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of revolutionary France, the commander in chief of all her armies belonged to the communion of the Greek Church; her minister of finance was a protestant, and her premier, a papist. Her affairs, civil and military, were not the worse conducted, in her agonizing struggle for existence, because she disfranchises none of her people of their political rights, on account of their religious opinions or belief.

But the ministerial and lay patronage of the Anglican Church is subject to a much higher and more awful objection than the mere want of political wisdom, in shutting out, for ever, so much talent, learning, and efficiency from the service of the State. It almost of necessity ensures a constant supply of formalism, at least, if not of absolute irreligion, to the clerical establishment.'

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Mr. Bristed cites the words of the benevolent Granville Sharp in his " Law of Retribution," as expressing his own sentiment: If I am prejudiced at all, I am sure it is in favour of Episcopacy. I am thoroughly convinced by the Holy Scriptures, that the institution of that order in the Christian Church is of God; and that the only defect in the English • Establishment of it, is the want of a free election to the office.' It is singular that that learned and good man should have failed to perceive, that, how consonant soever a free election may be with ancient usage and with primitive episcopacy, it is altogether incompatible with an Establishment. following account is given of the present state of what Mr. Bristed calls, we know not why, the American-Anglo-Church.

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At present there are nine bishops in the American-Anglo-Church, to wit, of the eastern diocese, including the states of Maine, NewHampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode-Island; of the states, respectively, of Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio. There are two dioceses, the state of Delaware, and the state of North Carolina, which have no bishops. Every state in the Union may become a diocese whenever its protestant episcopalians are sufficiently numerous, and deem it expedient.

The whole Church is governed by the General Convention, whose power pervades every diocese. It sits regularly once in three years; but may be especially convened in the interval. It consists of an upper house, composed of all the existing bishops; and of a lower house, containing a delegated portion of clergy and laity from each diocese. The state conventions are held, for the most part, annually in each diocese, and consist of clergy and lay-delegates from every separate congregation. These bodies legislate for their respective dioceses; but their canons must not contradict the constitution of the general Church.

• The liturgy, articles, and homilies of the Anglican Church are adopted, with some few slight, local alterations. No particular revenucs are attached to the episcopate; and the bishops, generally, are parish priests, in addition to their bishoprics. But efforts are making

in several dioceses to raise a bishop's fund, in order to disengage the diocesan from parochial duty, and leave him at leisure to perform the services that are deemed more peculiarly episcopal. Archbishops there are none, nor prebendaries, nor deans, nor archdeacons, nor a long list of et ceteras to be found in the Anglican Church; the only orders are three, bishops, presbyters, and deacons. The senior bishop presides in the house of bishops, during the session of the General Convention.

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The parish priests are elected, according to the charters of the congregations. Some Churches choose their minister by the vestry, consisting of persons elected annually by the pew-holders. Others by ballot, the whole congregation voting. The bishops have no direct patronage no livings in their gift. The clergy are settled by the choice or call of the people to whom they minister; and the stipend is fixed by the compact between the pastor and the congregation; and the common law enforces the fulfilment of this contract on both sides, whence all undue dependence of the clergy on the people is prevented.'

Into the bosom of this, his mother church, Mr. Bristed, after some erratic movements, and quarrelling with Dr. Mason, states himself to have returned; but whether, having relinquished physic and law, he has embraced divinity as a profession, and taken orders, we do not clearly understand from his metaphorical language. Our concern, however, is with the book, not with the man, except so far as the validity of his testimony is concerned, and that we see no reason to question. Of Mr. Bristed's talents as an author, we have given our opinion in reviewing his former work. These "Thoughts," as might be anticipated from the Title, are written in the same desultory, spirited style. They display, however, no small portion of acuteness, extensive, though somewhat loosely packed information, and, upon the whole, just Scriptural notions of the subject. The Author has got hold of some plain facts, and he does not seem over solicitous as to the order and mode of presenting them. Exception may be taken to some of his statements, great offence will be given by others, and splenetic criticism might find ample employment in his pages. But the general truth of his representations cannot be questioned; his facts will at least weigh down Mr. Wilks's reasonings; and the conclusion to which it will at all events conduct an American reader, will be, that a church-establishment is not necessary for the maintenance of Christianity.

Mr. Bristed begins with Ireland, and he asks Mr. Wilks:

• If it be sound doctrine that a church establishment is necessary to prevent a Christian nation from degenerating into heathenism, how is it, that, under the Hibernian church-establishment, Ireland has, ever since the time of Elizabeth to the present hour, (a period of

nearly three hundred years,) been positively increasing in popery, paganism, persecution, ignorance, and crime; so as now to become an object of apprehension and terror, instead of being, what her natural situation of capacity point her out to be, the efficient right arm of the British empire?........ The existing state, moral and physical, of Ireland, is, most assuredly, no proof of the Christianizing tendencies of the Anglican and Hibernian church-establish

ments.'

The Church of Ireland has the largest revenues of any Ecclesiastical Establishment in the world. It is bloated with wealth, and pampered into indolence. Yet, in the plenitude of its secular power, what has it achieved for Ireland? In that country, the operations of the Establishment have met with little or no counteraction from Puritans and Methodists: it has had pretty much its own way till lately. There has been full time enough allowed to shew what an Ecclesiastical Establishment, backed by the Aristocracy, and uninfested with Evangelicals, can do. And what has it done? Increased the amount of the tithes and the number of Papists. The history of the Protestant Church of Ireland would not bear the light.

