 dreds pf large and flourishing congregations, where 
 all the expenses of the service are defrayed by the 
 hearers themselves. These are pure instances of 
 free trade, and of an interchange as complete and 
 equal as any which erer takes place between the 
 buyers and the sellers of a market where Chris- 
 tian instruction is rendered by the pne party, and 
 where its price, its whole price, is rendered by the 
 other party where there is not one farthing of 
 endowment t;p Kelp put the maintenance of the 
 clergyman ; and a remuneration for his labour, 
 often adequate and respectable, is fully rnade good 
 to him by those who enjoy the fruits, of i<t. This 
 operation of demand and supply is often exempli- 
 fiepl both within and without th<e church of Eng- 
 land, in many a successful chapel and many a 
 prosperous meeting-house where, In virtue of a 
 large or a wealthy attendance, t^tie produce of the 
 seat-reats is sufficient, both for the payment of the 
 nfiinister and fpr all the 9ther expenses of the con- 
 cern. A<ud, most assuredly, we have no quarrel 
 witb institutes like these provided only that a 
 pure gospel is delivered, and that Christian good is 
 done by them. In whatever way Christ is faith- 
 fully and efficiently preached, it is the part of every 
 honest disciple therein to rejoice ; and no one can 
 question the undoubted contributions m^de to the 
 cause of religion, in the proprietary chaples of such 
 churchmen as Newton, and Cecil, and Howell, and 
 
05 
 
 Daniel Wilson, or of such dissenters as Watts, ami 
 Doddridge, and Andrew Fuller, and Robert Hall. 
 But it follows not, that, because there is a fitness in 
 such as these to supplement the Establishment, 
 there is also a sufficiency in them to supersede the 
 Establishment ; or, that the economy which is 
 found to succeed within the limits of many a select 
 and separate assemblage of worshippers, is the 
 proper type of that larger economy, the object of 
 which is to extend the blessings of Christian know- 
 ledge over the whole length and breadth of a 
 land. 
 
 11. And, on viewing more specifically and at- 
 tentively the state of these unendowed chapels, it 
 will be found, that, on the strict principles of a 
 reciprocal trade, a very large proportion of them 
 could not possibly be sustained. In very many 
 instances, the seat-rents of the occupiers, aided 
 even by their voluntary offerings, are inadequate to 
 the yearly expenses of the undertaking : and so 
 subscriptions have to be instituted, which are carried 
 beyond the hearers themselves ; or collections 
 are advertised for the benefit of the chapel-funds, 
 to which the public at large are invited ; or cre- 
 ditors, whether by constraint or generosity, have 
 to transmute their loan into a gift, by the abandon- 
 ment of their claims altogether j or journeys have 
 to be undertaken, that money might be raised in 
 various ways to help on the building of chapels in 
 progress, or to extricate those already built from 
 
 their sore embarrassments : And the innumerable 
 
 E 
 
other shifts and difficulties of these heavily indebted 
 concerns, familiar to those who are vested with the 
 management, all serve to demonstrate, that, un- 
 like to the other articles which are brought into a 
 market, and of which the supply is continued only 
 because of an adequately remunerating price 
 unlike to these, the returns for the article of 
 Christian instruction are very often beneath the 
 prime cost incurred in the preparation of it. In 
 thousands of instances, we might venture to say, 
 the inadequacy of the whole sum obtained from 
 the seat-rents must be made up by a liberality or 
 a bounty obtained from other quarters ; or, which 
 is the same thing, they who receive the whole 
 benefit of the ministration do not pay the whole 
 price of it and the deficiency is covered by cer- 
 tain others who have no share in the benefit. In 
 this transaction between the minister and his peo- 
 ple, what is given on the one hand, and what is 
 received on the other, do not stand to each other 
 as the equivalents of a mercantile exchange. The 
 payment for his services consists of two ingredients 
 one in the character of a price, but the other 
 in the character of a present, which coming from 
 the hands of individuals might be termed a bene- 
 volence, and would be termed an endowment did 
 it come from the hands of the state. 
 
 12. But the strongest argument remains behind, 
 for the necessity, either of such a benevolence 
 being raised from the Christian public, or of such 
 an endowment being obtained from the state. We 
 
07 
 
 may find, though a very few, of those wealthy 
 congregations, which, in virtue of a revenue made 
 up of golden seat-rents, can support their clergy- 
 men in affluence and of course the highest in 
 the scale, as may be seen at a glance on the face 
 of the assemblage within, or as may be collected 
 at the proper hour by the passing traveller with- 
 out, from the throng and splendour of the many 
 vehicles which beset the chapel doors. And, de- 
 scending from such, there may perhaps be some 
 hundreds more of independent or self-subsisting 
 congregations in our land, which at the end of the 
 year, can exhibit their favourable balance, and be 
 appealed to as so many examples of the prosperous 
 working of the system of free trade in Christianity 
 where wealthy merchants, even substantial 
 tradesmen, and at times, though rarely, a certain 
 but small proportion of the best conditioned among 
 the woiking classes in the cheapest or outskirt 
 pews, make up a body of worshippers, of whom 
 it may justly be said that they pay to the full, 
 and without help from any foreign quarter, for the 
 spiritual provision both of themselves and of their 
 families. Over and above these, we have as many 
 thousands of those places of worship, which, but for 
 the aid, either of private or public benevolence, 
 would have turned out to be so many failures in- 
 debted for their perpetuity to helps which are per- 
 fectly honourable toboth parties, but which, as being 
 departures from the system of free trade, serve at 
 least to demonstrate its insufficiency for the supply 
 
68 
 
 of any land with the lessons of the gospel. And 
 accordingly, we find, that, in such congregations, 
 it falls short of maintaining them ; and that, be- 
 cause congregations of altogether a more plebeian 
 cast and composition than those which we have 
 just specified planted, it may be, in some poorer 
 districts of the country ; or admitting, if in town, 
 a larger proportion of artizans and labourers. The 
 system of free trade does something for these con- 
 gregations, but does not and cannot do all. It 
 should be accredited with the sum of all the prices 
 fetched, in the shape of seat-rents, from those who 
 are hearers. But these, in violation of that free- 
 trade system which repudiates all bounties, have 
 to be supplemented by presents fetched from those 
 who are not hearers. These, therefore, are not 
 specimens of the sufficiency of this system. The 
 difficulties under which they labour, their struggles 
 to keep themselves afloat, the many shifts and diffi- 
 culties which they must resort to, in the shape of 
 drafts on the charity both of individuals and of the 
 public, may all be appealed to as evidences, that, 
 however commerce may thrive on the native power 
 of her own articles to summon the attendance of 
 customers, and call forth a full equivalent at their 
 hands; it is not thus that Christianity can be so 
 sped and carried forward, or can ever become 
 commensurate to the whole length and breadth of 
 a country's population. 
 
 13. But, as we have already said, the strongest 
 argument of all remains behind. We have accom- 
 
69 
 
 panied the progress of these unendowed chapels so 
 far down in the scale of society ; and have found, 
 in the greatest majority of those which we come to 
 last, that, on the mere footing of a commercial 
 speculation, they could not be upholden. They in 
 all probability would never have been built, but for 
 the prospect of an addition from some other source 
 than the market-price of sittings ; and certain it 
 is, that without such addition they would never 
 have been maintained. When thus pushed to their 
 extreme limit, and then examined as to the rank 
 and quality of those who repair to them, it will be 
 found that they serve chiefly for the accommoda- 
 tion of those who may be designated the lower of 
 the middle class ; and these mingled, to a certain 
 extent, with household servants and the better 
 conditioned of the working classes in society. But 
 the decisive fact is, that beyond this limit, across 
 which our chapel undertakers have never ventured 
 and that because from the ulterior on the other 
 side of it, there is the certainty of a dead loss to 
 scare them away on this untrodden vastness, 
 there do exist thousands and thousands more, com- 
 prising often the great mass and majority of the 
 common people, whom a deficient Establishment on 
 the one hand has necessarily left out ; and whom 
 all the energies of Dissent upon the other, with all 
 which the system of free trade can do, and all 
 which Christian benevolence does into the bargain, 
 have not overtaken. They cannot, it would appear, 
 be allured as customers into those houses which 
 
70 
 
 dissenters have provided ; and there are no houses 
 provided by the Establishment to take them in as 
 commoners and that, because the Establishment 
 has fallen short of its proper design, which is to 
 hold forth Christianity without charge to the poor, 
 or as a common good and benefit for all the families 
 of all the population. And so it will be found 
 that, in this surplus territory, whether it be met 
 with in town or country, the great bulk and body 
 of our ordinary workmen are neither church-goers 
 nor chapel-goers. It is a question of statistics, and 
 admits of being determined arithmetically and ex- 
 perimentally. Our assertion is borne out by every 
 ecclesiastical survey that has been made in those 
 places where the church is greatly short of the 
 population, and where the free trade system has 
 put forth all its energies to supplement the defi- 
 ciency. And, accordingly, there are eighty thousand 
 human beings in Glasgow who should be the 
 regular attendants on divine worship, and who yet 
 go regularly and habitually nowhere ; and fifty 
 thousand in Edinburgh ; and at the very least half 
 a million in London ; and untold myriads in the 
 manufacturing districts of Yorkshire and Lan- 
 cashire. The thing admits of being brought de- 
 cisively to the test of observation. It is at the 
 choice of any single inquirer to verify it on his 
 own account. Let him go forth on any district, 
 whether of town or country, if the same or similarly 
 conditioned with the places which we have now 
 specified, and it be chiefly inhabited by men of 
 
71 
 
 handicraft and hard labour let him fix at random 
 on some contiguous thousand of a population made 
 up of such materials, and he will often find, that, 
 where at least one half should be every Sabbath 
 in the house of God, not one hundred or a 
 tenth of the whole, much oftener not a hundred 
 and twenty-five or one eighth of the whole, very 
 seldom indeed one hundred and fifty or between a 
 sixth and seventh of the whole that have sittings 
 in any place of worship, whether in the parish 
 church or in meeting-houses of all denominations. 
 On the field of his investigation, the population 
 may have doubled or tripled, or perhaps even be 
 assembled on a territory where, within its limits a 
 century before, there was not a single human habi- 
 tation. It is most interesting to know what free 
 trade does, and what it leaves undone, in such new 
 and increasing settlements as these. And it will 
 invariably be found, that while shops, and markets, 
 and the number of victuallers or clothiers, keep 
 full pace with the increasing population and their 
 increasing demand for food and raiment the 
 churches, and the chapels, even the schools, and 
 of course the number of teachers whether for 
 religion or learning, have notoriously fallen short 
 and not kept pace with them. The dealers in 
 those things which are necessary to life ever main- 
 tain an equal proportion with the growing number 
 of the families. The dealers in those things which 
 are necessary to godliness fall behind this propor- 
 tion, very often to one fifth, not infrequently to 
 
72 
 
 one tenth, sometimes so low or even lower 
 than one twentieth leaving a vast moral wil- 
 derness in all those places where the people have 
 been left to multiply, and at the same time left to 
 themselves. Dealers, of course, accommodate 
 their wares to the taste and inclination of their 
 customers ; and it were a transgression on the 
 principle and philosophy of free trade to interfere 
 with this process. And true it is, that to its single 
 operation may be confided, with all safety, the 
 supply of the physical wants of our nature. Let 
 a bazaar be instituted for the sale of provisions ; 
 and, at the powerful and ever-recurring call of 
 hunger, the multitude with one accord will flock 
 daily to its portals, and with such a price in their 
 hands too as will remunerate all the expenses of 
 the establishment. Let the institute be a church, 
 for distribution amongst them of the bread of life, 
 or for the supply of their moral and religious 
 wants: and its presence in the midst of them, 
 with the weekly invitations of its Sabbath-bell, 
 will fail to attract beyond the veriest handful of 
 the surrounding population to this house of prayer 
 and, more especially, if the market-price for the 
 accommodation and the service be expected at 
 their hands. It may or it may not be filled to an 
 overflow by hearers from all distances, who have 
 both the wealth and the will to pay for their 
 attendance. But hundreds often are the families in 
 the precincts of this temple of piety, so near that 
 the voice of its psalms may enter their dwellings, 
 
73 
 
 yet not awaken them from the insensibility of their 
 spiritual death. In the midst of besetting oppor- 
 tunities do they abide in their fastnesses ; and just 
 because left, as the system of free trade leaves 
 every one, to their own inclinations are there 
 thousands, nay millions, in our land, who, aban- 
 doned to themselves, and voluntary aliens from the 
 light of the gospel, are left to live in guilt and 
 die in grossest darkness. 
 
 14. Such is the melancholy upshot of those rash 
 and unfortunate generalisations, which the philo- 
 sopher often indulges in his closet ; and which 
 have sometimes, to the great curse of the nation 
 on whom they are inflicted, found their way into 
 the cabinet, and been carried into effect, by those 
 vain and misguided statesmen, who, themselves the 
 erring worshippers of science and ambitious of its 
 honours, have drunk, but drunk not deeply, at the 
 Pierian spring. It may be well in commerce, that 
 markets should be left to find their own sponta- 
 neous level ; and that the two elements of demand 
 and supply should be suffered, without inter- 
 ference, to come to their own mutual adjustment 
 of themselves. But it is not well that matters 
 should thus be left in Christianity else no at- 
 tempt will be made, either to instruct the poor or 
 to reclaim the profligate $ and men, left to their 
 own native indifference in spiritual things, will 
 lapse into a habit of irreligion, will rather never be 
 raised or liberated therefrom. The benefits which 
 commerce confers upon the world are all provided 
 
74 
 
 at the expense, not of the dispensers, but of the 
 recipients. Let this he the footing on which the 
 benefits of Christianity are provided also; and in 
 what possible way shall we reach either the de- 
 praved or the destitute? those who have no will 
 for its moral and spiritual blessings, or those who 
 have no wealth to purchase them ? In truth, 
 there is no enlightened philanthropist bent on the 
 highest interests of humanity, and no enlightened 
 patriot or statesman bent on the chief good of his 
 own land, who would not prize it as a most gain- 
 ful as well as glorious achievement, if the great 
 bulk of the people in these realms would but con- 
 sent to take the lessons of Christianity for nothing; 
 and be taught in the doctrine and morality of the 
 gospel at the expense of others, and without one 
 farthing of the purchase-money being advanced by 
 themselves. This sacred theme the education 
 of the people, more especially when the education 
 of principle has been utterly vulgarised by these 
 computations of a cold and secular utilitarianism. 
 Never was there a wider departure from all prin- 
 ciple and truth, than when proposed to liken this 
 highest good of the community to the goods of 
 ordinary merchandise whether viewed as an 
 error of speculation by the savant, or as the crude 
 imagination of the prosperous citizen, who appeals 
 to the snug prosperity of his own thriving chapel, 
 which, because filled to the door by wealthy seat- 
 payers like himself, he would, therefore, hold forth 
 as the representative and type of that system, by 
 
75 
 
 which the religion of a whole country should be 
 provided for. The best and greatest interests of 
 human society must not be so trifled with. And, 
 after all, there is not only false sentiment but even 
 false arithmetic in the views of these gross and 
 mercantile calculators. The universal scholarship 
 for which we are contending, would, if carried into 
 effect, be indeed the cheapest defence of our 
 nation whether its expenses shall be defrayed in 
 the form of a liberality by the hands of private 
 individuals, or from the public tieasury in the form 
 of an endowment.* 
 
 15. We have not yet, however, made good the 
 
 * On the subject of cheapness, let us confess once for all " that we have no 
 sympathy with what has been called the spirit of the age. The very worst 
 effects are to be dreaded from it. Every thing now is made a question of 
 finance ; and science, with all that can grace or dignify a nation, is vulgar- 
 ised and brought down to a common standard the standard of the market 
 and of the counting-house. It does look menacing, to take an example out 
 of the thousand which may be specified, that it hinged on one solitary vote, 
 whether the trigonometrical survey of our island should be permitted to go on 
 a work which like the Doomsday-Book of England might, after the lapse 
 of a millennium, still survive, as a great national index for the guidance of our 
 most distant posterity. It makes one tremble for some fearful resurrection 
 of the old Gothic spirit amongst us when one thinks that we were within 
 a hair-breadth of this noble enterprise being quashed. And this is the spirit 
 of the age ! an age of unsparing retrenchment ; a regime of hard and 
 hunger-bitten economy, before whose remorseless pruning-hook lie withering 
 and dissevered from their stem, the noblest interests of the commonwealth ; 
 a vehement outrageous parsimony, which, under the guise of patriotism, so 
 reigns and ravens over the whole length and breadth of the land, and cares 
 not though both religion and philosophy should expire, if but some wretched 
 item of shred arid of candle-end should be gained by the sacrifice ; this, 
 though now the ascendant policy of our nation, elevated into power by the 
 decisions of the legislature, and blown into popularity by the hosannahs of 
 the multitude, will be looked back upon by posterity as an inglorions feature 
 of the worst and most inglorious period in the annals of Britain ; the befitting 
 policy for an age of little measures and little men." Chalmers's Political 
 Economy, p. 260. 
 
76 
 
 conclusion, that a National Establishment is the 
 best and fittest expedient for providing our general 
 population with the lessons of Christianity, al- 
 though we trust it may soon appear, that it is not 
 on the free trade principle, which is the principle 
 of let alone, that we can most effectually secure 
 this high interest. We may have scored off this 
 from the list of expedients ; yet other expedients 
 for the religious education of the people may re- 
 main to be disposed of, besides that of an Establish- 
 ment and having now delivered our views on the 
 scheme of the economists, we shall proceed in our 
 next Lecture to expound and to give our estimate 
 of another scheme, which, though generally held 
 to be identical with the former, is, in some material 
 respects, distinct from it ; we mean the scheme 
 of the voluntaries. 
 
77 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 VINDICATION OF A NATIONAL RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENT, 
 IN OPPOSITION TO THE VIEWS OF THOSE WHO ALLEGE 
 THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE. 
 
 THE Voluntary Principle is partly in unison with 
 the doctrine of a free trade in Christianity, but far 
 from being altogether so ; though thus generally 
 imagined by our undiscriminating adversaries, who, 
 in the management of this controversy, have so 
 confounded the things which differ, as to assail the 
 system of endowments sometimes under the former 
 argument and sometimes under the latter uncon- 
 scious all the while of such an occasional conflict 
 and contrariety between the two reasons which them- 
 selves employ, that the one reason often completely 
 neutralises the other. We should in fact have taken 
 up the anti-establishment expression of the Volun- 
 tary Principle sooner had it not been that the 
 other, or the principle of a free trade in Christianity, 
 though not so current in the vocabulary of the 
 general public on this question, is now the favourite 
 expression of our senators and economists ; and 
 more embodies that conception in their minds, on 
 which many of them do hold a National Estab- 
 lishment of Christianity to be uncalled for. Under 
 this title it carries more the air of science or of 
 profound and enlightened statesmanship ; is re- 
 
78 
 
 commended by such names as those of Smith and 
 Turgot and others of the high savans both in 
 France and in England ; and altogether has such 
 a character or pretension of philosophy about it, 
 as to prove greatly more seducing to minds ena- 
 moured of those generalisations, in which a lofty 
 and comprehensive intellect delights to indulge. 
 It is by a slow and laborious process, and after many 
 a severe encounter with the prejudices of the age, 
 that the original speculations of the closet, however 
 sound, come to have their practical effect and de- 
 velopment in the hall of legislation. It has been 
 said that it took half a century, ere the enlightened 
 political economy of Dr. Smith found its way into 
 the statute-book. But a great and unfortunate 
 error has been implicated with a theory otherwise 
 unexceptionable ; and will it take another half 
 century, ere the proper discrimination be made, 
 and that error be discharged from the minds of 
 those legislators, who have imbibed the whole system 
 and philosophy of this great master in economical 
 science ? And meanwhile, because the doctrine of 
 a free trade in commerce has now become an article 
 of the popular and prevailing creed, must we be 
 doomed to hear for the whole of that period of the 
 doctrine of a free trade in Christianity also? Never 
 truly did two distinct questions stand more widely 
 apart from each other, or had less of a common 
 principle to rest upon ; and should, in consequence 
 of the two being resolved alike, our religious 
 Establishments be abrogated then will the best 
 
79 
 
 and greatest of our national institutes have been 
 offered up in sacrifice to the wizard power of a phan- 
 tom to the mere deceit and sorcery of a name. 
 
 We now come to the proper subject of this day's 
 lecture. 
 
 1. When men tell us in argument of the Volun- 
 tary Principle, they are not aware of a certain 
 ambiguity in the phrase, which, though not gene- 
 rally noticed by controversialists, would, if fully 
 exposed and done away, go far to simplify, if not 
 to settle, the whole controversy. When we ask our 
 antagonists, what substitute they would propose 
 for a national establishment of religion, we shall 
 at one time hear of a free trade in Christianity ; 
 and at another of the Voluntary Principle and 
 that from the mouth of one and the same reasoner. 
 Yet in one sense of the Voluntary Principle, there 
 is an utter discrepancy between it and the system 
 of free trade j and it is only in the other sense 
 of it that the two are analogous, or rather indenti- 
 cal, the one with the other. If this matter were 
 perfectly cleared up, we think it would chase away 
 a certain mistiness which overhangs this whole 
 question insomuch that the agitation of it has, 
 in many instances, been a combat in the dark. It 
 has often been found to terminate an intellectual 
 warfare, when the champions on each side of it 
 have been made to understand, both each other 
 and themselves. 
 
