the whole army and navy are exempted from the operation of a tax upon dwelling houses; all lodgers, however opulent, and various other classes whom it is unnecessary to particularize. In consequence of these circumstances thus narrowing the field in which alone the Bill could operate, the Assessed taxes, doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled, as has been described, and pressing, of course, most severely wherever they were permitted to act, produced no larger a sum than four millions and a half. "It must be abundantly obvious, then, that it would be foolish and ruinous in the extreme to attempt creating a substitute for the Property-tax among those which are at present in existence. The assessed taxes, as has already been observed, present the only practicable field for financial operations, as the Excise and Customs are too ticklish a subject for experiment, and in fact rather guide the movements of the Minister than submit to his arrangements. But it has been shewn, we trust, from a fair examination of the principles upon which assessed taxes operate, as also from a review of Mr. Pitt's scheme in 1797, that such a mode of raising money is exceedingly unequal, oppressive, and unproductive. If, then, it be necessary for the stability and power of Great Britain, that a sum be raised within the year equal to the maintenance of the Sinking Fund, the expences of the National Debt, and the purposes of a respectable Peace Establishment, we must continue the Propertytax; because there is no other source of revenue open to the State, which would produce half the amount, without occasioning much greater inconvenience." P. 32. Our author establishes the truth of this position by arguments, which admit of no reply. All other taxes, under whatever name, they may pass, are in fact, taxes upon expenditure; on which account, hoarding is an effectual protection from their operation; but surely a tax should proportion its claims according to the income of those on whom it is imposed, and not according to what they may choose to lay out. "It has often been urged in favour of indirect taxes, that from the disguisement under which they act, they conceal the actual amount of their requisitions, and thereby induce the people to pay them without a murmur. The fact cannot perhaps be denied; but we are not on that account persuaded either that they are less severely felt, or that they are better calculated than those which operate more directly to prolong the ability of the subject to contribute. The man who was accustomed to spend two hundred a-year is admonished by the Income Bill that he must henceforth limit his expenditure to one hundred and eighty. This news, no doubt, distresses him; and if he is irritable, he will perhaps give vent to his wrath in execrating War-taxes and Prime Ministers: but if he is also a man of sense and prudence, he will review the items of his outlay, and retrench such articles as can be most easily dispensed with. At the end of the year he will indeed find that he has en joyed joyed fewer luxuries and perhaps fewer comforts, but he will not be in debt and the succeeding year, his privations will give him less pain, while his ability, as well as his inclination to contribute, will be rather improved than diminished. "With respect to indirect taxes, on the other hand, a person is less on his guard; for they operate in such a variety of ways, and are commonly so much identified with the price of the commodity to which they are attached, that they have frequently transferred a large sum into the Public Treasury without exciting the least alarm among those who had paid it. At the end of the year a man, in this case, will find, that, although he had not extended his pur chases or altered his style of living, he has got into debt. He knows not where he has exceeded, but he finds he has gone beyond the limits prescribed by his income. He must therefore relinquish some gratifications and contract some comforts, and, in short, he will discover, after a season of embarrassment, that his income has been diminished, although he had not perceived the process by which it was effected. He will have paid as much money in the shape of taxes as he who paid the £. 20 out of his £. 200, but,—and we beg attention to the circumstance,-probably not more than one-half of it reached the National Exchequer." P. 41. Our author then proceeds to show how large a portion of all indirect taxes is necessarily expended in their collection, and to point out the effect which they have in raising the price of the commodities on which they are raised. Duties on wine, sugar, or brandy, to the amount of five per cent., raise their price to the consumer ten or twelve per cent. and we perfectly recollect a speech of Lord North's, when first Lord commissioner of the treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which he declared that a tax, which he had laid on wine, amounting not to a penny per bottle, had raised the price sixpence to the consumer! It frequently happens, therefore, that of a large sum taken indirectly out of the people's pocket, only a small part goes to the collector of the customs, and a still smaller to the public purse; whilst it has been calculated by Adam Smith and others, that a tax of five per cent. on certain indispensable articles, is sometimes repeated and accumulated four or five times! "It is indeed a most important fact, that almost every shilling which is raised by the operation of this latter tax reaches the Exchequer, as the expence of collecting it is a mere trifle. To this weighty consideration let it be also added, that the Property-tax, being raised upon no commodity, whether luxury or comfort, enhances the price of none. In fact, it rather diminishes the price of such articles; for by absorbing that portion of private income which went to the purchase of luxuries, it naturally lessens the demand. It may therefore be said of the Property-tax with peculiar emphasis, that it is "so contrived, as both to take out and keep out of the pockets pockets of the people as little as possible over and above what it brings into the Public Treasury of the State." P. 45. The author then proceeds to state some modifications of the property-tax, which, in his opinion, would render it more acceptable to the people at large, during the period that he thinks there will be occasion to continue it: but this article has already swelled to a large bulk, and it is our wish to recommend to our readers, and not to supersede, one of the most argumentative and perspicuous political Tracts of the kind that have been published among us since Johnson's " TAXATION NO TYRANNY." ART. VII. Sermons. By Thomas Somerville, D.D. F.R.S.E. Minister of Jedburgh, and one of his Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary. 8vo. pp. 492. Cadell and Davies. 