contemplating Protestantism as it is displayed in the Church of England. The purer and more conscientious they were, the greater their detestation of her character and doings. If too religious to become infidels, and too refined to become mere disciples of Christ, they naturally turned their faces towards Rome. Among this class of the sincere and deluded, many writers have appeared whose pages breathe a spirit of pure piety, which is destined to meet very little sympathy in the Romish Church, to which it is tending. The leaders who are steadily guiding this deluded cohort to Rome, no doubt suffer the expression of such opinions among those in their train, knowing that, once safe in Popedom, such absurd goodness will soon be rubbed off or laughed out of countenance. The writer to whom we are now to refer is the Rev. Wm. Sewell, B. D., Author of CHRISTIAN POLITICS, and late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford. He plainly sees the incompatibility of the English poor-laws with Christianity; he freely admits that the poor are the charge of Christians, and, with Chalmers, he sees no way of discharging that duty but through the officials of an established church-not such as Chalmers had in his eye, nor such as exists in England, but a real priesthood after the order of the papacy of the Middle Ages. But, however antiquated the plan of Mr. Sewell for the care of the poor, what he says about them is deserving the attention of all; and evinces clearly that his heart is in the right place, however wrong his head or perverted his judgment. "Poverty, in some shape or other, is an essential condition of political society, and it will increase in proportion with the accumulation of money; because capital has always a tendency to drain and absorb into itself all the lesser springs of wealth by its command over labour, and competition will drive wages down to the lowest possible prices. But these questions, and the whole theory of national wealth, require to be examined at length; and a Christian political economy would form a necessary appendage to Christian politics, and must be reserved for such a place. "But, as a fact, the mass of poverty has now swelled in this country to a pitch which threatens to overflow and devastate society itself. With a free trade and a manufacturing system, it could not be otherwise. The interference of the legislature is demanded. All eyes are turned to its omnipotent arm; and it proceeds to act. It gathers under its protection the starving, houseless, miserable beings, whom the avarice of their employers has called into existence by the demand for labour, and then left them to perish in the fluctuations of employment, or has reduced them to the minimum of subsistence, and therefore to demoralization and despair. But it is compelled to gather them in masses, by broad, palpable lines of distinction; because the state has no delicate discrimi nating eyes, none of the finer organs of prehension and selection, which are required to separate between the bad and the good; the industrious and the idle; the poverty which is a fault, from that which is misfortune; that which demands consolation, from that which requires chastisement; the improving from the reprobate and lost. Its seat of action is too far removed to penetrate into the cottage and the hovel, to hear the tale of distress, and to balance degrees of indiscretion, or suffering, or crime. And no instruments can it create to execute such a task, because it can retain them by pay only, and hired servants can have neither the feeling nor the zeal to attempt it well. There is, indeed, in every parish, one or more persons, of whose sacred and appointed functions it is an especial part to care for the poor-the servants of a Divine Master who was born in a stable and laid in a manger; who, as far as personal enjoyment is concerned, are themselves pledged to poverty; whose office it is to watch over the souls of those around them, and therefore to discriminate characters; who can give alms without degrading the receivers; who can add to them a double grace and double comfort by words of blessing and advice; who are solemnly devoted to this work, whether the state employ their services or not; and who, by the ministrations of religion, can render even destitution tolerable, and raise even idleness and profligacy to an honest and respectable industry. The clergy are the clergy for the poor.". "The clergy must be set aside; and the poor must be fed and clothed by a Board of Poor-law Commissioners, who have no religious preference whatever. What follows? Destitute of the means of discriminating character, and justly afraid of encouraging every kind of vice and evil by an indiscriminating charity, they are compelled, I will not say to regard poverty as a crime, but to deal with it as if it were such; to reduce their alms down to the lowest possible point at which life can be maintained-life without hope, without dignity, without enjoyment, without possibility of improvement-one stern, cheerless, dreary, dismal protraction of imprisonment and privation, that all may be discouraged from approaching it. Whether it be from prudence towards the poor, or from selfish economy for itself, the civil power cannot hold out any alms, which are not wrung and counted out like drops of blood, and given with a curse, the curse of niggardliness and reproach, rather