vain at the whole territory, to make upon it his own little settlement, and thus to narrow, at least, the unbroken field, which he could not overtake-to beautify one humble spot, and there raise an enduring monument, by which an example is lifted up, and a voice is sent forth to all the spaces which are yet unentered on-this is benevolence, reaping a reward at the very outset of its labours, and such a reward, too, as will not only ensure the accomplishment of its own task, but, as must, from the and the certainty, and the disease, tinct and definite good which are attendant upon its doings, serve both to allure and to guarantee a whole host of imitations."

"We certainly invite, and with earnestness-too, the man of fortune and philanthropy, to assume a locality to himself, and head an enterprise for schools, in behalf of its heretofore neglected population."

"We know no object which serves better to satisfy these conditions, than a district school, which, by the very confinement of its operation within certain selected limits, will come specifically home with something of the impression of a kindness done individually to each of the householders. It were possible, in this way, for one person, at the head of an associated band, to propitiate towards himself, and, through him, towards that order in society with which he stands connected, several thousands of a yet neglected population. He could walk abroad over some suburb waste, and chalk out for himself the limits of his adventure; and, amid the gaze and inquiry of the natives, could cause the public edifice gradually to arise in exhibition before them; and though they might be led to view it at first as a caprice, they would not be long of feeling that it was at least a caprice of kindness towards them— some well-meaning quixotism, perhaps, which, whether judicious or not, was pregnant, at least, with the demonstration of good will, and would call forth from them, by a law of our sentient nature, which they could not help, an honest emotion of good will back again; and, instead of the envy and derision which so often assail our rich when chaVOL. VI.

rioted in splendour, along the more remote and outlandish streets of the city, would it be found, that the equipage of this generous, though somewhat eccentric visitor, had always a comely and complaisant homage rendered to it."

Such is Doctor Chalmers's notion of the effect of locality in adding to the useful establishments of a town. A corporation must not endow twelve schools at once, lest this should satisfy the public mind. But a benevolent individual "must walk abroad over a suburb waste, and chalk out for himself the limits of his adventure," and set up a school wherever he thinks fit. Parish boundaries and city boundaries are of little or no consequence. Each man is "to assume a locality to himself!" And his neighbour delighted with the improvement thus produced, is to determine upon an "adjoining district, and assume an adjoining adventure until the whole town is pervaded."

We most sincerely hope that the eloquence and popularity of the learned Doctor will not prevail upon his citizens to substitute his plan for their own. They offer a certain good. He prophesies a distant and an uncertain one. The twelve schools which he scorns, cannot but teach some thousands of children. And if the town requires more, we can trust to the liberality of the original patrons for an extension of their grants. But we fear that a very indefinite period must elapse, before the walking and chalking' individuals have pervaded a city with education,' and if they are to make their own rules as well as their own boundaries, to be their own teachers, and to write their own school books, then without affecting to feel any very intense interest in the ecclesiastical unity of the town of Glasgow, we have no doubt that it will be exposed to very imminent danger, and that the civil magistrate and the established clergy will be forbidden to exercise the slightest controul over the personal education of the people. Dr. Chalmers cannot contemplate this result, but it is the certain and the only certain effect of his system; and if that system were to be introduced into a town with which we 11

are connected, it should be resisted with all our might.

The fifth and sixth chapters are upon Church patronage; it is in these that we discover the key to the whole volume, the real aim and drift of, Dr. Chalmers's lucubrations. When the reader is fully master of these extraordinary chapters, he will agree with us in thinking that we have followed the Doctor far enough, and that the sooner we take leave of him the better. Not that the concluding sections upon Church offices and Sabbath schools are as ridiculous and as objectionable as those upon which we are about to animadvert, but they are all parts of one and the same whole; and if Church patronage will not bear the light, its followers will not be worth looking at.

