worthy? Is there no Balm in Gilead? We hope better things both for Mr Brougham and for England. What we admire most of all in the new bill brought into Parliament by Mr Brougham, is a circumstance that we doubt not will detract greatly from its merits in the eyes of many of Mr Brougham's customary admirers; and this is the practical acknowledgment it contains of the necessity for connecting the national means of general edution with the established means of religious instruction. Even in the eyes of Mr Brougham, the great problem has at last been satisfactorily solved, and he seems inclined to agree with our own great Christian philosopher, Dr Chalmers, in regarding the religion of the Bible as the sole specific for all the distempers of society.' What a triumph of truth is here! What a leap from the cold blindness of the old Edinburgh Review, to this frank and proud confession of the practical states man! What an example of the teaching of the times! Most cordially do we hope and trust, that the unanimous support of the gentry and clergy of England will be given to the main principle and purpose, if not to all the minuter details, of the proposed enactment. The days are gone by, when any British statesman could listen to the degrading doctrine, that it is possible to have an over-enlightened population. Look at the history of any nation in the world. Look, above all, at our own national history. Where are to be found, in the annals of man, eras of GOOD separate from eras of LIGHT? Does not the whole strain of our own political improvement keep harmonious pace with the increase of knowledge-true knowledge-among the people of our island? Were not the people more enlightened in the days of Elizabeth and her heroic counsellors, than they had been in the days of Henry VII. or Henry VIII.? Was it not at that very time that the blessed light of the Reformation had begun at length to tell effectually upon the stirred up darkness of a fast dissolving night of ignorance? Were not the people of England much farther advanced in true knowledge at the period of King William's revolution than they had ever been before? Had the motion of the general mind been retrogressive-or, say rather, had the true people of England ever before been pos

sessed of so much true wisdom and true knowledge, as when they rose up, heart and hand, to embody in action the knowledge and the wisdom of the greatest statesman ever England produced-and to check, with the sole adequate energies of a mighty and an enlightened empire, the mad and vicious career of revolutionary France, and her widening darkness, misnamed illumi nation?

But the argument is no less conclusive when applied to place than to time; and so applied, it will furnish the best answer to an objection which it is easy to foresee in certain quarters. The present time, it will be said, is acknowledged to be that in which Britain has attained the highest pitch of illumination-how then comes it, that it is the time also in which the wellbeing of the state has been most endangered by a mad spirit of encroachment among the lower orders of the people? Now, it is true, that the wellbeing of the state has been attacked and endangered-but is it not also true, that it has been defended and preserved? The question comes to be, who have been the enemies to whose assaults we owed our danger? who the champions to whose zeal we are indebted for our preservation? Which of these classes of men are the most enlightened-the most educated? In other words, has the security of the state been attacked by men of educa tion, and in districts where education prevails-or has not the spirit of these men, and of these places, been her only safeguard-comparatively ignorant men being the agents, and comparative ignorant places the scenes, of tumult and disaffection.

To these questions, whether we refer them to England or to Scotland, the answer will not be difficult. The enemies of our peace in both countries, have been found among the most ignorant inhabitants of both; and the scenes of tumult in both, have been precisely the most ignorant districts of both. In both kingdoms, the public tranquillity has been assaulted, only by a set of poor, ignorant, and deluded creatures; although, it is true, that these have all along been headed by a few chiefs, who cannot plead so much ignorance in excuse of their own greater offences, men, who, "inspiring venom, and forging illusions as they list," have been able, in the words of Milton,

Thence to raise,

At last, distempered, discontented thoughts, Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires." But to these men the question has no necessary reference. Whereas the defence of the established order of things, and the ancient constitution and faith of the land, has enlisted on its side the whole mass of our better taught population. Where was the tranquillity of England assaulted? In the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, by far the most ignorant districts between the Tweed and the Land's end. Where was the tranquil lity of Scotland assaulted? In the manufacturing towns of Lanarkshire, and Renfrewshire, and Ayrshire, the very places in all Scotland where it may be demonstrated that the means of education are most inadequate to the extent of the population-the only places where the wise and salutary pro visions of the laws of Scotland, for the education of the people of Scotland, have been rendered entirely nugatory, in consequence of a sudden and unforeseen accumulation of inhabitants, taking away every thing but the name of parishes; and, in effect, depriving these places of all that is most valuable in the provisions of the national legislature, both for their general and their spiritual instruction?

