French court, in which they learned nothing but dissipation; and the habit of sending the youth of the higher ranks to make the tour of Europe, at an age when they were unqualified by education and experience to resist the poisons of foreign profligacy, corrupted at once the old and the young. Nothing can give a stronger idea of the original manliness of the British mind, than that it should be enabled, under any future discipline, to resist the infinite frivolity, indolence, and libertinism, which then constituted the code of foreign life, and which, crowned by the ostentatious contempt of all religion, at length filled the cup of the continent, and filled it with fire and blood. In England the hurried and feverish changes of political parties assisted the contagion. The developments of political bad faith, and the sacrifices of personal principle which followed them, and which are always the fruit of continued revolutions, had first disgusted, and then infected the people. With a profligate on the throne of France, in whom even age and exhaustion were only stimulants to fresh scandals; with France giving the law of manners to Europe; with every foreign court laboriously emulating the libertinism, vanity and irreligion of France; and with England rapidly sinking into hardness of heart, and contemptuous insensibility to every principle of belief, Christianity seemed on the point of deserting the civilized world for ever, and winging her way to the

wilderness, from the selfishness and scorn of Europe, as she had once done from its persecution.

At this period Butler delivered his first charge to the clergy of the diocess of Durham. Adverting strongly to the general decay of manners, he advised his clergy to "do their part towards reviving a practical sense of religion among the people committed to their care," and for this purpose, to instruct them in the use of external religion; namely, the use of external and visible means of promoting virtue. "Thus," as the bishop observed in his charge, "if the sight of a church should remind the spectator of some pious sentiment; if, from glancing at this building dedicated to God, he should be led to think of his body as the temple of the Holy Spirit,' and therefore, as he knew the indecency and offence of profaning the edifice before his eyes, he should reflect on the guilt of suffering his own body to be the vehicle of impure, cruel, or irreverent thoughts;" could it be conceived that this sentiment was superstitious, or that it was not a right and Christian use of emblems.' But obvious as those remarks were, they were adopted for the subject of attack; and a pamphlet appeared, containing severe strictures on his opinions, under the title of "A serious Inquiry into the Use and Importance of External Religion, occasioned by some passages in the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Durham's Charge to the Clergy of his Dioceses.”

The pamphlet was soon forgotten, but the aspersion remained; and even fifteen years after the bishop's death, it was asserted in a publication, which however was anonymous, that his habits were popish, his convictions popish, and even that he had died in actual communion with the Church of Rome. On this occasion the zeal of his old friend, Secker, was roused. In a letter to the St. James's Chronicle," under the signature of Misospeudos, (the hater of a lie,) he challenged the writer of the pamphlet "to produce his authority for publishing so gross and scandalous a falsehood." A slight reply was made, grounding the imputation on Butler's fondness for ascetic habits, his study of Romish books, and his putting up a cross of marble in the chapel of the palace at Bristol. That he had put up the cross was known; but Secker, in his second letter, justly observed, that this act, though, in his opinion, imprudent, in the temper of the times; was merely in aknowledgment of his peculiar reverence for the great doctrine of redemption; and that it no more proved his being a Roman Catholic, than the crosses universally erected in the Lutheran chapels, or those which so frequently occur on the outside of the churches of this country, prove them to be Roman Catholic. The imputation of his having died in the Romish communion, was overthrown by the correspondence of Dr. Forster,

his chaplain, and Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, his friend, with Secker. Both those divines had attended him at Bath in his dying illness; and Forster had transmitted regular statements of his health, in letters to the archbishop, with every incident of his attendance. The letters were preserved, still exist in the Lambeth Library, and authenticate not the slightest surmise that he had ever wavered.

But a more direct evidence of the solid nature of his opinion on the subject, is to be found in his own writings. In the Analogy, (Part II. c. 1,) he states the peculiar hazard of substituting external religion, or mere ritual ordinances, for the religion of the heart. "Though mankind," he observes, "have in all ages, been greatly prone to place their religion in positive rites, by way of equivalent for obedience to moral precepts; yet, without making any comparison between them, the nature of the thing abundantly shows all notions of that kind to be utterly subversive of true religion: as they are, moreover, contrary to the whole tenor of Scripture, and likewise to the most express declarations of it, that nothing can render us accepted of God, without moral virtue."

But the application of these sentiments to the popish religion is, if possible, more unqualified, in his "Sermon before the Lords," June 11th, 1747, on the Anniversary of the Royal Accession. He there

declares, that "the value of our religious establishment ought to be very much heightened in our esteem, by considering from what it is a security. I mean, that great corruption of Christianity-popery, which is ever hard at work to bring us under its yoke. Whoever will consider the popish claims, to the disposal of the whole earth, as of divine right; to dispense with the most sacred engagements; the claims to supreme, absolute authority in religion; in short, the general claims which the canonists express by the words plenitude of power; whoever, I say, will consider popery, as it is professed at Rome, may see that it is a manifest and open usurpation of all human and divine authority. Yet, even in those Roman Catholic countries, where those monstrous claims are not admitted, and the civil power does, in many respects, restrain the papal, persecution is professed, as it is absolutely enjoined, by what is acknowledged to be their highest authority, a general council, so called, with the Pope at the head of it; and is practised in all of them, I think, without exception, where it can be done safely. And thus corruptions of the grossest sort have been in vogue, for many generations, in many parts of Christendom, and are so still, even where popery obtains in its least absurd form. And their antiquity and wide extent are insisted on as a proof of their truth; a kind of proof