The Sun.
London, England, 1841-08-16 00:00:00

o§nit.

LONDON:
MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 1341.

Upwards of six hundred clergymen are ex-
pected to attend the Anti-Corn-law Conference
which will be held to-morrow at Manchester.
This movement of the clergy, and more espe-
daily of the Dissenters, in favour of the famish-
ing poor, has quite alarmed the Tories. They
affect to be shocked at the idea of priests trou-
bling themselves about the things of this worn,
and remind them that religion, not politics, em-
braces the sphere of their duties. The Tories
can see a mote in a brother's eye, but they
cannot discern the beam in their own. The
assembling of priests at Manchester to advocate
the repeal of one bad law shocks them, but they
can see no impropriety in a number of priests
meeting at a house of ill-repute in Westminster,
to enact scores of bad laws every year. What
excites horror when done at a Conference in
Manchester, is applauded in the House of Lords.
What is rank irreligion in the Curate, is piety in
if priests are to be ex-
the Bishop. Now,
eluded from all intermeddling with politics,
here th
let the reform begin.
w al Bench,e so farscandal as
is greatest—with the Episcop
the religious principle is concerned. One set of
priests have as much right to insist upon the re-
peal of a law as another set can have to enact it.
The Gospel authorises no distinction here; nor
can any honest or consistent man make any.
To throw discredit upon the meeting at Manches-
ter, we must begin by removing the Bishops
from the House of Lords.
But if there be in the whole range of ethics
one question connected with politics which a
priest is justified in regarding wholly in a reli-
gious light, it is this of the Corn-laws; to feed
the hungry is a Christian duty; to starve the
poor, whether by bad laws or otherwise, a
heinous offence against Gov and man. And who
are so frequently eye-witnesses of the dreadful
effects of these starvation-laws, as the working.
clergy ? In the faithful discharge of their pas-
toral duties they are brought in perpetual con-
tact with the thousands who are daily perishing
from want of bread in all the large cities
and tows throughout the Kingdom. The cries
of the hungry are daily ringing in their ears;
they are familiar with those dens of misery into
which a bread-taxin.; oligarchy drives the fam-
ished artizan to hide himself, that he may die
out of sight. They know the dark thoughts and
darker deeds which starvation engenders in the
desperate wretches whom the Corn-laws have
doomed to hopeless penury. They must be
sensible that four-fifths of the crimes pre-
vailing among the poor, have their origin
in hunger produced by dear bread. No
wonder, then, that some of the most
eminent Dissenting clergymen regard the re-
peal of the Corn-lass as a duty which religion,
rightly understood, imposes in an especial man-
ner t pon the priesthood. The Corn-laws starve
the poor, and make them discontetted and irre-
ligious. They are therefore in the highest
degree immoral and impious. Now it is
,the duty of the priests to oppose what-
ever makes men bad, as not only per-
.. rad_
-‘a*
to Sc'dety, but
it*of as contrary to the
%-lon. The voluntal y fasts of the rich are
SOMetiraes very co
luraendable, and very healthy;

but the compulsory fasts of the poor are alike in-
jurious to the health of soul and body.

The Irish people have been long celebrated
for the fidelity of their attachments, and their
gratitude to those who treat them kindly. We
are not, therefore, surprised at the impassioned
feeling displayed in Dublin last week, at a large
meeting convened for the purpose of testifying
the gratitude of the Irish people to Lord MOR-
PETH for his useful labours in behalf of that ca-
lumniated and long-oppressed nation. The first
Peer of Ireland was in the chair, and he was
supported by the first men in the country,
all anxious to show their gratitude to a
man alike distinguished by his private and
his public virtues, and distinguished in that
country, above all other Secretaries, by the
humane, the generous, and firm conduct which
he displayed in performing the duties of an office
so beset with difficulties. We may safely say that
no Irish Secretary ever gave such universal
satisfaction as Lord MORPETH. No Orangeman
ever complained of his conduct. Mr. O'CONNELL
on one occasion did, but at the meeting he made
ample amends for his hasty remarks ; and at the
conclusion one universal opinion prevailed
as to the beneficial effects of the policy
adopted by Lord MORPETH. " Two-thirds of
the Representatives of Ireland," said one of the
speakers, " would be willing, and they would have
the consent of their constituents, to resign in his
favour." This statement was received with
loud cheers, and will be cheered through-
out nearly the whole of Ireland. We
do not envy his successor. Bayonets
and guns, and troops of cavalry and long lines
of infantry, are, after all, feeble means for pre-
serving the peace of a country compared with
mild and conciliatory measures. This system was
commenced by Lord NORMANDY, it has been fol-
lowed up by Lord EBRINGTON and Lord MORPETII,
and we fear will be looked back to with painful
and perhaps angry feelings when their successors
come into office. It will be seen from the Re-
port of the meeting, that a resolution was
adopted, inviting Lord MORPETH to a public
dinner. We cannot conceive any occasion on
which the guest would be so welcome or the en-
tertainers so anxious to do him honour.

