from the institution of individual properties and primogeniture. If these duties were efficiently performed, and these purposes adequately fulfilled, the very increase of the population (which would, however, by these very means have been prevented from becoming a vicious population) would have more than counterbalanced those savings in the expenditure of the Nationalty occasioned by the detachment of the practitioners of Law, Medicine, and the like from the national clergy. That this transfer of the national reserve from what had become national evils to its original and inherent purpose of national benefits, instead of the sacrilegious alienation which actually took place that this was impracticable, is historically true: but no less true is it philosophically, that this impracticability,-arising wholly from moral causes, that is, from loose manners and corrupt principles-does not rescue this wholesale sacrilege from deserving the character of the first and deadliest wound inflicted on the constitution of the kingdom: which term, constitution, in the body politic, as in bodies natural, expresses not only what has been actually evolved from, but likewise whatever is potentially contained in, the seminal principle of the particular body, and would in its due time. have appeared but for emasculation or disease. Other wounds, by which indeed the constitution of the nation has suffered, but which more immediately concern the constitution of the Church, I shall perhaps find another place to mention.

The mercantile and commercial class, in which I here comprise all the four classes that I have put in antithesis to the landed order, the guardian and depository of the permanence of the realm, as more characteristically conspiring to the interests of its progression, the improvement and general freedom of the countrythis class, as I have already remarked, in the earlier states of the constitution existed but as in the bud. Yet during all this period of potential existence, or what we may call the minority of the burgess order, the National Church was the substitute for the most important national benefits resulting from the same. The National Church presented the only breathing-hole of hope. The Church alone relaxed the iron fate by which feudal dependency, primogeniture, and entail would otherwise have predestined every native of the realm to be lord or vassal. To the Church alone could the nation look for the benefits of existing knowledge, and for the means of future civilization. Lastly, let it never be

forgotten, that under the fostering wing of the Church the class of free citizens and burghers were reared. To the feudal system we owe the forms, to the Church the substance, of our liberty. I mention only two of many facts that would form the proof and comment of the above; first, the origin of towns and cities in the privileges attached to the vicinity of churches and monasteries, and which, preparing an asylum for the fugitive vassal and oppressed franklin, thus laid the first foundation of a class of freemen detached from the land ;-secondly, the holy war, which the national clergy, in this instance faithful to their national duties, waged against slavery and villenage, and with such success, that in the reign of Charles II., the law* which declareevery native of the realm free by birth had merely to sanction an opus jam consummatum. Our Maker has distinguished man from the brute that perishes, by making hope first an instinct of his nature, and, secondly, an indispensable condition of his moral and intellectual progression:

For every gift of noble origin

Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath.

WORDSWORTH.

But a natural instinct constitutes a right, as far as its gratification is compatible with the equal rights of others. And this principle may be expanded and applied to the idea of the National Church.

The

Among the primary ends of a State (in that highest sense of the word, in which it is equivalent to the nation, considered as one body politic, and therefore including the National Church), there are two, of which the National Church (according to its idea) is the especial and constitutional organ and means. one is, to secure to the subjects of the realm, generally, the hope, the chance of bettering their own or their children's condition. And though during the last three or four centuries, the National Church has found a most powerful surrogate and ally for the effectuation of this great purpose in her former wards and foster

* The Author means the Act passed at the Restoration, 12 C. II. c. 24. "And these encroachments grew to be so universal, that when tenure in villenage was virtually abolished (though copyholds were preserved) by the statute of Charles II., there was hardly a pure villein left in the nation," &c. Blackstone ii. c. vi. 96.-Ed.

children, that is, in trade, commerce, free industry, and the arts; yet still the Nationalty, under all its defalcations, continues to feed the higher ranks by drawing up whatever is worthiest from below, and thus maintains the principle of hope in the humblest families, while it secures the possessions of the rich and noble. This is one of the two ends. The other is, to develop in every native of the country those faculties, and to provide for every native that knowledge and those attainments, which are necessary to qualify him for a member of the State, the free subject of a civilized realm. I do not mean those degrees of moral and intellectual cultivation which distinguish man from man in the same civilized society, much less those that separate the Christian from the this-worldian; but those only that constitute the civilized man in contra-distinction from the barbarian, the savage, and the animal.

I have now brought together all that seemed requisite to put the intelligent reader in full possession of (what I believe to be) the right idea of the National Clergy, as an estate of the realm. But I can not think my task finished without an attempt to rectify the too frequent false feeling on this subject, and to remove certain vulgar errors-errors, alas! not confined to those whom the world call the vulgar. Ma nel mondo non è se non volgo, says Machiavel. I shall make no apology, therefore, for interposing between the preceding statements and the practical conclusion from them the following paragraph extracted from a work long out of print,* and of such very limited circulation that I might have stolen from myself with little risk of detection, had it not been my wish to show that the convictions expressed in the preceding pages are not the offspring of the moment, brought forth for the present occasion; but an expansion of sentiments and principles publicly avowed in the year 1817.

Among the numerous blessings of the English Constitution, the introduction of an established Church makes an especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philosophers; in England, at least, where the principles of Protestantism have conspired with the freedom of the government to double all its salutary powers by the removal of its abuses.

That the maxims of a pure morality, and those sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found hard to

* Biog. Lit.-Ed.

learn and more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as common-place; this is a fact which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading desk. Yet he who should confine the efficiency of an established Church to these can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate, imitation; this inobtrusive, continuous agency of a Protestant Church Establishment, this it is which the patriot and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with a faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, can not estimate at too high a price. It can not be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is ahove rubies. The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbor and family-man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich-landholder while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farmhouse and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the instances of the blindness or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than the clamors of the farmers against Church property, Whatever was not paid to the clergymen would inevitably at the next renewal of the lease be paid to the landholder, while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the Church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family that may have a member educated for the Church or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is, in fact, the only species of landed property that is essentially moving and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences, who will pretend to assert? But I have yet to expect the proof that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by

forcing the latter to become either Trullibers or salaried placemen. Nay, I do not hesitate to declare my firm persuasion that whatever reason of discontent the farmers may assign, the true cause is that they may cheat the parson but can not cheat the steward: and that they are disappointed if they should have been able to withhold only two pounds less than the legal claim, having expected to withhold five.

CHAPTER IX.

PRACTICAL CONCLUSION: WHAT UNFITS FOR, AND WHAT EXCLUDES FROM, THE NATIONAL CHURCH.

THE Clerisy, or National Church, being an estate of the realm, the Church and State, with the King as the sovereign head of both, constituting the body politic, the State in the larger sense of the word, or the nation dynamically considered (ev Svváusi xατά пvεμα, that is, as an ideal, but not the less actual and abiding, unity); and in like manner, the Nationalty being one of the two constitutional modes or species, of which the common wealth of the nation consists; it follows by immediate consequence, that of the qualifications and preconditions for the trusteeship, absolutely to be required of the order collectively, and of every individual person as the conditions of his admission into this order, and of his capability of the usufruct or life-interest of any part or parcel of the Nationalty, the first and most indispensable, that without which all others are null and void, is, that the national Clergy and every member of the same from the highest to the lowest, shall be fully and exclusively citizens of the State, neither acknowledging the authority, nor within the influence, of any other state in the world;-full and undistracted subjects of this kingdom, and in no capacity, and under no pretences, owning any other earthly sovereign or visible head but the King, in whom alone the majesty of the nation is apparent, and by whom alone the unity of the nation in will and in deed is symbolically expressed and impersonated.

The full extent of this first and absolutely necessary qualifica