 2. There now seems on all hands a strong prac- 
 tical sense, if not an explicit and avowed one, of 
 
80 
 
 the insufficiency of the free trade system, for the 
 supply of the world with the lessons of Christianity. 
 This has long been acknowledged, or at least acted 
 upon in the business of foreign missions, or in the 
 business of supplying foreign parts with the know- 
 ledge of the gospel. Instead of waiting till the 
 demand for Christianity comes of its own accord, 
 from men ready with an indemnifying or remune- 
 rating price, to cover all the expenses of bringing 
 it to their shore the dispensers of Christianity go 
 forth on their missionary voyage, in quest of men, 
 to whom .they might offer this pearl of greatest 
 value, and on whom to urge the acceptance of it 
 without money and without price. Instead of 
 discerning in this process any of the methods of 
 ordinary trade, there is here a reversal of all its 
 principles ; and what comes near to the point at 
 issue, there is a like reversal of them in the home 
 as in the foreign missionary enterprise. And 
 accordingly we have the one institute as well as the 
 other. We have the Home Missionary Society, 
 that would never have been thought of, but for the 
 experimental feeling of a destitution and depravity 
 at our own doors, which required the very same 
 treatment with the heathenism of distant lands 
 and this Society composed of the very men, too, 
 who, while they give evidence by their own doings 
 of the insufficiency of the free trade system, can 
 yet talk of this as the grand specific, on the strength 
 of which they might dispense with a national 
 establishment of religion altogether. There is in 
 
81 
 
 truth no analogy between their operations, and 
 those of commerce on the system of free trade, 
 or of commerce alike unfostered and unfettered 
 by any artificial regulations. The agents of this 
 society, the men who labour under them, in the 
 streets of our city or the villages of our country 
 population, are not maintained on the principles of 
 a market do not receive their necessary hire in 
 the shape of equivalents from those who are bene- 
 fitted by them ; but in the shape of a bounty from 
 those who employ them. We say that all they who 
 have become parties in such an institution, stand 
 committed, if not in favour of a national Esta- 
 blishment, at least against one of the favourite 
 substitutes, by which it is proposed to replace the 
 want of one against the system of a free trade 
 in Christianity. They tell us emphatically by their 
 own conduct, that something else, something addi- 
 tional must be tried, beside the mere operation of 
 demand and supply as in ordinary merchandise ; 
 which, however sufficient for the upper and middle 
 classes, who, if they have got the will, have also the 
 wealth to purchase the lessons of the gospel for 
 themselves has long proved itself to be glaringly 
 insufficientfor the great mass of the common people, 
 for that mighty host of immortal and accountable 
 beings, who compose the great bulk and body of 
 every commonwealth. 
 
 3. Still we may have cancelled or disposed of 
 the free trade system, and made effectual demon- 
 stration of the necessity for its being supplemented, 
 
82 
 
 if not set aside, by the adoption of some other ex- 
 pedient for the Christian instruction of the people ; 
 and yet not made it out, that this expedient should 
 be a legal and sure provision for the maintenance 
 of an established clergy. The doctrine of an 
 establishment may have other rivals, or other 
 antagonists to contend with, beside the system of 
 free trade ; and accordingly such an antagonist 
 has been conjured up within these few years, 
 under the name of the Voluntary Principle 
 which, though identified in the imagination of our 
 opponents with a free trade in Christianity, is yet 
 not throughout all its extent identical therewith. 
 Had it been perfectly the same, we should have 
 viewed it as having been already fought against, and 
 placed hors de combat. But the two are in certain 
 respects distinct, and each requires a distinct 
 argumentation although confounded together by 
 the undistinguishing advocates of the Voluntary 
 Principle, who thus prove themselves alike insen- 
 sible to the strength and the weakness of their own 
 cause. 
 
 4. There are two sorts then of the Voluntary 
 Principle, which are almost never adverted to; but 
 which it is of the utmost argumentative importance 
 to discriminate the one from the other. A man, 
 then, may either make a voluntary return, in the 
 shape of a price or equivalent, for those Christian 
 ministrations which are rendered to himself or 
 his family ; or he may make a voluntary offering 
 in the shape of a donation, to set agoing or to 
 
support a Christian ministration Tor others beside 
 himself, or for other families than his own. The 
 one may be altogether as voluntary a payment as 
 tiie other. He may not have been more willing 
 to make remuneration for his own share of the 
 article of Christian instruction to himself than he 
 is willing to make a contribution that others may 
 share it along with him. Both of these exercises, 
 however different in their effect and object, have 
 been referred to the Voluntary Principle ; and the 
 result has been, that, to a great extent, it has 
 darkened or bewildered the whole controversy. 
 Two things so different in their nature, ought to 
 be signalised and set apart from each other by 
 different names. When a congregation, therefore, 
 do from their own contributions, whether formed 
 by seat-rents or otherwise, support their own mi- 
 nister we shall put it down to the account of 
 internal voluntaryism ; and that because the mem- 
 bers of the congregation raise within themselves a 
 sufficiency for all their expenses. In as far as they 
 have been helped to accomplish this by the con- 
 tributions of others, not members of the congrega- 
 tions, we shall put it down to the account of ex- 
 ternal voluntaryism as coming from people with- 
 out the limits of the congregation. In other 
 words, the one is voluntaryism ab intra ; the other 
 voluntaryism ab extra. We regret the scholastic 
 character of these designations ; but we can find 
 no others more expressive than these. 
 
 5. It will now be seen how far the Voluntary 
 
84 
 
 Principle is coincident, and how far it is in conflict, 
 with the system of free trade in Christianity. It 
 must be obvious of internal voluntaryism, that it is 
 just another name for this system ; and must 
 therefore share in all the defects and all the im- 
 potency, under which we have proved it to labour. 
 On the principle of a free trade, or of a trade un- 
 forced and un fostered by any bounty, each congre- 
 gation is left, out of its own resources, to pay the 
 expenses of its own ministry, a principle of which 
 we have already demonstrated, that it leaves mil- 
 lions and millions more of our British population 
 all in fact who have neither the wealth nor the 
 will to purchase a Christian education for them- 
 selves in a state of heathenism. But any short- 
 coming in the price which these are willing to give 
 for their religious instruction, may be supplemented 
 by the contributions which others from abroad are 
 willing to advance, so as to make out such a remu- 
 neration as may be essential to keep the chapel 
 and its services agoing. Now whatever comes 
 from this source, comes from the willingness of the 
 people to give, who have no ^benefit from these 
 services ; or, in other words, is the produce of 
 external voluntaryism. But this lands us in what, 
 to all intents and purposes, is a bounty ; or the 
 moment you draw upon external voluntaryism, 
 you make a practical acknowledgment of the in- 
 sufficiency of the free trade system, for the supply 
 of a population with the lessons of the gospel. 
 We hear of the sufficiency of the Voluntary Prin- 
 
85 
 
 ciple for the supply of all the moral and religious 
 wants of a population ; but if ever, to make this 
 out, the internal voluntaryism draw upon the ex- 
 ternal, in order to supplement its own deficien- 
 cies, let us at least hear no more of the sufficiency 
 of the free trade system : neither let us hear any 
 more of the same objection to bounties in Chris- 
 tianity, which the disciples of our modern and 
 enlightened school in political economy prefer 
 against bounties in commerce. If ever the inter- 
 nal need to be helped by the external voluntary- 
 ism, what becomes of the sufficiency of the free 
 trade principle? And, on the other hand, if the 
 offerings of the external be thankfully received by 
 the voluntaries themselves, when involved in the 
 struggles, and harassed by the shortcomings of 
 their internal voluntaryism what becomes of the 
 economical argument against a national establish- 
 ment of Christianity ? When the Voluntary Prin- 
 ciple in all its extent, or as comprehensive of the 
 internal and external, becomes your specific for 
 the Christianisation of a country then the free 
 trade system ceases to be that specific, for it is set 
 aside, whenever the internal requires the aid of 
 the external ; or, to express it differently, when- 
 ever a bounty has to be given for the purpose of 
 repairing the deficiencies of the market price. At 
 all events, let us no longer hear of the Voluntary 
 Principle, and the principle of a free trade in 
 Christianity, put into the same category; or so 
 confounded, as if the one were tantamount to the 
 
80 
 
 other vvhen, in truth, the Voluntary Principle, in 
 that branch of it which we have denominated 
 voluntaryism ab extra, offers as great a violence to 
 the system of the economists in this matter, as 
 does the doctrine of a national establishment, or 
 of a certain legal provision for the support of a 
 Christian ministry in a land. The free trade in 
 Christianity, and External Voluntaryism, are as 
 distinct from each other in the ecclesiastical ques- 
 tion as a market-price and a bounty are in the 
 economical question. 
 
 6. Let us now, after these various explanations, 
 understand the real state of the controversy. Our 
 antagonists who think that a national establish- 
 ment of Christianity ought to be superseded, tell 
 us of the sufficiency of the Voluntary Principle. 
 But this cannot be the sufficiency of internal vo- 
 luntaryism, which is but the system of free trade 
 under another denomination ; and the shortcomings 
 of which have been made abundantly manifest. To 
 make up for these shortcomings, to provide a gospel 
 ministration for the millions and the millions more 
 whom the system of free trade or of internal volun- 
 taryism does not overtake, were an achievement 
 worthy of the highest efforts of philanthropy and 
 patriotism. But viewed as a deed of patriotism, it 
 is the proper work of statesmen, or of the govern- 
 ment whose affairs these statesmen administer 
 thus landing us at once in a legal, or national, 
 religious establishment. But this is resisted, and 
 still, as heretofore, on the alleged sufficiency of the 
 
87 
 
 voluntary principle not surely of the voluntary 
 principle ab intra y this being already disposed of; 
 but of the voluntary principle ab extra, or on the 
 sufficiency of the external voluntaryism to com- 
 pensate all the defects of the internal. Perhaps 
 viewed as a deed of philanthropy, they regard it, 
 not only as the proper but as the exclusive work 
 of philanthropists, and in which the government 
 ought to have no share. At all events, the ques- 
 tion is now brought within a narrower compass 
 than before. We presume it to be agreed on both 
 sides, that the outcast millions ought to be reclaimed 
 from the ignorance and irreligion of heathenism. 
 The only difference relates to the party at whose 
 expense this great achievement ought to be per- 
 fected whether by private Christians, under the 
 impulse of a religious benevolence ; or by an en- 
 lightened government, under the impulse of a 
 paternal regard for the highest weal of its subject 
 population. We, the advocates of a National Esta- 
 blishment, hold it the duty and wisdom of every 
 state, thus to undertake for the education of the 
 great family under its charge, and to provide the 
 requisite funds for the fulfilment of the enterprise 
 and this without prejudice, but the contrary, to the 
 liberality of those individuals, who might choose of 
 their own means to build more churches, and main- 
 tain more ministers thus adding to the amount 
 of Christian instruction in the land. Our anta- 
 gonists on the other hand hold this to be only 
 the fitting work of individuals, whether acting 
 
88 
 
 separately or in associated bodies to be their con- 
 cern, and theirs exclusively ; and that the govern- 
 ment of a country should have nothing to do 
 with it. 
 
 7. We do not object to these supplemental efforts 
 of private Christians, and by which the shortcomings 
 of an establishment might in a greater or less de- 
 gree be repaired. But ere we confide the religion 
 of our people to the growth and multiplication of 
 these churches, we should like to know in how far 
 they have filled up those blank spaces, which, in 
 the course of an increasing population, our national 
 churches have left behind them. In the deficiency of 
 our existing apparatus, the Voluntary Principle has 
 had an ample field for the trial of its energies ; and 
 we desire to understand, whether, in virtue of those 
 spontaneous and expansive properties which have 
 been ascribed to it, the mighty surplus of our un- 
 provided millions has indeed been overtaken. In 
 this land of perfect toleration, there has been no 
 want of liberty for the great experiment; and now, 
 at the end of at least a century, since chapels may 
 without let or hindrance have been planted in each 
 vacant portion of the territory, let us be told, 
 whether all the national and all the voluntary 
 churches together be commensurate to the exigen- 
 cies of our augmented population. When reckon- 
 ing the outcast multitude in our land who congre- 
 gate nowhere, and that because there were no 
 cheap and accessible places of worship which could 
 take them in, we at that time appealed to them as 
 
evidence of the insufficiency of a free trade in nfe^^Otl' 
 ligion. But in truth they afford evidence of more 
 than this. This system of free trade is tantamount 
 only to the system of internal voluntaryism. But 
 the existing number of our voluntary chapels repre- 
 sents all that has been done, not by the internal 
 only, but by the internal and external voluntaryism 
 together. Over and above those places of worship 
 which are wholly sustained by the seat-rents of the 
 congregations assembled in them, it comprehends, 
 not only those which are wholly sustained, but that 
 still greater number who are partially helped by 
 the liberalities of Christian benevolence. The un- 
 provided millions of the British population furnish 
 a measure, not for the deficiency of the free trade 
 system of the voluntary principle ab intra, but for 
 the deficiency of that system after all the additions 
 which have been made to it by the voluntary prin- 
 ciple ab extra. They let us know, that, after both 
 have done their uttermost, there is a task of first- 
 rate social arid national importance, even the Chris- 
 tian education of thousands and thousands more of 
 our British families, which remains undone. These 
 tell us a great deal more than the impotency of the 
 great economical specific, even that of free trade in 
 Christianity. They further tell of the impotency 
 of the great sectarian specific, or of the voluntary 
 principle. If such be the filling and the fertilising 
 power of voluntaryism, whence those mighty wastes 
 of barrenness and moral desolation which meet the 
 eye, in all the overcrowded towns and all the recent 
 
90 
 
 and still church less villages of our empire? How 
 comes it that, while shops and markets for the sup- 
 ply of their physical necessities keep full pace with 
 the tide of advancing population, chapels and 
 churches for the supply of their spiritual neces- 
 sities should fall so immeasurably short of it? be- 
 speaking not only the languor of the spontaneous 
 demand, among those people who should be willing 
 to pay for Christian instruction to themselves ; but 
 bespeaking the languor of Christian charity, among 
 those people who should be willing to give it on 
 behalf of others without money and without price. 
 We confess a greater value for experience than for 
 experiments ; and when, in spite of all the talent 
 and energy of our dissenting brethren, we witness 
 on the outfield of our National Establishment, open 
 now to their enterprise for several generations, such 
 a spectacle of defects and difficulties and grievous 
 destitution, with the myriads of unreclaimed wan- 
 derers whom they have never reached, and far less 
 overtaken we do apprehend, that, on the over- 
 throw of this venerable institute, the same evils, 
 now so largely exhibited on all the unprovided 
 remnants of the country, would be realised and 
 multiplied over the whole length and breadth of 
 the land. We must first behold the moral triumphs 
 of voluntaryism, in the many hundreds of surplus 
 localities which are before our eyes, ere we can 
 consent to give up the whole territory into their 
 hands ; and do think that men who have evinced 
 so little their power to rebuild, should be some- 
 
91 
 
 what less fiery and precipitate in their zeal to 
 destroy. 
 
 8. If; on taking the moral statistics of a land, 
 we found, that, after all the voluntary efforts both 
 of individuals and societies for the spread of edu- 
 cation, a large proportion of the peasantry were 
 destitute of all good scholarship, we should not 
 feel it to be incongruous, but in perfect keeping 
 with our idea of a government in the exercise of 
 its best and highest functions, should we look to 
 the advance of funds from the National Treasury, 
 for the erection of schools and the requisite en- 
 dowment of teachers, in every little section of the 
 territory ; or, in other words, for a commensurate 
 scholastic establishment at the expense of the 
 state. And what is true of common, we hold to 
 be alike true of Christian education. If, in spite 
 of all the strenuousness and zeal of our religious 
 philanthropists, we behold millions and millions 
 more destitute of virtue as well as knowledge ; 
 with as little sense of immortality as the beasts 
 that perish ; and, reckless alike of their obligations 
 to God and man, living in that guilty abandon- 
 ment of all principle, which is at once ruinous to 
 their own everlasting prospects and hazardous to 
 the peace and order of the commonwealth then, 
 if competent for the rulers of a state to provide 
 against the nuisance of a population untaught in 
 letters, it is still more competent, we should say 
 still more imperatively binding, to provide against 
 the still more hurtful and intolerable nuisance of a 
 
population untaught in morality and religion. If 
 it be lawful and incumbent on the civil magistrate 
 to achieve the one object by means of National 
 Schools and schoolmasters where lies the objec- 
 tion to his achievement of the other by means 
 of National Churches and clergymen ? In other 
 words, we can discern no greater reason in a 
 Scholastic than in an Ecclesiastical Establishment, 
 or rather a more emphatic call for the latter than 
 the former. What is true of the smaller family of 
 a household, holds true of the greater family in an 
 empire. If both the parent in the one case, and 
 the governor in the other, be chargeable with a 
 guilty indifference who should suffer their re- 
 spective families to remain unschooled there is 
 guilt of a deeper die, if, by the indifference or 
 neglect of either, they are suffered to remain un- 
 christianised. 
 
 9. We are sensible both of a feeling and a theory 
 in our day, which are strongly and strangely ad- 
 verse to this conclusion. It is extremely difficult 
 to describe the antipathy, either in the nature or 
 in the grounds of it ; but the fact is undoubted, of a 
 certain sensitive notion that is now generally afloat, 
 as if a government overstepped the limit of its own 
 proper and legitimate functions, by charging itself 
 in any way with the religion of the people. On 
 the contrary, it is reckoned to be in the magistrate 
 the very perfection of enlightened patriotism on 
 this subject, when like Gallio he cures for none of 
 things. And thus it is held by the disciples 
 
93 
 
 of a certain cold and metaphysical utilitarianism, as 
 one of the chief proprieties of a government, that it 
 should be quite unconcerned, nay unconscious of 
 the religion of its subjects as if, bereft of all vitality 
 and sentiment, it were reduced to a sort of me- 
 chanical automaton which had other functions to 
 perform ; and to go beyond which, more especially 
 for the education of the people in the faith and prin- 
 ciples of any theological system, were an utter 
 confusion of the characteristics and the species of 
 things. Such is one of the theories of our day in 
 conforming to which a government should, as a go- 
 vernment, be lifeless of all regard to things sacred ; 
 and, maintaining a calm and philosophic indiffer- 
 ence to all the modes and varieties of religious 
 belief, should refuse to entertain the question, in 
 which of these varieties the people ought to be 
 trained or, rather, make it wholly the affair of 
 the people themselves, with which they have no 
 business to intermeddle in any form, whether or 
 not they are to have any religion at all. 
 
 10. Now we protest altogether against this view 
 of a government against what may be termed 
 this artificial inversion of its idea. We plead for 
 its moral prerogatives; nor can we forget the 
 human principles and human feelings of the indi- 
 viduals who compose it whether it be the hu- 
 manity which glows in the breast of the King upon 
 the throne, or the humanity that tells on the sen- 
 sibilities, and also does and ought to tell on the 
 votes of a Parliament. A righteous and religious 
 
94 
 
 monarch, or righteous and religious senators, must 
 impress their character on their acts; nor can we 
 understand the distinction, or rather the disjunc- 
 tion, which is spoken of in these days, between 
 Christian governors and a Christian government. 
 We have no such notion of the moral that we have 
 of the physical chemistry, in the compounds of 
 which, the properties of the ingredients may be 
 changed or disappear. The corporation of a state 
 cannot be thus denaturalised, or reduced to a sort 
 of caput mortuum, discharged of all soul and all 
 sentiment as if by a process of constitution- 
 making in the crucibles of a laboratory. The cold 
 metaphysical abstraction that is thereby engen- 
 dered, may exist in the region of the ideal ; but it 
 does not exist in the region of the actual, nor even 
 in the region of the possible; for men, though 
 convened within the hall of a legislative assembly, 
 will not, therefore, forget that they are men ; or 
 think that they must renounce all care for the 
 highest well-being of families, when called to deli- 
 berate on the well-being of a nation. 
 
