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and religious duties, encourage them by honorary rewards, pension them off after they have served as many years as their country ought to require they will love the service; and the arts of our enemies will be as unavailing as their arms. For the surplus of an army, when war shall be at an end, there is indeed no such immediate employment as would be offered for our seamen; but the same means which would, above all others, tend to promote the power and security of Great Britain, would provide an outlet for this redundance also.

National education is the first thing necessary. Lay but this foundation, and the superstructure of prosperity and happiness which may be erected will rest upon a rock; the rains may descend, and the floods come, and the winds blow and beat upon it, and it will not fall. Lay but this foundation, poverty will be diminished, and want will disappear in proportion as the lower classes are instructed in their duties, for then only will they understand their true interests: they will become provident, and the wages of labour may be greatly advanced to the unequivocal benefit of all persons; thus will the poor rates be diminished, and thus only may they be ultimately abolished. Thus also should we render ourselves less dependent upon the foreign consumer; the labourer being better taught and better paid, would acquire a taste for the new comforts which would then be placed within his reach, and by raising this class of the community a step in civilisation, we create a new and numerous class of customers at home.

Is it not easy then to conceive ourselves in that state when the wishes of Henry IV. and of our own king should be fulfilled; when every family should have its wholesome and abundant meal, and every child be able to read its bible? To that state we are advancing; and if the anarchists and their infatuated coadjutors do not succeed in exploding the mine which they are preparing under our feet, at that state we may arrive. Neither Mr. Malthus's checks of war, famine, pestilence and vice, nor his comfortable wedding sermons, would be required to render it permanent. Unquestionably we should increase and multiply. There would be more Englishmen in the world, more of the countrymen of the Blakes and the Nelsons, the Wolfes and the Wellingtons, the Drakes and the Dampiers, and the Cookes, the Harveys and the Hunters, the Bacons and the Newtons and the Davys, the Hookers and the Burkes, the Shakespeares and the Miltons; more of that flesh and blood which has carried our name to every part of the habitable globe; more of that intellect which has dived into the depths of nature; more of that spirit which has compassed earth and heaven!

The labouring classes have a natural tendency to increase faster than the higher ranks. Celibacy is much less frequent among

them;

them; they are more prolific, and except among the miserably poor in cities, a larger proportion of their children is* reared. This natural and necessary increase of the working part of the community is in its effects just what we make it. If the duty of providing for this increase, and of instructing the people be neglected, it is danger, and ultimate destruction; but if these duties be performed, population then becomes security, power, glory and dominion, All that is required to render it so is, that we should go to the ant and the bee, consider their ways and be wise: that we should learn ́ from wise antiquity, on this point indeed truly deserving to be stiled so; that we should do our part in obedience to the first great commandment, which bids us Replenish the earth and subdue it.'

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Let the reader cast a thought over the map, and see what elbowroom there is for England. We have Canada with all its territory, we have Surinam, the Cape Colony, Austral-Asia, countries which are collectively more than fifty-fold the area of the British isles, and which a thousand years of uninterrupted prosperity would scarcely suffice to people. It is time that Britain should become the hive of nations, and cast her swarms; and here are lands to receive them. What is required of government is to encourage emigration by founding settlements, and facilitating the means of transport. Imagine these countries, as they would be a few centuries hence, and must be, if some strange mispolicy does not avert this proper and natural course of things; the people enjoying that happiness and those domestic morals, which seem to proceed from no other root than the laws and institutious with which Providence has favoured us above all others: imagine these wide regions in the yet uncultivated parts of the earth flourishing like our own, and possessed by people enjoying our institutions and speaking our language. Whether they should be held in colonial dependence, or become separate states, or when they may have ceased to depend upon the parent country, connected with her by the union of reverential attachment on one side, and common interests on both, is of little import upon this wide view of things. In America at this day, hostile America, unhappily alienated from her dependence upon England by our misconduct and the artifices of our common enemy, and now the wanton aggressor in a war undertaken in obsequiousness to that enemy; still in America, whatever is civilized, whatever is intellectual, whatever is ennobling, whatever is good or great, is, and must ever be, of English origin.

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it.' This was the first great commandment given for collective society,

See this subject treated in Dr. Jarrold's Dissertations on Man, a book where the question of population is discussed with real originality, and where true philosophy and true piety enlighten and support each other.

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and

and what country has ever been so richly empowered to act in obedience to it as England at this day? The seas are ours, and to every part of the uninhabited or uncivilized world our laws, our language, our institutions, and our Bible may be communicated. Fear not if these seeds be sown, but that God will give the increase! Earthquakes may shake this island from its foundation, or volcanic eruptions lay it waste, or it may sink into the abyss and leave only rocks and shoals to mark its place; (this earth bears upon it the monuments of wider physical ruins;)—but earth itself must be destroyed before that from which Britain derives her pre-eminence can perish, if she do but enlarge herself, and send forth her blessings to the remotest parts of the globe,

ART. V. An Appeal to the Gospel, or an Inquiry into the Justice of the Charge, alleged by Methodists and other Objectors, that the Gospel is not preached by the National Clergy: in a Series of Discourses delivered before the University of Oxford in the Year 1812, at the Lecture founded by the late Rev. J. Bampton, M. A. Canon of Salisbury. By Richard Mant, M. A. Vicar of Great Coggeshall, Essex, and late Fellow of Oriel College. Fourth Edition. London. Murray. 1813. THE subject of these discourses is an inquiry into the justice

of the charge, that the great body of the national clergy do not preach the Gospel.' p. 9. They comprise, 'therefore, all the most arduous questions in theology; questions interesting, not to the members of some particular church, or the disciples of some particular teacher alone, but to all reasonable beings.

