in which he points out what strikes him as an inconsistency. The passage is as follows: "In one paragraph he has, I think, very properly reprobated my friend Dr. Stock's conviction, that he had adopted his new opinions under the special guidance of divine illumination;' but in the succeeding paragraph he says, 'I do not pretend to set bounds to the agency or influence of God. I believe that the Father of our spirits does afford aid to his frail children in ways which philosophy cannot yet explain, to strengthen, to console, and to guide: but I know of no proof that he at present communicates truth by supernatural means. Now I would ask, what difference does there seem to be between being under the special guidance of divine illumination, and being strengthened, consoled and guided by some inexplicable influence of the Father of our spirits?"" Now, Sir, I can see no inconsistency whatever, nor any parallel in the two cases put by your Correspondent. "The special illumination" is evidently the effusion of the holy energy or spirit of God which was shed upon the apostles; and all who believe in the Comforter as a personal agent, among whom Dr. Stock has now enlisted himself, believe that his agency did not cease with the Jewish age, (the original word rendered in the common version world,) but that he acts with equal efficiency, though with less visible effect, at the present time. It is this illumination to which Dr. Stock refers: but the aid which Dr. Carpenter adverts to as afforded by the Father to his frail creatures, cannot be called a special or a supernatural aid; for it is that secret mental influence, prompting to good or warning from evil, which God is conceived to vouchsafe to us in the ordinary course of his providence; and which might have been extended to an Aristides or a Socrates: and it is even cautiously contra-distinguished by Dr. Carpenter from the special influence of the Spirit's illuminating energy, which operated by the communication of truth. Surely there is a marked difference between a miraculous guidance to truth and a providential support in despondency, consolement in affliction, and incitement to good resolutions. The former was VOL. XIII, G always manifested by miraculous evi. dence; and as such evidence has ceased, we have a right to infer that the special or supernatural illumination has ceased with it, and that men are left to the guide of scripture and their natural understandings: but the latter has never been openly manifested; and it is not reasonable to require such manifestation: it is indeed incapable of proof; it is inferred from the moral government of God, whose character the Scriptures represent, in spite of Calvinism, as essentially merciful and gracious. Your Correspondent proceeds to say, that "Dr. Stock, as he imagines, does not suppose that truth itself had been communicated to his mind, but that he had been in some unaccountable way guided by the spirit of God to the right understanding of the truth already revealed in scripture." It may be asked, what difference is there between communicating truth and guiding to the discovery of truth? As to the question, "Has then Dr. Stock professed to have received more extraordinary influence than Dr. Carpenter allows?" I have shewn that he certainly has; and that these influences are clearly distinguished: the one supernatural, partaking of the immediate extraordinary agency of a supposed divine being operating on the mind to enlighten it, or what is equivalent, to guide it into light; and the other natural or providential, as inferred by philosophy. Dr. Carpenter in the words quoted disclaims a belief of supernatural illumination being now employed to communicate truth, or guide to truth; and the aid and guidance which he does conceive the Father of our spirits to employ are distinct from his miraculous or extraordinary operations, and are quite of a different nature, and respect different objects from the assistance and direction extended to Peter or Paul. Of Dr. Stock's re-conversion I cannot entertain the same hopes as your respectable Correspondent. "Let an enthusiast," says Locke, "be principled that he is actuated by an immediate communication of the divine spirit, and you in vain bring the evidence of clear reason against his doctrine." Besides, if I mistake not, the original or implanted principles of Dr. Stock, whatever fluctuations his mind may since have undergone, were Calvinistic: and he has merely recurred to the still uneffaced or reVived impressions of his childhood, "The spirit of superstition has walked into the desert seeking rest and meet ing none has returned to his first abode and found it swept and garnished and he has taken to him seven spirits more powerful than himself, and they enter in and dwell there." The Bristol theological public has beeu edified by polemic pamphlets of all sizes, from Trinitarians, Antinomians, " white, black and grey, With all their trumpery." Dr. Carpenter, you will be happy to hear, is not yet "buried