drunk, "I am William Wilberforce;" and a number of William Wilberforce's friends forgot his name, and sang and danced in honour of the goddess of slavery. One Walter Hook, happening to clothe himself with the infected garments of one Thomas Wyse, suddenly forgot his own identity; and went about repeating all that Wyse with wonderful volubility had discoursed of for twenty years in the Pnyx or at the Piræus, just as if it had been his own natural discourse "come by instinct." It was wonderful to see and hear these things;-but they shewed a verge and an era; and what would we more?

We could not in plainer words express our opinions respecting the new-era views which are said to be

beaming upon the world. Catch a member of Parliament-if you can find one who is not on the moors, or in the stubble, or on the continent; and hold him fast by the button, lest he escape to the grouse or the leverets, while you just ask him what is all this stir about opening the British Museum and the National Gallery upon the Lord's Day; and how soon Popery is to be Established, and Protestantism dis-Established, in Ireland; and whether with free corn and free sugar (meaning slavery sugar) we are to have free national atheism; -godless schools, supported from the public purse, (that is, the Irish Education plan run to seed);godless marriages we have already; -and in the end, godless churches, on the ground that men cannot agree how God is to be worshipped, and therefore we will not, as a nation, worship Him at all; though individuals may do as they please. If your captured senator is one who glories in the new liberality, he will say with exultation,-if of the old bigotted faction, with grief, that everything is at present afloat; that no man can see his way an inch before him;

that many important events are impending; that, in short, we are going to have "a new era;" and "anti-monopoly ;" and the greatest happiness of the million; and other great blessings, for each of which there is some pretty popular phrase, kept ready to form a cadence; as a school-boy stores up a few Adonics to introduce as convenient to round off his Sapphics.

It is a large field; let us at present confine our view to one corner of it; and let Dr. Hook be our guide. The following is a choice specimen of new-era doctrine; coming as it does, not from a Young Irelander, or an English Radical "Dissenter upon principle;" but from "a High-Church" clergyman of the National communion.

"The notion is now exploded which once prevailed, that the Church of England has an exclusive claim to pecuniary support on the ground of its being the Establishment. Those who, like mylittle or no sympathy with mere Esself, are called High Churchmen, have tablishmentarians. In what way the Church of England is Established, even in this portion of the British empire, it is very difficult to say......It exists, rations of the country, claiming from now, simply as one of the many corpothe State, like every other corporation, protection for its rights and its property. It is a pure fiction to assert that the State, by any Act of Parliament, has established the Church of England, or

any other form of Christianity, to which it is exclusively bound to render pecuniary support, or to afford any other support, than such as every class of Her Majesty's subjects have a right to demand. This is proved by the impossibility of producing any Act of Parliament by which this Establishment was ordained. The Church has inherited and it has a claim upon protection, preproperty, together with certain rights, cisely similar to the claim for protection which may be urged by the Lord Mayor and the Corporation of London, who

are also invested with certain rights and their predecessors. The Church has no property handed down to them from more claim for exclusive pecuniary aid from the State, or for any pecuniary aid at all, than is possessed by any other of those many corporations with which our country abounds. To call upon Parliament to vote any money for the exclu

sive support of the Church of England, is to call upon Parliament to do what is unjust. The taxes are collected from persons of all, religions, and cannot be fairly expended for the exclusive maintenance of one. I may indeed, in passing, observe, that the outcry is unjust which is sometimes raised against Government for not establishing bishoprics in the colonies. If the Government is to support our bishops, it is equally bound to support prelates of the Church of Rome, and Presbyterian ministers; and by seeking, therefore, for such support, we should only fare the worse. If the Church has a right to demand protection from the State, the State has an equal right to demand of the Church that, with her ample endowments, she should make provision for her wants without seeking grants from the public funds, which are raised by the taxation of all the people. I think that our colonial bishops ought to be supported, not merely by private subscriptions, but by the more wealthy bishops at home: but, be this as it may, we have certainly no right to make a demand for such a purpose upon the State. And if the Church of England claims a right to the exclusive education of the people, it becomes her duty to seek to supply the deficiency of the funds required, by appropriating her property to this purpose. Our bishops are, on this principle, bound to go down to the House of Lords, and seek powers from the Legislature to sell their estates, and their example should be followed by the more opulent of the inferior clergy. The help of the laity

would be then sufficient.