 11. And accordingly we find that, unchecked 
 by any freezing limitation of this sort, a Parliament 
 or National Assembly does collectively give way to 
 the very principles, or tastes, or feelings, by which 
 the men who compose it are separately and indivi- 
 dually actuated. For example, they have the 
 desire, that at least plain and popular learning 
 should be diffused throughout the mass of the 
 community ; and so, without let or hindrance, will 
 
95 
 
 they vote away the nation's money, anil that for 
 the support and establishment of schools, and for 
 the sake of a general scholarship throughout the 
 nation. Or, with a still loftier cast of intellect, 
 they are bent on the encouragement of science ; 
 and so, with like freedom, will they grant of the 
 funds of the nation for literary societies, and 
 universities, and museums, and botanic gardens 
 and all for the sake of a loftier learning, or for 
 the philosophy of the nation. Or, in their love 
 and value for the arts, will they, from the same 
 source still, that is from the nation's revenue, the 
 product of hard taxation, purchase and throw open 
 a magnificent park, for the health and recreation 
 of the public ; or a gallery of choice pictures, and 
 that for the improvement of a nation's taste. Or, 
 with the very impulse which enters into the heart 
 of the humblest individual, will they listen to some 
 tale of suffering, and not from their own funds but 
 from the funds of the state, undertake the charge 
 of relieving it as when they provided for the 
 destitution of the Highlands ; or resolved, at the 
 expense of the nation, on a voyage of benevolence 
 for the discovery and rescue of the missing ships 
 detained through the winter in Greenland, and 
 this in obedience to the call of the nation's hu- 
 manity. Now we have yet to learn, in the midst 
 and with a multitude of such proceedings as these, 
 why an assembly of legislators, having in them- 
 selves a sense and principle of religion, or bent on 
 the moral and Christian education of society at 
 
96 
 
 large, or lastly in obedience to the call of the 
 nation's piety, why they might not, and for the 
 accomplishment of this high end, ordain, and from 
 the means of the nation, an establishment of na- 
 tional churches even as, for the accomplishment 
 of other ends, they ordain national schools, and 
 national universities, and public or national in- 
 stitutes of various sorts and descriptions. We can- 
 not but imagine our antagonists reduced to a 
 difficulty, who would leave a government free to 
 provide for the health, or the scholarship, or the 
 taste, or even the amusement of the people j and 
 yet would tie up their hands against any provision 
 for the moral wants of the community, or for train- 
 ing the families of our land in that best and highest 
 of all education the education of principle and 
 piety. 
 
 12. And so far from any speciality of argument 
 against such a destination, all the sound reasoning, 
 we apprehend, is a reason inga fortiori in favour of it. 
 To establish our conclusion, it does not even require, 
 however desirable it might be on other grounds, 
 that we should have a parliament of spiritual men ; 
 for let them be utilitarians only, and that too in 
 the coarsest or merely material sense of the term, 
 and it were a mighty advancement of all their 
 objects, that the people should be trained in the 
 principles and habits of religion. Neither the taste 
 of the nation, nor the scholarship of the nation, 
 can so facilitate the business, or so prodigiously 
 lessen the expenditure of a government, as would 
 
97 
 
 the Christianity of the nation. It is this latter 
 education of which Burke's celebrated aphorism 
 holds most emphatically true, that it were the 
 cheap defence of the commonwealth. A universal 
 Christianity would annihilate crime ; and though 
 even then the poor should still be with us, or there 
 should still be poverty in the land, it would at 
 least annihilate pauperism. And what a universal 
 Christianity could accomplish in full, would be 
 accomplished in great part by a universal Christian 
 education, which might not annihilate, but would 
 at least indefinitely reduce both of these great and 
 expensive evils. It were an incalculable saving of 
 the wealth, and still more a saving to the happiness 
 of the nation, that there should be the prevention 
 of crime rather than its punishment. And it were 
 a like saving, that there should be the prevention 
 of .pauperism rather than a positive administration 
 to relieve its necessities, or to meet its exactions, 
 which at one time in England amounted to three 
 times the revenue of the National Church. It 
 could be made an affair of numerical computation ; 
 and an argument might be raised from it to suit 
 the understanding even of the most arithmetical 
 of our statesmen. The outlays on our civil and 
 criminal jurisprudence the still more enormous 
 outlay of our parochial expenditure ; and what we 
 have not yet noticed, the outlays on the main- 
 tenance both of the military and constabulary 
 forces, to overcome an untrained, and therefore a 
 
98 
 
 turbulent community, exceed, and more than in a 
 tenfold ratio, all the outlays which would be re- 
 quired for a system of religious discipline, by which 
 to form a manageable population of peaceful and 
 industrious and well-ordered families and which 
 last outlays, after all, should not be viewed in the 
 light of an expenditure which the Voluntaries 
 want to save, but as the present destination of a 
 long-established property which the Voluntaries 
 want to seize upon. But without remarking fur- 
 ther on this injustice had we only yet been at 
 the commencement of the work had we still to 
 institute a new, or to extend a deficient establish- 
 ment and could the object be provided for only 
 by a grant from the Treasury such an applica- 
 tion of the public money might be vindicated, we 
 contend, not alone on the high ground of religious 
 principle, but even on the infinitely lower ground 
 that is taken by those who merely view it as a 
 question of polity and economics. The main ob- 
 ject of the Christian who desires an establishment 
 is the godliness of the people, and that they may 
 secure the promise of the life which is to come ; 
 but to provide such an establishment is also the 
 wisdom of the statesman, even though his main or 
 only object should be the interest of the life that 
 now is. When a Christian labours for an esta- 
 blishment of churches, it is, first and foremost, for 
 the kingdom of God and His righteousness; but 
 the patriot and the statesman should also labour 
 
99 
 
 for an establishment of churches, though only for 
 the sake of the " all other things which are added" 
 to them. 
 
 15. It will now be seen that there is a harmony 
 not previously seen, perhaps not even suspected 
 before, between the doctrine of a national esta- 
 blishment, and at least one great branch of the 
 Voluntary Principle. It is no doubt at utter anti- 
 podes with the maxim that each man should pay 
 his own minister, which, if raised into a universal 
 and unexcepted category on this subject, would 
 not only exclude a payment by the state, but even 
 the contributions of private benevolence, either 
 for the erection of churches or the maintenance 
 of clergymen. But this total abandonment of the 
 great mass of the people to themselves this as- 
 sertion of the sufficiency of internal voluntaryism 
 for the supply of the country with religious in- 
 struction, is pretty well now given up, at least in 
 practice, and by sectarians of all denominations as 
 well as churchmen. Innumerable are the appeals 
 made by the Voluntaries themselves to the gene- 
 rosity of the public in behalf of their labouring 
 congregations ; and the call is responded to by 
 thousands, who feel that to give for the religious 
 education of the people is the best and most pro- 
 ductive of all benevolence and their contribu- 
 tions, whether from an impulse of piety or of 
 patriotism, are not more willingly made by the one 
 party than they are welcomed by the other. It is 
 not very discriminating we think, thus to hail the 
 
100 
 
 liberalities of private individuals, and to refuse or 
 regard them as incompetent and wrong, when they 
 are congregated in the form of one great liberality 
 from the state. For in truth, the very spirit which 
 prompts the individual gifts needs only to be strong 
 enough and general enough, to call forth a gift 
 from the treasury. This were but one of the many 
 examples, in which the voice of a country is found 
 to have an influential control over the acts of a 
 government. Let the sentiment prevail, that it is 
 good to pay for the Christian instruction of those 
 who either cannot or will not pay for it themselves ; 
 and a government, when adding its own great 
 national subscription to those of the many indi- 
 viduals who have preceded and pointed the way to 
 it, is not thwarting the sentiment by which they 
 were actuated, but only giving further expression, 
 or larger and more lasting effect to it. There is 
 no fear lest a popular government like ours will 
 award a grant for the erection or the endowment 
 of churches, till they anticipate a virtual ratification 
 of the deed by a preponderance of feeling in its 
 favour from without or till encouraged to the 
 measure, if not by the universal majority of tax- 
 payers, at least by that class of them whose larger 
 payments constitute the vast majority of by far the 
 larger part of the revenue of our nation. In as 
 far then as they are concerned, we behold in an 
 ecclesiastical provision by the state, an example of 
 external voluntaryism, or a willing public contri- 
 buting of their wealth to the Christian instruction 
 
101 
 
 of the common people, through the medium of a 
 willing government. It only differs from a separate 
 or a personal contribution, by the channel of con- 
 veyance through which it passes or as a mite 
 given by the hand to some individual object of 
 charity, differs from a mite cast into a treasury that 
 has been opened for the relief of this and of all 
 similar objects. When instead of local establish- 
 ments, for the good of so many special districts, 
 raised by the munificence of individuals, we behold 
 a great national establishment for the good of the 
 whole country and raised by an endowment from 
 the state we only see the final development of 
 an anterior tendency, which operated in the minds 
 of many thousands of private Christians ; or their 
 collective mind finding its outlet, and its ultimate 
 expression or effect, in the act of a government. 
 A parliamentary vote then in aid of religious 
 education, is, both in principle and effect, but an 
 example of the Voluntary Principle ab extra. And 
 you will now perhaps see, that, on this subject, 
 there was room for a distinction between the things 
 which differ, but which are apt to be confounded 
 even though you may have disliked the scho- 
 lastic and somewhat repulsive terms which we have 
 employed for the expression of it. It is but 
 internal voluntaryism, or rather the assertion of 
 its sufficiency, which comes into conflict with the 
 principle of a national establishment. On the 
 moment that the internal draws upon, or seeks for 
 help from external voluntaryism which it does 
 
102 
 
 in fact all over the kingdom our cause is practi- 
 cally and substantially gained ; for this external 
 voluntaryism, so far from being in conflict with 
 the principle of a national establishment, is in 
 perfect and precise coincidence therewith. 
 
 14. We have had a recent illustration of all this 
 in the doings of Scotland. It is but a moderate 
 estimate of the ecclesiastical destitution which ob- 
 tains there, when we affirm, that at least half a 
 million of inhabitants who ought to be church- 
 goers, have no right of occupancy in any place of 
 worship whether in the established church or 
 the dissenting meeting-houses. The population 
 had greatly outgrown the provision originally in- 
 stituted, for supplying them with the lessons of the 
 gospel having increased since the days of John 
 Knox from one million to two millions and a half. 
 Till within these four years, it was left chiefly to 
 the energies and the efforts of internal voluntary, 
 ism, to meet and make provision for this enormous 
 deficiency ; and the result is that certainly not 
 more than one third of the outfield population has 
 been thereby overtaken. At all events, there 
 remains as great a number to be provided for as 
 corresponds to the gross population of a million ; 
 and these, it is to be remarked, consisting mainly 
 of the common people the most helpless, because 
 the least able, and when once the habit of irre- 
 ligion is formed, also the least willing to help 
 themselves. For it cannot be too much insisted 
 on, that they are not the poorest in the community 
 
103 
 
 who attend the meeting-houses, but of a higher 
 grade than these though in greater part, perhaps, 
 and of course with many exceptions, of the lower 
 of the middle class, as shopkeepers and master 
 tradesmen, and in certain places a considerable 
 number of husbandmen, with doubtless a small pro- 
 portion of the better-conditioned among our artisans 
 and even labourers. It is upon these last that the 
 evilsof our ecclesiastical destitution have principally 
 fallen. They are the working classes, and families 
 of the working classes, who have been laid in con- 
 sequence under the burden of a great moral ca- 
 lamity. It is for their relief, for their enlargement, 
 that the scheme of church extension has been 
 formed ; and whereas we have been represented 
 as seeking a boon for the church, the true spirit 
 and design of our enterprise is to obtain, at the 
 hands of the public and the hands of the govern- 
 ment together, a boon for the common people. 
 
 15. In the prosecution of this enterprise, we, in 
 the first instance, have been drawing largely on 
 external voluntaryism. In virtue of our repeated 
 appeals and applications to the Christian bene- 
 volence of the land, we have undertaken the 
 erection of 180 churches greatly more than half 
 of which are now in progress of building; and 
 nearly one half of which are completed, and indeed 
 opened, for the regular services of the sanctuary. 
 It was highly instructive to us, when our friends 
 the Voluntaries, at the outset of this great opera- 
 tion, thought they saw it in the triumph of their 
 
own cause saying that we had at length given 
 in to their principle, and become Voluntaries our- 
 selves. Now it is very true, that in defect of their 
 internal voluntaryism, in utter defect of their free 
 trade system, which, after a century of perfect free- 
 dom for the enterprise and the utmost strenu- 
 ousness in the prosecution of it, left without the 
 blessings of a gospel ministration half a million 
 who ought to have been church-goers, and a whole 
 million of general population it is very true, that, 
 in these circumstances, we are attempting, by the 
 liberty of others, to do for our unprovided thou- 
 sands and tens of thousands, that which their 
 own poverty, and their own listlessness together, 
 have prevented their doing for themselves. We 
 are glad to understand that the Voluntaries approve 
 of this ; or that in any thing there is a community 
 of sentiment betwixt us. We can bear to be told, 
 that we too, in our endeavours to repair the de- 
 ficiencies of our church, have had recourse to the 
 voluntary principle for, as far as our share of it 
 is concerned, we hold it to be a very sound one. 
 Nay, we should have rejoiced most heartily, had 
 their internal voluntaryism sufficed for the moral 
 and religious wants of our countrymen ; and would 
 bid it God speed to the whole extent of its capa- 
 bilities and efforts. It is only because these have 
 fallen short of the object that we have taken an 
 onward step to external voluntaryism ; and should 
 furthermore rejoice if, in the tried sufficiency of 
 this expedient, we found that no additional exer- 
 
105 
 
 tion was called for. But this is not our experience ; 
 and therefore we do take another step onward ; 
 and, having drawn all we can from a pious or 
 philanthropic public, are now endeavouring to 
 draw as much more as we can from a patriotic or 
 paternal government. We are not sensible of any 
 incongruity between these two applications. They 
 are not conflicting, but conspiring movements ; or 
 the consequential following up of one step by an- 
 other, along a line of continuity. After having 
 obtained from the good will of our countrymen 
 the sum of two hundred thousand pounds for the 
 erection of places of worship, and that in behalf 
 of a people unable to build churches of them- 
 selves, we now knock at the door of our rulers, 
 in the hope of propitiating their good will to a 
 grant, and that too in behalf of the same people, 
 quite as unable of themselves to maintain their 
 clergymen. We stand before the ministers of the 
 crown, not so much in the attitude of supplicants, 
 for we ask nothing for our own personal advantage, 
 but rather in the attitude of donors, telling 
 them what is our contribution, and asking what is 
 theirs, to the religious education of the community, 
 a cause dear to us as Christians, and which 
 should be as dear to them as statesmen. We have 
 traversed no one view for which we ever contended 
 upon this subject ; and whereas our friends and 
 most vigilant guardians, the voluntaries of Scotland, 
 allege of us, because of this our appeal to the 
 liberality of the Christian public, that we have 
 
106 
 
 come over to their principle, they, from the first 
 moment of preferring the same appeal themselves ; 
 and when they sought, which they have ever done, 
 from the generosity of contributors, what they 
 could not make good from the seat-rents of their 
 own congregations, from that moment, in truth, 
 did they abandon their own, and come over to our 
 principle. And we cannot blame them for this 
 believing, as we do, that, but for a benevolence 
 from without, the Christian instruction of the 
 people never has, and perhaps never will be pro- 
 vided for. Meanwhile we maintain that there is 
 no conflict, no contrariety, but the utmost harmony 
 of principle, between the legal and the voluntary 
 parts of our conjunct operation. We have been 
 gifted with one sum by a willing Christian com- 
 munity in Scotland ; and we expect, sooner or 
 later, to be gifted with another, by a willing House 
 of Commons in London ; and, after having ob- 
 tained the willing support of both these parties, 
 our pugnacious opponents will be quite welcome 
 to call us Voluntaries, if they please. Only we 
 hope that it will serve to rectify their conceptions, 
 after they have made the discovery, that even the 
 Voluntary Principle, which they have hitherto 
 imagined to be all against our cause, if viewed 
 comprehensively enough, and in all its bearings, 
 is actually on the side of a national establishment 
 for the Christian education of the people. 
 
 16. So little have we any doubt of the perfect 
 harmony between a contribution from external 
 
107 
 
 voluntaryism and a grant from the state that the 
 one, we have every confidence, will at length prove 
 a stepping-stone to the other; and in the very pro- 
 portion that we enlarge the first, do we strengthen 
 and multiply our claims, and add a greater mo- 
 mentum to all our appliances for the second. So 
 thoroughly indeed is this our conviction, that the 
 discouragement we have lately received at the 
 hands of our rulers, will only redouble our exertions 
 in the country ; believing, as we do, that if the 
 voice of 180 congregations fall short of the re- 
 quisite force to carry an endowment, the voice of 
 250 or 300 will at least come nearer to it ; and 
 furthermore resolved, as we are, not to desist till 
 we have done our uttermost for the families of the 
 working classes, and so enlisted in favour of our 
 great design the friendly and approving suffrages 
 of the great mass of the commonlty of Scotland. 
 Yet this, we are told, is but the cry of the unfran- 
 chised population, of men who have no suffrages, 
 and are therefore of no weight in the senate-house. 
 We believe, on the contrary, that the cause of the 
 unprotected and the poor, whenever it comes to be 
 thoroughly understood, is of mighty influence there. 
 And besides, we not only begun our enterprise 
 under the countenance and support of the highest 
 orders in the country; but even in that class which 
 supplies the greatest numbers to the constituency 
 of Scotland, the ten-pounders and a little upwards, 
 whose prejudices were strongest against us at the 
 first, we are every year making sensible progress ; 
 
108 
 
 and have no doubt that, if we only persevere, and 
 are adequately upborne by the contributions of the 
 liberal, we shall be enabled to lift a still louder 
 appeal than heretofore; so that with the authentic 
 demonstration of a continued, or rather a greatly 
 augmenting interest in our cause, on the part of 
 the British public, the British Legislature will at 
 length give way. 
 
 17. We trust that this will both explain and 
 justify the efforts which the friends of our church, 
 most of them clergymen from Scotland, are now 
 making in London, not merely to recruit our ex- 
 hausted treasury, but, if possible, by that most 
 authentic of all demonstrations, the names and the 
 sums of those who shall have enlisted their testi- 
 mony in favour of our object, to make palpable 
 exhibition in the eyes of Government, soon to 
 hear a fresh representation on the subject, of 
 the growing strength and popularity of our cause. 
 The best recommendation I can give of their 
 errand, is to state the class or description of 
 persons for whom they are labouring, and who 
 are now shut out from the benefits of moral and 
 religious instruction, in virtue of the numbers in 
 our land having increased, and the Establishment 
 not having increased along with them. On whom 
 is it that the burden of this calamity principally 
 lights ; and of what description in society are those 
 sufferers, who are left without a church to human- 
 ise and elevate their spirits, without a clergyman, 
 who might be at once the friend and adviser of 
 
109 
 
 their families? They are the men, who, finding 
 no provision for them within the church, are either 
 not able or not willing to provide a ministration 
 for themselves. The two requisite elements for 
 this, are the wealth and the will ; and they who 
 want either of these, or most generally both of 
 them together, form the great class of our un- 
 happy exiles from the habits and observances of a 
 Christian land. In other words, they are the de- 
 praved and the destitute, whom we seek to reclaim; 
 and it is in their cause, or for the relief of their 
 moral necessities, that we labour to interest the 
 Government of these lands, in the enlargement 
 and further endowment of the Church of Scotland. 
 There is not one of our actual clergymen who will 
 be benefitted by the measure. We seek by it no 
 increase to any of our livings ; and as we have no 
 pluralities, each of our new churches must be 
 occupied by a distinct and additional ecclesiastic. 
 Let the Government themselves determine what 
 his revenue ought to be ; and then, for every 
 shilling which they contribute thereto, by a grant 
 from the treasury, let that shilling go, not in aug- 
 mentation to him, but in deduction from the seat- 
 rents, which we are at present forced to demand 
 from the general population. We repeat, then, that 
 the terminus ad quern of our proposition is, not any 
 personal object of our- own, but the public object 
 of a cheap Christian education to the community 
 at large. We knock at the door of Government, 
 not in the crouching attitude of supplicants for 
 
110 
 
 ourselves, but in the firm and high attitude of 
 donors, with two hundred thousand pounds, or 
 a hundred and eighty new churches, as an offering 
 to a cause of highest patriotism j and saying, "This 
 is our contribution ; what is yours ? It is not true, 
 as represented, that we stand before them as so 
 many fawning and pampered ecclesiastics, bent 
 on the further aggrandisement of ourselves or of 
 our order. We appear for the families of our pea- 
 sants and our artisans, and our men of handi- 
 craft and hard labour. We are the tribunes of 
 the people, the representatives of that class to 
 whom law has given no other representatives of 
 their own, of the unfranchised multitude, who 
 are without a vote and without a voice in the 
 House of Commons. Our sacred object is, the 
 moral well-being of that mighty host who swarm 
 and overspread the ground-floor of the fabric of 
 our commonwealth ; and, after the mists of pre- 
 judice and misconception have cleared away, our 
 ultimate hope of success, under Heaven, is the in- 
 herent and essential popularity of our cause. You 
 will not therefore be surprised if we look for the 
 countenance of those who esteem the moral well- 
 being of the poor as the highest boon which can 
 possibly be conferred upon them ; and also of those 
 who look on our present contest as being, in fact, 
 a contest between a higher and a lower element in 
 society and who, along with all the better and 
 finer spirits of our nation, are anxiously bent that 
 the higher of the two elements should carry it. 
 
