Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

THENEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR. LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

1897.

CHARLES SLOMAN,

PRINTER,

GREAT YARMOUTH.

PREFACE.

WHEN I published my "Conservative Address to the Freeholders of the British Empire," in January last, I pledged myself, "at a future and not very distant period," to employ my pen upon a subject connected therewith. This pledge I have here redeemed. I further expressed a hope, that I might be able to make some amends for the imperfection of the remarks then hastily thrown before the Public. How far this hope has been realized others must determine.

We are now, in all human appearance, on the eve of Revolution; of that Revolution which, in the year 1819, I endeavoured to impress, as strongly as I was able, upon the honest and intelligent mind, the not very distant probability of. A little time must now witness, either the preservation or the destruction of our Establishment, in Church and State. Before that time arrives, it behoves all to do what they can for the good of their country; for that which, in their estimation, constitutes its good. This solemn duty I, for one, have here endeavoured to perform; and with such adversaries as I have had to cope with, such severity as I have been compelled to use, and such prospects as, on

every side, surround and threaten, I have perhaps need enough to exclaim, "God send me a good deliverance."

I humbly hope he will-but, at all events, I hold it no dereliction of virtue to expose the corrupters of public virtue to contempt.

I am quite aware, that the task I have imposed upon myself I have very imperfectly accomplished; that against these "Whigs of England"-now become the ruin and the shame of England—I have not employed half the severity I ought; that I have too leniently stigmatized the deplorableness of their folly, and the greatness of their iniquity; and that I have only produced a faint likeness of the men, whose crimes against their country invite the strongest, the darkest, the most enduring representation. Against Whigs of the Old School, all censure would have been uncalled for, and all recrimination vain; but these Whigs, creating and outdoing the very Radicals themselves in mischief, hang over us as a disgusting terror. Isaac Tomkins is not a more loathsome defiler of "the Aristocracy of England" than they. The coarseness even of that coarse mind must yield to them in injury to the order.

It will be found that I have given, in some measure, a Religious cast to this Political Tract. The subject will be seen clearly to have required it. That subject is, His Majesty's Declaration in Defence of the Established Church of England and Ireland. Let one fall, and both will fall!

I have not much care upon me about the Whig insinuations, that the Clergy ought not to go out of their line,

and engage in the political disputes of the day; that we are more careful after our dues than our duties; and that they can only afford to venerate the conscientious, quiet, domestic Clergyman, who sees and says nothing. And yet, if this Clergyman happens to imbibe their principles, to take their views, and to thunder out his anathemas against his meeker brethren in their spirit and language, you hear none of these insinuations against the order then; but, one and all, they come forward, and exclaim, "behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" O this wretched hypocrisy! this insulting, sickening mode of reprehension! God deliver us from the esteem of such respecters of the Church and her Clergy.

I am afraid I have evinced, in these pages, a want of acquaintance with the leading politicians and their plans of the day. Living much in retirement, and seldom indulging beyond a mere weekly provincial paper (in which, however, I find, for the most part, an excellent abstract of the general bearings of the public mind,) I cannot be supposed to know much of the secret turnings and windings of party. I see the empire divided into two very distinct and well-defined orders of men; the one seeking the preservation, and the other the destruction of our Established Institutions; and, seeing this, I see quite enough. Still I have had some difficulty in making up this work as a whole. The great political horizon is every day, nay, almost every hour, varying its appearance, so that we have hardly, as it were, any enduring subject to write upon. Several pages I have, on this account, been

« AnteriorContinua »