Nothing could be more degrading to the character of human intellect, than the converse of the proposition-and, therefore, nothing could be more false. The people of England ought to be educated, and must be educated. They are already, take the face of the island all over, by far the most educated people in the world; and hitherto they have always been the most virtuous and orderly people in the world also, simply by reason of the light that is and has been amongst them. In the present state of the world, however, it is quite evident, that a great and systematic attempt has been made, and is in making, to persuade men that the virtue and order of British citizenship are things inconsistent with the posses

sion of moral and political light; and it is with this attempt, that the guardians of the state are most imperiously called upon to grapple and contend. The defect, in the existing means of education, is very considerable; but Mr Brougham's researches have shown most clearly, that the defect has been much, very much over-rated. Remove the defect, amplify the means; this is right and proper; but it is no less right and proper to take care that the defect be prudently removed, and the means judiciously amplified. In a word, the enlargement of the means of general education must be rendered co-extensive with an enlargement in the means of religious education. The communication of light must not be permitted to be rendered, even for a moment, an instrument in the aid of evil. The eye of legislative wisdom must not be blinded by any mists of popular jealousy. Satisfied that they are doing well, the framers of our laws must be satisfied, also, that they are doing wisely; and, knowing that "false teachers are abroad among the people," it is their business and their duty, to take care that the teachers appointed by the state, and supported by the public, are men incapable of taking sinful advantages of their situation. Such is the view which Mr Brougham and his committee have taken of the subject; and they have decided, that the parochial schoolmasters of England shall be, like those of Scotland, placed under the control of the established ministers of religion.*

It is possible that some of the dissenters may object to this arrangement, as intolerant on the part of the established church; and we shall even concede, that if the bill made it necessary that the peculiar doctrines of the national Church should be taught in any words of human invention, there might be good ground for the objection. But, in truth, although the bill provides that the parish schoolmaster shall be a member of the established church, it by no means provides, that he

shall instruct his pupils in the formularies of the church. On the contrary, The Bible is the only religious book which is ever to be permitted to enter the doors of the school-house, and no religious formulas are to be recited by the children, except the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Even to this, it is possible, there may be some objections, but these must be from a class, whose wishes ought not, we humbly think, to be treated with any very great worship by the legislature of any Christian country. These must be found among the dissenters, indeed-not among the dissenters from the Church of England only, a body that has furnished so many "bright and shining lights" to the church catholic of Christ-but among the dissenters from the church catholic herself-aliens, in name, or in all but name, from the common faith of civilized Europe and Christendom. These are they that call every Christian principle by the name of intolerance, being themselves of all sects the most blindly and fiercely intolerant. To these, or rather to those that have been shaken by their arguments, we would point out as a subject of deep and serious reflection, the following passage from the writings of one of the most mild and tolerant of all philosophers, Mr Coleridge.

"Here I fully coincide with Frederic H. Jacobi, that the only true spirit of Tolerance consists in our conscientious toleration of each other's intolerance. Whatever pretends to be more than this, is either the unthinking cant of fashion, or the soul-palsying narcotic of moral and religious indifference. All of us without exception, in the same mode though not in the same degree, are necessarily subjected to the risk of mistaking positive opinions for certainty and clear insight. From this yoke we cannot free ourselves, but by ceasing to be men; and this too not in order to transcend but to sink below our human nature. For if in one point of view it be the mulct of our fall, and of the corruption of our will; it is equally true, that contemplated from another point, it is the price and consequence of our progressiveness. To him who is compelled to pace to and fro within the high walls and in the narrow court-yard of a prison, all objects may appear clear and distinct. It is the traveller journeying onward, full of heart and hope, with an evervarying horizon, on the boundless plain, that is liable to mistake clouds for mountains, and the miriage of drouth for an expanse of refreshing waters.