Ill 
 
 For you cannot but remark, that there is a certain 
 coarse utilitarianism making way even in our high 
 places, and which threatens to vilify and vulgarise 
 the whole system of our affairs ; a growing dis- 
 trust in the efficacy of moral expedients, and the 
 substitution of palpable, or material, or merely eco- 
 nomical expedients, in their room ; a dealing with 
 but the grosser principles of our nature, as if mind 
 and conscience, and the higher faculties, were too 
 shadowy and ethereal things for a legislature to 
 work upon ; and so a harsh and stinted parsimony 
 in providing even for the common, but still more 
 for the Christian education of the working classes, 
 a universal cry for cheapness, and thus perhaps 
 an immediate saving of money, but with the sacri- 
 fice, let it be remembered of the money's worth, 
 and ultimately with a ten-fold greater cost, that 
 might have been prevented by a timely expenditure. 
 The memorable aphorism of Burke, that " Educa- 
 tion was the cheap defence of nations," has now 
 become obsolete and old-fashioned, in this headlong 
 and scrambling demand for all other sorts of cheap- 
 ness. It seems to have been forgotten how much 
 cheaper it is, that we should have to do with an 
 intelligent and well-trained peasantry, than with a 
 population adrift from the restraints of principle ; 
 each generation, from the growing numbers of the 
 community, more unprovided with the means of 
 instruction than the preceding ; and so rising up 
 in still more reckless defiance to all the duties of 
 life, and to all its decencies. This misleading and 
 
miscalculating economy will be disappointed of its 
 own object, and be at length filled with the fruit of 
 its own ways. Unless the emollients of Christian 
 kindness and Christian instruction be brought to 
 bear on the turbulence of the popular mind a 
 smouldering fire, which now lies at the bottom of 
 the social and political edifice, will at length burst 
 forth, and explode it into fragments. And a day of 
 fearful recompense for the moral wrongs of a long- 
 neglected population will be the sure result or reac- 
 tion of that process, by which our rulers shall have 
 conducted us onwards, step by step, in the path of 
 deterioration, till we have landed in the veriest 
 dregs and degeneracy of an iron age. 
 
113 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 ON THE CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH DETERMINE A GOVERNMENT 
 TO SELECT ONE DENOMINATION OF CHRISTIANITY FOR 
 THE NATIONAL RELIGION. 
 
 1. IT seems a very clear and indisputable axiom, 
 that there can be nothing better for a nation, than 
 when a common sentiment on the side of what is 
 good is shared between the rulers and the people ; 
 or, when one and the same principle, and that a 
 right one, is found to harmonize and actuate them 
 both. A certain amount of agreement between 
 these two parties is at all times indispensable to 
 the internal tranquillity of a state ; and there do 
 occur periods in history, when this unanimity be- 
 comes so strong and cordial and sympathetic, that 
 it has given rise to a general and wide-spread en- 
 thusiasm a kind of moral jubilee in the land, 
 when high and low rejoiced together ; and the 
 heart of the king upon the throne beat in unison 
 with the acclamations of the multitude. On such 
 occasions the distinction between the legal and 
 the voluntary is forgotten ; and both are often 
 blended together in one common offering at the 
 altar, whether of charity, or of patriotism, or lastly 
 of religion as when the hostile Armada made its 
 approaches to the shores of England, and the 
 
 appeal of the sovereign to the people was re- 
 
 H 
 
114 
 
 spondecl to, not by the willing services alone, but 
 the willing contributions of all the orders in the 
 land : Or as when, in recompense to the family of 
 a public benefactor, not only is a grant from the 
 Treasury welcomed by the public approval, but 
 followed up by the public subscriptions in tes- 
 timony of departed worth or departed patriotism : 
 Or, as happened more than once within the re- 
 membrance of us all, when famine, or pestilence, 
 or some signal calamity has involved thousands of 
 families, the same pathetic representation which 
 opened the hearts and purses of the wealthy, also 
 unlocked the coffers of the state. And there have 
 occurred many other passages in the annals of our 
 nation, where the governors and the governed, had 
 money been called for towards the attainment of 
 their common object, would have trampled under 
 foot that line of demarcation, which, but for the 
 wretched controversy of the present day, might 
 never have been heard of. This union of now 
 warring elements might have been exemplified, 
 even in the days of that cruel and capricious despot 
 who first broke off from the spiritual tyranny of 
 Rome still more under the brief and gentle sway 
 of his religious successor and still more when 
 the imprisoned bishops, those venerable Fathers of 
 the English Church, who could have laid down 
 their lives in defence of the pure faith and the 
 sacred rights of conscience, were met, on their 
 egress from confinement, by the loud and rapturous 
 acclaims of a then liberated nation. It is from 
 
such evolutions brief, while brilliant, though 
 they are that we catch, as it were, the transient 
 glimpse of a community in its best and happiest 
 mood when one simultaneous feeling pervades all 
 classes ; and, in the pulsations of one mighty heart, 
 the breath of one actuating and reigning spirit, 
 the wealth and efforts of all are consecrated to one 
 common object, and all jealousies are forgotten. 
 
 2. And it has happened not infrequently in the 
 history of nations, that religion has been the theme 
 of this generous and wide-spread exultation as 
 on the restoration, in the days of the Old Tes- 
 tament, of its long forgotten ordinances or, in 
 modern times, on the celebration of some achieved 
 triumph, whether of truth or liberty. These form 
 the brightest and sunniest periods, in the other- 
 wise dark history of the kings of Israel when 
 the monarch met in convocation with his people, 
 and both rejoiced together in the re-establishment 
 of the worship of their forefathers. There was no 
 conflict between the legal and the voluntary in 
 those days; when, under the authority of the one, 
 the people duteously and faithfully rendered their 
 tithes ; and, under the impulse of the other, added 
 their free-will offerings when the king made his 
 levies or issued his munificent grants from the 
 royal treasury ; and, at the same time, the people 
 cast abundantly, and with unsparing hand, into the 
 treasury of the temple. There is now, it would 
 appear, a war of extermination between these two 
 principles as if the one were destructive of the 
 
116 
 
 other, and there was not room for their contem- 
 poraneous operation. Under the best of the Jewish 
 monarchs, and in the best periods of the Jewish 
 history, they acted and reacted to each other's 
 hands ; and we need only cast an eye over the 
 reigns of David and Solomon, and Joash and Je- 
 hoshaphat, and Hezekiah and Josiah, to be con- 
 vinced that that was the happiest state of the 
 commonwealth when there was the harmonious 
 working of both. 
 
 3. But these were Jewish kings who lived, in 
 common with their subjects, under a palpable and- 
 declared theocracy who had prophets, with the 
 credentials of Heaven's authority, to guide and to 
 correct them ; and the book of God's law, which 
 had ordained a priesthood, and prescribed a main- 
 tenance for the support of their families. There 
 was, during the subsistence of this older economy, 
 a clear and express sanction for an established re- 
 ligion. But the question now respects Christian 
 kings and Christian communities ; and, in the 
 absence of that distinct and definite authority for 
 an established church in the New, which stands 
 forth so unequivocally in almost every book of the 
 Old Testament, we have to enquire what the cir- 
 cumstances were, which, under our present dis- 
 pensation, brought on, and as we think justified, 
 an enactment for the provision of a national clergy, 
 who might teach the lessons of the gospel, and 
 conduct its services among the people at large. 
 4. The causes, as far as they are known to us, 
 
117 
 
 which led to the first establishment of Christianity 
 as a national religion, might be stated in a few 
 words. For centuries after the original promulga- 
 tion of the gospel, it was not only an unprotected 
 but a persecuted faith. Under this severe regimen 
 it was nurtured into strength; and from year to 
 year, took deeper and firmer root, as if cradled 
 by the storms, in the midst of which it grew into 
 maturity ; and it was only fed and fostered the 
 more by every new edict that was framed for its 
 extirpation till converts were so multiplied, and 
 the public mind was so far carried in its favour, as 
 to leave it doubtful whether it was the piety of Con- 
 stantine, or the policy of Constantine, which led to 
 his espousal of Christianity, and determined him 
 to throw the shield, not only of his imperial pro- 
 tection, but of his imperial patronage over it. If 
 the former explanation be the true one if the 
 change of his profession originated in the power of 
 truth and principle, then he but did upon his 
 throne what a Christian parent does in his family. 
 The one carried into effect the wishes of a Chris- 
 tianised heart over a larger, as the other does over 
 a smaller sphere of operation. Each, by the ar- 
 rangements of Providence, obtained a certain mea- 
 sure of ascendancy over other minds and other 
 consciences than their own ; and gifted as the one 
 was with influence over an empire, and the other 
 with influence over a household, we behold in 
 each the example of a gift consecrated to the 
 honour of Him who is the Universal Giver ; and 
 
118 
 
 whom they now believed to be the author of that 
 Christianity sent down from heaven on purpose 
 to rule and to regenerate the world. In compliance 
 with this great duty, and as fellow-workers with 
 God, the one did for his subjects what the other 
 does for his children provides them with a Chris- 
 tian education, as the best boon which a religious 
 monarch can confer upon his people. On the sup- 
 position of the monarch being himself a Christian, 
 such is the account, and such also we deem to be the 
 vindication of that procedure by which he awards a 
 maintenance to the teachers of the gospel, and bids 
 them, in return, carry the lessons and services of the 
 gospel throughout his population. But he may have 
 been no Christian ; and policy, not principle, may 
 after all be the key for the explanation of his con- 
 duct. He must then be tried by a different standard; 
 and if he cannot be vindicated as a religious, he 
 may at least be vindicated as a wise governor ; 
 and that, not because he conceded to the religion 
 of the majority, but because he consented to place 
 his subjects under the best moral regimen, for the 
 formation of a virtuous and well-ordered common- 
 wealth. If even the heathen of these days could 
 say of Christians, behold how they love each other ; 
 if so palpable was the exhibition of their superiority, 
 that, by general acknowledgment, they made the 
 best citizens and the best soldiers in the empire 
 Constantine may have seen that, by the esta- 
 blishment of a universal Christian education, he 
 best consulted both for the economic well-being 
 
119 
 
 of his people, and for the prosperous administra- 
 tion of his own civil and political affairs. If we 
 cannot speak to the sincerity of his principle as a 
 man, we may at least speak to the soundness of his 
 policy as a monarch ; and although this vindica- 
 tion leaves the blemish of ungodliness and of poli- 
 tical hypocrisy on the memory of Constantine, it 
 lays no blemish on the compliance of the other 
 party in this great transaction we mean of the 
 church, in having complied with the overtures 
 which he made to them. We read of the earth 
 helping the woman. But we nowhere read, that 
 it is the duty of the woman to refuse this help, or 
 to refrain from the facilities which are opened up 
 to her by the hand of Providence, for the multi- 
 plication of her converts. He who can make the 
 wrath of man to praise Him, can make the ambi- 
 tion of monarchs subserve the honour and extension 
 of His own spiritual kingdom in the world; and 
 the church, in prosecuting this subserviency, and 
 labouring to make the most of it for the salvation 
 of human souls, is but following the bequeathed 
 duty of preaching the gospel to every creature 
 is but doing good unto all men, as she has the op- 
 portunity. 
 
 5. The first example then which we have 
 quoted, of a government having made selection of 
 a faith, to be by them signalized and supported as 
 the national religion is that of Constantine, who 
 evinced all the greater stength of motive and de- 
 termination in the act of doing so, that, in setting 
 
120 
 
 up this new establishment, he superseded or over- 
 threw an old one. It is all the more favourable to 
 the exhibition whether of sentiment or policy -, it 
 manifests with a so much greater force, and there- 
 fore distinctness, the inducement which led to this 
 measure, that, in the adoption of it, the prejudices 
 on the side of an ancient and hereditary worship 
 had to be overcome the very circumstance of a 
 struggle and a strenuous resistance having to be 
 encountered in effecting the movement, bringing 
 out more palpably into view some one, if not all, 
 of the many influences under which it was carried. 
 The second example of any thing similar to this 
 in history took place at the Reformation, when a 
 change was accomplished in the national establish- 
 ments of several countries in Europe not a change, 
 as before, from Paganism to Christianity, but a 
 change from Popery to Protestantism, or from one 
 denomination of Christianity to another. There 
 was the assumption of one kind of faith for the 
 national church, made all the more striking and 
 noticeable by the rejection of another affording 
 therefore so much a better chance of our being 
 able to detect the principle of so great a revolu- 
 tion. Nor is it difficult to find it, in the history 
 of a period so much nearer to ourselves. There 
 may have been other reasons beside those which can 
 be alleged in vindication of this great movement 
 resolvable neither into conscience nor patriotism, 
 as those which actuated the bosom of our capri- 
 cious and tyrannical Henry. But we speak not 
 
of the reasons which explain only of those which 
 justify the change ; and perhaps the best histori- 
 cal example which can be given of them, will be 
 found in the Elector of Saxony, who established 
 the Protestant religion in his kingdom, under the 
 impulse of the Protestant faith, or of a sincere 
 Protestant feeling in his own heart. The faith of 
 the monarch justified the part which he took in it 
 or the proposal of such a change ; and it was 
 the faith of his subjects which justified the part 
 which they took in it or their acquiescence in 
 the change. Without both these ingredients, it 
 may have been attempted by the monarch, but 
 not been accomplished by him as by James, who, 
 for attempting to impose the national establish- 
 ment of his own faith on an adverse and reluc- 
 tant kingdom, was hurled from his throne. We 
 shall not stop at present to enquire, whether the 
 conviction was right or wrong; or take up the 
 time, which at present we cannot afford, with the 
 demonstration, though we hold it to be impreg- 
 nable that wherever there is access to the light 
 and the opportunities of our present day, and there 
 be notwithstanding a wrong belief in religion, some 
 element of moral evil might be detected in the 
 process which led to it. But, without tracing our 
 way so far backward, grant the sincerity of the 
 potentate of James, for example, in his Catholi- 
 cism ; of Charles in his Episcopacy ; and the Elec- 
 tor of Saxony, in his Lutheran Protestantism it 
 may be said, both of him who succeeded and of 
 
those who failed in the establishment of their own 
 doctrine as the national faith, that all three in the 
 attempts which they made were alike conscientious, 
 and this might serve for the vindication of the 
 men even as it would serve for the vindication 
 of five hundred men, if the power, instead of being 
 concentrated in one individual, were lodged in 
 such an assembly, and they gave forth their col- 
 lective voice in favour of an establishment which 
 coincided with the faith of the majority. The only 
 other reason we can sustain in vindication is one 
 of patriotism, as the former was one of piety ; or 
 which had respect to the temporal, as the other 
 had respect to the spiritual well-being of the 
 people. We can imagine a monarch without the 
 principle of religion, but of sound enlightened 
 policy we mean the policy which has for its ob- 
 ject, not the maintenance or the increase of his 
 own power, but the prosperity of his kingdom and 
 the present welfare of its families. The one is a 
 justifiable motive on a heavenly, the other is a 
 justifiable motive on an earthly standard. Both 
 influences, the religious and the philanthropic as 
 they may be termed, may have acted at the same 
 time on the mind of the Elector of Saxony. He 
 may have felt, and with a deep sense of sacredness, 
 the truth of Protestantism ; and he may have been 
 alive also to its secular blessings to the virtue, 
 and the intelligence, and the industrious habits, 
 which its education and its principles carried in 
 their train. The act of setting up a Protestant Es- 
 
tablishment in his dominions may have been at 
 once the act of a sincere Christian and of a sound 
 patriot. 
 
 6. We may now carry our views onward in his- 
 tory nay down as far as from what has been done 
 by governments in former ages, to what might or 
 should be done by governments in the present day. 
 And at this moment, there is no legislative body in 
 Europe who are more called upon, to be ripe and 
 ready on the principles of this great question, than 
 the Parliament of England. There is a loud and 
 instant call upon them for a wise and righteous 
 decision. We cannot imagine a heavier misfortune 
 to our beloved land, than that a measure, so preg- 
 nant with consequences both to the present and 
 future generations, should cast up at random ; or 
 in the eddying whirl of party and political move- 
 ments, instead of coming forth as an unfettered, 
 but withal well-weighed deliverance, on the part 
 of intelligent and high-principled men best of all 
 if done on the greatest, and which should be the 
 first consideration of, What is truth ? but, if not 
 disposed to entertain this question, next best, when 
 done on the consideration of, What is the most 
 effectual regimen for training the successive gene- 
 rations of a country in the virtues of good citizen- 
 ship, and so as shall be likeliest to insure for the 
 commonwealth the blessings of a moral and reli- 
 gious population ? On either consideration we 
 should not fear for our own Protestantism j for, 
 though the two considerations be distinct from 
 
each other, in practice and fulfilment there is a 
 real harmony between them. For the determina- 
 tion of the one question, the lights of conscience 
 and erudition ought to suffice in every well- prin- 
 cipled and well-educated assembly : For the deter- 
 mination of the other, it will be enough to consult 
 the lights of history and of economic science. 
 
 7. It is well that there should be two principles, 
 altogether right and legitimate, on either of which 
 the question of a religious establishment might be 
 hinged ; so that, whatever the incapacity of sena- 
 tors might be to decide on the first of these prin- 
 ciples, that is, on the theological truth of any given 
 system of belief there might remain the other, the 
 moral and economic principle, on which to ground 
 their determination, that is, on the fitness of any 
 system, by the influence and the lessons of its dis- 
 cipleship, to humanise a population, and impart 
 such habits as are best both for the comfort and 
 the virtue of families. And yet we can see no in- 
 congruity, no extravagance, but the contrary, in 
 the supposition of its being quite competent for an 
 assembly of legislators, to decide on the former of 
 these principles ; or to give their suffrages for the 
 maintenance of a certain national creed, as well 
 on the ground of that divine authority which has 
 prescribed the lessons of our education for Heaven, 
 as on the ground of that human judgment or ex- 
 perience, which tells of the best education for 
 the virtues of good citizenship on earth. We are 
 aware of the summary and contemptuous rejection 
 
J25 
 
 to which this proposition is liable as if it would 
 transform the senate-house into an arena of theo- 
 logical conflict ; and senators into wrangling pole- 
 mics, who, to be accomplished for their task, 
 would need to grapple with whole libraries, with 
 the tomes of the mighty controversialists in former 
 ages, or at least, it may be thought, to be deep- 
 read, both in the Fathers of the Christian church, 
 and in the Fathers of our own Reformation. 
 
 8. Now this is exaggeration. It would have 
 been truth had the proposition been, to devolve 
 upon civil rulers, or to devolve upon a parliament, 
 the office of settling, and of filling up, the national 
 creed, even to its minutest articles; or of framing 
 the whole polity of a church, from the highest to 
 the lowest of its office-bearers, from the most 
 solemn ordinances of its ritual to the most incon- 
 siderable observances of its ceremonial and its 
 forms. The settlement of these is the proper work 
 of ecclesiastics. But the great and general question 
 between Protestantism and Popery does not hinge 
 upon these a question to which the public mind 
 in many countries of Europe, and particularly in 
 our own, was all awake, and, we may add, intel- 
 ligent also ; and to which the representative mind 
 in the body of legislators was alike sensible, and 
 ought surely to have been, nay actually was, alike 
 intelligent. This was not a question which could 
 only be resolved in an assembly of priests or of 
 scholastics; but a question that might be rightly 
 entertained, and rightly decided also, in any as- 
 
sembly of well-educated Englishmen. We could 
 not imagine a more testing evidence of an incom- 
 petent and vulgarised parliament, than that it 
 should not be qualified to decide the question 
 between the merits of Protestantism and Popery 
 or which of th? two systems, not in respect of 
 policy, but in respect of absolute truth and of 
 sacred obligation, is the most worthy of being 
 upholden as the national faith of these realms, 
 This is neither a minute, nor is it a manifold con- 
 troversy, but one great and simple question, on 
 which too there shine the broadest lights, both of 
 moral and historical evidence ; and that is, whether 
 the Scriptures, as being of Divine authority, be the 
 only rule of faith and practice in religion or 
 whether, co-ordinate therewith, the decisions of 
 any councils or governors in the church, after tha 
 days of the apostles, should be admitted to an 
 equal or superior lordship over the consciences of 
 men. This, of all the countries in Europe, is not 
 the land, where it should be difficult to find hun- 
 dreds, or even thousands, of the upper and middle 
 classes in society, with information enough, and 
 scholarship enough, to pronounce intelligently 
 upon this question the richest of Christendom 
 in that literature, and accessible too to all readers, 
 the literature of the Christian evidences the land 
 of the Stillingfleets, and the Clarks, and the But- 
 lers, and the Lardners, and the Paleys, or, if 
 any shall recoil from these ecclesiastical names, 
 the land of deepest reasoners in philosophy, of 
 
127 
 
 Bacon, and Newton, and Milton, anil Locke, and 
 Boyle, and Sir Gilbert West, and Lord Lyttleton, 
 all of whom have done profonndest homage to 
 Christianity, and many of them have told, and 
 with irresistible weight of argument, that the voice 
 in the Scriptures is a voice which speaketh to us 
 from Heaven. In this nation of all others, there 
 is none, with the ordinary schooling of a gentle- 
 man, who could not thoroughly inform himself, 
 and by the reading of a few weeks, on this great 
 question, so as to decide between the authority 
 of the Bible, and the authority of Rome's apostolic 
 church ; between the miracles of the gospel per- 
 formed in the face of the then civilised world, and 
 themummeriesofthePapal superstition, transmitted 
 to us in barbarous legends, those products of the 
 cells and the convents which overspread Europe 
 through the dark and dreary millennium of the 
 middle ages. We owe it to its church and its 
 universities together, that this knowledge is so rife 
 in England familiar as household words in so 
 many of its accomplished circles, so many of its 
 ancestral halls and that, not because of any pro- 
 fessional interest in theology as a science, but in 
 virtue alone of a full and finished education. It is 
 thus that we have abundant materials for a parlia- 
 ment that could decide the question on its high 
 and proper merits. We only need a parliament of 
 England's best principled and best educated men. 
 But should we not be so fortunate ; should the 
 disaster ever befall us, of vulgar and upstart poli- 
 
