looked upon establishments not so much as they are, but as they might be, if human nature were perfect, power never abused, injustice never resisted; and even under this form it has been found that they are eminently antichristian and unjust. By patronising one sect or opinion they punish another. They compel all to contribute for the maintenance of the opinions of the endowed, money and influence, while they deny to the dissenter, who believes his own faith to be the faith of the Bible, all share in them. In Italy, the penalty of dissent is proscription or imprisonment; in Spain, it is banishment or death; in England, it is loss of influence, of property,* of character; in all, men are punished for doing as God has commanded-searching the scriptures and judging for themselves for exercising one of the most sacred prerogatives of our nature, a prerogative which it is both impiety and injustice to invade.

*

12. "But these penalties," it will be replied, "are

"I might have been a very respectable churchman for five guineas a year" was the observation of an eminently liberal dissenter; "my dissent costs me more than fifty times that sum." Such instances are by no means rare; and the sums raised for various objects-missions, chapels, ministers, &c. &c.—are enormous, though still largely inadequate. It is a somewhat startling fact, that the Society of Friends alone pay annually no less a sum than 14,000l. towards the state church. The millions which dissenters pay annually would very soon fill the whole country with meetings. The poverty and debts of our places of worship are among the results of the persecutions of the church.

only the adjuncts of establishments, and not the end of their institution. We have no wish to inflict them, could the system be otherwise upheld. They are anomalies doubtless, spots' in our worship of love; but it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to remove them."

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The old plea of the advocates of the bitterest persecutions of pagan and catholic Rome, and one of the tritest sophisms of injustice! No one wishes to persecute. Penal laws against heretics were never intended to add to the revenues of the crown, or to multiply the number of criminals sentenced, but to prevent the offences against which they are directed. The question is to be determined, not according to the wishes of its advocates, but according to the actual tendencies of the system. Can government sanction one sect without branding others, - give money and influence to the endowed without denying them to the rest? This unequal treatment is, in its essence, persecution. To be just, government must withhold them from all.

13. The oft-repeated objection-that "Dissenters have certain prerogatives in their own communities with which churchmen never interfere; that none but quakers, for example, or methodists, have a voice in the general assemblies of quakers or of methodists respectively; and that these are never supposed to

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involve persecution"-is nothing to the purpose. We are speaking of prerogatives created by the government at the expense of the people, and without their unanimous consent, for the exclusive benefit of a privileged sect. The decisions of a conference refer only to the acts and opinions of such as choose to acquiesce in them—the decisions of the British parliament to the acts and opinions of the British people. I am not bound to be a methodist, or to support his creed; I cannot but be a member of the state. Methodism I may revere or condemn; we are all born, it is held, within the arms of " the church.”

Besides, the privileges which religious denominations unendowed confer are no more than the collective privileges of their own members, who have agreed to accumulate them by voluntary communion. The privileges of the government sect, on the other hand, are the collective privileges of the whole nation. The power and the wealth of the state is another's; the power and the wealth of the voluntary society is its own. To make the cases analagous, we must suppose a law passed, that all should be compelled to support methodism, and then that all should be excluded from its patronage and management but such as subscribed the articles of its faith. There is no persecution if there be wanting compulsion and injustice.

14. If any reply, that in the eye of the law all Englishmen are regarded as churchmen, -as true, though somewhat rebellious, subjects of the state sect, a legal fiction not unknown in history, and revived to some purpose in certain ecclesiastical calculations of our own days;* and that each church has a right, according to apostolic precept, to judge and punish its own members; we can only answer, by beseeching them to remember the language of the apostle- "A man that is an heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject ;" and to practise the commands of our Saviour" If they neglect to hear the church, let them be unto thee as heathen men and publicans." If, as Christians, we must be taxed, still ought we, as heathens, to be free.†

15. "But we conscientiously advocate the con

* It is a very delightful fact, not generally known, that, prior to the passing of the Catholic Relief Bill, some few years ago, there were no Romanists to be found in the whole of the three kingdoms. Such is legal fiction. At present, there is scarce church accommodation for one-tenth of the inhabitants of populous cities. As Dr. Chalmers phrases it, government “can take no count of dissenters." The state church must provide churches for all the members of the state; and for this excellent reason, as Cobbett and Chalmers both state it, that if it do not, it ceases to be "national." Experience tells us, however, that it may do this, and still be just as little a "national" church as before.

It is remarkable, that this argument of the Romish church should have been revived by protestants. She claims no right to punish those that do not belong to her communion. "Heathenmen" come not under her jurisdiction. Can protestants do less?

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tinuance of an establishment-we believe it one of the duties of a Christian state to support religion; and therefore to overthrow the church is to violate conscience, and, on your own shewing, to fight against God.' We are conscientious compulsionists, and the dictates of our conscience are to the full as sacred as the dictates of your own."

Now, had not history told us of the Munster fanatics, and of the fifth-monarchy men of our own country-and the "simple annals of the poor," of some who made it a religious duty to desert their wives and families, when these would not adopt their religious tenets; had we not known that there is no limit to the aberrations even of the sincerely conscientious, we might have been tempted to question the truth of this plea. That "the Father of spirits” should sanction a system that punishes men for doing as he has bidden them-that makes the worship of Him who "loves a cheerful giver" forced service— that fills the whole land with robbery and blood, is a proposition so monstrous in itself, so derogatory to his character, and in its operation so injurious to his cause, that it is difficult to understand how men endowed with reason could have been persuaded to adopt it. But, granting that they are conscientious, is it not a principle universally allowed, that as the civil ruler has the care of the temporal welfare of the