Parliamentary Reform generally, and particularly towards the exertions which I and many other individuals are now making in that cause? And further, have I not reason to complain, that now, when you must see the absolute necessity of Reform in order to secure the chance of a restoration of national happiness, you do not, from any of your more than thousand pulpits, utter a single word in favour of that measure, the justice of which no man, whose character is not already as black as soot, will attempt to deny !

If, indeed, the Reformers in general, and I in particular, had made the undermining of religion, or the taking away of the temporal property of the Church, a part of the change we contemplate and recommend, there might have been some ground for your hostility towards us and our plans. But, while the Reformers in general have been wholly silent upon these matters, I have most strenuously recommended the abstaining from all attempts to mix up questions of religion with the question of Reform. I am for coming to no previous determination as to the temporalities of the Church; but, to leave that matter to be settled (if it be necessary to meddle with it at all) by a Parliament, chosen fairly by the people at large. There are persons who have ascribed a large part of the present sufferings of the nation to the existence of tithes; and who, of course, have directed, as far as they have been able, the hatred of the people against you. They have, in fact, told the people, that your tithes are a tax; that they are a heavy burden upon the farmer and the poor; that they are oppressive; and, in short, that they are one of the great causes of the present miseries of the people. But, who are these persons? Not the Reformers; no, but those very men whom you are labouring to uphold against the Reformers! And, what is more, you must see, that these men have now in contemplation a measure which, if adopted, will inevitably, in a few years, produce the total annihilation of the whole of your temporal means! On the other hand, so far from joining in this deceptious outcry against you; so far from putting tithes upon a level of the taxes, I have taken no inconsiderable pains to show the fallacy of such a notion. I have reminded my readers, that it would be difficult to show, how the mass of the people can suffer because the rent of the landlord is divided with the parson; I have reminded them, that if tithes were abolished to-morrow, they would only be added to the farmer's rent, and go to add to the already immense estates of the landlord, without doing any good to the people at large; I have reminded them, that tithes have existed for seven hundred years, and that England has been very happy during that time, but that Paper-Money, National Debts, Standing Armies, Enormous Sinecures, Pensions, and Grants, to EastIndia Companies, French Emigrants, &c. are quite NEW THINGS, and, that to these, and not to our ancient establishments, are our miseries to be ascribed. Who but me amongst all the laymen in England, has ever treated your order with this fairness and liberality? Who, with any degree of talent at his command, has ever put your case upon its true ground? And yet, whom have you ever pursued with so much foulness and illiberality?

However, with regard to your temporalities you must now be left to take your chance. If prejudices, though they may be unfounded, exist against your possessions, I look upon myself as absolved from the duty of interference, seeing that those possessions are made use of by you to impede the progress of political knowledge, and that your pulpits re

sound with the cry of " sedition," against truths which cannot be denied and arguments which cannot be answered. You have, for years past, been cheering on the Gentry and Yeomanry in the pursuit and for the destruction of the Reformers; and, it will, therefore, not be a subject of very deep regret, if, at last, you should, like ActÆon, be devoured by your own hounds.

It is possible, that some of you may doubt whether a Parliamentary Reform would produce all the good which we contemplate; but, it is quite impossible that you should not be convinced, that it would put an end to the greatest mass of wickedness that ever existed in any nation upon earth. You know as well as I do, that the land is filled with crimes in consequence of the present mode of election. You know that drunkenness, fraud, calumny, bribery, corruption, false-swearing, and, in short, every species of infamy, are produced by this cause, and that, too, in degree and quantity wholly unparalleled in the history of the world. When I was at HONITON, in 1806, many of the wretched voters told me, in the hearing of witnesses now alive, that they knew how wicked it was to do what they did; but, that they wanted the money to pay their rents, and that they should be starved if they did otherwise. Some abused me very foully, and said, that, in advising them to vote uninfluenced by money, I was endeavouring to rob them of their blessing! For this was the term they gave to the money which they were to receive. But, indeed, the bribery and corruption, the frauds and false swearings are too notorious to need particular instances to establish their existence. The Records of Parliament, the proceedings of Election Committees, contain a greater mass of proofs of fraudulent villanies, than, as I verily believe, is to be found in the Records of all the Criminal Courts of all the other nations in the world. And, if to this be added the frauds and the perjuries, growing out of the Custom and Excise Laws, which, for the far greater part, have grown out of Paper-money, National Debts, and Standing Armies, the picture is too huge and too horrid to be endured by any one not lost to every sense of morality and honour.