under the mass of papers." The Trinitarian or Triunitarian cause, (I know not which of these barbarous terms be the more orthodox, had never, I believe, such á van-guard of miserable skirmishers. In their estimation of Dr. Carpenter's scriptural knowledge and ability, we are reminded of the Lilliputian savans, who, with considerable geometrical Jabour, contrived to measure the altitude of Gulliver's shoe. JOHN BUNCLE. Lanrumney, SIR, January 18, 1818. the HE speculations of Mr. Malthus, THE most able and satisfactory animadversions of your Correspondent T. N. T., who, by the publication of his letters on this subject in your Repository, has rendered a lasting and highly importaut service to the cause of truth, political and religious. The system of Mr. Malthus, as fur. nishing an easy means of accounting for the ill effects of mis-rule without implicating its authors and supporters, is become very fashionable with a certain class of politicians in this country; and the speciousness of his mode of treating his subject has made many converts. The misapplication of the principles of this system to account for the tremendous increase of pauperism and burdens of the poorrates in this country, appears to be a subject deserving the farther attention of your most able and enlightened Correspondent. In a pamphlet which I have in the press, and which will be published in a few days, on the subject of the Poor-laws, I have been compelled to allude to the principles advocated by Mr. Malthus, but a conviction of their being without foundation in truth or nature, and the perception of their mischievous tendency and application induce me to express a hope that T. N. T. will make still more public his concise but full and triumphant refutation of these heart-chilling principles. With the sincerest respect for your important exertions for the diffusion of religious and moral truth, and in the hope that their usefulness will be additionally and greatly extended by the rapid increase of the circulation of your invaluable Miscellany, I remain, JOHN H. MOGGRIDGE. The Nonconformist. [A society of gentlemen, who have associated to promote inquiry into the literature and history of the Nonconformists, have promised us a succession which we this month insert the first.. of papers under the above title, of ED.] No. I. A Vindication of the Two Thousand Ejected Ministers. WRITER who is entitled to A some degree of respect, and liberty, relating the history of the whose prejudices are on the side of two thousand+ ejected ministers, says, after allowing them high praise for their integrity and conscience, that "when we examine into the reasons of their secession from the church,” (he should rather have said their nonconformity,)" we cannot but stand amazed at their extreme frivolousness, and our admiration is almost annihilated by contempt." It is deserving of serious inquiry, and it is the object "Remarks on the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Poor-Laws; in which the proposed alteration of the laws of settlement; and pauperism, its causes, consequences and remedies are distinctly considered. By a Monmouthshire Magistrate. Sold in London, by Baldwin and Co., and R. Hunter, (successor to Mr. Johnson,) St. Paul's Church Yard." The number of the ejected ministers is not capable of being exactly ascertained. I use the round number of two thousand as being agreaeble to usage. of this paper to inquire, whether this judgment be equitable. One observation may guide us in our examination, viz. that approbation of an action does not always imply approbation of the reasons on which it is founded. I admire the step taken by Archbishop Sancroft and the nonjuring clergy at the Revolution, though I hold the principles on which it proceeded to be extremely erroneous and pernicious. In fact, it is impossible to behold a strict adherence to the dictates of conscience without reverence; at least in those cases where conscience requires acts of disinterestedness, humility and self-denial. This is a spectacle which the human heart is formed to admire; whether we resolve our admiration into sympathy, into the pleasure taken in beholding moral consistency and uniformity, or into the lower principle of approbation of that conduct in our fellowcreatures which lays the surest foundation for our own advantage, as far as we are connected with them. The motives by which men are led to any great resolution are commonly mixed, and in so large a body as the Ejected Ministers, there were probably many individuals who were swayed by some sentiments of dubious character. There is not a virtue which may not be exercised under the influence of some passion or prejudice which robs it of its merit. But though no one is ignorant of this, we all love virtue, and place confidence in the virtuous. If it be allowed, therefore, that many of the ever-memorable two thousand were actuated by some reasons which in the present day appear weak, and that few of them were guided by those great general principles