species of property that is grudged to the Church; and the reason is, that, whether it be paid to the Crown, the Church, or the landed proprietor, it is a tax upon industry,-a charge, not upon the land, but upon the cultivation of it,-an additional and arbitrary rent for which the tenant receives no equivalent, and which is therefore felt to be a mere and vexatious incumbrance saddled upon him by the State. Whether the total revenues of the Church be excessive or not, what is felt to be the chief grievance, is the nature of that portion of its revenues which is derived from tithe; and next to this, the unequal dis tribution of Church property, and the meagre portion which falls to those who best deserve remuneration.

But we must revert to what Mr. Coleridge regards as the primary ends of a National Church. One of these, which, though seldom put forward by the clergy themselves, or by their advocates, has the greatest influence as an Idea, is, that the Church holds out to the subjects of the realm generally, 'a 'chance of bettering their own or their children's condition an avenue to honourable advancement. Now, putting religion out of consideration, we are not disposed to deny, that society has been greatly benefited, especially in the early stages of national civilization, by the existence of such a link between the aristocrasy and the people, as was supplied by the clerical order. Before the mercantile and commercial classes had risen into importance, so as to form an influential body in antithesis' (as Mr. Coleridge would say) to the Landed Interest, the National Church was, to a certain extent, a substitute for the 'bur'gess order', a check, on some occasions, upon the Prerogative, on others, upon the power of the Nobles. During this period, says our Author,

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 predestinated 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. Under the fostering wings 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. We 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 privilege 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 declared every native of the realm free by birth, had merely to sanction an opus jam consummatum.' p. 74.

One of the original purposes of the National Reserve, Mr. Coleridge contends, was, the alleviation of those evils which, in the best forms of worldly States, must arise from the insti'tution of individual properties and primogeniture.' 'All advances in civilization, and the rights and privileges of citizens, are especially connected with, and derived from, the four classes of the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive, and the professional.' Now, there was a time when the last of these was almost entirely identified with the Church. Professors and practitioners of law, of medicine, of the arts and sciences, and schoolmasters of all descriptions were, for the most part, clerks. But for the church property, in the infancy or minority of commerce and manufactures, all professional men must have been absolutely dependent upon the patronage of the Aristocrasy. This reserve of national property, therefore, by which an interest was created, distinct from that of the landed order, a property not heritable, but reversionary,―must have been no small benefit to the community. Now that the National Church, instead of being a distinct estate, has become little more than an appanage to the landed Interest, its political character has become so entirely changed, that we are apt to forget that it was not always in abject bondage to the Aristocrasy and the Crown. A similar revolution, Mr. Coleridge remarks, has transferred to the Magnates of the Landed Interest so large a 'portion of that Borough Representation which was to have 'been its counterbalance.' In order to have a distinct idea of the encroachment of that leviathan Interest, thus swelled by the spoils of the Church, as well by a large share of its patronage, on the one hand, and by that foul source of corruption, borough-dealing on the other, we must conceive of it as having converted to its own purpose, and assimilated as it were to its own structure, institutions that were originally designed to protect the nation against the domination of the feudal Proprietorship.

Wherever Agriculture is the principal pursuit, there, it may certainly be reckoned, that the people will be living under an absolute government.' This remark is cited by Mr. Coleridge, with deserved approbation, from Mr. Crawfurd's History of the Indian Archipelago; and the history of all countries would supply ample illustrations of the truth of the axiom. So long as Italy was commercial, it was free; or (which comes nearly to the same thing) so long as the Republics preserved their freedom, commerce flourished. But, when they relapsed into principalities, manufactures, commerce, and public liberty de

6

clined and became extinct together; and as M. Sismondi expresses it, all Italy fell to ruin.' The progress of desolation was, in great measure, arrested by the efforts of the Medicean princes. Agriculture revived under their patronage; but it was at the expense of commerce, for all the great capitalists became transformed into nobles and territorial proprietors. The consequence was, that amid the specious magnificence of the patrician order, public spirit and national wealth were being dried up at their sources. It was the profound policy of the Austrian and the Spanish courts,' remarks Mr. Coleridge, by every possible means to degrade the profession of trade; and even in Pisa and Florence themselves, to introduce the feudal pride and prejudice of less happy, less enlightened countries. Agriculture, meanwhile, with its attendant population and plenty, was cultivated with increasing success; but, from the Alps to the Straits of Messina, the Italians are slaves.'

Such might have been, in our own country, the result of the enormous aggrandizement of the Agricultural Aristocrasy, connected as it has been with the appropriation of parliamentary and ecclesiastical patronage, by which the very weights intended for the effectual counterpoise of the great landholders, 'have been shifted into the opposite scale,'-such might have been the catastrophe of our civil liberties, but for the increasing importance of the monied Interest, (i. e. the manufacturing and the commercial,) which is, however, closely allied to the landed Interest, and is perpetually passing into it; and still more, for the creation of new forces,' which have preserved in some degree the equilibrium. Among these, our Author enumerates, roads, canals, machinery, the press, the periodical and daily press, the might of public opinion, the consequent increasing desire of popularity among public men and functionaries of ' every description, and the increasing necessity of public cha'racter, as a means and condition of political influence.' It is strange, that he should altogether overlook the rise and consolidation of one most influential professional body, who might seem, more than any other, to have replaced the National Clerisy,' as a check upon the Landed Interest, and to have supplied the defalcation of the Church, as providing the humblest families with the means of education and a path to intellectual and social advancement. We of course refer to the Dissenting Ministry of this country, to which we find no other reference or allusion than is obscurely conveyed in the following paragraph, unworthy alike of the good sense and the liberality of the philosophical Author.

