But, alas! it frequently happens that the wise and good are not the most adventurous in attacking the mischiefs which they are the first to perceive and lament. With a timidity in some respects virtuous, they fear attempting any thing which may possibly aggravate the evils they deplore, or put to hazard the blessings they already enjoy. They dread plucking up the wheat with the tares, and are rather apt, with a spirit of hopeless resignation,

"To bear the ills they have,

"Than Ay to others that they know not of."

While sober-minded and considerate men, therefore, sat mourning over this complicated mass of error, and waited till God, in his own good time, should open the blind eyes; the vast scheme of reformation was left to that set of rash and presumptuous adventurers, who are generally watching how they may convert public grievances to their own personal account. It was undertaken, not upon the broad basis of a wise and well-digested scheme, of which all the parts should contribute to the perfection of one consistent whole: it was carried on, not by those steady measures, founded on rational deliberation, which are calculated to accomplish so important an end; not with a temperance which indicated a sober love of law, or a sacred regard for religion; but with the most extravagant lust of power, with the most inordinate vanity which perhaps ever instigated human measures-a lust of power which threatens to extend its desolating influence over the whole globe;-a vanity of the same destructive species with that which stimulated the celebrated incendiary of Ephesus, who being weary of his native obscurity and insignificance, and preferring infamy to oblivion, could contrive no other road to fame and immortality,

immortality, than that of setting fire to the exquisite Temple of Diana. He was remembered indeed, as he desired to be, but it was only to be execrated; while the seventh wonder of the world lay prostrate through his crime.

But too often that daring boldness which excites admiration, is not energy, is not virtue, is not genius. It is blindness in the judgment, is vanity in the heart. Strong and unprecedented measures, plans instantaneously conceived, and as rapidly executed, argue, not ability, but arrogance. A mind continually driven out in quest of presumptuous novelties, is commonly a mind void of real resources within, and incapable of profiting from observation without. Sure principles cannot be ascertained without experiment, and experiment requires more time than the sanguine can spare, and more patience than the vain possess. In the crude speculations of these rash reformists, few obstructions occur. It is like taking a journey, not on a road, but on a map. Difficulties are unseen, or are kept in the background. Impossibilities are smothered, or rather they are not suffered to be born. Nothing is felt but the ardour of enterprize, nothing is seen but the certainty of success. Whereas if difficulties grow out of sober experiment, the disappointments attending them generate humility; the failures inseparable from the best concerted human undertakings, serve at once to multiply resources, and to excite selfdistrust; while ideal projectors, and -actual demolishers, are the most conceited of mortals. It never occurs to them that those defects of old institutions, on which they frame their objections, are equally palpable to all other men. It never occurs to them that phrenzy can demolish faster than wisdom can build; that pulling down the strongest edifice is far more easy than the construction of the meanest ; that

the

the most ignorant labourer is competent to the one,
while for the other the skill of the architect; and the
patient industry of the workman must unite. That
a sound judgment will profit by the errors of our
predecessors, as well as by their excellences. That
there is a retrospective wisdom to which much of our
prospective wisdom owes it birth; and that after all,
neither the perfection pretended to, nor the pride
which accompanies the pretension," is made for
"man."

It is the same over-ruling vanity which operates
in their politics, and in their religion, which makes
Kersaint* boast of carrying his destructive projects
from the Tagus to the Brazils, and from Mexico to
the shores of the Ganges; which makes him menace
to outstrip the enterprizes of the most extravagant
hero of romance, and almost undertake with the
marvellous celerity of the nimble footed Puck,

"To put a girdle round about the earth

"In forty minutes."

It is the same vanity, still the master-passion in
the bosom of a Frenchman, which leads Dupont
and Manuel to undertake in their orations to abolish
the Sabbath, to exterminate the priesthood, to erect
a pantheon for the world, to restore the peripatetic
philosophy, and in short to revive every thing of
ancient Greece, except the pure taste, the profound
wisdóm, the love of virtue, the veneration of the
laws, and that high degree of reverence which even
virtuous Pagans professed for the deity.

It is the same spirit of novelty, and the same hos-
tility to established opinions, which dictated the
preposterous and impious doctrine that death is an
eternal sleep. The Prophets and Apostles assert the
contrary. David expressly says, " when I awake

*See his Speech, enumerating their intended projects.

up,

66

up after thy likeness I shall be satisfied;" implying, that our true life will begin at our departure out of this world. The destruction or dissolution of the body will be the revival, not the death, of the soul. It is to the living the Apostle says, "awake "thou that sleepest, and arise from the DEAD, and "Christ shall give thee light."

It is surely to be charged to the inadequate and wretched hands into which the work of reformation fell, and not to the impossibility of amending the civil and religious institutions of France, that all has succeeded so ill. It cannot be denied perhaps that a reforming spirit was wanted in that country; their government was not more despotic, than their church was superstitious and corrupt.

But though this is readily granted, and though it may be unfair to blame those who in the first outset of the French Revolution, rejoiced even on religious motives; yet it is astonishing, how any pious person, even with all the blinding power of prejudice, can think without horror of the present state of France. It is no less wonderful how any rational man could, even in the beginning of the Revolution transfer that reasoning, however just it might be, when applied to France, to the case of England. For what can be more unreasonable, than to draw from different, and even opposite premises, the same conclusion? Must a revolution be equally necessary in the case of two sorts of Government, and two sorts of Religion, which are the very reverse of each other?-opposite in their genius, unlike in their fundamental principles, and completely different in each of their component parts.

That despotism, priestcraft, intolerance, and superstition, are terrible evils, no candid Christian it is presumed will deny; but, blessed be God, though these mischiefs are not yet entirely banished from

the

the face of the earth, they have scarcely any existence in this happy country.

To guard against a real danger, and to cure actual abuses, of which the existence has been first plainly proved, by the application of a suitable remedy, requires diligence as well as courage; observation as well as genius; patience and temperance as well as zeal and spirit. It requires the union of that clear head and sound heart which constitute the true patriot. But to conjure up fancied evils, or even greatly to aggravate real ones, and then to exhaust our labour in combating them, is the characteristic of a distempered imagination and an ill-governed spirit.

Romantic crusades, the ordeal trial, drowning of witches, the torture, and the inquisition, have been justly reprobated as the foulest stains of the respective periods in which, to the disgrace of human reason, they existed; but would any man be rationally employed, who should stand up gravely to declaim against these as the predominating mischiefs of the present century? Even the whimsical Knight of La Mancha himself, would not fight windmills that were pulled down; yet I will venture to say, that the above-named evils are at present little more chimerical than some of those now so bitterly complained of among us. It is not as Dryden said, when one of his works was unmercifully abused, that the piece has not faults enough in it, but the critics have not had the wit to fix upon the right ones.

It is allowed that, as a Nation, we do not want faults; but our political critics err in the objects of their censure. They say little of those real and pressing evils resulting from our own corruption, of that depravity which constitutes the actual miseries of life; while they gloomily speculate upon a thousand imaginary political grievances, and fancy that the reformation of our rulers and our legislators is

all