land, and much more to the by-laws of any particular congregation. According to this view, if consistent with itself, the whole Christian Church all over the world must be subject either to a Pope or to a General Council: which of these two be preferred is a very subordinate question, both being consistent, and alone consistent, with the notion of a divinely constituted Christian priesthood.

For the same reasons this doctrine prevents the identity of Church and State in all ages which have any just notion of good government. For a power neither derived from law nor responsible to law, such as that of a pretended jure divino priesthood, is so clear an evil, that no men in their senses, when arrived at that period of society at which mere might is taught to yield to right, would allow it to exercise dominion over them. The Papacy therefore is unsuited to an age which begins to have a sense of justice. On the other hand, the claim of divine authority in the priesthood will not yield to those offices which are derived from human law, and have only so far God's sanction. Thus as men's common sense will not allow the priest to be King,-and the belief in a priesthood equally interferes with the King's sovereignty over the priest, the Church and the State are kept of necessity distinct, and the connexion between them must be one of alliance, whether equal or dependent, or else there can be no friendly relation at all between them.

From this supposed divine right of a priesthood, flowed directly the distinction between the so called secular and spiritual powers; and farther between secular matters, as the phrase runs, and spiritual. This distinction striking as with a two-edged sword, and pulling asunder what God had joined, made common life profane and religious life formal and superstitious;-for what are all our business and our studies but profane, if not done in Christ's name? and what are our acts of religion but the extremest folly and falsehood, if they are not made to act upon our common life? Every act of a Christian is at once secular and spi

ritual ;-secular, inasmuch as it is done in the body, in time, and on earth;-spiritual, as it proceeds from the mind and the heart, and therefore affects the soul, and reaches on to eternity.

Here then we have, in point of centralization, three systems. One which would subject all the Christian world to one government, namely to that of one or more persons of the pretended divine order of priesthood. Another, which rejecting the priesthood and the extreme of centralization, is not content with this, but rejects all centralization whatever; bringing back society almost to its simplest element, that of a single town or village. Between these there is the third system, which adopts centralization as far as God's providence appears visibly to have sanctioned it, and no farther; not placing all the world under one government, nor yet making sovereignty ridiculous by ascribing it to what may be called social atoms: but taking the clearly marked and practical division of nations or commonwealths: so that the nation should be sovereign,and not each particular town or village on the one hand, -nor on the other hand, the whole world.

Again, we have the system of a pretended priesthood, which, to be consistent, requires the system of extreme centralization, and that the centre should be itself. But being driven from this by the common sense of mankind, it has yet prevented the acknowledgment of any other centre, and has therefore been the fruitful parent of division, contradictions, and anarchy. It has given occasion to the notion of a Church in alliance with a State, or patronized by a State; and having thus led men to conceive of the State as of something not Christian in itself, it has tended to produce that system of extreme anti-centralization, which has renounced the ideas both of the Church and of the State together.

And here I pause,-fearful of having trespassed too much on your columns;-yet afraid also lest in trying not to write too tediously I should have written obscurely,

or have omitted to anticipate objections, and so have written unsatisfactorily.

XI. THE LABOURING POPULATION AND THE CHARTISTS.

[From the Paper dated May 25th, 1839.]

SIR,-During the session of Parliament, your columns, I know, are better employed in recording what is actually said or done by persons in public stations, than in circulating the mere comments of a private individual; nor would I wish you to depart from your practice in this respect. I will not comment upon facts,-I would only again and again entreat my countrymen to consider the facts themselves.

We read with interest the accounts of changes in the ministry, we rejoice or grieve, as it may happen, at the result of the late negociations. And we do well in this ;for it is not a light matter whether our rulers be wise or. unwise, equal to the emergencies of our condition, or unequal to them. Yet I verily believe, that the existence of the worst conceivable administration would be a light evil, in comparison to the insensibility which appears so general, as to the amount and real nature of the mischiefs which threaten us.

Are we not apt to be a great deal too lenient in punishing crime, and a great deal too sluggish in removing real evil?

Language is publicly held by the Chartist leaders, as wicked and as mischievous as the tongue of man can frame; -they recommend, directly or indirectly, murder and arson to thousands:-and yet these men, a hundred times more wicked than any felon who suffers death for a single crime, are either allowed to enjoy perfect impunity,or their offence is a misdemeanour, to be corrected merely by fine and imprisonment.

If history teach any one point clearly, it is that the leaders and instigators of a populace, as opposed to a people, are always either foolish or wicked,-and mostly in the highest degree both. They are entitled to no respect and to no compassion. The heaviest punishments of law never fall more deservedly than on the heads of such men. They are a mere curse to the human race, and most especially to the wretched victims of their delusions, in the actual evil which they do in their own generation, and still more in the good which they hinder, through disgust and terror at their crimes, in many generations after them.

Against these men we use neither prevention nor adequate punishment. This may be most wise and most noble, if we render them powerless by removing or lessening that real evil which alone makes them dangerous; it is mere suicidal folly, if we at once allow them to go on in their wickedness, and allow their victims to remain in such a state, that when the pestilence is let loose amongst them they cannot but catch its infection.

But whether we prevent or punish these men, or whether we let them alone, still if the real evil is not attended to, it must come in the end to the same thing. Could these men produce any impression at all in any healthy state of society? Could they be listened to for a single instant unless suffering and ignorance had already prepared the minds and hearts of their hearers for the reception of any wickedness and any folly? Suffering and ignorance are co-existent amongst a vast mass of our people, with a power of organization, and with a sense of personal and civil rights, not clear indeed or just, but lively, and with a foundation of justice which makes it doubly dangerous. Poverty, ignorance, numbers, organization and a sense of wrong done and right withheld,-I know not how any country can be more cursed than by having all these points combined together within its bosom, in opposition to every one of its existing institutions.

Greater poverty may have existed elsewhere, and

greater ignorance, perhaps too in a greater multitude of persons; but never with such organization, never with such a keen consciousness of evil suffered, never in such fearful and exasperating contrast with wealth and knowledge, never within historical memory, I speak advisedly, did there exist in any country so alarming a mass of disaffection towards the whole actual frame of society as we have now around us in England.

When Prussia, in the hour of her greatest need, wanted to wield the united energy of her whole population in one unanimous effort against the tyranny of France, she at one stroke emancipated her peasantry. It was a great measure, a measure to alarm the timid and offend the selfish; but yet the way to effect it was obvious and easy: a servile tenure was easily changed into a free one: the peasant held the land before and he continued to hold it still the change required was but political, the relieving him from certain oppressive services, which had needlessly galled and degraded him but these once removed, the boor was ready at once to start into the free landholder and citizen.

When France shook off the accumulated iniquities of centuries of neglect and oppression, her path too was comparatively easy. She had but to destroy the mere gratuitous insolences of feudality, as we might do away with the vexations of copyhold or customary tenures: but there, as in Prussia, the peasant had his house and his land, and the multitude of feudal tenants became a multitude of free proprietors, constituting the strength and happiness of their country.

But what can remove the evil here? It is no remnant of an unjust political system, which can be swept away in an instant; it is no mere accidental incumbrance on a social state essentially sound, and which, as soon as the incumbrance is shaken off, springs up with unabated vigour. It is a social evil merely; the growth not of feudality but of free trade, not of minute and insulting