The essay commences with a comparison between a chapel and a school; and we are told that as a city may be pervaded with schools, by individuals who select their own localities, so chapels and chapel districts may be accumulated upon one another till the whole town is adequately supplied with sittings, and preachers. Had the Dissenters understood this system, and adhered to it, they would long ago have become "the stable and recognized functionaries of religion in our great towns," and have been enabled " by a fair usurpation to change places with the establishment altogether." But as these advantages have not secured by "the dissent," the Church is still to be allowed one other chance; and it may yet recover its lost ground, and become the bulwark of Christianity throughout the country, if its patronage be rightly disposed of. In the last of these sentiments we fully concur: but we see no probability of coming to an agreement with Dr. Chalmers upon the question, what is a right disposition of Church patronage?

During the reigns of George the First, and George the Second, the ecclesiastical patronage of the Crown was shamefully abused. An improvement took place under George the Third; but it was only during the last twenty years of his reign, that the alteration can be said to have been conspicuous. Before that time, nominations were al

most always "overruled by family interest and connexion," which Dr. Chalmers seems to regard as a very laudable practice; and as having produced that popularity which is the great end of patronage. The consequence however was, that the Church lost ground. Since that time, and more especially since the administration of Mr. Percival, attention has been paid to professional character; the opinion of our leading ecclesiastics has had its weight, and the Church has been recovering ground much faster than she lost it.

The hopeless state of the Establishment in England having been thus proved and accounted for, the next link in the chain supplies us with a requisite remedy. "A more respectful accommodation to the popular taste in Christianity than the dominant spirit of ecclesiastical patronage is disposed to render it," is the great charm which is to convert radicals into Methodists, and quiet the alarms of those who are no friends to revolution. The reader will remember, that Dr. Chalmers proved the necessity of a Church Establishment, by shewing that "the native desire and demand of the people for Christianity," would never be strong enough to make them true Christians, unless their attention was attracted by the continued calls of a National Church. And he further admitted, "that they are our establishments which have nourished and upheld the taste of the population for Christianity."

Now the Established Church of England has never preached, that "alone doctrine of Christianity, commonly called methodism," since the year 1660; and yet it has nourished and upheld the popular taste for religion!! And this popular taste has been so highly cultivated, that although, when native, it is not strong enough to exist without an Establishment; it is now the most accurate judge of its own spiritual wants, and is the sole tribunal to which Government may appeal!! That is to say, man is a mass of utter pollution, without one spiritual thought or desire; and yet he never is deceived upon spiritual subjects. First, he has no appetite at all for the Gospel-he loathes it, he rejects it, he spurns it

Secondly, he has a very good appetite; and of such nice discrimination, that it always distinguishes what is whole some, from what is hurtful; and is never seduced by an agreeable savour, to prefer a pleasant to a nutritious meal, Can Dr. Chalmers possibly defend such a heap of inconsistencies as these? Can he believe that the individual, who, at the outset, is so careless about Christianity, becomes so quickly, and so completely altered during his progress, as to run no risk of misunderstanding the Gospel? We are of opinion, that the Doctor exaggerates the melancholy consequences of the Fall. But we are arguing with him for the present, upon his own assumptions and admissions, and the more complete and entire he believes man's ruin to be, the more obvious and the more certain is it, that the popular taste cannot be the true test of Gospel truth. It is because we are corrupt and faulty creatures, that religion has so few charms for the multitude, and that of those who do embrace her, so large a portion go astray. Superstition and enthusiasm enter into the closest alliance with our corrupt hearts; and it is not more difficult to make men Methodists, than it is to make them profligates. The pure and unsullied doctrine of Jesus Christ, is hard to be received; the perversions of it are palatable, and will be greedily devoured. But to say, that the Clergy ought therefore to administer the poison, rather than the remedy; that they ought to fill their Churches at all events, and by any means; that nothing but the genuine Gospel can attract large congregations; and consequently, that wherever a large congregation is assembled, there the genuine Gospel is preached; this is the real drift of the reasoning before us; and it is as mischievous, and as absurd as can be imagined. Dr. Chalmers acknowledges, that the mob have their occasional whims, and absurdities, and are very squeamish in their dislike to what is very innocent,' especially to the Doe tor's own laudable custom of preaching written sermons. But then who is to decide, whether the mob is 'puling and fantastic,' or whether it is only indulging the appetite of human nature, for

a Scriptural administration of the Gospel ?' This is a delicate question, and is resolved with the Doctor's ordinary address. In Scotland, the decision is to rest with the Clergy, as witness the following extract. In England, the de cision, we are told, has long rested with the very same tribunal; and it is this circumstance which is destroying the nation and the Church.