128 
 
 ticians to be lords of the ascendant ; should an 
 infidel or demi-infidel government wield for a 
 season the destinies of this mighty empire, and be 
 willing, at the shrine of their own wretched par- 
 tizanship, to make sacrifice of those great and hal- 
 lowed institutions, which were consecrated by our 
 ancestors to the maintenance of religious truth and 
 religious liberty ; should, in particular, the mon- 
 strous proposition ever be entertained, not to 
 tolerate (for that is quite as it should be) but to 
 endow Popery not perhaps to abolish, but at 
 le,ast to abridge the legal funds for the support of 
 Protestantism, and at all events to uphold an 
 antiscriptural, and with this aggravation, that it 
 should be at the expense and with the diminution 
 of a scriptural faith let us hope that there is 
 still enough, not of fiery zeal, but of calm, reso- 
 lute, and, withal, enlightened principle in the land, 
 to resent the outrage enough of energy and re- 
 action, in the revolted sense of this great country, 
 to meet and to overbear it.* 
 
 * " Speaking of the competency of men not ecclesiastical, to decide a ques- 
 tion which hinges on the evidence and authority of the Bible, there is, we 
 have long apprehended, a striking contrast between the lay mind of France 
 and that of England in this respect; and one of its most remarkable displays 
 is, when Voltaire, in the examples which he has quoted of the aberrations of 
 the human understanding along with the case of Roger Bacon, having 
 written upon witchcraft brings forward also that of Sir Isaac Newton hav- 
 ing, in his declining years, written a commentary on the book of Revelation. 
 Now, as to our great philosopher, who transferred his mighty intellect from 
 the study of the works of God to the study of his word, this may have taken 
 place at the decline of his years, but not, most certainly, at the decline of 
 his understanding. The truth is, that he felt a kindredness between his old 
 and his new contemplations ; that, after having seen farther than all who 
 
9. But let us imagine for a moment the conces- 
 sion made, though we think it neither a right nor 
 a necessary concession, that it were too theological 
 for a Parliament to decide between the two reli- 
 gions of Popery and Protestantism, on the ground 
 of the argument which respects their truth there 
 remains another argument, which it is surely com- 
 petent for the most secular assembly on earth to 
 
 \\ent before him into the godlike harmonies of the world, he was tempted 
 to search, and at length did behold the traces of a wisdom no less marvellous 
 in the godlike harmonies of the word ; that, after having looked, and with 
 steadfastness, for years on the mazy face of heaven, and evolved thencefrom 
 the magnificent cycles of astronomy, he then turned him to Scripture, and 
 found, in the midst of its now unravelled obscurities, that its cycles of pro- 
 phecy were equally magnificent : and, whether he cast his regards on the 
 book of Revelation, or on the book of Daniel who, placed on the eminence 
 of a sublime antiquity, looked through the vista of many descending ages, 
 and eyed from afar the structure and the society of modern Europe he 
 whose capacious mind had so long been conversant with the orbits and the 
 periods of the natural economy, could not but acknowledge the footsteps of 
 the same presiding Divinity in the still higher orbits of that spiritual eco- 
 nomy which is unfolded in the Bible. And while we cannot but lament 
 the deadly mischief, which the second-rate philosophy of infidels has done 
 to the inferior spirits of our world, we feel it almost a proud thing for 
 Christianity, that all the giants and the men of might in other days, the 
 Newtons, and the Boyles, and the Lockes, and the Bacons of high England, 
 have worshipped so profoundly at its shrine. But, chief of these is our 
 great Sir Isaac, who, throned although he be by universal suffrage, as the 
 very prince of philosophers, is still the most attractive specimen of humanity 
 which the world ever saw and just because the meekness of his Christian 
 worth so softens while it irradiates the majesty of his genius. Never was 
 there realised in the character of man so rare and so beauteous a harmony, 
 that he who stands forth to a wondering species of loftiest achievement 
 in science, should nevertheless move so gently and so gracefully among 
 his fellow-men not more revered for the glory he won on the field of dis- 
 covery, than loved by all for the milder glories of his name his being 
 the modest, the unpretending graces of a child-like nature his being the 
 pious simplicity of a cottage patriarch." Third Volume of Dr. Chalmers's 
 Lectures on the Romans, 
 
 1 
 
150 
 
 entertain ; and that is the argument grounded on 
 the palpable and glaring experience that tells us, 
 and with an evidence too plain to be resisted, under 
 which of the two regimens it is that we can best 
 provide for the moral and economic well-being of 
 a population. I will not speak of the impolicy of 
 France in their expulsion of the Huguenots, who 
 carried into other countries the arts and the habits 
 by which they might have enriched their own. I 
 will not speak of the contrast, which strikes the 
 eye of every traveller, between the Catholic and 
 Protestant cantons of Switzerland. I will not 
 speak of the moral and industrious population of 
 the United Provinces, or tell of their immeasurable 
 superiority in virtue and freedom, and all that 
 makes for the superiority or well-being of a na- 
 tion, over the people of Spain, that land at once 
 of superstition and despotism the land of their 
 proud oppressors, against whom they nobly re- 
 volted, and as nobly triumphed. The lesson may 
 be learned by us nearer home. Literally, he who 
 runs may read it in Ireland ; and that on a cursory 
 glance, and in the course of a few 7 days' rapid tra- 
 velling. It is patent as the light of day, that the 
 same geography, which marks off the distinction 
 between the two faiths, also marks off the distinc- 
 tion between, on the one hand, a land of industry 
 and peace, with a population of thriving families, 
 and on the other, a land teeming with ail moral 
 and all political disorders a land of mendicity 
 and midnight tumults, where violence is abroad in 
 
131 
 
 their streets and their highways ; and at home, in 
 their wretched hovels, there are found, and almost 
 invariably, the filth and the squalid destitution of 
 perhaps the worst-conditioned peasantry in Europe. 
 Let us have but the names of the Popish and 
 Protestant counties, and we could learn from the 
 map, which is the region of grievous and general 
 distress, of unquelled turbulence, of fierce and in- 
 cessant agitation ; and which the region of pros* 
 perous industry, of peaceful and orderly habits, 
 and of decent respectable sufficiency, even down 
 to the lowest labourers of the soil. This truth is 
 open to us through many channels, and by various 
 statistics as the amount of crime and number 
 of commitments in the province of Ulster, when 
 compared with the rest of Ireland the propor- 
 tion of military required in these two great de- 
 partments, to protect from outrage, and maintain 
 the authority of Government the vagrancy that 
 meets us everywhere in the one territory, and is 
 comparatively rare in the other. These all speak 
 for themselves ; and if our statesmen are afraid of 
 the theological question, we ask them to take it up 
 as a question of polity, and tell us in the name of 
 all that is dear to patriotism, whether it were better 
 to have a nation of Papists or a nation of Protestants 
 in that unhappy land. We are aware of an utter 
 heartlessness in the negotiations of national policy, 
 when ambassadors meet, and if the balance of power 
 required it, would barter away or bargain for the 
 faith of whole countries, just as they would barter 
 
away or bargain for the protection and encourage- 
 ment of their commerce. And there is, too, a ba- 
 lance of power to be adjusted at home, as well as 
 on the great theatre of the politics of Europe ; and 
 what takes place in the war of states, may also take 
 place in the war of parties when the temptation 
 to make the same unprincipled sacrifice may occur, 
 and when, for the ambition of place, the moral in- 
 terest of a whole nation is disregarded, and both 
 the comfort and character of its families are given 
 to the wind. If any thing can add to this atrocity, 
 it is when perpetrated, not by the simple adoption 
 of that which is evil, but by the transmutation of 
 the good into evil when done in the face of pos- 
 sessory rights ; and the proposal is, not merely to 
 plant a corrupt establishment, but to change a better 
 establishment for a worse in other words, to clear 
 out the Protestantism, and so make room for the 
 Popery; or, at least, to abridge the one, and follow it 
 up by such institutions, whether of an ecclesiastical 
 or scholastic nature, as will surely extend and per- 
 petuate the other. We can imagine nothing that 
 would so mark the utter absence and abjuration of 
 all public virtue in public men, than, with their eyes 
 open not, you will observe, to persist in what is 
 bad, but, greatly worse to retrograde into what 
 is bad, and lavish the resources of the nation on 
 the maintenance of a faith, which, if the sacred con- 
 sideration of immortality must be kept out of the 
 question, all history and experience tell, is, of every 
 form and variety of religion, the most fitted to blind 
 and vitiate a population. 
 
10. But, when considering the movement by the 
 state in the days of Constantine, we made a refer- 
 ence to the clergy ; and then observed that, without 
 the forfeiture of principle, but, rather in compliance 
 with the dictates both of the most sound principle 
 and of the soundest and most upright policy, they 
 could accept of a national provision, and undertake 
 in return for the Christian education of the people. 
 And in like manner would we speak of the part, 
 which belongs to the clergy of the % Protestant Esta- 
 blishment in Ireland. They virtually did under- 
 take the Christian education of the families in their 
 respective parishes ; and, I speak only of the 
 generations that are past, they have not acquitted 
 themselves of that undertaking. It is in the spirit 
 of an even-handed justice that we would make this 
 avowal ; for though it never can vindicate, it at 
 least explains, and perhaps in'some degree palliates, 
 the indifference, nay, in some instances we believe, 
 the hostility even unto death of many of our 
 statesmen to the church of our sister kingdom. It 
 cannot be disguised that, with many illustrious and 
 honourable exceptions, the clergy as a body have 
 not, during the whole of the last century, done 
 what they might, or done what they ought, for the 
 cultivation of the vineyard, made over by the state 
 to their care ; and which, in return for their main- 
 tenance, they should by this time have put into 
 right order, and now been keeping in order. But 
 we must not lose sight of the goodness of a 
 machine in the badness of the working of it. We 
 
134 
 
 must see where the failure lies not in the mag- 
 nitude of those revenues, which the wayward poli- 
 ticians of our day are now labouring so hard to 
 reduce, if not to annihilate not in the number of 
 those Protestant labourers, whom, with a strange 
 inversion of all sound policy, they are now doing 
 their uttermost to diminish not in things per- 
 taining to the framework of the establishment, 
 wherewith they are now tampering by all sorts of 
 paltry economical reform. The whole evil, in the 
 great bulk and essence of it, has been, that the 
 church in former times was carelessly and corruptly 
 patronised. The church itself, viewed as a ma- 
 chine, is well fitted for its work, provided only that 
 it be well supplied with good and able workmen. 
 A few hundreds of these, with the spirit and apos- 
 tolic zeal of good Bishop Beddel, could, in the multi- 
 tude of their converts and the great moral change 
 effected in their respective neighbourhoods, have 
 made this as manifest as day. Had this establish- 
 ment been what it ought to have been, a great 
 home mission, with its ministers acting the part of 
 devoted missionaries, we should by this time of day 
 have been rid of all our embarrassments. There 
 would have been no Catholic question to perplex 
 and that because there might have been few or no Ca- 
 tholics. But matters there have not been so ordered. 
 We need not speak of their pluralities, and their sine- 
 cures, and of all the evils of their clerical absenteeism. 
 These are the more patent corruptions of the Pro- 
 testant hierarchy in Ireland, and perhaps the only 
 
135 
 
 ones that strike the public observation. But over and 
 above this, there was a mistaken policy, maintained 
 and avowed even by their best clergymen, in the 
 form of an honest, though still of a grievously mis- 
 taken, principle as if they went beyond their 
 legitimate province if they at all meddled with the 
 Catholic population ; at which rate the primitive 
 Christians went beyond their legitimate province, 
 when they meddled with the Pagans of the Roman 
 empire. Even the most venerated of their prelates, 
 as Bishop Jebb, proclaims this in his published 
 letters, as if it were one of the categories or 
 proprieties of a Protestant minister in Ireland. 
 We do not say that the maxim has been universally 
 acted on, but it has been greatly too general, that 
 to attempt the conversion of a Papist was to enter 
 another man's field ; and that, in kind at least if 
 not in degree, there was somewhat of the same 
 sort of irregularity or even of delinquency in this, 
 as in making invasion on another man's property. 
 In virtue of this false principle, or false delicacy, 
 the cause of truth suffered, even in the hands of 
 conscientious ministers; and when to this we add 
 the number of ministers corrupt, or incompetent, 
 or utterly negligent of their charges, we need not 
 wonder at the stationary Protestantism, or the yet 
 almost entire and unbroken Popery of Ireland. 
 We now inherit the consequences of the misgovern- 
 ment and the profligacy of former generations. 
 They may be traced to the want of principle and 
 public virtue in the men of a bygone age. Those 
 
ISO 
 
 reckless statesmen who made the patronage of the 
 Irish Church a mere instrument of subservience to 
 the low game of politics those regardless clergy- 
 men who held the parishes as sinecures, and lived 
 in lordly indifference to the state and interests of 
 the people these are the parties who, even after 
 making full allowance for the share which belongs 
 to the demagogues and agitators of the day, are 
 still the most deeply responsible for the miseries 
 and the crimes of that unhappy land. 
 
 11. But here the distinction again recurs, which 
 has been so often insisted on, between the good- 
 ness of a machine and the goodness of its working. 
 If the latter have been in fault, that is no reason 
 why the former should be condemned or given up 
 to destruction. The remedy is not to abolish the 
 Protestant establishment of Ireland, but rightly to 
 patronise it ; nor can I imagine a wider contrast, 
 than between the wise and the temperate reformers 
 from Popery of 300 years back, who, despite the 
 enormities of that system, let alone the material 
 apparatus of its establishment, and only committed 
 it to other and better hands, and the reformers of 
 the present day, who have abridged and would 
 destroy the Protestant Church, and that too in the 
 face of a manifest revival in the zeal, in the cha- 
 racter, in the devoted and missionary spirit of its 
 clergymen ; who, unlike to those predecessors for 
 whose errors, I should say for whose crimes, they 
 are not responsible, consecrate their whole time, 
 and talent, and unrequited labour to the moral in- 
 
TFIR 
 
 r uin~ rr 
 
 13? 
 
 lerests of their country the martyrs of its 
 misplaced and excited violence, yet we trust the 
 agents of its coming regeneration. The truth is, 
 that, among the established churches of our em- 
 pire, that of Ireland, in the vital and spiritual sense 
 of the term, is the most prosperous of the three. 
 " While its outward man perisheth, its inward 
 man is renewed day by day." The hand of power 
 may strip it of its temporalities ; but we trust that 
 its indomitable spirit in the cause of a pure and 
 scriptural faith, will not so easily be quelled. 
 Though despoiled of their rights, they will not 
 abandon their duties. Like the Christians before 
 the days of Constantine, they may perhaps have 
 to win the ground over again when the Church, 
 purified by the discipline of adversity, will again 
 arise in its strength ; and, repeating the conquest 
 of truth over the errors of a degrading superstition, 
 will add another victory to the triumphs of former 
 
 generations. 
 
 12. But though such be the economy of things 
 under which we live, that often the greatest good 
 moral and spiritual good comes out of evil, 
 that is no reason why we should do the evil that the 
 good may come. Better if the injustice were not 
 perpetrated, of that spoliation that would abridge 
 or would abolish the Protestant establishment of 
 Ireland. Better that the ministrations of a scrip- 
 tural church should be upheld, than that they 
 should be suspended, even in the hope of a great 
 and consequent revival ; and that the present ge- 
 
138 
 
 iteration should not be made to sutler, or be offered 
 up in sacrifice, for the sake of the ages that are to 
 follow. The hidden purposes of God do not form 
 the measure by which to estimate the plain duties 
 and obligations of man, whose part it is to proceed, 
 not on that which is hidden, but on that which is 
 revealed to shun all which is palpably and at 
 present evil, and to do all the good for which he 
 has a present opportunity. There is nothing more 
 instructive in the philosophy of public affairs, than 
 to observe, that in those seasons when the govern- 
 ment is weak, and the spirit of the country is way- 
 ward and strong, so that the pressure from without 
 carries it over the will or the principle within 
 in those seasons, when the governors and the go- 
 verned may be said to change places there is 
 nothing more instructive, or from which a sounder 
 lesson of political wisdom may be gathered, than 
 to observe the almost constant misdirection of the 
 popular zeal ; and so the misuse of that power, 
 wherewith for a time the people may be said to be 
 invested. However good the institutions of a 
 country may be, that the country may have the 
 full good of them, it is indispensable that they 
 should be placed in the hands of able and upright 
 functionaries for if not, they may have proved 
 to be the instruments of evil, not however because 
 the machinery, but because the men are in fault. 
 In these circumstances what we ask in the name 
 of common sense is the desirable reform? and what 
 is the right object for reformers to set their hearts 
 
139 
 
 upon? Whether (it may be thought strange to 
 ask,) whether on the destruction of the machine, 
 or on the appointment of right men for the work- 
 ing of it? There may be energy, there may be irre- 
 sistible momentum, there may be the impulse of a 
 good feeling, of a good and honest design ; but 
 there is no discrimination in the masses. With 
 what salutary effect, one is apt to think, their 
 influence might be brought to bear upon rulers, so 
 as to compel a virtuous exercise of their patronage ; 
 and then every good institution of the country, and 
 its churches among the rest, would be placed in 
 fair circumstances, for the development of their 
 properties and their power. But this is almost 
 never the use to which the popular will is turned 
 and so when let loose upon the commonwealth, 
 unfit either to purify or guide, it is found powerful 
 only to destroy. 
 
140 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 ON A TERRITORIAL ESTABLISHMENT, AND THE REASONS 
 OF ITS EFFICACY. 
 
 1. But it may well be thought, that it is easier to 
 state the grounds of preference, on which Protes- 
 tantism should be adopted rather than Popery, even 
 in those cases, where, as in Ireland, it is not yet the 
 national faith, as being the worthier of the two for 
 a national provision ; and that not merely for the 
 sake of its maintenance, but also of its propagation 
 in the land That it is an easier task to select 
 the one and pass over the other, from the very 
 wide and palpable distinction which there is both 
 in principle and effect between them than it 
 were to select and single out from among the nu- 
 merous sectarian varieties of Evangelical Protestan- 
 tism, that one denomination, which is most entitled 
 to the privileges and honours of an establishment. 
 For, substantially speaking, they have all one and 
 the same theology ; and we may add, that, ex- 
 perimentally speaking, they have all made their 
 respective contributions to the sound education of 
 the people in the habits and principles of Chris- 
 tianity. Who can question, for example, the whole- 
 some effect of the active and widely extended 
 ministrations, which have been rendered by the 
 Wesleyan Methodists ; and that, too, among the 
 
14.1 
 
 families of that very class which stands most in 
 need of those cheap or gratuitous services which 
 it is one great object of an establishment to afford, 
 even the families of those poor men and labourers, 
 who can, with the least safety, or with the greatest 
 risk, be left to take their chance, or be abandoned 
 to that most frail and fluctuating of all securities, 
 we mean the operation of the voluntary principle. 
 And we cannot deny the pure and effective minis- 
 trations of Baptists, and Congregationalists, and 
 Presbyterians, and many other sectaries all vary- 
 ing circumstantially from the Church of Eng- 
 land, and each other ; yet all, in essence and 
 effect, teaching the same Christianity. It were, in 
 our estimation, a grievous outrage not on charity 
 alone, but on truth, to deny that the education 
 given in many of our dissenting chapels, is a good 
 education for heaven ; and that in both countries 
 we stand indebted to their co-operation, for much 
 of the religion of our faaiilies. But does not this 
 make it all the more puzzling, to assign any ground 
 on which they should be excluded, we do not say 
 from the honours, but from the substantial benefits 
 of an establishment; or why a national provision 
 should be withheld from the ministers of those 
 Protestant denominations, more than from the Pro- 
 testant Episcopalians of England ? It may be easy 
 to say, why we should keep out Popery and let in 
 Protestantism ; but it does not appear easy to fix 
 on the proper reason, why, when there is so little 
 to discriminate between them, we should let i: 
 
one species of Protestantism, and keep out all the 
 rest. The closer their modes of faith approximate 
 to each other, it does it may well be thought 
 aggravate the task of selection, and make it all 
 the harder to specify, why it is that the monopoly 
 of the emoluments of a great national institute 
 should have been vested in one alone ; or why its 
 favoured disciples should have been admitted into 
 the bowers of the establishment, while all the rest 
 have been left on the out-fields of unendowed sec- 
 tarianism. 
 
 2. These, at first sight, may appear to be for- 
 midable questions ; and all the more so, the more 
 nearly the sectarians approach in doctrine to the 
 Church or the more significant the points of 
 difference are between them. Now we happen to 
 think, that, where there is a substantial agreement 
 and only a circumstantial variation the adjust- 
 ment of this matter, instead of becoming more 
 difficult, becomes on that very account all the 
 more easy - 9 and though the principle on which we 
 would let in Protestantism and keep out Popery, is 
 not that on which we would let in the Episcopalians 
 and keep out the Presbyterians and all other de- 
 nominations from the establishment in England 
 or, what might look strange, let in one set of 
 Presbyterians and keep out all the other sets and 
 sectaries, nay even the Episcopalians of the South- 
 ern Establishment from the Northern Establish- 
 ment of this our land still we think, that there is 
 a substantial principle on which to vindicate these 
 
seeming anomalies of the ecclesiastical system 
 under which we at present live, or to leave them 
 untouched. But ere we proceed further in this 
 undertaking, we must interpose in the form of a 
 lemma, or as a stepping-stone to the argument 
 which follows, a proposition which has been mainly 
 overlooked by all the parties in this controversy, or 
 at least the importance of which to the decision of 
 it has not been perceived we mean the immense 
 good of a religious establishment being formed on 
 the territorial principle the meaning and efficacy 
 of which principle it will require a whole lecture 
 to explain. 
 
