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the attention of parliament, down to the convicted felons recorded in the Newgate Calendar. While this scandal necessarily cleaves to national churches, it prevents them from practically promoting the cause of morals, whether public or private, by excluding from their communion those, who grossly violate the pure code of ethics, which they may publish from their pulpits.

But the dissenting churches can follow up the moral doctrine, which all parties profess to inculcate, by the strictest discipline. As excommunication, among them, involves no injury to civil rights, it is practised, whenever the vices of a member disgrace the body. Knowing themselves to be objects of notice and of censure, dissenters are unwilling to be identified with the loose and immoral; and within the limits of a single congregation, the character of an individual cannot be long unknown. The evangelical dissenting churches, whether presbyterian, or independent, or methodist, feel themselves bound by the authority of Scripture, to put away from them a wicked person; and even the less honourable motive of zeal for the party, would induce any sect to watch over its moral reputation, as essential to the accession of proselytes, and the preservation of its own members; since the grossly profligate will cease from all profession, or sink into the easier and more fashionable religion of the state church.

While, therefore, some are deterred from vice by fear of exclusion from a society composed of their most intimate acquaintances, friends or relations; those who are lost to fear or shame, usually abandon the dissent, and transfer their character and influence to the establishment. If, on these accounts, the interest of morality is more powerfully promoted by dissenters than by churchmen, therefore is so much odium attached to dissent. For while the religious condemn and abhor every species of vice, the vicious endeavour to retaliate, by pouring ridicule and calumny upon the stricter profession of religion.

Hence the national rage against the nonconformists, at the restoration of the second Charles. Had they joined the revels of the profligate monarch and his infamous court, their dissent from the state religion, which he, as defender of the faith and supreme head of the church, established, would have been a venial crime; for while he was reconciled to the church of Rome, he was quite cordial with the church of England. But they wounded his pride, and stung his conscience, by moral conduct too far elevated above his own; and therefore aided, nay urged onward by his established hierarchy, he sought to quench every ray of evangelical light, and truth, and purity, in the tears and blood of the persecuted disciples of Christ.

For the same reason, dissenters are unpopular now; especially in villages and small towns, where men are better acquainted with the characters of each other than in great cities. The supporters of the village alehouse or theatre, are the greatest enemies to those who regularly attend the meeting-house; and who are often reminded by rude and insolent treatment, as they pass, in their way to the sanctuary, the Sunday tipplers, or combatants in rustic games, how hateful their superior strictness in observing the Lord's day is to those, who are lovers of pleasure more than, lovers of God.

Good example, however, has a beneficial influence even when most hated. The societies for reformation, which sprung up immediately after the revolution in 1688, were the first fruits of the superior moral sense, preserved in England by the dissenters; and the strict manners of the methodists, who emanated from these societies, may be traced to the puritans. The modern associations for the suppression of vice, and for the observance of the Sabbath, find their most zealous members and patrons among the dissenters, who have, by these and other means, elevated the standard of public morals. And as the Reformation compelled the popish clergy to adopt a more correct

exterior; the influence and increase of dissenters often obliges the established clergy to regulate their conduct, so as to avoid odious comparisons. Even this constrained morality is advantageous to society; because, although it will not render either the parson or his parishioners real Christians, it precludes the triumphs of avowed and open vices, which would otherwise be sanctioned by usage and custom, as by common law.

Even the infidel tory, Hume, who has so zealously laboured to whitewash the Stuarts, acknowledges that the English owe their free constitution to the struggles of the puritans. And the dissenters have the same civil right as others to vote for legislators, who will express their mind in the debates of the senate. This right they have generally exercised in favour of civil liberty. And if, as Fuller observes, in all political changes the pulpits of the established church are made of the same wood as the council board; it is well for the liberties of England, to have other pulpits, which do not resound with panegyrics upon despotic measures.

Mr. Howe, whose penetrating eye had seen much of the interior of courts, declared, that the great cause of the hostility of governments to dissenters, was their known abhorrence of arbitrary rule. The tyrannous house of Stuart reproached them as an unyielding race, who could not be won to sacrifice their country's liberties; and the high tory churchmen, who favoured the exiled dynasty, have ever been implacable foes to the cause of dissent.

But princes, the least unfriendly to the liberty of the people, have always been most desirous of extending the benefits of the toleration act, and of abolishing the odious and impolitic restrictions of the test-laws; and the most zealous partisans for public freedom have usually deemed it consistent to advocate the cause of dissenters. As the very existence of churches, dissenting from the state religion, is an avowal of the duty of thinking for ourselves.

and of the right of differing in matters of religious conscience, from our civil rulers, the patriot prince, or minister, alone, can look favourably on this indication of a free spirit,-while the lovers of passive submission, of exclusive claims, of church establishments, must regard it with abhorrence and alarm.

If the mere political reformer deny the obligations of England to the influence of dissenters in the civil state, the Christian patriot must own religious liberty to be the offspring of dissent. The puritans and nonconformists pleaded only for the right of enjoying their own sentiments, because they were true; but the dissenters, their successors, have added the benevolence that contends for the liberty of every man to profess whatever he thinks requisite to his own eternal safety.

Nay, even within the pale of the establishment, dissenters have diffused a portion of religious liberty. So much has the continual increase of separatists lowered the haughty tone of the ultras and formalists, among the English hierarchy, that they now profess to plead for their own existence. It is highly consoling to observe the influence of dissenters, in compelling the establishment to be less notoriously rigid towards her own sons. It is now full half a century since the first faint appearance of the evangelicals among the state clergy, who have, at length, increased into what the formal dignitaries denounce, as a dangerous schism in the establishment.

But 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

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decided preponderance, by adding to their numbers such a formidable host of piety, talent, learning, wealth, wisdom, influence, and power.

Nations are, too generally, supposed to prosper, in proportion as they extend their conquests; yet it is not the extent of territory, but the number of people, their industrious habits, their correct morals, their superior comforts, and their intellectual eminence, which form the prosperity and permanence of a nation. The voice of history attests, that these important objects have been always promoted, precisely in proportion as religion has prevailed. But nations cannot expect the advantages of religion, unless they afford it the protection and liberty, which it demands, deserves, and repays.

The

While Spain, by completely extinguishing the free spirit of the reformation, sunk, in spite of her immense physical advantages, into a feeble, decrepid state,-Holland, by a more liberal policy, rose to a rank far beyond its mere territorial claims. spirit of religious liberty, cherished by dissenters, in spite of all the efforts of the church establishment to crush it beneath the iron hooves of persecution, enabled the little British Isles to contend successfully, during five and twenty years of unexampled warfare, against the portentous power of revolutionary France.

The mental vigour, produced by free discussion of the most important of all subjects, religion, is not only favourable to intellectual eminence in every other department, but is, also, an incitement to physical exertion, multiplying the productions of the soil; while the temperance of religious sects husbands private capital, the germ of national wealth. The full effects of this spirit may be seen in these United States; where the men, driven from England by an intolerant and persecuting church establishment, have, in their descendants and followers, grown up into a mighty empire, which regards religious liberty as its palladium; and suffers no exclusive,