The Sun.
London, England, 1862-08-23 00:00:00

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THE SUN.
LONDON, SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1862.

To-morrow is Bartholomew's Day—and what o
that, we suppose, the reader will ask. We shall
have our appropriate service at Church, and there
will be the end of it. It will be very much like
other Sundays. The great body of the Noncon-
formists, however, do not mean that it should be
like other Sundays. Precisely two hundred years
ago, the KING, Lords, and Commons of that year,
by a kind of Cesarian operation, gave birth to what
is now English Dissent. It was born, indeed, Pres-
byterian, but as the governmental system of that
Church never took firm root in English soil, all the
apparatus of presbyteries, synods, and assemblies
soon dropped off, and Dissent became not a Church,
but Churches ; it presented the singular aspect of a
vast number of little municipalities or republics,
wherever it gathered a congregation, and soon was
chiefly known under the denominational names, so
familiar to us since the Reform Bill and the late
census, of Baptists and Independents. It is singu-
lar, in this respect, to note the difference between
Scotland
and
England. In the former country the
Dissenters,
are very numerous, indeed, since
the Free Church secession, a large majority, all re-
tain the form of the State Church they seceded from.
Scotch Dissenters, with few exceptions, are Presby-
terians. With English Dissenters, on the other
hand, Episcopalianism is the exception ; all the
great bodies, Baptist, Methodist, Independent—
reject the system, and nearly always the Prayer
Book, of the State Church. This is the more re-
markable, since the 2,000 who were ejected two
hundred years ago were not disinclined to a mode-
rate Episcopacy, nor did they, like the Scotch, ob-
ject to a Liturgy, but to the Liturgy, or rather to
what they deemed superstitious in it.
It might not be difficult to trace the reasons for
these apparently singular results. But one, in
which the politician must take most interest, is that
this great ecclesiastical secession was the safeguard
of English liberty. We may, unless indeed we be
bigots, we must, regret the hard usage at the time
of so many of the best clergy of the Church of
England; but whatever injury she did herself by
the Act of Uniformity, she created a body of ener-
getic freedom-loving Englishmen among the middle
classes, compelled them to suffer all kinds of hard-
ships, for what men instinctively feel to be their
birthright ; and thus, in forcing them to be dissen-
ters, she forced them also to study, with the rights
of conscience, the civil rights of men also. It was
the civil power which enabled the ecclesiastical
power to drive these clergymen from their flocks,
and to harass both flock and pastor with con-
venticle acts, and five mile acts, and test and cor-
poration acts; thus every dissenting chapel became
a training school for teaching the great doctrines of
civil and religious liberty.
How wisely and well they went to work in that
study MACAULAY'S immortal chapter on the trial of
the seven bishops, and his description of the
" auction" at which Papists and Anglicans bid
against each other for the aid of the Nonconformists,
has taught, we doubt not, most of our readers. Per-
haps a nobler instance of forbearance and forgive-
ness of injuries by a large body of men hardly stands
on record than that of the English Nonconformists
in the time of JAMES 11., refusing to take advantage
of their opponents' difficulties, and standing firmly
to the fundamental principles of all freedom, when
a blind and superstitious despot was prepared to
violate them in their favour. They had their
reward in the Toleration Act which, poor instal-
ment of religious liberty, as we regard it in these
times of religious equality, was a considerable
emancipation for them, and much grudged by their
unworthy opponents when the latter again saw
themselves in a position of safety. Happily, the
Nonconformists had in WILLIAM one of the sin-
cerest believers in the rights of conscience. How
their congregations have multiplied since, how they
have become in most boroughs the staunchest sup-
porters of liberal principles, and how in the number
of its worshippers Nonconformity now equals and
slightly surpasses those of the State Church, are
matters of notoriety.
It is not, perhaps, so commonly noticed to
what the steady, sober character of Noncon-
forming liberalism is due. We take it to be due to
the fact, that its acknowledged members, as
distinguished from the promiscuous and fluctuating
congregation, have the entire management of their
own affairs. They form a little republic in each
chapel. JEFFERSON, the founder of American
Democracy, is said to have taken his first cencep-
tions of thorough-going republicanism from the
Baptist Church, of which his father was a member.
If so, in applying their principles to the State, he
overlooked the fact that the franchise in the Baptist
church was not without qualification. Whatever
their errors, they lay rather in the direction of too
high than too low a moral qualification for admis-
sion to membership. Early Puritanism, and the
Dissenters, as its successors, gained their name
more frera
their moral and religious strictness than
from their doct •
inow:_e:nutitritions of the kingdom,
addition
doctrines, Had JEFFERSON'S electors
tested, probably America would
been as carefally
it. To this circumstance,
to taking part in the
however, beeeeNrv,hathtayte
. .
they had, even when excluded from
parish and municipal
m corporations, the
management of their own churches, we are inclined
to attribute the practical character of
Dissenting
liberalism. Chartism and the extreme forms of
liberalism never found much favour with
the
political and ecclesiastical successors of the two
thousand. How strong the political influence of
the religious organisation is on those who earn_
pose it, we see in the contrast presented by the
Methodists to the older, and we must say more in-
telligent Dissenters. The Methodist system is one
in which the absolutism of an oligarchy of clergy
and the submission of the
people is complete.
Hence there is probably, proportionably, much
more Toryism among Methodists than even in the
Church of England.

To-morrow then, perhaps almost every Dissenting
chapel in the Kingdom, will have services appro-
priate to the historical fact of the ejection of the
two thousand. The legendary flaying alive of St.
Barth°lemew himself, and the dreadful massacre of