The Tory organs have all taken to preaching
up the Church, and crying down the Dissenters.
Their Bible is the Thirty-nine Articles, and
their text a homily. They treat all who refuse
to listen to them as little better than infidels, and
they insinuate that if they do not call them
by that odious appellation, they are restrained
more by good breeding than by any scruple
of conscience respecting its being unmerited.
Now we cannot consent to let the Tories
brand with infidelity that very large pro-
portion of the people of England whom the
corruptions and abuses of the Established
Church forced to retire from its communion.
The people of England are pre-eminently a
religious people. Their imagination is not worked
upon by tangible objects like the Italians ; they
have not the quick sensibilities of the French;
the Scotch exceed them in a headlong zeal, and
the Irish in an undiscriminating enthusiasm; but
in that deep conviction of religious truths which
regulates the moral conduct and the moral sen-
timents—which influences not the feelings and
the imagination but the judgment, the heart,
and all that proceeds from them—no people ever
surpassed the English. Their religion is a prin-
ciple, not a passion ; they believe from conviction
and from the innate desire to supply a moral
want, not from the craving of an appetite for
strong excitement like our continental neigh-
bours; and hence the rapidity with which the
Reformation overspread England. Religious
shows, and processions, and image-worship, and
pilgrimages to shrines, chapels, and to holy wells,
while they shocked their moral sense, were not
wanted to keep alive their devotional feelings.
The first Reformers, therefore, in attacking these
outworks of Popery, had no trouble in convincing
the people of the holiness of their mission.
While they pulled down the fabric of supersti-
tion with one hand, they held out the New Tes-
tament with the other, inviting all men to judge
from its sacred pages the amplitude of their com
mission from the mouth of CHRIST SO to act in
his service. In the calm judgment of the people
of England they found a ready and an approving
response. The New Testament became to them
the only rule of faith, and private judgment—
that judgment to which the Reformers appealed
against the absurd and impious pretensions of
Rome—its only interpreter.
Nov, it is because the people of England are a
pre-eminently religious people—because religion
is with them a principle, and not an excitable im-
pulse—because they presume to be guided by the
doctrines of the New Testament—because they
display that hostility to ecclesiastical pride, pre-
sumption, rapine, and sluggishness in the.LOßD's
vineyard, which induces such hireling recreants as
the Times, and such pro-Popery bigots as the
Standard, to brand large bodies of them with the
odious epithets of atheists and infidels. The pro-
gress of Dissent from the Church of England at-
tests the condemnation of that Church by the
public judgment, and the deep religious con-
victions of the people, who seek in other
wells for the living waters of eternal life.
When they grow dissatisfied with the apos-
tolical labours of the Most Reverend Father in
GOD, his Grace the Lord Archbishop of CAN-
TEREURY, or the Right Reverend Father in GOD
the Lord Bishop of LONDON, they do not cast
their Bibles from them from any conscientious
dread that a comparison of the lives of the RE-
DEEMER and his Apostles, with those of these
meek, and holy, and self-denying Prelates,
would fill them with despair for the injustice of
which they had been guilty in rejecting the
ministry of the Right Rev. saints-militant. The
farther they remove from the splendours of
Anglican Episcopacy, the closer do they press
the sacred volume to their hearts. In wending
their way to what the pride of State-Religion
calls the Conventicle, they hold in their hands
that inextinguishable torch which was a light to
the eyes and a guide to the feet of LUTHER, of
MELANCTHON, and all the great Apostles of the
Reformation.

If then, by the Church, the Tories mean the
religion of the Gospel, there is small need to call
upon the people of England to support it. They
hoval‘- witheal
vaysspi,
supported it, and they support it
n
Church, theundiminished zeal. But if, by the
Tories
1,4,7
mean Archbishops and
Bishops, Deans and Chapters, and Prebendaries
and Pluralities, and
pulsory tithes and
Church-rates,
we fear it
be necessary to take
their Bibles out of the hands of the people, and
to make the exercise of private
can be judgment.. a capi-
taloffence, before they
-- eptures in their
brought to stir a
step in its support. With the R -;
hands, it will be impossible to persuade them
that the REDEEMER shall have shed one drop less
blood for the sins of the world because Dr. pH
POTTS ceases to be a Peer, and the successors
fishermen and tent-makers no longershare titles,
and honours, and palaces with Kings. The Times,
a short while ago, called for a new translation of
the Bible. We are astonished such a cry
was not
raised by the Bishops two centuries past. Though
made by themselves, the common authorised
version is so little favourable to the Christianity
exhibited in their lives, that it might be taken for
the production of the Society of Friends. Not a
word is there in it about the enthronement of
their Right Reverend FatliershiPs in God the
Lords Bishops PETER, and PAUL, and TIMOTHY,
and TinTs, and the other Right Reverend
Members of the Apostolo-Episcopal Bench.
The inspired recorder of the Acts of the
Apostles has, in the authorised version,
omitted a description of their palaces, there
glebes, their - princely revenues, their sena-
torial honours, their trains of attendants, and
their distinctive liveries. In any new transla-
tion
or the Scriptures advocated by the Church
of Englund, as represented by the clergy, it will
be- necessary to supply ' these omissions if it be

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