Now, if this be not a true and fair statement of the case, why have none of you ventured to contradict and disprove it? There are more than fifteen thousand of you, who have livings or benefices of one sort or another, and, there are more than twenty thousand of you in orders. Out of this number can no man be found, with all your College acquirements, to put a cool and fair answer upon paper? For forty years has that venerable and most able and virtuous Reformer, Major Cartwright, challenged you to the discussion; and never has he been answered but by revilings. Not that you dislike to meddle with politics; for of what else have your printed sermons consisted for the last twenty-five years? Amongst the pamphlet-writers in favour of the wars against the French nation, who figured next after the pensioned Burke ? Who but the Ministers of the Church of England? Mr. HERBERT MARSH, who is now become a Bishop, wrote a pamphlet to prove the justice and necessity of the war; and, this gentleman had a pension, too, of more than five hundred pounds a year. Whether he has

it now is more than I can say; but, he had it in 1808. He published his pamphlet in 1799, or in 1800; and the pension was given him in the month of May, 1804. I mention this, not only as a well-recorded instance of clergymen meddling with politics; but also, as a proof, that

such meddling has not been displeasing to the Government. The late Rev. JOHN BRAND wrote a political pamphlet in favour of Pitt and the war, and he had the great living of St. GEORGE, in the borough of Southwark, given to him very soon afterwards, by the then Lord Chancellor Loughborough. Messrs. NARES and BELOE were long, and, perhaps, still are, the chief conductors of that political engine, called the BRITISH CRITIC. They have both good rich livings, if not two each. Besides, Mr. NARES, who has the living of Reading, is an Archdeacon, and Mr. BELOE was Librarian of the British Museum; the manner of his ceasing to be which, may, when I have more time, be fully recorded. The object, in giving these instances, is, not to throw blame on these gentlemen for writing on politics. I could say, that some of them have written very baldly, and, I am convinced, that, whatever may have been their intentions, they have, in the same degree as they have produced effect, done mischief. But, this is not the point at which I am aiming. The object is to show, that you have not been backward to meddle with politics; and indeed, it is notorious, that, at public meetings, held for the purpose of promoting the continuation of the late wars, you have seldom failed to take a prominent part, and that, upon one particular occasion, the Clergy of the Diocese of Salisbury, just after the death of PERCEVAL, stood alone in urging the Prince Regent to push on the war with vigour.

Your not answering us, therefore, cannot be ascribed to your dislike to enter into political discussions. No; it arises from your consciousness of the goodness of our cause, and the consequent badness of that of our opponents. You do not answer, because you cannot answer. You cannot openly say, that it would be an evil to get rid of bribery, corruption, perjury and subornation of perjury; and yet this you must say, or no answer can you give. There are no shifts and shuffles to be made avail with you. Others may say, that a Reform of the Parliament would not do good in certain other ways. But you, being clergymen, must say, at once, that you approve of bribery, corruption, and perjury, or that a Reform would be a good thing. This is the reason why you do not answer our writings, and why you endeavour to misrepresent our characters and our motives.

But, what is most surprising to me, is, that you, above all men in the world, should be able to endure the thought of the existence of such disgraceful crimes, such an audacious violation of decency and moral rectitude, such an open defiance of the religion you profess. When I have beheld the scenes of drunkenness, fraud, perjury, bribery, and of beastliness at the contested rotten borough elections, and, indeed, at all elections, where money is expended as the means of obtaining a majority on the poll, I have felt shame at the reflection that those whom I beheld were my countrymen. What, then, ought to have been my reflections, if I had been, as you are, charged with the care not only of the morals, but of the souls, of the people? At your ordination you vow before God, that you firmly believe yourselves to be called by the Holy Ghost to take upon you the teaching of the people; and, previous to your induction into any living or curacy, you most solemnly declare that you will do all in your power to lead your flocks in the paths of religion and virtue and holy living, and of your sincerity you call upon the Almighty to be your witness. It is not my wish to accuse you of being wholly unmindful of vows made with such awful solemnity; but, may I not,

