it is not; your law cannot make wrong to be right, nor falsehood to be truth. We have beaten you, Mr. Peel, at your own game; we have turned your own foul weapons upon you, and you are prostrate on the score of prosecuting infidels; you have been a bitter persecutor to us; you have done your worst to us, so we have nothing for which to thank or to applaud you. We have beaten you, and that is the true cause of your altered tone, and until you learn to make honest confessions upon the subject of infidelity toward the Christian religion, we will teaze you with these reminiscences, and with defiances to your shelved law. We will beat the city magistrates on their interference in this matter. A few months hence, and you will find Mr. Taylor producing three-fold his former effect through town and country. You will find him publicly attacking the Christian religion as he before attacked it. I will engage to be at once his bail, and to find him a public room wherein he may attack the Christian religion in the way that shall best please him. In one of the papers which I have seen, you are reported to have said, that, to prosecutions, you or the government have preferred to let the offending parties grow ashamed of their own proceedings. What indications have you had to justify such an imputation? Has it been in any case that I have exhibited? Or has such a case been exhibited by any other person who was of the least weight in the advocacy of infidelity? Two persons have turned their backs upon us, among the many who have been prosecuted; but one of these, William Haley, was so very profligate as a Christian, that he came to us incurable of that profligacy, and we were glad to throw him back upon you; the other is William Tunbridge, who, though possessing a great deal of moral integrity, and good disposition, really never had any sentiment of his own on which to form a fixed principle. He is not to be classed with William Haley. Haley had talent, but was a profligate. Tunbridge was moral without any pretensions to talent, and changed sides from mere peevishness and irritability increased by imprisonment and no prospect of release, from a want of patient firmness. So, your imputations were, on this head, as unwarrantable as were your paltry observations on the assumed law of the case.

In all the papers that I have seen, Mr. Leslie Foster is reported to have made himself a blundering and impudent fool, on the subject of this petition, and to have talked about points in the case of which he is evidently ignorant. One paper stated, that Mr. Foster objected to the observation, that Mr. Taylor was the victim of religious opinions; because he, Mr. Taylor, was a Deist or an Atheist, and had no religious opinions; and that a deist or an atheist ought to be prosecuted. Now Mr. Taylor's complaint is, not that he is not allowed to enjoy his own, but that he is the victim or martyr to, or persecuted sufferer from, the religious

opinions of others; and that the christian religion is essentially a persecuting religion.

In all the matters on which I have a little knowledge, I find, when I contrast that knowledge with the views which members of parliament take of it, that they are deplorably ignorant and I conclude, that they are equally ignorant on matters to which I do not turn my attention. I feel nothing but contempt for the mental or moral character of the parliament, as at present constituted; so I have nothing but contempt of which to make an honest expression concerning it and as to political fear in doing it, I have none remaining. On the presentation of this petition from Mr. Taylor, there is not one sentence of sense offered in comment upon it, as reported; but much nonsense, some misapprehensions and some scandalous falsehoods.

:

Mr. Leslie Foster says, that a man without religious opinions is a proper subject for prosecution. I proudly tell him that I have no religious opinions-that there is not in me a particle or shade of that principle which is called religion; and I proclaim myself the equal, if not the superior of Mr. Leslie Foster, in all that constitutes the moral duties of man; and I proudly defy him, or any one else, to prosecute me for having no religious opinions, and for the expression of contempt for all religious opinions, Jew, Gentile, Christian, or Mahometan.

Darings and defiances of this kind are absolutely necessary to beat down the persecuting disposition of all religious opinions, and that is my apology for being thus offensive. I am, and always will be, ready to join any man, or sect of men, mildly, for the purposes of mutual instruction; but I know religion to be a vicious error, and when it meets me with hostility, I will repel it with hostility. RICHARD CARLILE.

LETTER XXII.-FROM THE REV. ROBERT TAYLOR.

THE RIVAL UNIVERSITIES.

DEAR MR. CARLILE.-I suppose you have purposely left the important movement in Israel, which distinguishes the last month, to my animadversion, since I observe your noble LION hasn't so much as wagged his tail upon the subject. You couldn't doubt but that I should be wide awake to such an ominous "shaking of the powers of Heaven." A pair of universities for you! Orthodoxy versus Latitudinarianism, alias, Anythingarianism. It never rains but it pours. You'll have your metropolis deluged with learning-King's College and Dieu et mon Droit, against the London University and Astra Castra.* The market for learning will be over-stocked, and professors will have to go canvassing for pupils to come and hear their lectures.

* The Stars my Camp! a Scotch Deistical motto.

Old Mother Church, who ever moves so slowly, and never moves at all but upon the needs-must of the Devil's driving; that is, when her own interest, or the apprehension of danger to her suspiciously-held influence, stings her into action, at length betrays her jealousy, and discovers the thorough penetration of her keen observance through the thin veil of affected liberality, that covers the latitant infidelity of Brougham's prayerless, creedless, graceless University.

Drowsy as the old cat in her dotage may seem to be, she was not going to let the rats exactly run over her back-she wasn't going to dream that there was no mischief in mischief. A church founded on the principle of controlling all the actions of the human mind, and "bringing down every thought to the obedience of faith," and necessarily existing so long and no longer than, as delusion shall exist, was not likely to let the master-key of education be tickled out of its hands, and to suffer a generation of scholars to grow up, unwarped by a sufficiently early engrafting of those habits of hypocrisy, or impressions of superstition, which, if not early engrafted, can never afterwards get hold on the mind. Nature is too well known, to admit of even churchmen being ignorant, that if the child were not imposed on, the man would never be so. Though the Missionaries may boast of making converts of the West Indian savages, of vulgar kerns and illiterate boors, a well educated infidel is an animal too untameable for their manage. The whole world's history presents not a single instance of an individual of the human race, who ever came to believe the Christian religion, or ever could do so, who could say the multiplication table first.