on which their posterity justify their own nonconformity, it will not follow that, in their peculiar circumstances and with their habits of thinking and feeling, their self-denying conduct was not magnanimous and entitled to the highest praise. Kneeling at the sacrament, the sign of the cross in baptism, bowing at the name of Jesus, and other ceremonies of the same class, may be mere trifles, but their insignificance, though a good reason for not imposing them upon Christians, is none for submission to them in opposition to the judg ment. To comply with any rite which is regarded as unscriptural and superstitions in its tendency, is hypocritical in a Christian. Any contempt that attaches to the frivolousness of the rite, belongs not to him that resists, but to him that would enforce it. The imposition can be designed only, in the wantonness of power, to exact obedience at the expense of conscience, If one sacrifice of this kind be made for the sake of peace, another may be demanded, and where is compliance to end? Principiis obsta, is the only safe maxim, with regard to such unjust and tyrannical demands. Whilst the Ejected Ministers scrupled, for various reasons, to submit to these ceremonies, they protested against the right of the supreme power to make them compulsory. The Conferences at the Savoy, in which, according to our present notions, we must pronounce the Presbyterians sufficiently yielding, turned chiefly upon this point. It is indeed the hinge of the controversy between conformists and nonconformists. To admit the imposition of the cross in baptism or any other frivolity upon human authority, is to give up religion wholly to the magistrate to be moulded by him at his pleasure; for he has only to represent any imposition, however grievous, as a thing indif ferent, in order to stand justified upon this principle in its rigorous enforcement. But it is not the amount of the tax upon conscience, but the right to tax conscience, that is in dispute. Hampden's portion of ship-money was inconsiderable, but had it been less, and as small as it could be, resistance of payment would have been equally the part of enlightened patriotism, because the power that could assess him without the consent of the Commons, in the lowest possible sum, could, at its arbitrary will, strip him of all his property, and even overturn the constitution. In the present instance, a power to cause the knee to bend before bread and wine, would be equivalent to the power to constrain the prostration of the body be fore an idol, in short, a power to annul the plainest commandments of Al mighty God. There are other points of view in which the case of the Ejected Minis ters requires no argument whatever; to state it is to pronounce their justification. For example, the Act of Uniformity required such of them as had not received episcopal ordination to be re-ordained by a bishop. Now, to have submitted to this demand, would not only have been at variance with their confirmed opinion of the office of bishop and presbyter, as laid down in the New Testament, but would also have been a confession that their Previous ministry (in a great number of persons, the ministry of a long and active life,) had been a continued irregularity and usurpation. How could they stoop to this degradation, with out forfeiting, besides their own approbation, the esteem and confidence of their respective flocks, on whose estimate of their characters depended the success of their labours! Again, the Act of Uniformity extorted a public declaration from all the clergy of unfeigned assent and consent, to all and every thing contained in the Book of Common Prayer. So extravagant is this demand, the size of the book and its multifarious contents, the work of men of different minds, in periods when contradictory principles prevailed, being considered, that many subterfuges have been discovered by casuists, in order to evade the plain meaning of the law; and without these, it is not probable that any considerable number of men, even in these lax times, could be found to conform openly to the church. But no such expedients occurred, or would have been allowed, to the clergy in 1662. The meaning of the legislators was certain; and an artful course had been adopted, with regard to the Presbyterians, which reduced them to the alternative of nonconformity or deep dishonour: they had been drawn into public controversy just before the Act was passed, and pressed to explain and defend their objections to the ritual and rubric of the church: they were then dismissed, and the statute compelled them to abide, as honest men, by their previous declarations, or to subscribe their own indelible disgrace. Nor was this all: the Book of Common Prayer, to which entire assent and consent was to be acknowledged, was referred to the bishops for revision and correction; and it is an historical fact, that the new edition was published only on the eve of Bartholomew Day; so that very few of the clergy could possibly have read the