 3. And first, as to what is meant by a territorial 
 establishment. The circumstance of its being an 
 establishment, involves in it a legal provision for 
 the clergyman. But, over and above this, sappose, 
 that, in return for this provision, this clergyman 
 has a certain geographical district, whether in town 
 or country, assigned to him ; and that he is ex- 
 pected to take an ecclesiastical cognizance of all 
 the families within its limits. To perfect this ar- 
 rangement, they must stand so related to his 
 church, as to have a right of preference over all 
 extra-parochial* families to the occupation of its 
 sittings j and he, on the other hand, should be so 
 related to his parish, as, if not to have a right of 
 entry into all the houses, at least to be bound in 
 point of duty to make a tender to every house* 
 
 * That is, all families who reside without the limits of the parish in 
 question. 
 
144 
 
 holder who is willing to receive him, of such eccle- 
 siastical attentions and services as his time will per- 
 mit him to bestow, and which might be conducive 
 to the Christian good of himself and of his family. 
 In other words, he is bound to superadd, as far as 
 the people will let him, week-day and household to 
 his Sabbath-day and pulpit ministrations. He is 
 the minister not of a congregation only, as far the 
 greater number of our unendowed ministers are ; 
 but he is the minister both of a congregation and 
 of a parish. 
 
 4. To illustrate this distinction between paro- 
 chial and merely congregational ministers the more, 
 we may .point to those few instances, which ex- 
 emplify what we have defined to be the essence or 
 principle of an establishment, without at the same 
 time that establishment being territorial. There is 
 a legal provision to a certain amount, in the shape 
 of a regium donum, for the Presbyterian ministers 
 in the north of Ireland who are helped in con- 
 sequence, to congregate their hearers at lower 
 seat-rents than would otherwise have been pos- 
 sible ; but without any definite section of a terri- 
 tory being assigned to them within the limits of 
 which they might exert an ecclesiastical surveillance 
 or guardianship over one and all of the families. 
 The minister is thus enabled, to surmount in so far 
 the barrier in the way of his ministrations, which 
 lies in the want of wealth on the part of the 
 people ; but there is no guarantee secured under 
 such an arrangement, for surmounting that other 
 
145 
 
 barrier, which lies in their want of skill. He has 
 to do with his hearers ; but there is nothing in such 
 an economy, which at all necessitates him to do 
 with those who are not his hearers. They may 
 choose to attend him if they so like ; but if they 
 do not choose, they may accumulate in any numbers 
 without the sphere of his observation, or at least 
 without the sphere of his moral influence and con- 
 trol. If they do not come to him, there is nothing 
 in this congregational, even though endowed sys- 
 tem, which insures that he should go to them ; and 
 at this rate it is obvious, that whole masses of hea- 
 thenism might be forced out of contiguous families, 
 lapsing into their own native earthliness, and in- 
 fecting each other with habits of irreligion. We 
 can see how possible it is, that, in such a state of 
 things, the people should sink into a rapid and 
 fearful degeneracy while there are no forces in a 
 system so imperfect, by which to recal them. The 
 same economy obtained at one time in the United 
 States of America only, instead of the legal pro- 
 vision being confined to one sect, it extended to 
 all that were in sufficient force to muster one or 
 more congregations. But neither here does it ap- 
 pear, that any ministers had the charge and super- 
 intendence of all the families within a given district. 
 They preached to those who came j but there was 
 no understanding on the part of the state from 
 whom they received their maintenance, of any ob- 
 ligation on their part to take any cognizance, or go 
 in quest of all within the limits of a certain assigned 
 
146 
 
 territory who did not come. The Presbyterian 
 establishment in Ireland is sectarian, but not terri- 
 torial. In the Northern States of America, so long 
 as it subsisted, it extended to a congeries of sects ; 
 and may therefore perhaps on this account be also 
 regarded as sectarian yet neither was it terri- 
 torial. In the Presbyterian Establishment of Scot- 
 land, the Episcopalian of England, and, we believe, 
 all the religious establishments in Europe, the 
 ministers have to do with parishes as well as congre- 
 gations ; and therefore they are both sectarian and 
 territorial. 
 
 5. Now our object at present is to demonstrate, 
 that it is in the territorial principle where the 
 great strength of an establishment lies ; and that, 
 though by means of voluntaryism, or of a merely 
 congregational establishment, we may somewhat 
 retard the progress of irreligion in a country yet 
 that it is only by a territorial establishment, and 
 in virtue of the peculiar energies and adaptations 
 which belong to its parochial system, that we can 
 lay an arrest on this melancholy process ; and, far 
 more, it is only thus that we can recover a people 
 from the moral degeneracy into which they have 
 fallen. 
 
 6. It is well that both the reality of the disease, 
 and the operation of our proposed remedy, can be 
 ascertained by methods so strictly experimental 
 insomuch that henceforth we might almost dispense 
 with any general reasoning to prove either the 
 impotency of voluntaryism on the one hand, or the 
 
14? 
 
 efficacy of a well-worked territorial establishment on 
 the other. We are not sure but that in the study 
 of this important question, we might obtain a 
 clearer and more impressive view of the truth by 
 limiting our attention to but one locality from the 
 present state and the future treatment of which, 
 the whole principle and philosophy of the subject 
 might be gathered. 
 
 7. In any large town, where the population has 
 greatly outgrown the capacity of the established 
 churches to hold them, you can be at no loss to 
 find an apt specimen of ecclesiastical destitution, 
 on which, after having experimentally ascertained 
 the inadequacy of all the existing methods, the 
 operation of our proposed remedy might then be 
 exemplified. For this purpose, let there be as- 
 sumed a plebeian district of not more than two 
 thousand people ; and let a thorough investigation 
 be made of the state and habit of the families 
 more especially as respects their church-going ; 
 and the number of sittings in chapels of all de- 
 nominations, which, in defect of the legal pro- 
 vision, they 'have provided for themselves. The 
 inquiry should first be made from door to door, at 
 the mouths of the householders; and their answers, 
 when thoroughly sifted and subjected, if need be, 
 to the correction of various tests which it is need- 
 less to specify, will exhibit a melancholy proof of 
 the impotency, the glaring impotency of that vo- 
 luntaryism, which, in the arrogance of its boasted 
 sufficiency, would supersede every other method 
 
148 
 
 but its own, for the spread of a Christian educa- 
 tion throughout the community at large. A mighty 
 field has lain open to its enterprises for several 
 generations ; and yet what has been the result ? 
 We do not need to guess, or to speculate on the 
 probabilities ; for we can lay our immediate hand 
 on the verities of the subject. Let the survey, 
 which we now recommend, of one single locality, 
 be at all accordant with the numerous surveys of 
 other and similar localities, which have been ac- 
 tually taken ; and we shall be sure to find, that, at 
 the very most, not one in five or six far more 
 usually not one in eight often not one in ten 
 and, in some instances, not one in twelve, fifteen, 
 or twenty of the gross population, possess accom- 
 modation in anyplace of worship whatever, whether 
 in churches or meeting-houses. Such is the languor 
 of the demand when people are left to themselves. 
 Such is the certain consequence oftheir being aban- 
 doned, either to the voluntary principle, or to the 
 system of free trade in Christianity a conclusion 
 this, not excogitated by any theoretical speculation 
 of ours on the laws of human nature; but a conclu- 
 sion, which might be verified by yourselves within 
 less than half a mile of your own doors resting on 
 the firm basis of induction ; or of that evidence, 
 which, in every other department of inquiry, is re- 
 spected as far the most authoritative and the most 
 accordant with the spirit and the philosophy of mo- 
 dern science. 
 
 8. Now the question is, how shall we reclaim 
 
149 
 
 this outlandish population to habits of church- 
 going? In what way shall we propose to go about 
 it? They reside, it will be recollected, within the 
 bounds of one locality an assemblage of con- 
 tiguous householders occupying in space not more 
 than a few streets, alleys, or lanes. In their assumed 
 gross number of two thousand souls, the likelihood, 
 often realised in London and elsewhere, is, that not 
 two hundred go to any place of worship whatever 
 implying therefore a general population of sixteen 
 hundred, or eight hundred human beings, the fit 
 subjects for a public and regular ministration of the 
 gospel, and who wait to be recovered from that 
 habit of irreligion, which may not only have been 
 confirmed by the practice of a whole lifetime, but 
 into which the people of that district may have 
 sunk and settled down for several generations. A 
 voluntary chapel might be adventured in the midst 
 of them, and be even filled to an overflow not 
 by them, however, let it well be remarked ; but 
 by hearers from all distances, who have a pre- 
 disposition for the services of the sanctuary, and a 
 power as well as a willingness to pay for them. 
 Now the probability is that the people have not 
 the power ; and, at all events, and which forms* a 
 still more material obstacle, the certainty is that 
 they have not the willingness. A predisposition 
 for the regularities of Sabbath attendance, either 
 was never felt or has long been extinct among 
 them ; and there is nothing fitted to awaken it in 
 the mere presence or juxta-position of a chapel, 
 
1,50 
 
 whose minister has to do with hearers, and hearers 
 only, and who takes no charge of other families be- 
 sides. And this impotency, which attaches to the 
 unendowed, attaches also in great part as a defect 
 and blemish to the endowed minister provided 
 that no territorial charge has been assigned to him. 
 He may be enabled, in virtue of his endowment, to 
 minister to the people at low seat-rents, and thus 
 be helped over the first barrier in the way of their 
 attendance the want of ability to pay for church 
 accommodation : but this does not help him over 
 the second, which is greatly the more insuperable 
 of the two their want of willingness. He may be 
 attended by those who have the predisposition 
 that is, just like the other, by hearers scattered up 
 and down from all parts of the city ; but be nearly 
 as little attended as the unendowed minister before 
 him, by people in his own immediate vicinity, or 
 in the immediate confines of his own place of wor- 
 ship. Now the specific business which we should 
 like to put into the hands of a Christian minister 
 is, not that he should fill his church any how 
 that he may do by the superior attractiveness of 
 his preaching, at the expense of previous con- 
 gregations, and without any movement in advance 
 on the practical heathenism of the community : 
 But what we want is, to place his church in the middle 
 of such a territory as we have now specified and 
 to lay upon him a task, for the accomplishment of 
 which we should allow him the labour and per- 
 severance of a whole lifetime j not to fill his 
 
151 
 
 church any how, but to Jill this church out of that 
 district. We should give him the charge over 
 head, of one and all of its families ; and tell him, 
 that, instead of seeking hearers from without, he 
 should so shape and regulate his movements, that, 
 as far as possible, his church-room might all be 
 taken up by hearers from within. It is this pecu- 
 liar relation between his church, and its contiguous 
 households, all placed within certain geographical 
 limits, that distinguishes himf rom the others as a 
 territorial minister. And let the whole country be 
 parcelled out into such districts and parishes, with 
 an endowed clergyman so assigned to each, and 
 each small enough to be overtaken by the atten- 
 tions of one clergyman we should thus, as far as 
 its machinery is concerned, have the perfect ex- 
 ample of a territorial establishment. 
 
 9. But good machinery, even the best in the 
 world, can avail nothing of itself without the good 
 working of it ; and the all-important question 
 remains, flow are we to work the machinery of a 
 territorial establishment? We shall study so to 
 frame our reply to this question, as still to concen- 
 trate your regards on our supposed territory of two 
 thousand inhabitants ; and which, for the very 
 purpose of making an experimentum crucis, we 
 should like to be in the worst possible circum- 
 stances for such an achievement, that is, to be the 
 section of a town, and that too, if you will, among 
 the very deepest and most depraved recesses of the 
 vast metropolis where the present, the actual, 
 
152 
 
 proportion of church-going is the lowest thai 
 anywhere to be found So that the object of our 
 enterprise you will observe is, not to retain a 
 people in their attendance on the ordinances of the 
 gospel, but, far more difficult, to recover from 
 non-attendance not to perpetuate a good habit, 
 but to change a bad one ; and to restore a people, 
 now sunk among the lowest depths in the abyss of 
 irreligion, from the degeneracy into which they 
 have fallen. The question is, How shall a terri- 
 torial minister address himself to so stupendous a 
 moral undertaking ; and where lies the charm or 
 efficacy of that territorial system, on which we 
 reckon for so stupendous a fulfilment ? 
 
 10. He of course would begin with a very small 
 attendance. Few, very few, would, in the first 
 instance, be inclined to go to him on the Sabbath ; 
 and that is the precise reason why he should make 
 the most of every opening and every opportunity 
 for going to them through the week. Of these 
 two parties, the minister and the people on the 
 unendowed, or even the endowed, if but the general 
 and congregational system, the first movement is 
 left with the people ; and so, with all those who 
 have lost the taste and habit of waiting on the 
 ordinances of the sanctuary, no such movement 
 ever can be counted on : And the people, once 
 become alienated from the services of the gospel, 
 might, for any force that is brought to bear upon 
 them, remain alienated for ever. There is no 
 self-originating or spontaneous tendency to such an 
 
1,53 
 
 approximation ; and the families will abide in the 
 dormancy of nature until they are operated upon 
 by an influence from without. The minister will 
 never, by his mere power of attraction, draw them 
 to his church ; and he must therefore take another 
 way of it or, on the method of aggression, he 
 must go forth upon their houses. In short, cir- 
 cumscribed though he is within a very limited 
 sphere, he must fill it up, else he will never succeed 
 in it, with the labours and the locomotion of a 
 missionary. The movement never will begin with 
 them ; and it must therefore begin with him, or 
 there will be no movement at all. The first im- 
 pulse lies in his general week-day attentions ; the 
 final result, to be gradually come at however in a 
 greater or less number of years, and perhaps not 
 till after the patience and painstaking of a whole 
 incumbency, will be their general Sabbath attend- 
 ance. 
 
 11. But it will be asked, what reason, grounded 
 either on experience or on our knowledge of human 
 nature, have we for counting on so mighty a prac- 
 tical effect as this even in the course of a whole 
 generation ? We are quite sensible of a certain 
 secular or shrewd incredulity, by which all our 
 anticipations on this subject have been met and 
 resisted ; of a very prevalent idea, that, to think 
 of operating with any sensible effect on such stub- 
 born and unlikely materials as the families of the 
 working class in a city population, is but a con- 
 fident and overweening imagination, which can 
 
1,54 
 
 never by any possibility be realised that all sense 
 and all observation reclaim against it; and there- 
 fore, however much to be admired as a picture 
 the beautiful fancy picture of a sanguine high- 
 coloured and most amiable Utopianism we must 
 not look for the living fulfilment of it, in this our 
 actual and every. day world. It is thus, that our 
 project of subdividing city parishes, has been put 
 into the same category with another benevolent 
 project, the parallelograms of Mr. Owen ; or 
 likened to one of those many schemes of fond, but 
 withal visionary and speculative philanthropy, which 
 pass in rapid succession before the eye of the pub- 
 lic, have their day and are forgotten. It is, there- 
 fore, all the more incumbent on us, to demonstrate 
 the likelihoods of our proposed undertaking to 
 show wherein it differs from a romance of Arcadia; 
 and prove that it has no common quality with a 
 mere painting or fiction of airy sentimentalism. 
 
 12. Our first experience, then, which we quote 
 with the greater confidence that it is so general 
 we had almost said constant and unexpected, and 
 which it is in the power of any one to verify at 
 pleasure, is the welcome and cordiality on the part 
 of the householders, wherewith these visits of a 
 Christian minister are received. This is the actual 
 finding among all who make the attempt; and 
 surely, after it has become their finding, it should 
 no longer be stigmatised as our fancy. Whether 
 in town or country, it makes no difference. There 
 is an open door of admittance every where; and 
 
155 
 
 this forms a very great encouragement to at least 
 the initial footsteps of our enterprise. From the 
 immense overgrowth of our city parishes, the 
 practice of household attentions, on the part of 
 the clergymen, has got into disuetude ; but now, 
 when the thing is tried on little experimental slips 
 of their huge territory, it universally happens, that 
 the manifested good-will on one side, draws forth 
 the response of an honest and heart- felt gratitude 
 on the other. In this respect human nature main- 
 tains a certain vigorous identity, which survives 
 every change of situation or exposure insomuch 
 that ministers, when transplanted into cities from 
 the most remote and rural parishes in the land, 
 have been astonished to meet with the same re- 
 spectful and kindly entertainment of their visits 
 from the families of the manufacturing, which they 
 were wont to experience from those of our cottage 
 and agricultural population. And the human 
 nature of England, is the same with that of Scot- 
 land. In the year 1822, I made a small household 
 survey in the worst part of the parish of St. Giles, 
 in London, in company with Mr. Joseph Butter- 
 worth, who then lived in Russell Square, at the 
 distance of little more than a stone-throw from the 
 wretched hovels that were explored by us. Our 
 ostensible errand was not a dispensation of money, 
 but an inquiry into the state of education among 
 their young : or, in other words, ours was not an 
 object by which we laid hold of the sordid appe- 
 tencies of the people, but of a higher and more 
 
156 
 
 generous part of their nature. There was not one 
 exception, I will not say to the civility, but to the 
 cordiality of our reception j which was no surprise 
 to myself, for I had learned a good many years 
 before, with what perfect confidence, nay witli 
 what a pleasurable exercise of the affections, one 
 might enter the houses and hold converse with the 
 families, even in the poorest and most outlandish 
 districts of a city ; while, on the other hand, Mr. 
 Butterworth uttered the observation, that it was 
 only within a few months, since they had made the 
 discovery that it was consistent with their personal 
 safety thus to go forth among the people. In 
 other words, such had been the ignorance among 
 the rich and the poor of each other such the bar- 
 rier of suspicion or fear on the one side ; and such 
 most likely, because most naturally, the consequent 
 distrust or defiance on the other, that, when at 
 last the one party broke their way over the moral 
 distance by which they had been separated, it was 
 to them altogether an unexpected novelty, when 
 they found that the other party welcomed their 
 advances, and could enter with the most warm and 
 intelligent sympathy on those concerns, which ap- 
 pertain to the brotherhood of our common nature. 
 If this was indeed a discovery, it is a discovery 
 which all of you have the opportunity of making 
 for yourselves ; and I shall be glad if this first 
 experience should dispose you to wait, and be the 
 willing disciples of any experiences which might 
 follow else it is possible, that while denouncing 
 
157 
 
 the theoretical imagination of others, you may be 
 setting at nought the authority of facts, and so 
 evincing yourselves to be the most unsound and 
 precipitate of all theorists. 
 