then, express my surprise, that I have never heard of any one instance, in which you have appeared at any election to put a stop to or to check the abominations exhibited at such scenes? But, suppose this remissness to be excusable, which, I think, no one can suppose, ought you not to appear foremost in the ranks of those, who would apply a remedy to this monstrous evil, this unparalled wickedness? Of minor offences you are ready enough to take notice. The breach of the observance of the Lord's Day, which observance is, as you know, enjoined merely by human laws, you are apt enough to notice. You talk stoutly enough against drunkenness, profane swearing, and rioting, all which, though deserving of serious censure, are mere trifles, or, rather, they are nothing at all, when compared to those deliberate acts of bribery, corruption, and perjury, which are not only base and detestable in themselves, but which strike, with traitorous hand, at the vitals of our country's freedom and happiness. It is curious to observe, with what alacrity you push forward to join in condemning every thing that is aimed against the conduct of persons in power; how ready you are to make the charge of sedition against every man who writes or speaks in defence of the people's rights; but, not a word do you say against the violation of those rights or against any acts, however scandalous, of which persons in power have been guilty, as witness your ever-memorable conduct relative to the affair of the Duke of York and Mrs. Clarke. Instead of making your pulpits ring with condemnation of the acts which had been brought to light, though you were condemning such acts in the people every day, you stigmatized as seditious men, those who had endeavoured to put an end to such acts by the exposing them to the reprobation of the world. As if it was sedition to complain of the vile traffic which was then brought to light! Nay, it is notorious, that more than one of the clergy of the Church of England were, more or less, involved in the transactions; and, let it never be forgotten, that one; DOCTOR of the Church obtained the honour of preaching before the king and queen through the interest and at the express recommendation of Mrs. Clarke! Now, though I do not pretend to believe, that you, as a body, approved of these things, yet never did I hear of your disapprobation of them; and, I well recollect, that when, at a public meeting at Winchester, resolutions were moved strongly condemning these scan. dalous transactions, a clergyman of the Church of England was the only man who had the shamelessness to oppose them. He, too, called the resolutions seditious, which is a very convenient word, as it seems to mean any thing that those who use it please; but, the sense which we ought to put on it when used against fact and argument, is, that it means "true and unanswerable but dangerous to the corrupt.”

Amongst all the Ministers of my time PERCEVAL was the favourite of the Church. All men in great power are favourites; but there seemed to be a sort of intrinsic merit in PERCEVAL, which entitled him to your peculiar regard and affection. This man, when Attorney-General, prosecuted a tinman of Plymouth, for having offered Mr. ADDINGTON, then Minister, a sum of money for a place under the Government. This appears to have been a very ignorant man, and he had seen so much of, bribery, that he, I dare say, thought there was no danger in what he was doing. Perceval, however, made a grand display of the enormity of the offence, and took occasion to assert, that in no age, in no country, were men in power so free from this species of traffic. He, thereupon,

called for punishment on the tinman, who was fined and imprisoned, whose family was utterly ruined, and who soon after died with grief and misery. Well! "But was it not right," you will say, "to punish this attempt to bribe ?" Yes: but now let us look at the conduct of this same Perceval, when he became a Minister, six years afterwards. The exposures of 1809 included every species of bribery; selling of offices; swapping of offices for seats; all sorts of trafficking in this way. But, at last, out came a distinct charge of Mr. MADDOCKS against this same Perceval himself, whom Mr. MADDOCKS accused of having, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was also a Privy Councillor, ČONNIVED at the sale of a seat in Parliament, and at the causing the holder of the seat to quit it afterwards, because the holder would not vote for the acquittal of the Duke of York! This was the distinct charge which Mr. MADDOCKS made against Perceval, and he pledged himself to prove it by witnesses, at the bar of the House of Commons, if the House would hear those witnesses.

Now, then, what did your favourite Perceval, the unrelenting prosecutor of the poor tinman do? Why, he did not deny the charge, but, he begged of the House to get rid of Mr. MADDOCKS' motion, and not to hear his witnesses; and, why? Because, as he said, those who brought forward such charges were enemies to the Constitution, and were actuated by seditious motives. And, generations to come will hear with indignation, that the House determined by a large majority, that, they would not hear the witnesses! And Perceval continued to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, he continued to be a Privy Councillor, he was afterwards exalted to be Prime Minister, and when he was killed by Mr. Bellingham, you, particularly in the diocese of Salisbury, sent up an Address to the Regent, in which you eulogized his character!

Do you think, that these things can be forgotten? Do you think, that the calling the exposure of such things seditious will silence the voices or assuage the indignation of the virtuous part of mankind? Do you wish the people of England to be a moral and religious people, and yet do you wish that they should not hold these things in abhorrence? Do you wish them to be honest and true, and yet do you wish that they should approve of the foulest of frauds and the basest of perjuries? Do you wish them to believe in the Scriptures, and yet do you wish to regard those men as seditious, who reprobate bribery and corruption and falseswearing, agreeably to the principles of those very Scriptures?

SAMUEL, when about to yield up his Rulership over the Israelites, appeals, thus, to their justice as to his conduct in his great office :-" Be"hold, here I am: witness against me before the Lord, and before his "anointed: whose ox have I taken ? or whose ass have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand "have I received any bribe to blind mine enemies therewith? and I will restore it you."-1 Samuel, chap. xii, verse 3. But his sons, whom he had appointed to rule after him, appear to have been of a different character. "And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment."-1 Samuel, chap. viii.

"

verse 3.

What was the consequence? Nothing short of a revolution; for the people, abhorring so much this act of taking bribes, called upon Samuel to leave them under the sway of a King; and, though Samuel told them, that a King would scourge them and plunder them; though, in short,