"In Scotland, too, there is a law of patronage now firmly established, and now almost entirely acquiesced in; and there are few belonging to our Church, whoever think of disputing the right of the patron to the nomination. But there seems to be a great diversity of understanding about the line which separates his right from the right of the Church. He can nominate; but it would startle the great majority of our clergy, were they told, that the Church can, on any principle which seemeth to her good, arrest the nominee. The Church can, on any ground she chooses, lay a negative on any man whom the patron chooses to fix upon. It is her part, and in practice she has ever done so, to sit in judgment over every individual nomination. There are a thousand ways, in which a patron might, through the individual whom he nominates, throw corruption into the bosom of our Establishment; and we would give up our best securities, we would reduce our office as constitutional guardians of the Church, to a degrading mockery, were we to act as if there was nothing for it, but to look helplessly on, and to lament that there was no remedy. The remedy is most completely within ourselves. We can take a look at the presentee; and if there be any thing whatever, whether in his talents, or in his character, or in his other engagements, or in that moral barrier which the general dislike of a parish would raise against his usefulness, and so render him unfit, in our judgment, for labouring in that portion of the vineyard, we can set aside the nomination, and call on the patron to look out for another presentee. It is the patron who ushers the presentee into our notice; but the fitness of the person for the parish is a question which lies solely and supremely at the decision of the ecclesiastical courts."

"The power of a veto on every presentation, and without responsibility at any bar but that of public opinion, is by all law and practice vested in the supreme ecclesiastical court of this country. And in these circumstances, is it to be borne that, with a power so ample, we are tamely to surrender it to the single operation of another power not more firmly established, and not more uniformly indispensable than our own? Are we, whose business it is to watch over the interests of religion, and to provide for the good of edification, and who, if we would only make use of the rights with which we are invested, could, in fact, subordinate the whole machinery of the Establishment to our own independent views of expediency-are we, as if struck by paralysis, to sit helplessly down under the fancied omnipotence of a deed of patronage? So soon as the majority in our Church shall revert to the principle of its not being generally for the good of edification, that a presentee, when unsupported by the concurrence of the parish, shall be admitted to the charge of it, there is no one earthly barrier in the way of our nullifying his presentation, and making it as absolutely void and powerless as a sheet of blank paper. We are not now contending for the right and authority of a call from the people, but for the power of the Church to admit the will or taste of the people as an element into her deliberations on the question, Whether a given presentation shall be sustained or not? and of deciding this question just as she shall find cause. And therefore it is, that in the lengthened contest which has taken place between the rights of the patrons and of the people, the Church, by giving all to the former and taking all from the latter, and in such a way, too, as to establish a kind of practical and unquestioned supremacy to a mere deed of presentation, has, in fact, bartered away her own privileges, and sunk into a state of dormancy the power with which she herself is essentially invested, to sit as the final and irreversible umpire on every such question that is submitted to her."

This is speaking to the purpose. The Church of which Dr. Chalmers is

a member, is and ought to be the 'final and irreversible umpire' on every dispute between a patron and a parish. The Church which does not number Dr. Chalmers among her eloquent and argumentative sons, must never presume to take a look' at a candidate for preferment, or give our governors a hint in his favour. We suppose, that the Doctor is not yet prepared to contend that our Bishops should be elected annually, by universal suffrage and ballot; but at all events, popularity is the grand criterion by which they are to be judged; and woe be to the unfortunate cabinet-minister, who has recourse to any other test.