1813. WHETHER the present be a less religious age than the former may be questioned. If there be more open profligacy there is on the other hand less hypocrisy and fanaticism. Many of the projects which have been formed, during the present age, for the propagation of the gospel both at home and abroad, are indeed, in our opinion, most injudicious; but still we are willing to believe that the majority of those who patronize them, are men who mistake the means of prosecuting a laudable object, rather than traitors to the cause which they profess to serve with such irregular zeal. There is certainly less theological learning in the present century than there was in the begiming of the, last and this we think, may be easily accounted for by the neg lect into which the writings of the early fathers of the church have been suffered to fall; as this partial neglect (for thank God it is not universal) is to be attributed again to the little encouragement, which such of the clergy, as cultivate the study of Chris-. tian antiquity, have to publish the results of their learned labours. When a clergyman proposes to a bookseller any work of which the object is to trace the great articles of our faith from their sources in the scriptures through the succeeding ages of the church, the general reply, we believe, is that there is "no demand for such commodities;" for even the trade could hardly, say at present that the market is overstocked with such wares. There seems, however, to be still a considerable demand for sermons; and this we should consider as a very favourable symptom of the spirit of the age, were we sure that there is the greatest demand for sermons of the greatest value; but this has at no period, perhaps, been the case, and certainly is not so at at present. The demand at present is for what is called light reading on every subject; but sermons composed in that style, though they may be very fit for many pulpits, are certainly of little use in the closet. We do not by any means recommend the mode of composing sermons, which prevailed in the reigns of the first and second Charles; for, though we should be tempted, were we called upon, to point out some passages in the sermons of Jeremy Taylor as the finest specimen of pulpit eloquence that are to be found in the English language, truth would compel us to admit that the ponderous as well as the sublime and splendid, are sometimes to be found in the same sermon. His sermons too are overlaid as those of almost all his contemporaries were, by quotations, not only from the original Hebrew and Greek scriptures, which their respective audiences could not understand; but also from the philosophers and poets of Greece and Roine--quotations, which, though they had been generally understood, would have been not always appropriate in a Christian church. From this sort of pedantry the preachers of the present age are perfectly free; for it is the endeavour of almost all of them to mould their sermons into the form of such essays as are comprehended under the genus of what is called light reading. The scriptures, we believe, are considered, though most unjustly, as heavy reading; and hence we have seen two volumes of sermons by a very fashionable and very petulant preacher, prefaced by a violent invective against the puritanical practice of introducing scriptural phraseology into discourses from the pulpit. Light reading, however, the standard of perfection at which every fashionable preacher and every publisher of sermons aims, comprehends three species of composition-the flowery and pathetic; the argumentative; and the simple and perspicuous adapted to every understanding from the most highly cultivated to the most illiterate and rude. It might seem strange that we should consider the argumentative style as light reading; and it would be not barely strange but absurd, were it not for the fact, that fashion not only guides the taste of the public, but also imposes the proper or generic name as the favourite subjects and discussions of that public. Since the commencement of the French revolution we have all-men, women, and children, become dabblers in politics, in metaphysical morals, and theology; and so universal is the taste for these discussions-under the controul of the Edinburgh council of criticism-that no disquisition on any religious topic, can be heavy reading, unless the basis of the reasoning be made to rest on sacred scripture! True it is, that no man preaches the gospel, who either declaims or reasons from any other principles; but the gospel, though frequently in the mouths of one class of readers, occupies very little of the attention of any. A polite audience listens for half an hour with real or seeming attention, to a smooth and elegant discussion, to which the text read before it has no relation; provided the declaimer display the talents of an orator, or reason, with language of philosophy, from the laws of nature, with as few appeals as possible to the word of God. This, however, is the taste of only the fashionable circles. The admirer of our modern evangelists listens with equal attention to him, who rails at reason and morality, and insists on what Christ has done for the elect; provided he interlard his discourse with the technical slang of fanaticism, and carefully refrain from exhorting the elect to do any thing for themselves! What men admire when delivered from the pulpit, consistency makes them profess to admire when it comes to them through the medium of the press. Hence the sermons, which are most read, may be divided into two kinds, viz: those in which the gospel is not preached at all, and those in which it is preached partially. The sermons of Dr.Somerville will be admired by neither of these parties; for they are not flowery declamations, philosophical discussions, nor fanatical cant. They teach, in plain and simple language, the pure doctrines of Christianity, and inculcate with force the importance of its precepts; whilst the foundations of all the reasoning which they contain are taken from the scriptures of truth. In elegance of style they are certainly much inferior to the sermons of hist late brother Dr. Blair; and in cogency of argument they come at least as far short of the admirable sermons of another Scotch preacher, the late professor Finlayson of Edinburgh; but for general utility, especially among that class of men, to whom the gospel was first preached*, they are perhaps superior to the sermons of both these preachers. Could we suppose that Blair, Finlayson and Somerville had chosen each for himself, some model of composition among our great English preachers; we should be tempted to say, that Atterbury was the favourite of Blair, Barrow of Finlayson, and the late Dr. Paley of Somerville; not that we think the Scottish sermons by any means servile imitations of the English; but only that Blair has the classical elegance of Atterbury, Finlayson the argumentative powers of Barrow, and Somerville the Christian simplicity of Paley. Paley intended his sermons chiefly for the use of persons in the middling and lower ranks of life; and the sermons of Dr. Somerville seem to have been calculated for people in similar stations, by whom they may be read with pleasure and improve * Matt. xi. 5. VOL. III. FEBRUARY, 1815. ment, |