"But notwithstanding this deep con

viction of our general fallibility, and the most vivid recollection of my own, I dare avow with the German philosopher, that as far as opinions, and not motives; principles, tolerant, nor wish to be regarded as such. and not men, are concerned; I neither am According to my judgment, it is mere ostentation, or a poor trick that hypocrisy plays with the cards of nonsense, when a man makes protestation of being perfectly tolerant in respect of all principles, opinions and persuasions, those alone excepted which render the holders intolerant. For he eithindifferent towards all truth, and finds noer means to say by this, that he is utterly thing so insufferable as the persuasion of there being any such mighty value or importance attached to the possession of the Truth as should give a marked preference to any one conviction above any other; or else he means nothing, and amuses himself with articulating the pulses of the air instead of inhaling it in the more healthful and profitable exercise of yawning. That which doth not withstand, hath itself no standing place. To fill a station is to exclude or repel others, and this is not the less definition of moral, than of material, solidity. We live by continued acts of defence, that involve a sort of offensive warfare. But a man's principles, on which he grounds his Hope and his Faith, are the life of his life. We live by Faith, says the philosophic Apostle; and faith without ful positiveness, or fanatical bodily sensaprinciples is but a flattering phrase for wiltion. Well, and of good right therefore, do we maintain with more zeal, than we should defend body or estate, a deep and inward conviction, which is as the moon to us; and like the moon with all its massy shadows and deceptive gleams, it yet lights us on our way, poor travellers as we are, and benighted pilgrims. With all its spots and changes and temporary eclipses, with all its vain halos and bedimming vapours, it yet reflects the light that is to rise on us, which even now is rising, though intercepted from our immediate view by the mountains that enclose and frown over the vale of our mortal life.

"This again is the mystery and the dignity of our human nature, that we cannot give up our reason, without giving up at the same time our individual personality. For that must appear to each man to be his reason which produces in him the highest sense of certainty; and yet it is not reason, except as far as it is of universal validity, and obligatory on all mankind. There is a one heart for the whole mighty mass of Humanity, and every pulse in each particular vessel strives to beat in concert with it. who asserts that truth is if no importance except in the signification of sincerity, confounds sense with madness, and the word of God with a dream. If the power of reasoning be the Gift of the Supreme Reason, that we be sedulous, yea, and militant in

He

the endeavour to reason aright, is his implied Command. But what is of permanent and essential interest to one man must needs be so to all, in proportion to the means and opportunities of each. Wo to him by whom these are neglected, and double wo to him by whom they are withheld; for he robs at once himself and his neighbour. That man's Soul is not dear to himself, to whom the Souls of his Brethren are not dear. As far as they can be influenced by him, they are parts and properties of his own soul, their faith his faith, their errors his burthen, their righteousness and bliss his righteousness and his reward-and of their Guilt and Misery his own will be the echo. As much as I love my fellow-men, so much and no more will I be intolerant of their Heresies and Unbelief-and I will

honour and hold forth the right hand of fellowship to every individual who is equally intolerant of that which he conceives such in me. We will both exclaim-I know not, what antidotes among the complex views, impulses and circumstances, that form your moral Being, God's gracious Providence may have vouchsafed to you against the serpent fang of this Error-but it is a viper, and its poison deadly, although through higher influences some men may take the reptile to their bosom, and remain

unstung.

"In one of these viperous Journals, which deal out Profaneness, Hate, Fury, and Sedition throughout the Land, I read the following paragraph. The Brahman believes that every man will be saved in his own persuasion, and that all religions are equally pleasing to the God of all. The Christian confines salvation to the Believer in his own Vedahs and Shasters. Which is the more humane and philosophic creed of the two? Let question answer question. Self-complacent Scoffer! Whom meanst thou by GOD? The God of Truth? and can He be pleased with falsehood and the debasement or utter suspension of the Reason which he gave to man that he might receive from him the sacrifice of Truth! Or the God of love and mercy! And can He be pleased with the blood of thousands poured out under the wheels of Jaggernaut, or with the shrieks of children offered up as fire offerings to Baal or to Moloch? Or dost thou mean the God of holiness and infinite purity? and can He be pleased with abominations unutterable and more than brutal defilements? and equally pleased too as with that religion, which commands us that we have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness but to reprove them? With that religion, which strikes the fear of the Most High so deeply, and the sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin so inwardly, that the Believer anxiously inquires: Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?' and which makes answer to him.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of

But

thee, but to walk justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.' I check myself. It is at once folly and profanation of Truth, to reason with the man who can place before his eyes a minister of the Gospel directing the eye of the widow from the corse of her husband upward to his and her Redeemer, (the God of the living and not of the dead) and then the remorseless Brahmin goading on the disconsolate victim to the flames of her husband's funeral pile, abandoned by, and abandoning the helpless pledges of their love-and yet dare ask, which is the more humane and philosophic creed of the two? No! No! when such opinions are in question I neither am, or will be, or wish to be regarded as, tolerant.

