convulsions as may deserve the name of civil war; we think highly probable that persons and property will, in certain parts of the country, be so exposed to violence as materially to affect the prosperity of our manufactures and commerce, to shake the mutual confidence of mercantile tuen, and to diminish the stability of our political and social institutions.' (P. 44.)

L

To doubt these solemn warnings is to doubt the powers of the avalanche in the Alps, because we know the snow to lie innocuously on Newmarket heath.

*

Nor ought these fearful results to create surprise. The author whom we have quoted refers most properly to the observation of Dr Adam Smith, to prove that what we now see and deplore was anticipated by that great philosopher. This is one of the numerous instances in which experience gives its sanction to the theories of wisdom; and in which the inestimable value of the recommendation of those who carefully and cautiously deduce from existing facts their future consequences, are proved to all those who aspire to the name of statesmen. In the progress of the division of labour,' says Dr Smith, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour comes to be confined to very few operations. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employment. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of exertion, and generally becomes stupid and ignorant. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing part in rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming a just judgment concerning many of the duties of private life. Of the great interests of his country he is incapable of judging. The uniformity of his stationary life corrupts the courage of • his mind, and corrupts even the activity of his body. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and mental virtues. But in every improved or civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor (that is the great mass of the people) must necessarily fall, UNLESS GOVERNMENT TAKES SOME PAINS TO PRE

เ

VENT IT.'

We entreat the attention of our rulers, of our legislators, and of all our fellow-countrymen, to these last words. Adam Smith has here recapitulated the awful calamities to which the progress

* B. v. c. 1, Wealth of Nations.

of manufacturing industry is incident, unless Government takes some pains to prevent it. But when her Majesty's Ministers have endeavonred to discharge this their sacred duty, how have their propositions been met? The present session has exhibited that which Dr Smith, with all his prescience, never could have anticipated. That a government should undertake this task he considers hypothetical; but what he never contemplated as possible was, that those exertions, when made, should have been, as far as was possible, neutralized and rendered inoperative, by the combined movements of a great party calling themselves the friends of the throne and altar.

We have hitherto urged the performance of these duties, on the ground of the social interests of mankind; and of the imminent dangers to that social system which it behoves legislators to avert. But we confess, that there are still higher and more ennobling motives which ought to lead us to the same conclusions. Is there no delight felt in the performance of the very highest class of duties which God has prescribed to mankind? We hear every day of the triumphs of mechanical invention-of the progress of agricultural improvement-of fens drained, of heaths improved, of mountains enclosed and cultivated. The names of those useful and excellent men under whose auspices this progress has been made are had in honour. Holkham, Woburn, and Althorp, are places to which much of our industry may trace its present development. In manufactures, also, we pay a just tribute to Watt, to Arkwright, and to Peel. But what are their exertions, and how insignificant their services, compared to those of the labourers in a better vineyard, who remedy the barrenness of the mind-who cultivate the rich harvests of the understanding and promote the accumulation of that intellectual wealth which forms the capital of our moral nature? It is through their agency that the reason is prepared to receive and to appreciate the higher impulses of religious obligations. It is thus that our fellow-men, in their social capacities, are made better subjects; and that under the divine blessing they become better Christians also. Are not these high obligations and duties-are not these eternal interests such as to justify, or rather to demand, some slight sacrifice of party zeal, and of personal ambition? If the cause of morality and of religion has been promoted, is not that somewhat of a consolation for the loss of a political triumph? To procure the consent and agreement of Parliament in the performance of this greatest of all national duties, is a triumph to which the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo are secondary and inferior. Will not our politicians be tempted by the hope of earning this glory?

But if the Conservative party have willed it otherwise; if their compact-alliance' can only be preserved by converting all questions into Church Questions; if they prefer a strong division at night to the consciousness of a good action which will outlive the morning; then it behoves the honest and intelligent people of England to exert their own powers for the advancement of their internal interests. While rendering to the Church the things which belong to the Church, let them resist, like freemen, the encroaching usurpation which seeks to place the clergy of the Establishment in possession of the exclusive right of conducting education. Let the people of England consider that, on this question, their moral, their civil, and their religious freedom depends. No cajolery to the Wesleyans-no hypocritical compliments to the Dissenters should close their eyes to the consequences of introducing into our schools an ecclesiastical tyranny of the worst description. Should this attempt succeed, our civil and religious rights will both be placed in peril; and therefore our resistance to these claims becomes a sacred duty.