With this impression on our minds we may, nevertheless, be allowed to doubt whether even an university pulpit affords the most suitable opportunity of entering upon these subjects. If properly treated, they must involve, and as Mr. Mant has treated them, they have involved, some of those abstruse questions which cannot be profoundly sifted without the employment of closer reasoning and nicer definitions than the attention of the best informed congregation can convey to the mind. Without these disquisitions the inquiry is incomplete; with them it becomes unsuitable to the occasion. We do not urge this as a censure upon Mr. Mant; the same objection might apply to most other subjects, which his peculiar appointment admitted; but it accounts, we conceive, for his passing lightly over points of great importance to the matters under discussion, but not very manageable in a discourse from the pulpit; and also for his having thrown a more oratorical garb over the *hole than we usually find such subjects invested with.

In

In the survey which we propose to take of these questions, we shall lay particular stress on those branches of them which appear wanting to the completeness of Mr. Mant's inquiry; for while these are left out of the consideration, no opponent will allow the difficulties to be set at rest which have perplexed the church ever since the heresy of Pelagius.

The most striking defect which we have to regret in the lectures before us is the neglect of systematic arrangement. After an introductory discourse, which contains some very judicious remarks on the proper method of explaining scripture, the author proceeds, at once, to consider the doctrines of justification, predestination, and grace, thus reversing the natural order in which the subjects depend one upon the other, and omitting entirely what ought rather to precede them all,-the consideration of original sin.

Now in every regular discussion of the subjects between Calvinists and Arminians, the degree of corruption entailed upon our natural will by the fall of Adam must take the lead. Those who hold that corruption to be so entire as to render the human will, unless regenerated and renewed by grace, altogether averse from spiritual things, and morally incapable of any obedience to the divine commands, must necessarily be brought to a dilemma, which carries them to all the consequences on which they found their objections against Calvin's decrees. This has not always been kept in view by modern divines, and it even seems doubtful, from the terms of his third article, whether it occurred to Arminius himself. Many who strenuously oppose the tenets of personal election and irresistible grace, do not hesitate to agree with their adversaries as to the natural aversion from holiness in the unrenewed mind; but they differ from them in the assertion, that grace to counteract the evil tendency is fully bestowed, not merely on the elect, but on every man. Be it so but this grace, confessedly, is often abused. It does not force the man to act against his inclination, but may be resisted and rendered ineffectual by the perverse will of the impenitent sinuer.' It follows, that where it produces not the fruits of holiness, man's will rejects and quenches it; where it is received it becomes effectual through the co-operation of the same will. Whence, then, is this co-ope rative will to be derived? It cannot be from nature, because it is a good will, and goodness is excluded from the natural will by the hypothesis; and if it is of grace, it must be of special grace co-operating with the common grace bestowed upon all men equally. Here, then, we have all that the Calvinist demands; and the difficult question may be retorted upon us, Why is this special grace bestowed upon any, if it is not bestowed universally? And

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how

how is man to be judged, if his will is thus predisposed to evil from which he has no natural inclination to escape?

It is of great importance to observe this indissoluble connection between the total corruption of the human will and the doctrine of personal election, when the opinions supported by our church are made a question of controversy. The ninth article asserts, that original sin is the fault or corruption of the nature of every inan, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil.' These terms imply a strong moral difficulty, but not a moral incapacity; they affirm that man is very far gone from original righteousness, not that he has no seeds of righteousness remaining; that the brightness of his original glory is obscured, but not that it is extinguished The degree of natural corruption is, in fact, the basis on which the whole superstructure must rest, whether it be erected by Calvin or his opponents. The insertion and studious retention of these limited expressions on this subject shews that the framers of our articles were well aware of its importance; and as long as the church is in possession of this vantage-ground, it is an error, if not a calumny, to assert that her articles are Calvinistic while her clergy is Arminian.

Our next inquiry must be, on what foundation it is asserted, that man is morally unable, by the means either of his own natural powers or of common grace, to will any thing that can render him an object of favour in the sight of God. The broad distinction drawn by Calvinists is this; the natural will, they say, can enable a man to perform the various moral duties of life, and to abstain from sinful actions; it is capable of natural affection towards relatives, and humane compassionate feelings towards our fellowcreatures; but it can incline to none of these things on that principle of obedience to God which alone can render them acceptable to him. Of love to God, and love to man for the Lord's sake, and according to his will, fallen man is absolutely incapable except by the special grace of God.'

Now this distinction, if it is just, must be founded either on reason or on Scripture. But it is not founded on reason. The same natural understanding which points out to us the different degrees of regard due to other men, according to the relation we bear towards them, and shews us our social duties and our personal obligations, renders it evident that when these duties appear to be enjoined as positive commands by him who is supreme in

*We have seen it observed, justly enough, that the Latin expression is stronger, which says, ab originali justitia quam longissimè distat.' But it is not the Latin, but the English, article which has been proposed for subscriptiou ever since the first ratifica tion in the year 1562.

nature,

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