cern, been enabled to accomplish the very desirable and very laudable purpose of freeing yourself from those embarrassments, which, during a long season, bore so heavy on your Grace, and must have tended to distract your Grace's thoughts, in some measure, from the duties of your high and holy station; as the consequence of which fortunate change of circumstances, I am told that even your Grace's Peterborough creditors are at length paid and satisfied and seeing also, that your Grace is very far from having been the only Clergyman of the established Church, who has found himself unable to support and educate a numerous family on the income arising from his benefice or his stipend; others of that body, not less eminent than your Grace, for the apostolic virtues of temperance, frugality, and abstinence from all worldly luxury and profuseness, having yet (and without enjoying the same protection) found the same difficulty, nay, even impossibility of keeping themselves (nothwithstanding all their efforts) free from debts and difficulties why, I would venture to ask, why, my Lord, might not another Clergyman, under the same circumstances (his poverty being his misfortune, not his fault,) be permitted, if canonically qualified, to labour in the same Vineyard with your Grace, to reap the same fruits, and to perform the same honourable and gratifying task of satisfying his creditors out of the revenues of the Church, levied on the people, for the welfare and salvation of their immortal souls ? To the observations thus put forth, impugning the plea of the Church's honour and dignity, set up, as the canonical bar to my admission into a canonical office and profession, I might add the counter allegation of those several matters in the existing state of Ecclesiastical circumstances and relations, already long since privately submitted for the consideration of your Grace's high metropolitan wisdom and justice. These additional proofs of that plea's preposterousness, and of the untenableness of the ground so taken, are, however, in their nature such, that, although fully prepared to substantiate their validity, whensoever a regard for the Church's honour and dignity shall induce your Grace judicially to exact it from me, I deem it neither expedient nor advisable to obtrude their uncalled-for and extrajudicial publication. One more testimony does yet remain, whereto I shall appeal ;-being that of your Grace's declaration, expressly made to me, of the lay vicegerent. Whether or not these things are otherwise ordered in those few dioceses wherein the " grievance" (as it is styled by Sir W. Scott) still exists, of the Bishop being assisted in the "sacred and dreadful works of spiritual discipline" by one of his clergy, I will not take upon me to say. For "the honour and dignity of the Church," they could not, I humbly conceive, be ordered worse, let who would be either Bishop, or Bishop's chancellor. motive which did actually lead to the recall of your Grace's metropolitan order. Unless this chartered company can so identify itself with the Church of England, that its "wishes" and that Church's wishes" and that Church's "honour" shall become synonimous and convertible, the latter of these must, while standing merely as a make-weight to the former, and prove While liberty and honour fill one scale, "altogether lighter than vanity." By the Church's laws, framed, for the most part, by your Grace's predecessors in the primacy, and confirmed by the legislature, the powers vested in your Grace's metropolitan office and dignity are, equally with the functions, duties, rights, and privileges of the Church's Advocates, prescribed and limited. To your Grace's high metropolitan judgment thereon, I shall ever yield a bounden deference. As touching the argument I now maintain, a ready and even a willing deference. That Judgment has been given in my favour, and has established, without a trial, the justice of my cause. To the judgment of your Grace's lay ministers and counsellors, I, my Lord, owe not, neither shall I pay, any deference greater than to my own, or to that of any other professed civilian and canonist. Of laws, so framed and issued, it would be fruitlessly presumptuous in me, were I to state to your Grace, that by their provisions, the appointment to the Advocate's canonical office, is not one in the Primate's gift, to be either conferred, or refused by that high spiritual functionary, at pleasure. By the chartered franchises of our two Universities, every Doctor and Professor of civil Law is entitled to exercise his profession in the Church's courts and offices, provided no exception can be duly taken to his academic qualification. Nor can a metropolitan order for his admission be refused, or when granted, recalled, but by such an appeal (against the validity of his qualification) to the Church's laws, as your Grace has, in my case, deemed it unadvisable to permit. Had your Grace allowed of that appeal, it would then have been seen whether the assertion of your Grace's Official-principal* and VicarGeneral,† (viz. that my admission is forbidden by the canons of the Church) was a true or a false assertion; as it would likewise have appeared, not only, that my Ecclesiastical commission (so falsely denied by your Grace's officers) was duly made out, and did exist,—but that there existed no legal or canonical ground for cancelling