"Were the Church of England rightly extended and rightly patronized, there would be neither sédition nor plebeian infidelity in the land. And thus, in the eye of one who connects an ultimate effect with its real though unseen cause, the whole host of radicalism may have been summoned into being by the very government that sent forth her forces to destroy it; and fierce ministerial clergymen, though they mean not so, may, each from his own parish, have contributed his quota to this mass of disaffection; and, ascending from the men of subaltern influence, that Bishop, whose measures have alienated from the Church the whole popular feeling of his diocess, instead of a captain of fifties, may virtually though unwittingly be a captain of thousands, in the camp of that very rebellion which would sweep, did it triumph, the existence of his order from the kingdom; and, to complete the picture of this sore and infatuating blindness, if there be one individual in the Cabinet, whose pernicious ascendancy it is, that has diverted away the patronage of the Crown from the only men who can Christianize and conciliate the people, he, in all moral and substantial estimation, is the generalissimo in this treasonable warfare against the rights and the prerogatives of the monarchy."

In preceding pages, we read of "the High Church intolerance, that so evidently scowls from the Episcopal Bench," and of "the fiery and alarmed bigots of our Establishment;” and in this last extract, we are told of " fierce

ministerial clergymen." It is in these terms, that Dr. Chalmers thinks it becoming to talk of a Hierarchy and Priesthood, which he assures us, that he does not desire to destroy. For our own parts, we see no reason to conceal the sentiments, to which these and similar expressions have given birth; they compel us to think, that if the Doctor suffers our Establishment to survive, his poverty and not his will consents,' and that the Church of England will owe her safety to the impotence, rather than the regulation of his wrath. We trust also, that instead of there being one eminent individual in his Majesty's Cabinet, whom an evangelical jury may pronounce guilty of high treason, there are at least enough to form a jury upon the evangelicals themselves; and to give a verdict in favour of the Church, as often as she is called to their bar.

We here take our leave of Dr. Chalmers, and not without regret. For we assure our readers, that the Chapters which we have left untouched, are very nearly on a par with those from which our extracts have been taken; and on the ground that we have traversed, we have not started above half the game. There is an encomium upon evangelical senators, which is as fine as any thing in the volume. The days of triumphant Puritanism, the days of Peters, and Praise-God Barebones, are termed the Augustan Age of Christianity in our island!" And the difference between an elder of the kirk, and a deacon of the kirk, and the great superiority (as far as the spiritual edification of the people is concerned) of an unlearned man over a learned man, are set forth with great success. But it is needless to enlarge upon any of these topics. The idle, who are in search of amusement, may turn to the book itself, and will be repaid for their trouble. The busy must have long ago pronounced it a compound of solecisms in language, and contradictions in argument,-an amicable contest between false grammar and false logic, conducted on both sides with so much skill, as to make it impossible to determine which has the best of the battle.

A Tatar Marriage.

[From Mary Holderness's Notes on the Manners and Customs of the Crim Tatars.

WHEN a Tatar desires to marry, and has fixed upon the family from which he intends to choose his wife, (in which determination he must for the most part be influenced by interest, although the reputed beauty or good qualities of his bride may perhaps have been described to him by her attendants,) his first step is to obtain the consent of the father, This being accomplished, presents are sent according to the circumstances of the suitor, who now visits in the family on a footing of increased familiarity. None of the female part of it, however, are on any occasion visible to him, unless he can by stealth obtain a glance of his fair one, who possesses the superior advantage of seeing him whenever he comes to the house, through the lattice work which encloses the apartments of the women.

At the period fixed for the wedding, a Tatar Murza sends to all the neighbouring villages an invitation, to come and partake of his festivity and good cheer. Two, three, or more villages in a day are thus feasted, and this lasts a week, ten days, or a fortnight, according to the wealth of the bridegroom. Each guest takes with him some present, which is as handsome as his means will allow a horse, a sheep, a lamb, various articles of dress, nay, even money, are presented on this occasion.

Much ceremony takes place in preparing the intended bride, on the evening before the wedding, of which I have been a witness. The poor girl either was, or appeared to be, a most unwilling victim. She was lying on cushions when I first entered, covered so as not to be seen, and surrounded by the girls who were her particular friends, the rest of the women attending less closely. The girls, at intervals, loudly lamented the loss of their companion, and she joined in the voice of woe. At length, the women told her that it was time to commence the preparations. In an instant the girls all seized her, and uttering loud cries, attempted to withhold her from the women, who, struggling against them, endeavoured to force her away. This scene lasted till the bride