than with a blessing. "But the necessity of economy and privation renders another step equally necessary. The home cannot be permitted to remain; expenses cannot be curtailed, nor enjoyments restricted, where the poor are allowed to expend what they receive in the bosom of their families; and therefore they must be gathered together under one roof. Oh, how thwarted nature and despised truth will avenge themselves at last; and, if we refuse to receive and honour them in their genuine forms, will compel us to fall down and worship some deformed idol, which we erect, without knowing it, after their mutilated image! It is necessary that some men be poor. It may be good for us all to abandon wealth, even if we are not abandoned by it. And social life is a blessing: and for those who have no firesides, it is charity to provide a home, after the model of a family, where they may live under a wise and merciful restraint, and have their affections developed and their energies exercised, and even accomplish many a grand and noble work, by united labour, which cannot be attempted by individuals." "And in the nineteenth century, when we boast of having receded so far from such ignorance and superstition, that we cannot possibly relapse to it, suddenly, at the call of the most vague latitudinarianism, there rise up on every side vast houses and refuges of the poor, maintained not by religious alms, but by extorted taxes; and, containing in their system, almost every circumstance which has been either wrongly ridiculed by the bad, or justly condemned by the good, in the system of monasticism; omitting only that which commanded the reverence of all-religion. "There is poverty, but forced, not voluntary; privation and fasting, but reluctant sufferings, not self-denying and repentant discipline. There is seclusion from the world without contemplation, or any of the benefits of retirement. There is endless, hopeless fixedness of lot, but riveted by the denial of all means of improving the condition, not by vows, which, however erroneously taken, were at least dignified by their sacredness. There is labour, wasted and unproductive; society, without any bond of union but common degradation and restraint; and dependence upon others, but on their grudging penuriousness, not on their benevolence and love. There is celibacy, or a compulsory disruption of the marriage-ties, but with no holy thoughts or high aspirations to purify and guard it from crime. There is a breaking up of the family and the home, but without creating any community of love to supply its place. There is a badge stamped upon all inmates, separating them from the rest of their fellows, but neither holding up before the world the memorial of higher duties and purer feelings than the world at large permits, no giving dignity and elevation to them who bear it, but branding them with a mark of infamy, as the paupers of a poorhouse. And there are no duties to animate or dignify. Shame, but not for sin-fear, but not of God-inactivity without repose-labour without hope-ignominy without self-reproach-and punishment without crime; such are the essential and inseparable characteristics of a system which gathers together the good and the bad into one abode of poverty, and feeds, and clothes, and shelters, and employs them by the hands, not of the church, but of the state. "For religion is excluded; or, if admitted, it can come before them only in the rare and grudged ministrations of a single chaplain; set side by side with the authorized teaching of others, who denounce his doctrines as false, and his commission as invalid. Heresy and schism, and, following on them, unbelief, must pursue the civil power, even into the poorhouse. And the last refuge for its miserable inhabitants, the belief in a God, and the hopes of heaven, must be shut against them by the distractions of doubt and controversy, which the state, instead of excluding, forces on them; which it brings into their very home-gathering the war of words and the strife of tongues, as before round the bewildered child, so now in the ear of the ignorant, the aged, the sinful, the miserable, the hard of heart, the bereaved and the friendless, the dull and dead of hearing and understanding, even round the decay of sickness, and the agonies of the death-bed. The state will acknowledge no exclusive truth in religion, and listen to no controversies, because truth is full of doubt, and controversies the destruction of peace; and therefore the miserable pauper is compelled by it to listen to them himself, and to end where the state begins, in disbelieving all that he hears." .... "And then turn to another relation of domestic life-that of master and servant. Christianity set the slave free. It struck off his chains, not by any violent infraction of an established system-not by encouraging that restless and dangerous spirit of independence which refuses to own any master-not by indulging in vain and fanatical clamours against an institution which had not been excluded even from the divinely appointed polity of the Jews-which nature herself had in some degree adopted-and the very name of which had been assumed into the most ennobling relations of the gospel. She knew that where the spirit of Christian love is infused, there the outward form of slavery not only loses its terrors, but becomes capable of generating great virtues. And, however