that commission, in compliance with the "wishes" of a chartered company of unlicensed monopolists. While my cause could boast, as it at one time did, your Grace's protection, it needed no other sanction, nor looked for any other aid. Left, singlehanded, to maintain that cause's justice, however severely I have felt and deeply must regret the loss it has sustained, in the withdrawing of your Grace's countenance, I neither yet have suffered, nor (my Lord, I trust) shall ever suffer one moment's envy at the dear-bought triumph of its more fortunate opponents. With profound veneration, I am, May it please your Grace, London, March 25, 1809. &c. &c. &c. SECOND PREFATORY EPISTLE ΤΟ HIS GRACE, THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. "Nihil enim invidiam magis suscitat, quàm ambitiosum et immodicum negotiorum monopolium." Lord Bacon. "and, on their replying, that the refusal of a fiat to such an applicant would be more agreeable to them than the grant of it, he forbore to gratify the soliciting Deacon." Catalogue of English Civilians, by a Member of the College. "This seems to carry a piece of satire on monopolies." Notes on "Twelfth Night; or, What you will:" by Bishop Warburton. May it please your GRACE, AT one of those conversations, which I, a few years since, had the honour to hold with your Grace, you were pleased to draw a comparison between the different rules of action, respectively adopted by us, under circumstances, supposed similar. Although readily yielding the palm to that superiority of firmness, claimed for your Grace's conduct, I yet neither could, nor can convince myself, that any actual unsteadiness, or (to use your Grace's expression)" vacillation" was justly chargeable on mine. The measure, whereon your Grace's parallel was grounded, I must, indeed, confess to have been one, on my part, somewhat suddenly taken; my chief inducement to it having lain in a wish for retirement, tranquillity, and study, after a residence of some years continuance in France and Italy. This its object was, however, frustrated, and my views differently directed, by means of the advice which I received from that learned civilian,* by whose episcopal aid I had just been admitted into the Church's ministry, and invested with the holy orders of a Deacon therein. I having, at that time, taken no academic degree, it was suggested to me by that very amiable Prelate, (to whose memory, as well as for his kind advice, I stand indebted for much The late Dr. Halifax, Bishop of Gloucester. my condescending and polite attention) that I should return to the University, of which, notwithstanding my absence on the Continent, I still continued to be a member. This I accordingly did, and having already declared for law, during a former residence in College, in the year 1785, I persevered in "devotion" to that faculty. Neither, my Lord, did the highly respectable and beneficed Clergyman, who now so ably fills the civilian Professor's chair in that University, when I, as a Clergyman, offered myself as his pupil, give me any intimation that I was dedicating many years of my life, and a Jarge portion of my fortune, to a vain pursuit. I, therefore, prosecuted with diligence my studies; took, at the wonted period, my Bachelor's degree; and, after a further lapse of five years, (having, also, in the interval, for obtaining a more complete knowledge of my profession, studied that science in the University of Edinburgh) received the full degree of Doctor and Professor of Civil Law; together with authority (an authority royally confirmed, and lawfully conferred) to practise and to teach the same. The former of which, I, however, need not inform your Grace, can, in this kingdom, no where be done, except by admission as an Advocate in the Courts superintended by your Grace. And it, therefore, forms a part of your Grace's metropolitan duties, to admit to this canonical office such Doctors and Professors of civil Law, as shall produce to your Grace a regular certificate from the University register, of their being canonically qualified, in the manner prescribed by the Church, for the regulation of these her courts and offices. Such having been the nature of my education, your Grace, on the other hand, having, after a still longer course of studies, in the same University of Cambridge, received the still higher degree of Doctor in Divinity, was thereby qualified to labour in the higher department of the Church's Ministry, by expounding the doctrines, and teaching the rules of her faith, and by inculcating the precepts of our pure and holy religion. While I, who had, in that University, never received a lesson, nor read a page of divinity in my life, was yet qualified to assist your Grace, without wavering or "vacillation,' in the less honourable, though not less necessary department of that Church's Ministry, the administration of her laws and government," the sacred and dreadful works of her spiritual discipline." Which the learned and pious Hooker, in his immortal work on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, has clearly proved to be the true and only legitimate end of the Church of England's jurisdiction. Admiring, therefore, as your Grace cannot fail of doing, the admirable order wherewith, in our Holy and Catholic Church's economy, by the very frame and constitution of that Church, her doctrines and her laws, although |