The

If the state of parties does not admit of the introduction of a good system of National Education, we call upon the people of England to provide it at any cost and sacrifice for themselves. We address them in the words of an eloquent writer: You ⚫ cannot without guilt and disgrace stop where you are. past and the present call on you to advance. Your nature is too great to be crushed; you were not created what you are, merely to toil, eat, drink, and sleep, like inferior animals. No 'power in society, no hardship in your condition, can keep you ⚫ down in knowledge, power, virtue, or influence, but by your ⚫ own consent. Do not be lulled to sleep by the flatteries you hear. You have many great deficiencies to be remedied; and the remedy lies not in the ballot-box, not in the exercise of your political powers, but in the faithful education of yourselves and of your children.'*

* Dr Channing on Self-Culture.

ART. VII.-The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, with a Preface, giving some Account of the Author, and of this Edition of his Practical Works; and an Essay on his Genius, Works, and Times. 4 vols. 8vo. London: 1838.

HIS publication reminds us of an oversight in omitting to notice the collection of the works of Richard Baxter, edited in the year 1830, by Mr Orme. It was, in legal phrase, a demand for judgment, in the appeal of the great Nonconformist to the ultimate tribunal of posterity, from the censures of his own age, on himself and his writings. We think that the decision was substantially right, and that, on the whole, it must be affirmed. Right it was, beyond all doubt, in so far as it assigned to him an elevated rank amongst those, who, taking the spiritual improvement of mankind for their province, have found there at once the motive and the reward for labours beneath which, unless sustained by that holy impulse, the utmost powers of our frail nature must have prematurely fainted.

About the time when the high-born guests of Whitehall were celebrating the nuptial revels of Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, and the visiters of low degree were defraying the cost by the purchase of titles and monopolies, there was living at the pleasant village of Eaton Constantine, between the Wrekin Hill and the Severn, a substantial yeoman, incurious alike about the politics of the empire and the wants of the exchequer. Yet was he not without his vexations. On the green before his door, a Maypole, hung with garlands, allured the retiring congregation to dance out the Sunday afternoon to the sound of fife and labret, while he, intent on the study of the sacred volume, was greeted with no better names than Puritan, Precisian, and Hypocrite, If he bent his steps to the parish church, venerable as it was, and picturesque, in contempt of all styles and orders of architecture, his case was not much mended. The aged and purblind incumbent executed his weekly task with the aid of strange associates. One of them laid aside the flail, and another the thimble, to mount the reading desk. To these succeeded the 'excellentest, stage player in all the country, and a good gamester, and a good fellow.' This worthy having received Holy Orders, forged the like for a neighbour's son, who, on the strength of that title, officiated in the pulpit and at the altar. Next in this goodly list came an attorney's clerk, who had tippled himself into so great poverty,' that he had no other way to live but by assuming the pastoral care of the flock at Eaton Constantine.

Time out of mind, the curate had been ex-officio the depositary of the secular, as well as of the sacred literature of the parish; and to these learned persons our yeoman was therefore sain to commit the education of his only son and namesake, Richard Baxter.

Such, from his tenth to his sixteenth year, were the teachers of the most voluminous theological writer in the English language. Of that period of his life, the only incidents which can now be ascertained are, that his love of apples was inordinate, and that, on the subject of robbing orchards, he held, in practice at least, the doctrines handed down amongst schoolboys by an unbroken tradition. Almost as barren is the only extant record of the three remaining years of his pupilage. They were spent at the endowed school at Wroxeter, which he quitted at the age of nineteen, destitute of all mathematical and physical scienceignorant of Hebrew-a mere smatterer in Greek, and possessed of as much Latin as enabled him in after life to use it with reckless facility. Yet, a mind so prolific, and which yielded such early fruits, could not advance to manhood without much welldirected culture. The Bible which lay on his father's table, formed the whole of the good man's library, and would have been ill exchanged for the treasures of the Vatican. He had been no stranger to the cares, nor indeed to the disorders of life; and, as his strength declined, it was his delight to inculcate on his inquisitive boy the lessons which inspired wisdom teaches most persuasively, when illustrated by dear-bought experience, and enforced by parental love. For the mental infirmities of the son, no better discipline could have been found. A pyrrhonist of nature's making, his threescore years and ten might have been exhausted in a fruitless struggle to adjudicate between antagonist theories, if his mind had not thus been subjugated to the supreme authority of Holy Writ, by an influence coeval with the first dawn of reason, and associated indissolubly with his earliest and most enduring affections. It is neither the wise nor the good by whom the patrimony of opinion is most lightly regarded. Such is the condition of our existence, that beyond the precincts of abstract science, we must take much for granted, if we would make any advance in knowledge, or live to any useful end. Our hereditary prepossessions must not only precede our acquired judgments, but must conduct us to them. To begin by questioning every thing, is to end by answering nothing; and a premature revolt from human authority is but an incipient rebellion against conscience, reason, and truth. Launched into the ocean of speculative enquiry, without the anchorage of parental instruction and filial reverence, Baxter would have been drawn by