 13. So far from its being a theory, we are not 
 aware of a more felt and familiar experience, than 
 the power to conciliate and subdue human hearts, 
 which lies, not in the gifts, but in the mere at- 
 tentions or offices of kindness however trifling 
 in themselves, if they but give the authentic manU 
 festation of genuine unequivocal good-will on the 
 part of those who discharge them. It is not with 
 a romance, but with a solid history, that we are 
 dealing when we read of the moral triumphs 
 achieved in prisons by the philanthropy of Howard 
 and Fry ; and we are only carrying back their 
 experience from prisons to parishes we are only 
 concluding from the more to the less marvellous, 
 when we affirm, that the same charity which ef- 
 fected such conquests in the malefactor's cell, and 
 before which the desperadoes of the gaol melted 
 and gave way, will effectuate a still larger and 
 more enduring conquest when brought to bear, in 
 their own dwelling places, on the men and women 
 of our actual and every-day world. If such be the 
 might and mastery of Christian benevolence 
 such the omnipotence of its spell, even among the 
 "guilty outcasts of society, and that in the last stage 
 of depravation what might we not anticipate from 
 the working of the same engine in the earlier 
 stages, when the man of God goes forth in the 
 
158 
 
 spirit of zeal and love ; and, in the midst of their 
 domestic groups, speaks out the earnestness of an 
 affectionate heart to the fathers and mothers of fami- 
 lies? But why make that a matter of inference, which 
 should be,and which is,a matter of direct observation? 
 Let a parish minister go forth on the walk of house- 
 hold visitation; and the kindness of his reception, 
 especially among the families of the working classes, 
 is all but universal. Let their unpractised rudeness, 
 nay even let their depravity be what it may, they 
 almost never shut the door against him j and if he 
 will but venture himself across their threshold, he 
 may lay his account with a courteous, and in far 
 the greater number of instances, with a friendly 
 entertainment at their hands. At the commence- 
 ment of a new parish, when provided with its new 
 church, specially destined for the accommodation 
 of the people who have been assigned to him, it is 
 his part in the first instance to move toward them 
 for they never, if left to themselves, will move 
 toward him. And he can be at no loss for topics 
 of introduction to jhese, his parish families. The 
 very announcement of himself as their minister, 
 will secure, with the majority of the householders, 
 a favourable outset ; and there are so many ingrati- 
 ating errands, by which he might incorporate him- 
 self and his doings, with the strongest and the 
 tenderest affections of nature as when he makes' 
 inquiry into the education of children ; and can 
 tell them of the schools which are visited by 
 himself as their official guardian, and which are 
 
159 
 
 open for their reception ; or as when his services 
 are required for marriages, and baptisms, and fu- 
 nerals ; or as when he volunteers the frequent 
 entry of himself, at the bedsides of the sick and 
 the dying; or as when, with kind and judicious 
 advice, he can make himself of use to them in their 
 quarrels, or their misfortunes, or their difficulties; 
 or as when a signal calamity befals the household, 
 and the sympathy of neighbours is awakened, he 
 falls in with the epidemic feeling and, on every 
 such occasion of a common sentiment and common 
 effort for the good of the unhappy sufferers, be- 
 tween himself and the parochial community over 
 which he presides, he rivets and confirms still more 
 his moral ascendancy over them. To denounce 
 all this as Utopianism, is really to betray the ut- 
 most ignorance and inexperience of our common 
 humanity. It is not a fairy-land that we are now 
 employed in picturing and settingforth. We are but 
 describing our own average and every-day nature. 
 We ask any man, possessing an ordinary sense or 
 discernment of the feelings and the fellowships of 
 social life we ask him, not sanguinely to image, 
 but soundly and soberly to estimate, the likelihoods 
 of such an enterprise as we now set before him 
 when a Christian minister assumes to himself, in 
 the heart of a crowded metropolis, a manageable 
 vineyard, say of two thousand people, and turns it 
 into a home-walk, where, day after day, he plies 
 the attentions and charities which belong to his 
 sacred office ; and superadds to the personal 
 
160 
 
 influence which lies in the air and education 
 of a gentleman, the weight of his personal cha- 
 racter, and still more resistless, the weight of 
 that tried and manifested friendship which glows 
 within his breast, and pours forth, as from a foun- 
 tain, the most gracious and endearing cordialities 
 on all who are around him. We do not ask for 
 him the eloquence, or the talent, or the rare and 
 surpassing brilliancy, which distinguish the few ; 
 we but ask for him the principle, the worth, the 
 kind and Christian affection, which, by the power 
 of the divine word, and with the operation of the 
 divine Spirit, are diffusible among all. It is on 
 the strength of high moral, and not of high mental 
 qualifications, that we look for the result in ques- 
 tion. If but gifted with these, he go forth on such 
 a territory as we have ventured to chalk out for 
 him ; and, more especially, if he reside within or 
 upon its confines there is not a month will elapse, 
 before that by his presence and his labours, he will 
 light a moral sunshine throughout nearly all the 
 habitations. We are not so extravagant, not so 
 visionary, as to think, that, as by the lifting up of 
 a magical wand, he will obtain, by dint of his week- 
 day attentions, even in the course of half an in- 
 cumbency, their universal attendance on his Sabbath 
 services. If he gather in but a hundred hearers 
 from amongst them in the first twelvemonth of his 
 labours, this were enough for us to indicate the 
 germ of a most hopeful experiment, and at length 
 a most triumphant consummation ; when, without 
 
161 
 
 magic and without miracle, he shall have congre- 
 gated the residenters within his little domain into 
 a parochial family; and, as the fruit of his sustained 
 efforts and assiduities and prayers, he bequeaths 
 them a now church-going and church-loving people 
 to the minister of the next generation. 
 
 14. We would not overstate our prospects of 
 success in this great enterprise. We know it to 
 be a work of slowness and difficulty. We are quite 
 sensible that, with those who have arrived at man- 
 hood, and lived all their days in a state of exile 
 from the ordinances of the gospel that with 
 many of them, the obstinacy of their habits, habits 
 of neglect and non-attendance, is well-nigh irre- 
 claimable. And therefore it is, that we count on 
 a very gradual accession from the grown-up people 
 of a newly allocated parish, to its infant congre- 
 gation. And yet all experience tells, that, even of 
 these, a goodly number may be confidently ex- 
 pected beginning perhaps with a small fraction 
 of the whole, who, few at the first, draw others 
 after them, till (the gregarious principle coming 
 every year into fuller play) the regular, the respect- 
 ful observance of church-going, ripens at length 
 into one of the established proprieties of that little 
 vicinage, which has been selected as the field of 
 this momentous experiment the experiment, we 
 think, of all others, fraught with deepest interest 
 both to the church and to the commonwealth. Yet 
 however confident of the final result, we demand 
 time and patience for its successive footsteps. In 
 
16* 
 
 In the midst of all these bright anticipations, it is 
 our melancholy conviction that many of the old 
 and middle-aged of such a heretofore neglected 
 population may never be reclaimed, even to the 
 external decencies of Sabbath observation ; and that 
 the locality on which this apostolic enterprise is 
 going forward, will be relieved from the spectacle 
 of their profaneness or profligacy, not by their con- 
 version, but by their death. Our best hopes, we 
 confess, are associated with the coming up of an- 
 other generation ; and under a right treatment of 
 the ductile and susceptible young, congregated in 
 parish-schools, and trained from earliest boyhood 
 to a punctual attendance on the ministrations of 
 the parish clergyman. He, if put in possession of 
 a complete parochial economy, is on mighty van- 
 tage ground at all times of course a welcome 
 visitor in those dependent seminaries, which have 
 been reared for the express convenience of his 
 operations, forming part and parcel of the machi- 
 nery that has been committed to his hands ; and 
 where, without charging himself with the executive 
 details of their week-day education he, neverthe- 
 less, by the encouragement of his presence and the 
 cognizance he takes of their presence and behaviour, 
 might obtain the most wholesome ascendancy over 
 the hearts and habits of his juvenile population. 
 Over and above the juvenile influence, which, 
 through the mediun of their youth, he transplants 
 into the bosom of families, these schools become 
 the direct nurseries of the church, the feeders, as 
 
 i 
 
it were, of that grand reservoir, which, in return 
 becomes the centre and the fountain-head of a rich 
 moral dispensation, to the neighbourhood around 
 it ; and so more prolific of blessings every year, as 
 it rises onwards from its first slender beginnings 
 till filled to an overflow, even before the expiry 
 of the present, or commencement of the succeeding 
 age. 
 
 14. But let us not lose sight of the influences 
 for good which might thus be carried forward, not 
 in the public schools only, but in the most private 
 and retired dwelling-places of this appropriated 
 vineyard. The most reckless, the most resolute 
 in their moral hardihood, are not beyond the opera- 
 tion of these. Even let them carry it so far, as 
 to barricade their houses, even as their hearts are 
 barricaded, against the first approaches of this 
 apostolic clergyman ; and he need not yet give 
 them up in despair. He has only to watch his op- 
 portunity and Providence will work for him. The 
 hand of death may at length open a door for him 
 even to the worst habitation of aliens in the parish. 
 Let him be ever ready with his services ; and, in 
 the hour of family disaster or family bereavement, 
 the most sullen and else impracticable of these out- 
 laws from all the decencies and humanities whe- 
 ther of Christian or civilized life, may at last give 
 way. And when he makes good his entry, it will 
 not be against their will ; but with their will, soft- 
 ened and subdued under the power of that untired, 
 that invincible charity, which they find it impos- 
 
164 
 
 sible any longer to withstand. The man who can 
 achieve a victory like this, fully though it be within 
 the likelihoods of nature and experience, has only 
 to be disencumbered from the labours and cares of 
 a general congregation ; and, concentrating his 
 efforts within a given territory, to operate with 
 perseverance on its contiguous households, that he 
 might build, by successive additions, from time to 
 time, a local congregation out of them. And we 
 have only to imagine the same repeated often 
 enough from one manageable locality to another, or 
 in other words, we have only to imagine a sufficiently 
 thick-set establishment, in the hands of diligent and 
 conscientious ministers, each working within his 
 own domain, on the territorial principle in order 
 to effectuate the moral transformation of a city, of 
 a vast metropolis, of a widely extended province ; 
 or finally, to carry it over the length and breadth 
 of a whole empire. 
 
 16. It is true that though we can create the right 
 machinery, we cannot create the right men; and that 
 withoutthesethemanchinerymayeitherbeillworked 
 or not worked at all and so be the instrument of 
 evil instead of good. This may be admitted, with- 
 out, at the same time, destroying the importance, 
 the vast importance, of the proposition that there 
 is a certain machinery, a certain system of moral 
 and spiritual tactics, by which the Christian worth 
 of one man might be made tenfold more available 
 for the Christianisation of two thousand people, 
 than we ever find it under a random economy 
 
165 
 
 and by which therefore the well directed labour of 
 five hundred zealous and devoted clergymen, could 
 be made to tell with an efficacy, far surpassing all that 
 has yet been realised on a population of a million 
 human souls. The difficulty, we are quite sensible, 
 lies in our want of the men but why not make 
 them effective as far as we have them, as far as 
 they will go? Why not provide them with the 
 greatest possible facilities for the greatest possible 
 result ; and, could we only make good a few spe- 
 cimens of the power and the fruitful ness that lie in 
 this territorial cultivation would it not, along 
 with the demonstration given by them to the worth 
 of an Establishment, give a mighty impulse and 
 direction towards a pure and well-principled exer- 
 cise of the ecclesiastical patronage? 
 
106 
 
 LECTUKE VI. 
 
 CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH JUSTIFY A GOVERNMENT, THAT HAS 
 ASSUMED ONE FROM AMONG THE SEVERAL DENOMINA- 
 TIONS OF EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM FOR THE NA- 
 TIONAL ESTABLISHMENT, IN ABIDING BY THE SELECTION 
 WHICH IT HAS MADE. 
 
 J. WE trust that it will now appear of a territorial 
 establishment, however rapid or imperfect our de- 
 scription of it, that it is the only one by which the 
 mass of a community can be out and out pervaded. 
 It is this pervading faculty, in fact, which consti- 
 tutes its great and characteristic recommendation. 
 It comprehends all ; and if it do not enter into 
 converse, it at least proposes converse with all. It 
 may not introduce Christianity within the precincts 
 of every family ; but it brings the overtures of 
 Christianity, or of Christian instruction, to the 
 door of every family. The lessons of the gospel 
 are brought by it to every door ; and our expe- 
 rience is, that, when once brought thus far, in the 
 vast majority of instances an entry is permitted 
 and so these lessons are carried by it across almost 
 every threshold. It is our further experience, that, 
 when this system of aggression on the households 
 of a newly assigned parish is kept up and perpe- 
 tuated by the clergyman not only does it secure 
 a private ministration to the inmates on a week- 
 day j but these inmates are at length evoked by it 
 
167 
 
 into the act, which in time ripens into the habit, oi 
 attendance on the public ministrations of the Sab- 
 bath. From a parish of aliens, they may in less 
 than half a generation become generally and upon 
 the whole a parish of church-goers ; and, if not all 
 converted to religion in the full life and power of 
 it, almost all of them undergo a visible reformation 
 of utmost importance to the well-being of society. 
 If not all transformed into the citizens of heaven, 
 they are bettered as citizens of earth ; and, in 
 respect to the courtesies and the proprieties and 
 the companionable virtues of our present exist- 
 ence, almost all of them are greatly humanised. 
 
 2. And perhaps it will give in your eyes less of 
 a Utopian, and more of an experimental character, 
 to our anticipations of a result so general if we 
 ask you to consider the just observation of Mr. 
 Wilberforce, on the effect of Christianity, even 
 beyond the circle of its own proper and genuine 
 disciples. It elevates the general standard of 
 morals, in every country or neighbourhood which 
 it enters. Even though it should but spiritualise 
 the few, it civilises the many. Over and above its 
 direct influence on those whom it converts, it has, 
 through the medium of their example and their 
 virtues, a reflex or secondary influence on the fa- 
 milies of every little vicinity around them inso- 
 much that the sanctities and the extraordinary 
 graces of a small number, with the influence of a 
 purifying and preserving salt on the general mass, 
 tell, by a certain overawing power, in restraining 
 
168 
 
 the profligacies, and so in raising the character for 
 decency and morals of society at large. This will 
 be remarkably seen in any parish that is under a 
 reclaiming process from the out-fields of heathen- 
 ism, if the experiment be but well and vigorously 
 conducted. We do not say that the minister will 
 christianise all ; or that he will introduce the 
 worship of God, the voice of psalms, into every 
 family. But the melody that is heard in the habi- 
 tations of the righteous, will have a certain soften- 
 ing and subduing effect on the inmates of other 
 habitations ; and it will be found no romance, but 
 in strict accordance with the realities of human 
 nature if, by means of his schools and of his 
 other parochial institutes ; and (of no small ac- 
 count either) if by means of his own frequent and 
 various intercourse with the people, and the dig- 
 nifying effect upon all the householders of their 
 personal acquaintance with the clergyman, and of 
 the personal cognizance which he takes of them 
 and of their families he will mollify, and to a very 
 great degree, the general aspect of that parochial 
 community over which he presides ; and bequeath 
 to his successors a far blander and better genera- 
 tion, than he had to encounter himself at the outset 
 of his great undertaking. 
 
 3. It will now be seen, that, for the accomplish- 
 ment of these blessed ends, a territorial establish- 
 ment is indispensable an establishment that the 
 people might be served with the ministrations of 
 the gospel, either at no price at all, or at a price 
 
169 
 
 which they can afford ; and that a territorial one, 
 that, instead of being left to come to these minis- 
 trations of their own accord, the ministration* 5 
 might in the first instance be brought to them, 
 and with all that power to conciliate and draw 
 forth, which lies in the frequent, the importunate, 
 but withal the well-timed attentions, of a wise and 
 benevolent clergyman. It will also be seen wherein 
 it is that the secret of its great strength lies. It 
 lies in the first movement being laid on the right 
 party. The thing to be effected is, that the 
 teacher and the taught shall be brought into juxta- 
 position with each other ; and the question is, 
 which of these two shall begin the approximation ? 
 If we wait till the taught seek after the teacher, 
 we shall have to wait for ever; for in reference to 
 the great mass and majority of an alienated parish, 
 there is no taste, no predisposition, for the lessons 
 of the gospel ; and nothing therefore to originate 
 a right impulse among the people. The only 
 thing which remains then is that the teacher shall 
 seek after the taught a movement to which he 
 is or ought to be prompted, by a sense of official 
 duty, and the actuating benevolence of the gospel. 
 We shall look in vain for a spontaneous or primary 
 movement, in a desire on the one part to receive 
 the moral benefit. The spontaneous and the pri- 
 mary can only be looked for, in a desire on the 
 other part to confer the moral benefit. In other 
 words, the work of christianisation, even onward 
 to the stage of its last and minutest subdivision, is 
 
170 
 
 at all times and essentially a missionary work. 
 The missionary spirit, or the missionary effort, is 
 required for short as well as for long distances. It 
 is needed to reclaim a parish, as well as to reclaim 
 a continent ; and never, but by a system of aggres- 
 sion on the households of any given territory, shall 
 we ever be able to retain and far less to recover a 
 parochial congregation. 
 
 4. The immense moral importance of this terri- 
 torial method, will now be palpable ; nor can we 
 imagine a higher object of true and enlightened 
 patriotism, than the piecemeal application of it, 
 one by one, to each district of a town and to each 
 section of the country at large. But we ask you 
 to conceive how impossible it is, to combine the 
 full advantage and efficacy of this method, with the 
 endowment of different sects. For, in the first 
 place, how upon this system shall we parcel out the 
 territory so as to make sure of a thorough eccle- 
 siastical surveillance reaching overhead to all the 
 families of any given portion of it? For shall we 
 say first to the Baptist minister, You take charge 
 of these contiguous streets in one part of the city, 
 and of the two thousand people by whom they are 
 occupied ? Secondly to the Independent minister, 
 Here is the outline of your vineyard, in another 
 part of the city, comprehending so many of the 
 courts and lanes and alleys which are to be found 
 in it? Thirdly to the Episcopalian, we assign to 
 you this square with its various outlets, stretching 
 onward till the families come up to such a number 
 
171 
 
 as you can still overtake? And, extending the 
 same system from the town to the country, shall it 
 in like manner be pieced out geographically so 
 as along with the principle of a general endow- 
 ment, by way of equal justice to all the sects, you 
 may also secure the principle of a territorial opera- 
 tion, as being the only one by which to penetrate 
 and pervade the mass of a community ? At this 
 rate, we shall have here a Presbyterian village ; 
 there a Methodist township ; somewhere else a 
 landward domain, marked off either by natural or 
 artificial boundaries ; and within which the business 
 of the paid instructor will, just as it happens, be 
 to make Baptists of all, or Methodists of all, or 
 Episcopalians of all, or Presbyterians of all. Each 
 shade of opinion will have its own limits and its 
 own localities ; and, on the other hand, each 
 locality, whether it be of town or country, will 
 have its own theological designation. At this rate 
 the fair face of our island would be like the skin 
 of one of Jacob's cattle, spotted, speckled, ring- 
 streaked, with all the hues and varieties of secta- 
 rianism. At present the men of all parties can 
 conveniently enough arrange themselves into con- 
 gregations. But the government will not find it so 
 convenient, if, attempting to be even-handed with 
 all sects, and at the same time to provide a Chris- 
 tian education for all the people, it shall make the 
 further attempt of arranging them into parishes. 
 
 5. It is quite obvious, that the people cannot thus 
 be made over, at the arbitrary will either of civil or 
 
ecclesiastical superiors cannot thus be made over, 
 in sections of contiguous households, to this one or 
 that other denomination, just according to the 
 locality in which they happen to reside. And if, 
 to avoid this inconvenience, each shall be left to 
 choose their own denomination, and Government to 
 endow all without respect to the territorial prin- 
 ciple then, on this system, all who choose to be 
 Methodists may have their minister supported by 
 the state ; and all who choose to be Presbyterians 
 may have theirs ; and all who choose to be Episco- 
 palians may have theirs ; and all who choose to be 
 Baptists or Independents, or of any other sect, that 
 is comprehended within the limits of scriptural and 
 evangelical Protestantism, may have theirs. But 
 what in the mean time becomes of that number, 
 who relinquish, or never acquired, the habits of 
 church-going, and choose to be nothing at all a 
 number altogether left by this system without 
 guardianship and without observation ; and who 
 are therefore sure to increase every year, and that 
 either with or without an increase of population ? 
 There are no territorial ministers to look after these, 
 or take any charge of them. Each minister is 
 employed with the hearers of his own sect; and as 
 to all others, he may presume that they belong to 
 the minister of some other sect and that, at all 
 events, they lie without the scope of any care or 
 cognizance on his part. It is obvious, both from the 
 nature of the arrangement and from experience 
 the experience of America when it had its endowed 
 
173 
 
 ministers of various denominations ; and of Britain 
 when its parishes became too populous to be made 
 the subject of territorial cultivation that the fami- 
 lies were left to recede, and accordingly did recede 
 in larger multitudes every year, to the out-fields of 
 entire heathenism. They who choose to have Chris- 
 tian instruction, may, under this economy, have some 
 one or other of their own peculiar tenets, to whose 
 ministrations they can repair ; and they who choose 
 not, abide outcasts from every ministration ; and 
 there is no certain provision by which to recal them. 
 There is no counteractive force set up, by which 
 to make head against that bias of the human will, 
 wherewith it gravitates, as if by a sort of constitu- 
 tional necessity, towards the alienation and lethargy 
 of nature. The system, in fact, is tainted through- 
 out with the disease and impotency of voluntaryism. 
 Men are left by it, if they so incline, in voluntary 
 exile from the ordinances of the gospel ; and it 
 wields no aggressive influence, by which either to 
 restrain or to recover them. There might be men 
 labouring in every neighbourhood, for the souls of 
 those, who, in obedience to the summons of the 
 weekly bell, repair to some one assembly or other 
 of worshippers. But, in every neighbourhood, 
 there is an accumulating number of human beings, 
 who yield no such obedience ; and there is no man, 
 although they stand in*pre-eminent need of such a 
 moral superintendence, whose peculiar office it is 
 to care for their souls. The only functionary 
 suited to their special condition, is a territorial 
 
174 
 
 minister; Tor they tali through, or fall between, into 
 their own native irreligion among the congrega- 
 tional ministers who are labouring on every side of 
 them. In these circumstances, the rapid degenera- 
 tion of the community seems unavoidable ; and the 
 only adequate remedy is a well-worked territorial 
 establishment. But government, on the one hand, 
 cannot set this machine agoing in the complicated 
 way of having to do with men of different bodies and 
 
 different denominations instead of providing for the 
 
 Christian education of its people, through the me- 
 dium of one correspondence, and with the simplicity 
 of one management. Neither, on the other hand, 
 can the people be made over in aggregates and 
 geographical divisions each to its own variety of 
 those multiform sects into which Protestantism has 
 severed. To avoid this double inconvenience, the 
 attempt to combine the territorial principle with 
 an equal treatment of all the denominations, must 
 be given up as impracticable ; and some one de- 
 nomination must be singled out, for an establish- 
 ment whose ministers are to be charged overhead 
 with the Christian education of the whole country 
 and each in his own sphere to have an oversight 
 and a certain responsibility laid upon him for the 
 religious knowledge and habitudes of all the families. 
 6. It is a most rightful wish, on the part of a 
 government, that its people should be placed under 
 / an effectual system of Christian education ; and if 
 this cannot be done, but by means of a territorial 
 establishment, then is it shut up unto the necessity 
 
17*5 
 
 of resolving on such an establishment, and that it 
 shall be territorial. And, again, if this cannot be 
 well done but by a church of one given denomina- 
 tion, then is it further bound to select some one ~s 
 denomination, whose ministers it shall entrust with 
 the high office, and maintain in return for the 
 great service of teaching morality and religion to 
 the people of the land. Now it is at this point 
 that the question is laid upon us On what prin- 
 ciple ought the selection to be made ? We have 
 already seen, that the principle is a very obvious 
 one ; and respecting which even statesmen, if but 
 men of large and liberal education, should feel no 
 difficulty, on which to reject that church which 
 would subordinate the authority of Scripture to the 
 authority of man or even place the decisions of 
 their own sovereign pontiff, on the same level with 
 the declarations of the Bible. But there are other 
 churches, other ecclesiastical bodies, that have all 
 agreed in abjuring this corruption ; and are alike 
 free from any participation in it. Many, we should 
 say, the great majority of our Protestant sects, hold 
 the authority of Scripture paramount to all other ^ 
 authority ; and are so far agreed in the interpreta- 
 tion of it, as to hold the same fundamental tenets; 
 and, while differing in circumstantials, to be at one 
 on all the great and essential articles of faith. The 
 government may be at no loss for reasons to eject 
 Popery ; but it may be at great loss for reasons to 
 determine its preference of one shade or variety of 
 Protestantism over all the rest and that too in 
 
170 
 
 very proportion to the nearness of their agreement 
 with each other. The difficulty is enhanced, when 
 it comes to be regarded as a question of equity 
 between sect and sect ; nor is it readily seen, 
 when there is a substantial unity of doctrine be- 
 twixt them, on what principle one should be ad- 
 mitted to the bowers of an establishment, while 
 all others are suffered to abide outcasts from its 
 emoluments and its honours. 
 