book, which they were obliged to profess before God and man to approve in every iota. Once more; by the Act of Uniformity, the clergy were compelled to subscribe and declare, that it is not lawful, upon any pretence whatsoever, to take arms against the King, i. e. the Presbyterians amongst them were required, as the condition of retaining their benefices, to acknowledge themselves rebels in resisting the illegal exactions of Charles I. and, in opposing his attempt to govern without a Parliament. This was an The unexampled act of tyranny. most arbitrary rulers had been hith erto content with enforcing obedience and submission, and had never entertained the wish to force their slaves into the hypocrisy of asserting that, in their consciences, they loved tyranny and hated freedom. Had not a considerable body of our ancestors opposed this execrable doctrine and profligate demand, is it too much to assert, that the constitution of England would have been broken up and buried under a despot's throne! The Revolution of 1688, which in fact and in theory declared passive obedience and non-resistance to be contrary to the spirit of the constitution, was in reality a justification of the memorable 2000, who, twenty-six years before, had, with immense sacrifices, maintained the true constitutional principles. On either of these grounds, but especially the last, the Two Thousand Confessors, stand justified and ho noured in the eye of reason. Their splendid example has associated non conformity and patriotism. Let their descendants maintain them indissoJuble; and as, according to the acknowledgment of Mr. Hume, the Puritans kindled and preserved the precious spark of liberty in the days of absolute prerogative, so that to them the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution, let the Protestant Dissenters of these times emulate the public virtue of their fathers, and be ready, if occasion serve, by sacrifices or by exertions, to encounter slavish doctrines and to resist constitutionally measures that are unconstitutional, and thus to lay an obligation upon their children to speak of them, in the times to come, as those that stood in the breach to defend their own and their children's liberties, and to save their country and the world from being again subjugated to the tyranny of Divine Right, under the mask of legitimacy. A. GLEANINGS; OR, SELECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS MADE IN A COURSE OF GENERAL READING. No. CCCXXI. Savageness of War. The American papers, at the close of the late war, related the following anecdote with apparent triumph in the military glory of their countryman, whom they dignify with the title of a sharp-shooter. Of such stuff is this same glory composed! "Previous to the examination of those of the dead who fell in the affair of the 8th, near New Orleans, it is said, two or three of the riflemen claimed the honour of shooting Lieutenant-colonel Rennie, the brave but unfortunate Briton. Mr. Weathers said, If he is not shot in the left eye, I shall not claim the MERIT—if he is I shall. On examination, it was found the ball had perforated the head a little below the left eye." No. CCCXXII. Execution of Charles the First. This memorable event, which has been described with so much eloquence by our historians, is thus re corded in a newspaper of that period, called The Moderate Intelligencer, without comment, and on the same type with the common news of the day. "On the 30th of January, was Charles, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, put to death, by beheading, over against the banquetting-house of Whitehall." The newspaper from which the above extract is copied verbatim, is printed in a small quarto half sheet, and in some of the numbers, the proceedings of Parliament are shortly mentioned under the head of "A perfect diurnal of some passages in Parliament." No. CCCXXIII. Dr. Waring's Testimony to pure The celebrated Dr. Waring, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, has given, in his Essay on the Principles of Human Knowledge, the following just account of the treatment which Christianity has met with from the men of this world: "The most pure, the most enlightened religion has, by artful and designing villains, been rendered an engine for their ambitious, self-interested and cruel projects, but this does not invalidate the truth of the religion, which gives no precepts of any such tendency." With this statement before our eyes all books of ecclesiastical history should be read, which is, in fact, nothing else but an history of these artful and designing villains, with the exception of a few traits in the characters of honest men who protested against their villanies. No. CCCXXIV. F. An Item in a Parish Account. In the Appendix to the History of Lambeth, there is the following item in the Church-warden's accounts: "1708, November 19, paid Mr. Skinner a bill for prosecuting Clark the Dissenting parson." Can the reader explain this precious relic of parochial history? |