6

But neither shall the fear of scorn prevent me from declaring aloud, and as a truth which I hold it the disgrace and calamity of a

professed statesman not to know and acknowledge, that a permanent, nationalized, learned order, a national clerisy or church, is an essential element of a rightly constituted nation, without which it wants the best security alike for its permanence and its progression; and for which neither tract-societies, nor conventicles, nor Lancastrian schools, nor mechanics' institutions, nor lecture-bazaars under the absurd name of universities, nor all these collectively, can be a substitute. For they are all marked with the same asterisk of spuriousness, shew the same distemper-spot on the front, that they are empirical specifics for morbid symptoms that help to feed and continue the disease.' p. 70.

6

Mr. Coleridge needs not fear provoking either our scorn or our anger; but we regret to observe the tone betrayed by this effusion of splenetic prejudice. As regards what our Author himself tells us are the primary ends' of a National Clerisy, these institutions which he decries as spurious, are an actual succedaneum for the Church; and these new forces,' ororgans,' or 'means,' have been called into operation, because the Church has not kept pace with the progress of society, or adequately discharged its engagements. The cardinal and essential defect of the Church as a political apparatus, is, that it is wholly incapable of self-adjustment, or of being accommodated to the varying scale and circumstances of the population. In its fiscal system only, it has kept pace with the improvement and expansion of society. The revenues of the Church have increased far beyond their due proportion to the rent of the soil; but every thing else has remained immutably fixed. The means of liberal education, of religious instruction, of parochial oversight, which the Establishment provided for three or four millions of people, it has satisfied itself with furnishing for twelve or fourteen millions. The only additions have, at least, been recent, forced, and scanty. A parish which, two hundred years ago, contained two thousand persons, may have decupled its population, but it is a parish still; and though the tithe has risen in value a hundredfold, the service rendered for it shall be, as regards the tithe-holder, the same. Every difficulty is thrown in the way of increasing the provision for parochial instruction; and whenever a new church is to be built, the chief matter of solicitude, is, that the revenues of the old incumbent should not be taxed or infringed upon. The Church, as an 'estate of the realm,' has, out of that national fund, the tithe, contributed literally nothing towards meeting the wants of an ever-growing population. The National Schools, the Lincoln's Inn fieldstract-society,' the King's College 'lecture-bazaar,' which Mr. Coleridge would probably exempt from the sarcasms bestowed upon Lancastrian schools and saint and sinner so'cieties,' are supported by the voluntary contributions of church-men, but not by the Church,'-not by the Establish

ment as such, nor out of the church-revenues. They must therefore be set aside, equally with the more spurious' substitutes for a National Clerisy, in estimating the efficiency of the Establishment as a scheme of instruction,-in examining the wisdom of its constitution, or its practical results. So far as regards a very great part of the means of education and civilization now provided for the lower classes within the pale of the Established Church, the Tithe, the national reserve, as Mr. Coleridge styles it, is of no avail whatever. Scarcely any part of the money raised, consists of a charge upon this national fund, notwithstanding its immense augmentation.

But, in addition to the means of education provided by the voluntary subscriptions of individual churchmen, all the spuri'ous' substitutes for the labours of a permanent, nationalized, 'learned Clerisy,' must be taken into account as so much done towards effectuating the primary end' of the Establishment, and so much left to be done, by other means: whether it is better or worse done, is not the question. The provision made and supported by the Church for communicating moral and religious instruction, for teaching even the morality which the State ' requires in its citizens for its own well-being,'-confessedly falls very far short of the demand; and the people supply the deficiency by what Mr. Coleridge calls the substitute, but which is the substitute for what has never existed. To the full extent of what is thus substituted for the tithe-paid service, the people are the gratuitous surrogates for the National Church.

The Church property in this country has been estimated at five millions per annum. We have little faith in the accuracy of such calculations, but, according to Bearblock's Tables, put forth during the reign of high-prices, the amount of the Tithe alone, if levied in full, would be not less than twenty-seven millions, or rather more than the total rental of England and Wales. Mr. Beverley has given a Table of the Cost of Religion' in England and Ireland, as compared with the expenditure in all the rest of Christendom; from which it would appear, that the National Clergy of all other Christian States, including nearly two hundred millions of persons, receive about £8,500,000 per annum, while the clergy of England and Ireland receive rather more than that annual sum for ministering to six millions and a half of hearers. This curious calculation rests of course upon no certain data, and is altogether unfair and inconclusive for its intended purpose. In the first place, that portion only of the church property ought to be reckoned as any part of the cost of religion,' which is actually received by the clergy. To this

* See Park's Suggestions, p. 23.