 7. Now this question, full of perplexity as it 
 may seem, we think might be easily and at the 
 same time be rightly and on a clear principle dis- 
 posed of. And our first observation is, that the great, 
 the primary design of an establishment, is wholly 
 misunderstood by those who view it as a question 
 of equity between sect and sect. The object of 
 such an institution is not this, but wholly distinct 
 from this, which is to provide a Christian education 
 for the people. What does, or what ought to, 
 move a government in the adoption of such an 
 economy, is not that it may prefer one church or 
 one order of clergymen over another ; but that it 
 may possess itself of a good and efficient organ, 
 through which to distribute the lessons of sound 
 morality and religion among the families of the 
 land. Grant that either of two, or if you choose 
 that any one of twelve sectaries, is equally accom- 
 plished for this great task that may be a suffi- 
 cient vindication for government taking any one it 
 may choose into its employment ; but no reason 
 why government should alike employ them all. 
 
177 
 
 Nay, it is incumbent, morally incumbent, on the 
 government to employ but one, if, in so doing, it 
 retains the territorial principle, rather than employ 
 all, if, in so doing, it must give up that principle ; 
 and so inflict the deepest injury upon the popula- 
 tion. There may be no very distinct ground of 
 preference in the overpassing merits of any one of 
 these rival competitors, on which to guide the 
 selection that the government should make. It 
 may be difficult to allege, and still more to vindi- 
 cate, the superiority of any one of these denomi- 
 nations to all the rest ; in which case, the govern- 
 ment should not suspend, on the determination of 
 this question, an immediate measure for a sound 
 Christian education to the families of the common- 
 wealth. In so doing, it singles out for the national 
 establishment some one of these various denomi- 
 nations ; and this, of course, involves the exclusion 
 of all the others. This regarding it in one aspect, 
 may be viewed in the light of an injury to them ; 
 but, regarded in another aspect, it should be viewed 
 in the light of a benefit to society. The so called 
 injury to the sects is a collateral effect, which 
 forms no part of the wish, perhaps comes not 
 within the contemplation, of the government at 
 all. The benefit to the country at large is the 
 moving principle of government, the object of its 
 sole and single-hearted prosecution. It is not to 
 be endured, that a great, nay, the greatest of all 
 national objects, shall be thwarted and impeded, / 
 
 because minute differences in theology have arisen ; 
 
 M 
 
178 
 
 and theologians, with their respective followers, 
 have chosen, upon these differences, to fall out 
 among themselves. The moral well-being of the 
 nation is not to stand at abeyance, till an adjust- 
 ment shall have been made among controversies 
 not yet determined, and perhaps indeterminable. 
 The government does right in resolving on a terri- 
 torial establishment, and in selecting the ministers 
 of one denomination to work it. Should it, be- 
 cause of this, incur the complaint of not doing 
 equal justice to all the sectaries, it can allege, in 
 its defence, the far higher consideration of doing 
 equal justice to all the families of all the population, 
 by so adapting the church which it pays and takes 
 into its service by so adapting it to the country, 
 that it may reach all, and be comprehensive of all. 
 It is neither for the exaltation of one sect, not for 
 the infliction of a stigma on all the rest, that go- 
 vernment confines its overtures to one only. It 
 is because in this way the business of a general 
 Christian education is most thoroughly done, and 
 most fully overtaken. The government is not to 
 be diverted from this object, of highest and most 
 Catholic policy, by the differences which have 
 broken out in the Christian world. Notwithstand- 
 ing of these, it does right in keeping by the minis- 
 ters of one certain denomination, provided they be 
 vitally and essentially right; though, in so doing, 
 they pass over the ministers of other denominations, 
 who though vitally and essentially right also, have 
 chosen to isolate their body into a separate com- 
 
179 
 
 munion, and to stand out on certain circumstantial 
 peculiarities of their own. Nevertheless, the duty 
 of government remains a stable and unaffected 
 element, which is to ordain a right system of good 
 and efficient education for their subjects ; and 
 leave the sectaries to settle their differences as they 
 may. 
 
 8. Of these two parties the government on 
 the one hand, who have established and endowed 
 the right-thinking ministers of a certain denomina- 
 tion ; and the ministers of the denominations, as 
 right-thinking it may be as the first, in all the 
 leading articles of the faith and weightier matters 
 of the law, and who may complain, that, while 
 equally sound and scriptural with the clergy of 
 the national church, they have been so unequally 
 treated by the reigning power of the state we 
 say of these two parties, the state and the sectaries, 
 the state should, in the question between them, be 
 less at a loss for their own justification. It is 
 true, that, for the sake of a great moral blessing to 
 the community, they have selected one set of 
 ministers, to whom they have made over, in sec- 
 tions or parishes, the Christian charge, and en- 
 trusted the Christian surveillance of all their popu- 
 lation. In so doing, they may have left out, let us 
 imagine, five other sets of ministers all of them 
 equally deserving of such preference ; and who 
 may therefrom complain of the partiality. But the 
 government cannot, for their sakes, break up the 
 territorial principle, that great barrier against the 
 
 M 2 
 
180 
 
 inroads of heathenism ; and, on the other hand, 
 we ask, in the name of Christian charity, whether 
 the existence of their minor differences forms a 
 worthy or sufficient cause for the barrier being 
 taken down ? Must the conveniences of an object 
 so mighty as the Christian education of the people, 
 be on this account trampled under foot ; and we 
 ask, whether it would not be far more beautiful 
 and good, that these distinctions between sect and 
 sect should be offered up a sacrifice on the altar of 
 one common faith, and for the well-being of our 
 common and general humanity than that a cause 
 so dear, both to piety and patriotism, as a universal 
 schooling in the lessons of sound principle for all 
 the people of the land, should be given to the 
 winds? This were really straining at a gnat, and 
 swallowing a camel. 
 
 9. We do not speak of the sin of schism in the 
 abstract. There is much said on this subject by cer- 
 tain domineering churchmen, who arrogate a mystic 
 superiority to themselves, while they would consign 
 all others beyond the pale of Christianity where- 
 with we cannot in the least sympathise. It is not 
 on any pretension of this sort, that we would vin- 
 dicate the establishment of the churches, either of 
 Scotland or England. We do not feel it necessary 
 for such a purpose, to depress immeasurably beneath 
 us, either the creed or the government of other 
 denominations. We most willingly concede of 
 sectaries we could name, that they are at one with 
 us in all which is vital, and only differ from us 
 
181 
 
 in certain minute and insignificant peculiarities; 
 and yet the establishment, the single the exclusive 
 establishment, of our existing churches in their 
 respective countries, might be made to rest, we 
 think, on a firmer because a more rational basis 
 on a far clearer principle than is alleged by those, 
 who claim for their ministers the immaculate 
 descent of a pure and apostolic ordination. We 
 disclaim all aid from any such factitious argument, 
 an argument which could have been of no avail 
 against the Popery that we rejected, and should be 
 of as little avail against those denominations of 
 Protestantism which have been left unendowed, 
 contend against Popery as unscriptural. We 
 contend, not against all Protestant denominations 
 beside our own as being unapostolical, but, which 
 is truly a different thing, we cnntend against the 
 endowment of more than one denomination for one 
 country as incommodious, and not fitted to the 
 great object for which an endowment is desirable 
 and that is the general Christian education of the 
 people of the land. In reasoning against Popery, 
 the more erroneous, or the wider the difference 
 from us the more easily their case is disposed of. 
 In reasoning, not we repeat against the Protestant 
 sectaries, but against the endowment of them all 
 save one the less erroneous, or the nearer they are 
 to ourselves, the more easily their case is disposed 
 of. If people will but attend to the distinction 
 between one thing and another, they will find that 
 there is no paradox here. It was on theological 
 
principles that we stripped Popery of her endow- 
 ments. It is on the principles of a right fiscal, or a 
 right economical arrangement that, while recog- 
 nising the substantial unity of two, three, or more 
 of the Protestant bodies, we but endow one of 
 them, and leave out the rest. To the question by 
 which it was thought they would have gravelled 
 us, When the difference is so insignificant between 
 the church and the sectaries, why treat them so 
 unequally ? our reply is, When the difference 
 is so insignificant, why keep up that difference at 
 all? Why do sectaries keep aloof from the 
 church, on considerations which are confessedly 
 insignificant and paltry ? We hear of their com- 
 mon faith, that is, of their agreement with the 
 church, on all vital and essential topics ; and this, 
 in opposition to the bigots within the establish- 
 ment, we heartily accord to the great majority of 
 the Dissenters in both parts of the island. But if 
 they agree in all that is essential, what is the cha- 
 racter of the topics on which they differ ? There 
 can be no other reply to this, than that they must 
 be the non-essentials of Christianity the nugce 
 triviales, if not the nugce difficiles of doctrine or 
 government the caprices, or whimsical pecu- 
 liarities, in which, through the very wantonness of 
 freedom in this land of perfect toleration, men have 
 chosen to besport themselves, and so broken forth 
 into their party-coloured varieties ; each having a 
 creed, or rather, I would say (for substantially 
 speaking nine-tenths of the people in Britain have 
 
183 
 
 all the same creed), each having a costume and a 
 designation of their own. Meanwhile, if of the 
 four, five, or six denominations it be granted 
 which we do most cordially, such being the cha- 
 racter of their variations that mainly and sub- 
 stantially speaking they all of them are right The 
 government, after having done what was theologi- 
 cally right in rejecting Popery, would still be theo- 
 logically right, in transferring the endowment of 
 the national church to any one of these denomina- 
 tions. And if theologically right in fixing upon 
 some one, then, on another ground that is, for 
 the sake of the territorial principle, with all its 
 mighty benefits to the population, it would be fis- 
 cally or economically right in keeping by that one. 
 We see no way of escaping from this conclusion, 
 but by unchristianising the Church of England ; 
 or the bigots without the establishment becoming 
 as outrageous in their way, as are those bigots 
 within the establishment who would unchristianise 
 the Dissenters. Enough for government, that it 
 has taken a scriptural church into its service ; and 
 vindication enough for its not taking more, that its 
 work can be better done by one such servant than 
 by several. To the remonstrance of the excluded 
 sects, Why when we differ so little do you not 
 take us in ? it may well be replied, Why when 
 you differ so little do you keep yourselves out? 
 Truly it is not for government to make the adjust- 
 ment here ; nor is there another way of bringing 
 the adjustment about, but by means of a larger 
 
184 
 
 intelligence and a larger charity both in the church 
 and among the sectaries themselves. 
 
 10. We trust it is now palpable that, whereas, 
 in proportion to the nearness which obtains be- 
 tween the endowed church and the unendowed 
 sectaries, it has been thought all the more dif- 
 ficult to justify the selection of the one and ex- 
 clusion of all the rest, it in very truth is all they 
 other way. Let us overlook for a moment their 
 circumstantial peculiarities, and grant them to be 
 all equally well fitted for tutoring the families of 
 our population in the lessons of a sound and scrip- 
 tural Christianity the government theologically 
 could not be wrong, in adopting any one of them 
 for the national establishment ; but government 
 fiscally and economically would be wrong, in thus 
 adopting more than one for it would embarrass 
 thereby the operation of the territorial principle, 
 and so endanger the great object of a universal 
 Christian education. If you tell me of twenty 
 sectaries, that they are all very near right this 
 is just telling me that government, in having taken 
 one of these into its employment for the services 
 of a national church, is not very far wrong. You 
 may thus reduce it to a question of insignificance, 
 which of them it shall be while there is no in- 
 significance, but the weightiest and most moment- 
 ous of all national intersts involved, in some one 
 or other of them having this distinction conferred 
 on it. Government, after having made the pre- 
 ference, and so standing acquitted of the greatest 
 
185 
 
 duty it owes to the commonwealth, leaves the 
 whole charge of insignificance and folly to rest 
 upon those, who, for the sake of paltry and insig- 
 nificant differences, will thus quarrel and fall out 
 among themselves. 
 
 11. It is no purpose of ours to wound the feel- 
 ings of our dissenting brethren, whose services in 
 the cause of our common Christianity cannot be 
 too highly estimated. It is true that we venerate 
 the Church of England as a Christian church ; 
 but, so far therefore from laying a stigma on the 
 sectaries, there are several, and these comprising a 
 very large majority of the Nonconformists through- 
 out England, who, in our apprehension, are so near 
 in theology to the Establishment, that, for our- 
 selves, we cannot make out a principle in any of 
 the differences, on which they continue to stand 
 without its pale. Yet we refuse not the credit of 
 principle to themselves ; and not because we hold 
 them in error, but because we desire an effective 
 Christian surveillance for all the families in the 
 nation which can never be accomplished with- 
 out the responsibility and the charge being laid, 
 not on the ministers of all, but on the ministers 
 only of some one, and that at the same time a 
 scriptural and right denomination It is on this 
 account, and on this account alone, that we con- 
 tend for the endowment of one and of one only. 
 On this subject we are altogether at one with the 
 dissenters of a former age, as Baxter and many 
 others, who would have felt the abandonment of a 
 
186 
 
 national support for the clergy to have been a 
 national abandonment of Christianity ? and who, 
 without ever once dreaming of such a support for 
 themselves, demanded no more, and would have 
 been fully satisfied, with liberty and toleration. 
 
 12. I will not relinquish the hope of a consum- 
 mation to all these differences ; and that some 
 high achievement of charity, a great and noble 
 sacrifice at the shrine of true Christian patriotism, 
 is still awaiting us. When once the habit of the 
 Christian world is to think more on their articles of 
 agreement, and less on their articles of difference; 
 or, in other words, when they come to think more 
 on that which is great, and less on that which is 
 little when principles on the one hand, and points 
 on the other, shall hold their just relative propor- 
 tion and place in the estimations of men then 
 will the gravitating power which unites bodies to 
 a common centre, prevail over the repulsions which 
 are almost all associated with the now rapidly 
 fading, and we trust soon to be forgotten, wrongs 
 of former generations. When once the church of 
 England shall have come down from all that is 
 transcendental or mysterious in her pretensions ; 
 and, quitting the plea of her exclusive apostolical 
 derivation, shall rest more upon that wherein the 
 real greatness of her strength lies the purity of 
 her doctrines her deeds of high prowess and 
 championship in the battles of the faith the noble 
 contributions which have been rendered by her 
 scholars and her sons to that Christian literature, 
 
18? 
 
 which is at once the glory and the defence of Pro- 
 testantism the ready-made apparatus of her 
 churches and parishes the unbroken hold which, 
 as an establishment, she still retains on the mass of 
 society and her unforfeited possessory right to be 
 reckoned and deferred to as an establishment still 
 When these, the true elements of her legitimacy 
 and her power, come to be better understood ; in 
 that proportion will she be recognised as the great 
 standard and rallying-post, for all those who would 
 unite their efforts and their sacrifices in that mighty 
 cause, the object of which is to send throughout 
 our families, in more plentiful supply, those waters 
 of life which can alone avail for the healing of the 
 nation. But the best and highest sacrifice of all 
 were by the Dissenters of England, those represen- 
 tatives and descendants of the excellent ones of 
 the earth the Owens, and Flavels, and Howes, 
 and Baxters, and Henrys of a by-gone age who 
 rejoiced to hear of all the Christianity which there 
 was in the Church ; and to see all which the Church 
 did, if but done for the Christian good of the 
 people. We speak not of the sin of schism, of 
 which we have sometimes heard, in language far 
 too strong for any sympathy or even comprehension 
 of ours. But we speak of the blessings of unity ; 
 and we confess how greatly more it is endeared to 
 us, since made to perceive, that, only by an un- 
 divided church, only by the ministers of one de- 
 nomination, can a community be out and out per- 
 vaded, or a territory be filled up and thoroughly 
 
188 
 
 overtaken with the lessons of the gospel. Tell, 
 whether it is of greater consequence that minor 
 differences be upholden, or that the universal 
 Christian education of our families shall be pro- 
 vided for? But, in truth, these minor differences 
 may co-exist with the operations of an effective 
 establishment. We want not to overbear the con- 
 sciences of dissenters; but, if possible, disarm their 
 hostility to an institute, of which we honestly be- 
 lieve that its overthrow were tantamount to the 
 surrender, in its great bulk and body, of the Chris- 
 tianity of our nation. 
 
 13. The question which has so long engaged us, 
 is not one of justice between sect and sect ; but, of 
 a far higher character than this, a question of jus- 
 tice to the population. It is ever to be deplored, 
 when a greater question is transmuted into a lesser, 
 and the moral interests of the community should 
 thus be suspended on the adjustment of a matter 
 which affects but the personal feeling or the secular 
 advantage of some one or more orders of eccle- 
 siastics. It is thus, we fear, that the great boon 
 of a parochial system of education has been so long 
 withheld from the people of England. Is it right, 
 or seemly, that the difficulties of a harmonious set- 
 tlement between churchmen and dissenters, should 
 stand in the way of a great national blessing to the 
 families of the working classes ? We trust that the 
 legislature is now awakening to the truth, that no 
 popular education can be of avail for the well- 
 being of the community, which is not based upon 
 
189 
 
 religion. And then on the question of, What re- 
 ligion ? we have not to speak over again the argu- 
 ment of principle which leads to the preference of 
 Protestantism over Popery. And neither should 
 we have to repeat that other argument, not of 
 principle but of convenience and effect, which leads 
 to the selection of one denomination of Protestan- 
 tism, and not to the employment of all, for the terri- 
 torial charge, whether of the Sabbath or week-day 
 education of the people. In as far as parochial 
 schools are laid under an ecclesiastical superinten- 
 dence, it should be the superintendence of the 
 ministers of the ecclesiastical establishment while 
 open to all the population. In Scotland there is 
 little or no resistance to this arrangement; and, 
 while there is enough of jealousy and adverse feel- 
 ing between the church and the sectaries, there is, 
 on the whole, a general and practical acquiescence 
 in our scholastic economy. Our schools have been 
 the nurseries of Christianity ; but not, that we are 
 aware, have they ever been complained of as giv- 
 ing an undue advantage to the Established Church 
 nor, although it be the general practice of our 
 dissenters to send their children to these parish 
 seminaries, have we ever heard them spoken of as 
 the nurseries of a proselytism that was all on the 
 one side, while injurious to every other denomina- 
 tion. Must religion, on the one hand, be excluded 
 from education for the sake of harmony j or must 
 education, on the other, be kept in abeyance for 
 the sake of those minor differences, which separate 
 
190 
 
 the Church and at least nine-tenths of the Protes- 
 tant sectaries from each other? Let us hope that 
 Christian philanthropy will prevail over all these 
 difficulties ; and that we shall soon have a suffi- 
 ciently thick-set establishment of schools for the 
 families of England Protestant, in deference to 
 the high behests of principle and truth Parochial, 
 and therefore connected with the Church, that 
 education, as well as religion, might have the full 
 benefit of the territorial principle. The attempt 
 to harmonise Catholics with Protestants in a com- 
 mon habit of attendance on unscriptural schools, 
 and that in the vain hope of a great moral regene- 
 ration to ensue from the experiment, proceeds on 
 an entire reversal of the apostolic order it is an 
 attempt to be first peaceable and then pure. The 
 attempt to harmonise the churchmen with the dis- 
 senters of England, in a common habit of atten- 
 dance on schools where the theology of the Esta- 
 blishment is taught, is in the direct footsteps of that 
 order it being " first pure, and then peaceable." 
 
 THE END. 
 
 GLASGOW: 
 WILLIAM COLLINS & CO., PRINTERS, CANULL'KIGG COJRT. 
 
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