Mr. Bristed asks again :

'If it be a correct position, that a church establishment is necessary to preserve a Christian country from the darkness of heathen ignorance, how happens it that there has been generally, and is now, a larger proportional aggregate of evangelical piety out of, than in the Church of England? To say nothing for the present, of the condition of the state religion under the Tudors and Stuarts, its formalism and deadness during the reigns of William, of Anne, and of the first two sovereigns of the Brunswick dynasty, are sufficiently notorious to all who are acquainted with the ecclesiastical history of the period.'

From the restoration of the second Charles, to the rise of Methodism in the reign of George the second, Dissenters stood alone in defence of the best of causes. They alone maintained the depravity of human nature, which no baptismal waters could wash away; they preached the great tenets of the Reformation, the doctrines of justification by faith alone, and of regeneration by the Holy Spirit; when they were ridiculed by the established clergy, in defiance of their own articles and homilies, as the dogmas of fanaticism; and they, singly, dared to protest against the fashionable vices of the nation, the profligacy of a corrupt or a careless court, at the hazard of being treated as outlaws from society, and traitors to the state.

Of them may it be said-except the Lord of Hosts had left us that remnant, our country had been as Sodom and Gomorrah. The apostacy of the English nation from the sentiments and spirit of the Gospel, had been nearly total, but for the Dissenters; by their

means, almost exclusively, a vital spark of pure evangelism was preserved, and the nation is now warmed into light and life by the spreading of the heavenly flame. To have been, for nearly a century, the witnesses for God in the land, although prophesying in sackcloth, was a high honour, and a distinguished blessing.

A thousand dissenting churches were, during all that time, receiving into their communion, those who were converted by the preaching of the Gospel among them; while no such effects were Jooked for by the established clergy; nay, were derided by them, as the delirious dreamings of puritanical madness and folly. To form an adequate estimate of all the benefits, direct and indirect, produced in the cities, towns, and villages of England, from such a practical testimony borne to the most important of all truths, is beyond the power of human calculation. But he who exults in the prosperity which now attends the Gospel of Christ in various communions, must look back with veneration to the people, who once professed, alone, what now forms the general glory of the land.

Though the numbers of the Dissenters are more than doubled, and their activity much increased, it is difficult to compute their influence, at present, upon true religion: because they share it in common with new sects, and a new party in the establishment. But as their ministers more than double the evangelical clergy in the state church, it is manifest, that so many labourers, added to those who preach the Gospel in the establishment, must produce the happiest effects in diffusing religion throughout the nation.

Besides, many of the Dissenting churches are as important now as ever they were; being located where all around them is still, notwithstanding the Christianizing tendencies of a state church, as dark in irreligion and heathenism as before the rise of Methodism in England, or the subsequent revival of religion within the bosom of the establishment The living fire, so long secretly cherished by the Dissenters, has communicated its heat to many who avoid their name. Those clergymen who were the fathers of the Methodists, might never have been heard of beyond the boundaries of a single parish, had they not learned from the Dissenters to consider the whole kingdom as their parochial cure.

The social religion, cherished by Dissenters as the life of the Christian church, has not only produced the happiest effects among themselves, but has also been imparted to the friends of evangelical truth in the establishment. Many, who remain under episcopal government, imitate the Dissenters in the choice of their own ministers. Thus several parishes in London have obtained evangelical afternoon lecturers; and some livings have been procured for those who preach the creed to which they have sworn.

• The zealous friends to the doctrines of the articles and homilies, also, observing that the Dissenting seminaries for the ministry are supported by voluntary contributions, have established a similar fund to support serious young men, while preparing at the universities for the ministry of the Anglican Church. The Missionary Society, formed among various classes of Dissenters, has given rise to

another, confined to churchmen; and new proofs are continually exhibited of the salutary effects of Dissent on the cause of true religion, even beyond the immediate circle of Dissenting churches.'

Mr. Bristed, after further expatiating on the obligations this country is under to Protestant Dissenters, for both its religious character and its civil liberties, proceeds to put a third question to Mr. Wilks.

'If the want of a church-establishment necessarily tends either to wear out, or to prevent the existence of Christianity in a country, how happens it that the Anglican Church, ever since its establishment at the Reformation, has so generally persecuted pure, evangelical religion, whether detected in its own members, or in those of other communions?

Mr. Bristed acknowledges that, under the House of Hanover, persecution has always been discouraged by the State, and that the religious liberty of the subject has been put out of jeopardy. And the influence of Dissenters has, he thinks, compelled the Establishment to be less notoriously rigid to her own sons.

But,' he proceeds, instead of the sterner inquisitions which cast out the puritans, and cut off the Nonconformists, the present ecclesiastical governors of England have recourse to such paltry persecution of stipendiary curates and pious presentees, as fully demonstrates their own fear and weakness, as well as their hatred to the doctrines of the Reformation, contained in their articles, homilies, and liturgy. Whatever inclination the formalists exhibit to expel the evangelical clergy from the Establishment, they dare not now, by another Bartholomew-act, give the Dissenters a decided preponderance by adding to their numbers such a formidable host of piety, talent, learning, wealth, wisdom, influence, and power.'

All party feeling, whether connected with this or that outward form of doctrine, or worship, or church government, is ruinous to religion; and most nefarious are the attempts, now made by formal divines of all the gradations of rank in the state church, to prove the existence, and to promote the spirit of a religious schism among the English established clergy, adverse to the existing order of church and state. No such schism exists, notwithstanding the unhallowed efforts of the formalists to provoke it, and to produce and perpetuate a hostile division between the evangelical clergy in the establishment, and themselves.

Infinite pains are taken by the established formalists, to persuade the evangelicals to become discontented with the existing order of things, by assuring them that they are so; and when they strongly deny it, by still again insisting that they are, and must, and shall be discontented. Loud charges of schismatical guilt are continually growled forth from all the conduit-pipes of formalism; and there is not a pious pastor of a flock, in any English parish, far or near, large

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