"Having conceded and asserted the principle that in any measure of education the State must admit the co-operation of Dissenters as well as that of the Church; let us proceed to consider what religious men of all parties would require before they would submit to the direct interference of the State. They would require a recognition on the part of the State of the solemn importance of religious training,-training in what is called special or doctrinal religion. Now, if the State were to establish a school in which literary and scientific instruction only should be given by the master appointed by Government, would not this principle be sufficiently affirmed, provided it were required of every child to bring on the Monday of every week a certificate of his having attended the Sunday-school of his parish church, or some place of worship legally licensed, and also of his having attended for similar religious instruction, at some period set apart during the week? Let this, then, be a principle laid down, that

the State might endow schools in which instruction purely literary or secular should be imparted, with due care to impress upon the minds of the children the fact, that this instruction is not in itself sufficient; but that, to complete the system of education, religious instruction is also secured for them, in accordance with those traditions, whether of Church or of Dissent, which they have received from their parents.

"To effect this object, there should be attached to every school thus established by the State a class-room, in which the clergyman of the parish, or his deputies, might give religious instruction to his people, on the afternoons of every Wednesday and Friday; another class-room being provided for a similar purpose for Dissenting ministers."

Specious as these statements may seem, and panegyrised as they have been as conclusive and irrefragable, they are one glittering fallacy;-unless we at once denounce as unjust, all laws, all taxes, all social institutions, all restrictions upon what are called "the rights of man," in what is called "a state of nature." But no such state exists; or has ever existed. Men are, and ever have been, united in society; and laws are enacted with a view (however mistaken) to the common welfare; and all must be subject to them, though all may not approve them. If Dr. Hook is right, there ought to be no army or navy, seeing that tax-paying Quakers object to an armed defence of nations. But the conscience of the strictest Disin its corporate capacity imposing senter is not violated by the nation such taxes as it deems requisite for the public welfare; for the appropriation is not his act. It is property, not opinion, that is mulcted. My house and yours must pay church-rate; but the collector does not call for a confession of faith from either of us in exacting it. A hundred other questions, it is true, may arise-very important questions, though we are not now discussing them-but the abstract position which is the ground-work of Dr. Hook's argument, is unte

nable, because if carried out to its legitimate extent it would sweep away all social compacts whatever. The class of objections urged by Dr. Hook, might be applied, we say, to any social institution. Why' should a Chartist or Socialist be taxed to build a nursery for Queen Victoria's babies? Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has shown that such arguments, applied to the practical affairs of the common-weal, may often lead us astray, even though in the abstract they may seem plausible. The notion, says Dr. Hook, that the nation should uphold " Establishmentarianism," is exploded. And are we not told quite as confidently that the notion is exploded that the nation should suffer its legislation to lie at the mercy of a Chamber of hereditary legislators, whose only claim to veto what the Commons may demand, is that they are the sons of their fathers? And does not the Crown itself hang upon the same thread? Why is a Republican weaver, who can scarcely maintain himself, to pay taxes to support in dignity the granddaughter of George the Third, who came to the throne without his suffrage? Let Gibbon reply:

"Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, that of an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. Is it possible to relate, without an indignant smile, that on the father's decease, the property of a nation, like that of a drove of oxen, descends to his infant son, as yet unknown to mankind and to himself; and that the bravest warriors, and the wisest statesmen, relinquishing their natural right to empire, approach the royal cradle with bended knees and protestations of inviolable fidelity? Satire and declamation may paint these obvious topics in the most dazzling colours; but our more serious thoughts will respect a useful prejudice, that establishes a rule of succession independent of the passions of mankind; and we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master. In the cool shades

of retirement we may easily devise imaginary forms of government in which the sceptre shall be constantly bestowed on the most worthy, by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the whole community. Experience overturns these airy fabrics, and teaches us, that in a large society, the election of a monarch can never devolve to the wisest, or to the most numerous, part of the people; that the superior prerogative of birth, when it has obtained the sanction of time and invidious of all distinctions among manpopular opinion, is the plainest and least kind; that the acknowledged right extinguishes the hopes of faction, and the conscious security disarms the cruelty of the monarch; that to the firm establishment of this idea, we owe the peaceful succession, and mild administration of European monarchies; to the defect of it, we must attribute the frequent civil wars through which an Asiatic despot is obliged to cut his way to the throne of his fathers."

In saying that we shall not at present digress to the consideration of Dr. Hook's abstract position, we do not mean that we are afraid, or unwilling, to discuss it; but simply that it is not now our subject; and we feel entitled to regard the national duty, with justice to all parties, of establishing the worship of God, as having been satisfactorily proved in the controversies which have occurred upon it during the last sixteen years. The difficulties or objections, when urged by Dr. Hook, are not more formidable than when urged by Mr. Binney; and that Dr. Hook has become a convert to the doctrine of Conder's Nonconformist's Catechism, is no reason why new treatises should be written in reply till the old ones are refuted. Dr. Chalmers, in his "Lectures on the Establishment and Extension of National Churches," delivered in London in 1838, has refuted Dr. Hook's main arguments by anticipation. We refer to this eminent and highly-gifted man, among a host of writers, not only because he has devoted much attention to this particular question, and argued it conclusively; but also because his present position as a Dis