So much, for the present, concerning the plan for establishing parochial schools in England, under the superintendence of the Church of England. There is a subject nearer home, and therefore more immediately interesting to us, on which we would fain be permitted to add a very few words of our own, and a short extract from the writings of one of our own Scottish philanthropists. We have already hinted, and it is indeed universally known, that the sudden rise in the population of many of our manufacturing towns in Scotland, has been attended with effects most deeply injurious to the inhabitants of these places, in all that regards their intellectual, moral, religious, and political being. Of these the most plain and obvious are, first, their deprivation of those common means of education, which the old established existence of parish schools has furnished for centuries to the lower orders, throughout all the other districts of Scotland; and, secondly, their deprivation not only of the means of attending on the public ordinances of religion, but even of every incentive to the desire of attending on these ordinances.

Now, we are quite sensible, that there is something excessively disgusting in the cry about the neglect of religion, which on many occasions of political alarm, is lifted up by men who have never been in the habit of shewing any great care about the practice of religion themselves. That cry was never heard more distinctly, nor more offensively, than it has been for the last six months in Scotland. But it is time that the higher orders amongst us, should open their eyes to the ridicule, which they cannot fail to draw upon themselves, by having recourse to such thin and transparent

devices as these. It is time they should see and know, that if it be true there is implanted in all men's minds a natural reverence for religion, it is no less true, that it is planted by the side of a strong natural feeling of contempt, for all false pretences of godliness whatever-and of a most indignant scorn for all that would turn the pretence of religion, into an instrument for the accomplishment of any purposes of their own. Now, it is possible, that many men may be little disposed to religious feeling themselves, and yet very sincerely and deeply convinced, not only that religion is the sole adequate guardian of public order, and of civil security; but that, without religion, no reflective man can be comfortable in his mind while here, or calm in the prospect of exchanging this life for another. This is very possible, but it will not do. The poor will not have religion preached to them by their irreligious superiors. "Si vis me flere flendum tibi ipsi est-" If you would have me go to church, and reverence my spiritual guide, you must go thither likewise, and you also must shew him reverence. This is the law of human nature, and they that would take advantage of any other principle of our nature, to promote either our own, or their own good, must not neglect it.

The sense, however, of the importance of religion to the well-being of all society, which all persons of superior station have found themselves compelled to express in these trying moments-may be made use of as the best of all arguments to the minds of these men, for setting about, seriously and calmly, now that the moment of trial and alarm is over, a more effectual and authoritative expression of the same belief. If in the day of trouble, they themselves were glad to call upon the aid of the Christian Faith, and to reproach themselves for having in some sort neglected the support which that Faith lends to the well-being of civil society-surely, unless they be of opinion that no day of similar trouble ever can return, they are bound, even on grounds of human prudence alone, to bestir themselves for the extension of the blessings which the knowledge and feeling of that faith bestows. But we should be very

sorry indeed, and very much ashamed, did we suppose that we ought to rest with this. It becomes these men to act in this matter, not on the grounds of human prudence alone-but on far higher and far better grounds. It be comes them to lay to their hearts the serious question-whether they themselves have not been in their way partakers in the same spirit of neglect, the existence of which they deplore in others. It becomes them to amend their own conduct-not at one moment-nor for one moment-but seriously-deliberately, and sacredly. They plead no plea of ignorance-they have none such to plead. Their errors have arisen from other sources, it may be, than those of others, and they have not led to any similar immediate effects in themselves;- but they ought to ask of themselves-with no light voice of self-examination-whether their errors have not been in part productive of the very errors they have been condemning-whether had they had the class to which they belong-set the example they ought to have set, it is either probable or possible, that their inferiors would have acted as they have done. It is to such men that Dr Chalmers seems to have chiefly addressed himself, in the last of his quarterly publications, " on the Christian and Civic Economy of large towns"-and it is to such, that we hope the issue will shew he has not addressed himself in vain.

His observations being written and published in Glasgow, may, of course, be understood as applying more immediately to the inhabitants and the necessities of that great and populous city, and its neighbourhood. It appears, however, that the particular defects he points out in the state of education, and the means of religious instruction at Glasgow, are far from being confined to that place alone-or even to the manufacturing towns in the same district. The evil seems to be experienced more or less all over Scotland, wherever there is a town. Town parishes contain prodigiously more inhabitants than country onesand therefore, the establishment of one school for each parish, which may answer tolerably well in a country place, must be totally ineffectual and useless in a town. What shall we say, for example, to one parish in Dr