"Train up a child in the way he should go," was ever a necessary axiom for the knaves who had but too good reason to be aware that none but a child or men of childish understandings would go in that way. So all that is to be of learning in the world, is to be trammelled and broken into the yoke of subserviency to the established superstition. King's College, London, is founded on the avowed principle of that of Maynooth, and all other Catholic Universities, those styes for learned pigs, from which all Protestant books are excluded, and which, (I wish it were not also true of the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Dublin,) exist as standing demonstrations to the world, how desperately ignorant and measurelessly stupid a man may be, though his brain were a Greek Lexicon, and his tongue a Polyglot, if that brain be enforced to render service to a folly, and that tongue to varnish falsehood. It is not more physically than it is morally true, that the existence of a depression on any one point of the intellectual organization, will render all advantages that its developement in every other respect might command, utterly nugatory and abortive. 'Tis true the trammelled and

hide-bound suckling may indicate surprising capacities, and reach the ordinary perfection of bodily stature, but his mind will be still in its infancy; the callow forehead over the full-fledged chin, will still betray where the nurse pinched him in his cradle, and marked him for a fool and a Christian for life.

What say nature and humanity, on contemplating such a spectacle as that prodigy of acquired learning, Dr. Parr, under the necessity of being rolled before the kitchen fire, and having his abdomen rubbed and oiled by his own servants, to relieve him from the distension of excessive gormandizing? Or what of Porson, the facile princeps of Greek literature, rolling in the gutters, in the filthiest horrors of intoxication, and unable to indicate how he came in such plight, or who he was, but by a glass-eyed stare, and slobbering eructation of the word, Greek; nothing but Greek! Greek! Greek! to signify that he was the Greek professor of the University of Cambridge.

His unrivalled shrewdness of criticism on the enodation of the difficulties of the ancient Greek tragedies, induced a request from high authorities, that he would apply his mighty acumen to some critical elucidation of the text of the Greek Testament, to which his answer was as pregnant of signification, as it was coarse in expression: it was dangerous ground. He could use his liberty in commenting on Eschylus or Sophocles, but the less a man criticised the text of the Evangelists, the greater would be his respect for it. It was for the surpassing genius of Herbert Marsh, to cope with the difficulties of the New Testament, and yet become a bishop.

But the silent sister, Dublin, is not without her crying shame. Her renowned Provost Dr. Barrett-who, like his library, had all the learning in it, but none that ever came out of it, and to the fame of unmatched acquirements united the distinction of being the most sordid, selfish, senseless epicure, that ever made reason blush for degraded humanity. It is a fact, as glaring on the records of human talent, as the day, that among all our senior wranglers, medallists and first honours of Oxford or of Cambridge, the world finds not one in an age, that pays for his training. They shine, but as the sparks on burnt tinder, neither giving warmth nor light, and, God knows, not intended to do so. They glisten and go out, attracting only the gaze of children. "There goes the parson, O illustrious spark!

And there! scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk." Important discoveries, useful treatises, light thrown on times. past, or held out to times to come, any kind of work, by which mankind might be amended, is to be looked for from any quarter rather than an university. Your universities will indeed supply you with Harmonies of the Gospels, Diatesserons, Illustrations of the Acts of the Apostles, Discourses on Prophecy, Explications of

the Apocalypse, and holy rubbish for the destruction of so much paper, or much worse destruction of all there is of mind spent on such garbage: but any thing really clever, serviceable, honourable, and beneficial to mankind, emerges only from the vale of plodding industry; or bursts into fame rather in spite of literary distinctions, than by their aid.

All the fault of this, is not owing solely to the fetters and restraints imposed on the actings of the human mind by the known character and discipline of our seats of learning, their subserviency to the keeping up of a known fraud and imposition on the ignorance and weakness of mankind, and the forcing of the mind into a particular and circumscribed orbit of movement; but much as these things contribute to the mischief, much would still remain, and attach even to an infidel university, that adopted the mischievous principle, that has hitherto characterized all seminaries of public learning, that is, the principle of seeking their own renown from the attainments of their pupils, rather than the pupil's advantage. The vehement incitement to precocious effort in the production of boy scholars, in the attempt to complete an education by the age of twenty: preposterously drives in upon the brain, ere it has acquired its full strength, a quantity of indigestible learning (if I may so speak) that its capacities would but conveniently accomodate, after they had been enlarged and strengthened by twice that number of years. Hence arises the universal complaint of well educated persons, of their having forgotten their education; and the universal fact, that these clever boys never end in clever men. The prematurely incited brain, like the over-tilled ground, losing its fertilizing energies, and settling down into effete and arid barrenness. The one profitless and vainglorious display of pedantry has cracked the strings and dried up all the juices, needed for the sucking and keeping up of the character of a scholar and a ripe and good one.-Your boy that got the medal, is fixed, a boy for ever.

Certainly, however, we should have heard nothing of this King's College, or orthodox university, if no fears had been entertained of the meditated heterodoxy of the Brougham College. If such a college had been called for, by the real wants of the people; if the evils it is designed to avert, or the benefits it professes to intend, had cried to heaven for such a favour, they might have cried and called, till the welkin rang, ere one shilling would have been subscribed by the philanthropy or good intentions of these college-founders; but it is to their bad intentions, their misanthropy, their dislike and hatred of their fellow-creatures, and their greedy, selfish, wicked carkings, and crooked policy, to keep their own tyrannous ascendancy, and perpetuate the known lie, that perpetuates their influence over insulted and degraded millions. To this, we owe