remarks, which he pronounces "sensible," on the English laws relating to Marriages:

"Marriage consists, in our view, of two things-a civil contract, which makes the offspring legitimate in the eye of the law, and involves temporal obligations, and a vow before God. Now, with respect to the first, it ought to be competent to persons of all persuasions to form the civil contract, without any violence to their religious principles, however erroneous, and without any interference with religious rites whatever. Oliver Cromwell was right for once, in causing the civil contract to be made before the civil magistrate. Neither Jews, nor Turks, nor Christians, can object to this, if they choose to live under the laws of the land. The magistrate, therefore, ought to certify and register the due contraction of this engagement. But as for the religious rite, that should be left to the religious community to which each person belongs. I cannot but think in the case, for instance, of the Unitarians, that there is both a species of persecution and profanation committed. I need not tell you that I abhor the faith of the Unitarians;

so I do that of the infidel Jews and Mahometans ;-but I think that none of these should be compelled, in order to contract a marriage, to be witnesses and partakers of a ceremony which their conscience condemns; and it is, under these circumstances, a degradation to the minister, and a profanation of the ceremony, that it should take place. * * * But many of the English clergy seem to think, with Paley, that the solemnization of a marriage by a justice of the peace, (though without forbidding any previous or subsequent religious ceremony which the consciences of the parties might dictate,) was calculated to degrade the clergy. They stickle for their exclusive right of solemnizing marriage between those who think the ceremony blasphemous, and who blaspheme the doctrines implied in it! One has scarcely patience with men who thus perversely glory in degradation. They remind me in many points of the dog in the fable, who mistook the clog round his neck for a badge of honourable distinction." P. 496.

On the case of the Unitarians, with regard to the marviage-laws, here referred to, the Reviewer observes,

"What has been done, and what is likely to be done hereafter, with regard to the disgraceful state of things here alluded to, affords a fair sample of the pertinacity with

which a certain party successfully defend every abuse in the ecclesiastical institutions of England. Once and again bar the Unitarians petitioned Parliament to be allowed the indulgence actually enjoyed by the Jews and Quakers, that of legally solemnizing their own marriages, without employing the ministers or the ritual of the English Established Church. Once and again have their petitions been rejected! One learned Prelate is reported to have said, that he would not give them credit for any scruples of conscience about the matter! and Parliament itself seemed to be of opinion, that it was better that their consciences should suffer violence, than that the venerable rust which during two centuries and a half, has incrusted the institu tions of the Church should be injured by any profane attempts to purify them. So the question rests for the present. But as the Unitarians will probably persevere, their individual complaint is likely in time to be listened to,and, in the usual comprehensive spirit of our legislation, we shall have a sort of privilegium enacted, to redress that particular grievance the enemies of reform gladly yielding thus far, in order to obviate a more alarming evil, the removal of abuses by a general law founded on the plain principles of wisdom and justice. Nor is their policy a bad one; for, amidst the prevailing selfishness of mankind, general principles have little chance of finding an advocate, when once individual interests are satisfied."-Pp. 496, 497.

Having pointed out and commented on with approbation the contents of the pamphlet, the Reviewer proceeds to take notice of a few things in the actual constitution of the Church of England which prove the necessity of a further reformation. He touches first on the want of sympathy between the Church and the people of England.

"The Church of England is unpopular. It is connected with the Crown and the Aristocracy; but it is not regarded with affection by the mass of the people;-and this circumstance greatly lessens its utility, and has powerfully contributed to multiply the number of Dissenters. To this day it feels the effects of the peculiar conjuncture at which it was established. It was the child of the Civil Government, when that Government was a Despotism; and it learnt to echo the language and to copy the arbitrary proceedings of its patrons, till it shared with them the indignation of the people, and fell with them in one common

overthrow. Thus the Church has never thoroughly harmonized with the popular part of our Constitution; and we have been often amused, by observing the soreness with which some English clergymen still speak of the House of Commons and its Committees as if the terrors of the Long Parliament were still haunting their memories. This notorious spirit of Toryism would of itself tend to alienate the affections of the people from the clergy as a body; but other causes have combined to aggravate the mischief.

"The system of Church patronage, for instance, while it makes many of the clergy directly dependent on the rich and great, makes all of them independent of popular favour; and their course of life keeps them somewhat remote from the contact of public opinion. Again, the rank which the English clergy hold in society is often prejudicial to their influence with the poor. Birth, habit and education, have identified them with the higher orders; they share their feelings, and enjoy their pleasures; and they sometimes are ignorant, from mere inexperience, of the language and manner which are most intelligible to the common people, and most readily find the way to their hearts. Hence has arisen the peculiar unpopularity of their style and manner of preaching. It trembles to offend a cultivated taste and a critical judgment:-it is generally, therefore, free from gross extravagances, but is, beyond all other preaching, tame, and unimpressive to uneducated minds. The same character prevails in their writings;-their Tracts, intended for circulation among the poor, are mostly stiff, and have about them an air of lecturing and prosing like that of a condescending superior, addressing readers almost of a different species from himself.