capable of abuse may be the power of one human being over another, she knew that far greater abuses prevail in the unrestricted rule of each man over himself. The highest virtues of our nature-patience, fortitude, humility, faith, may be cherished and exercised in the slave, even under the harshest bondage; and mercy, and pity, and love, and self-denial may be practised by the master even when armed with absolute power. But no virtue whatever can be generated in the license of self will, except it be the self-command taught to us by bitter suffering, and resolute to abandon its freedom and to confine itself under an external rule. If a Christian was born a slave, by the advice of the apostle he was not to seek to become free.".... "Labour-the labour of human beings-is now an article for the market. It is a subject of competition. It is open to the same rivalry, and its value is fixed by the same irregular struggle between two contending selfishnesses, as the price of a bale of cotton or a loaf of bread. The hirer and hired have each but a single object: the one to purchase as cheap, the other to sell his toil as dear, as possible. But in such a conflict the master must ultimately be the vanquisher. The servant who outstands his market must starve. And thus, we have seen the price of the labour of the poor throughout the kingdom, in almost every department, reduced to so low a rate, that life can scarcely be supported. And the wretched workman is left to starve, throughout the vigour of his life, in a miserable hovel, and to die in a poorhouse, while the master is apparently exempt from all responsibility, as he is untouched by any compassion, because the relation between himself and his servant has been stripped of all moral obligation and religious character, and has been reduced to a mere act of barter. Faith and fear have perished from it. And so it must be, when the dependence of man upon man ceases to be regarded in a religious lightas a positive dispensation of Providence; when, instead of submitting to, and acquiescing in, the position in which we are placed at our birth, until some other call from heaven summon us from it, we are taught from our childhood, that there is no law or rule for our temporal conduct, but to secure, each of us, what we deem to be our own advancement in the world; when, in this way, a perpetual fretting fever of restless ambition is diffused through every class; when the master, to increase his gains, reduces his servants to starvation, and the servant serves, not as an act of duty, and in the Lord, but simply to earn his bread.".... "We sigh over the imprisonment of the canary-bird, exclaim against the cruelty of its oppressor, unbar the doors of its cage without a moment's delay, and the poor bird claps its wings with joy, flutters into the open air, regains its liberty, its blessed liberty,-and the next day is found dead of cold and hunger. It is not for a Christian to argue in favour of slavery; still less to speak of it, except with abhorrence, when the master abuses his power, and the slave, instead of being raised by him, by degrees, to the capability and enjoyment of his freedom, is rivetted in his chains for ever. But a Christian may indeed ask, whether the total exclusion of all constraint, of all fear, of all positive external obligation from the relation of master and servant, has not ended in reducing the servant in this country to a condition far worse-far more abject and degraded-far more hopeless-far more vitiated-than that of any slave in any period or country of the world. Our mines, our factories, our common workshops-even our farms and agricultural cottages-full of crippled children and deformed women, of famine and fever, of drunkenness and vice, of depraved, miserable, hopeless beings, doomed by their own free act-the free act of a being in the agony of starvation-to the severest toil in darkness, at midnight; deprived of rest, stinted in food, selling their children to the same misery with their own for a few shillings, or sickening over hours of toil to earn their pence-all the horrible scenes revealed by late inquiries into the state of our lower classes,-what is there in the records of slavery to be found more heart-breaking, or more appalling, to those who believe that nations, like individuals, are visited by curses from the Almighty, and that the first curse denounced in His commandments is uttered against those who depart, even in the slightest degree, from His positive, external, revealed truth, and shape out ideas of the Divine nature after their own fancy."-pp. 313-328. THE SUBJECT OF HUMANITY APPROACHED WITH TIMIDITY IN ENGLAND, THROUGH DREAD OF UNSETTLING THE FOUNDATIONS OF THEIR SYSTEM. The writers of England have come slowly and reluctantly to the persuasion that something must be done for the working classes. All the searching and thorough expositions of parliamentary reports, in which the condition of the poor was set forth with a fidelity of detail and power of truth have failed to conquer public apathy, for the mass of evidence proved too heavy for the public digestion. No doubt it had some weight even in England, by furnishing sources of information to the few who were inquiring. Some reforms followed in the hours of labour, in the employment of children in factories, and females in mines. These documents never touched the great social |