"Other causes have their weight with the middling classes of society in indisposing them to the existing Establishment. The great incomes and the pluralities enjoyed by the higher clergy cannot but appear excessive ;-the difficulty of procuring places of worship, and ministers of the Established Church, to meet the increased population of the country in large towns and in manufacturing districts, argues something deficient in its actual constitution: And wherever the blame ought most to fall, the general impression is unfavourable to the Church, from the feeling, that while it absorbs a large part of the revenue of the country, it does not sufficiently perform its work. The old laws against Conventicles, and the inflexible strictness with

which the service of the Church is confined to scribed forms of the Liturgy, place its ministers disadvantage, when opposed to the unfettered and activity of the Dissenters. Whilst any other Ch teacher may address an audience wherever he can find and in the language which he may judge most approp to the occasion, a clergyman of the Establishment preach only within the walls of his parish Church, he may not preach there, unless he choose also to rea morning or evening prayer at the same time—a re which makes it impossible to open the Churches purpose in country parishes on any other day than We are not now discussing the propriety or impropy of these and similar regulations; we are only assertin they tend to make the Church less popular than we to be-and when it is notorious that no steps have be taken for the last two centuries to amend or improve its institutions, it is not unnatural that it should be taxed with indolence and indifference, and with thinking more of its dignity than its duties."-Pp. 502-504.

Next, the Reviewer remarks on some things in the present state of the Church of England which are bad in themselves, independent of any effect which they may produce on public opinion. For example, "The Church of England is Exclusive, and has, in many instances, provoked the separation from it, which it affects at once to lament and condemn." Again, "The Government and External Constitution of the Church are full of abuses, and bear divers marks of the mistaken notions and extreme misgovernment of the times in which they were formed, and of those which neglected to amend them. It may never have occurred to some of our readers," (the Reviewer proceeds-but bappily we cannot even imagine the same thing of the readers of the CHRISTIAN REFORMER,) "that the Greek word, Ecclesia, which we translate Church,' was the peculiar term used to denote the general assembly of the people in the old democracies; that it essentially expresses 'a popularly constituted meeting; and that such, in great measure, was the original constitution of the Christian society. We need not say with what different associations our English Version of it is now connected; we need not ask what popular elements are left, in a body in which the people have no voice at all, either by themselves or their representatives; where the chief officers, the Bishops, are

ppointed by the Crown, and are accountable to no one but he Archbishops and the Crown for the manner in which hey discharge their trust."" Then," says the Reviewer, comes the system of Pluralities and Dispensations, he relics of the worst times of Popery, which the Protesant Church of England retains, even in the nineteenth entury. One person may hold two benefices, if they are within forty miles of one another; and the distance is always computed, not by the number of miles along the road, but as if the incumbent could fly with the crow, or ride on a steeple-hunt from one of his cures to the other;to say nothing of the absurdity of fixing on a such a distance as the maximum to be allowed by law ;-for if a minister can discharge his duties in a parish forty miles distant from him, he may just as easily fulfil them in one that is four hundred. Again, those persons who have taken degrees in civil law, and the domestic chaplains of noblemen, are permitted to hold two benefices. In the one case, this indulgence was granted to encourage a study which the clergy in ancient times always laboured to propagate; but now, amid the ignorance of the Civil law which prevails in England, and when the degree of Doctor of Laws does not necessarily imply an acquaintance with its simplest rudiments, its continuance is utterly ridiculous. In the other, it marks how little the Reformation in England was able to correct abuses patronized by the Aristocracy; while the readiness with which the friends of the Church acquiesced in them, shows how greatly they wanted some of the most essential qualities in the character of perfect reformers."

An extraordinary defect in the Church of England, observed by all intelligent foreigners, is the total want of any system of Education, peculiarly fitted for those who are to become ministers of the church, and this is animadverted on with spirit by the Reviewer. A parish boy is taught the trade of a shoemaker before he is expected to be entrusted with his neighbours' shoes, but the souls of the whole parish are entrusted to a priest who, for any thing his teachers at the University know to the contrary, may not be able to read so as to be heard and understood by the parishioners in the pew next the desk. We say nothing of his possible ignorance of divinity, or of the actual ignorance of it and of the disinclination for theological studies which is so notorious amongst the clergy.

The object of the CHRISTIAN REFORMER, as expressed