The Sun.
London, England, 1845-03-24 00:00:00

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LONDON, MONDAY, MARCH 24, 1845,

The Established Church of this country appears to
have fallen, in our times, upon evil fortunes. We
are sorry for the fact; but we still more sincerely
deplore the aggravation of her mischances, which she
must experience in the knowledge that they are
almost exclusively visited upon her by the misconduct
of her own ministers. It is our profound respect for
her doctrine, our grateful recollection of the signal
occasions on which she has nobly identified her own
independent existence and action with those of civil
liberty, that have caused us to view the progress of
Puseyite innovation, bigotry, and contumaciousness
with so much apprehension and disgust. Civil and
religious liberty is too noble a " birthright," God
knows ! to be sacrificed for " a mess" of ceremonial
mummery. Yet there are scandals more disgraceful
to the character of the Church, so far as this is to he
collected from the deportment of her ministers, than
the wildest follies, the most solemn impertinences of
that ecclesiastical coxcombry, which is now vexing
her peace and compromising her welfare. Of these
scandals none are so flagrant, or so offensive to all the
common sympathies of our nature, as the ebullitions
of intolerant bigotry which certain country parsons
appear to be given to, from a self-consciousness, one
might almost infer, of inability to attain dis-
tinction in their calling by any more le-
gitimate means, such as the orthodoxy of their
doctrine, the purity of their lives, the extent of their
learning, or the superior Christian charity and
humility of their bearing. We read in the Wiltshire
Independent a case of "Clerical Bigotry Extraordi-
nary," stated to have recently occurred at War-
minster, which would have seemed scarcely credible
to us had it been told even of some remote village in
the heart of Spain,—the head-quarters of priestly
domination and of lay ignorance. An aged and re-
spectable female, whose parents were Members of the
Established Church, and she had been herself bap-
tized a member of it, married, many years ago, a
member of the Unitarian Church of the same place,
and with him had since attended its service. After
being afflicted with many years of ill hea]th, she was
seized with a sudden affection on the 6th of this
month, which next day terminated her existence.
She had brought up a family of fifteen children.
Four of these lie buried in the parish church-yard of
Warminster, one of them having been interred there
only last year (the victim, we infer, of some distress-
ing casualty.) Of the survivors, many are respect-
ably settled in life. Her widowed husband, mourn-
ing for his aged partner, to whom he had
been united for fifty-seven years, applied to the
parish sexton to re-open the grave which had
so lately closed upon their daughter, with
whose remains it was her wish that her own should
be deposited. The Vicar, Mr. FANE, interposed his
written veto, in a notice addressed to the widowed
husband, in its tone so unmanly, so unchristian, so
inhuman, and withal so insolent, that we should com-
promise our duty as public journalists were we to
abstain from holding up this precious document to the
public indignation it so richly merits. The old man,
bowed down with years and humbled by his recent
affliction, was overwhelmed at finding himself, at such
a time, and under such circumstances, the object of
animosity and accusations which he knew to be so
unfounded. But his present anxiety being to fulfil
the last wishes of his wife, by laying her bones near
those of their daughter, he obtained and exhibited a
certificated copy of the entry of her baptism from
the parish-church register, concluding that—as we
we are fully prepared to contend it legally was—this
document would be sufficient to obviate the difficulty
which had been raised to the burial of the deceased
according to her instructions. But all further nego-
tiations were fruitless; and he was at last compelled
to commit the body to unconsecrated ground, apart
from the mortal relics of the children and family
with whom, in life, she had been so fondly con-
nected. The matter has been since brought under
the notice of the Bishop, who has promised to insti•
gate inquiries into the facts.
We now come to the letter itself of this Reverend
Vicar. It is a production, in point of style, feeling,
and expression, every way worthy of the persecuting
spirit and paltry bigotry which dictated it, and
though as a composition it be absolutely beneath
criticism, it is not the less expedient to analyze it,
paragraph by paragraph. The time has arrived at
which, if the Established Church is to retain its
former influence over the attachment and respect of
its flock, the high-flying pretensions of these " chur-
lish priests," must be distinctly and permanently put
down. If the superior clergy, the diocesan or the
spiritual courts will not or cannot interfere with effect
for such a purpose, the Legislature must do so by
express declaratory enactments, for nothing short of
these will satisfy the growing impatience of the public
for the repression of these offensive outbreaks of petu-
lant intolerance and spiritual tyranny. Let it not be
objected to us that we are prejudging the
merits of the case before us, pending the
result of investigations which the Bishop of
the diocese has promised to institute. No investiga-
tion can alter the admissions of this amiable Vicar',
own letter to the ancient widower. We assume that
the Wiltshire Independent has not been imposed upon
by a forgery, and we, therefore, without hesitation,
denounce the language we are about to quote as
equally presumptuous and cruel. What says this
minister of peace—this servant of Him, whose Divine
mission it was to proclaim " on earth, peace and good

will towards men "—to the aged and sorrow-stricken
parishioner, desiring to have the remains of his wife
committed to the same grave which had formerly
, received those of her daughter ? Ile commences his
letter in a strain of unornamental address, such as—
out of the Church—we apply rather to dogs than to
men. From the " HAINEs" which " leads" the papers
all margin of pity, recognition, or concern, in respect
of a suffering fellow creature, is carefully cut off.
His pointer Ponto, instead of his parishioner, might
be the animal address& by this meek Vicar; but a
tcuch of the odium theologicum, in its full intensity,
soon shows itself :—" HAINES—I understand your
wife has died as 'awfully suddenly' as others of your
family." The purport of this in uendo developes itself in
the next sentence--" She has died in an awful and
damnable heresy" Humane, gentle, considerate,
soothing, Christianlike pastor! Just the topic this,
and just. the time to discuss it, for a wounded spirit.
If tl..e reverend writer conscientiously believed that his
Unitarianism was a " damnable, awful heresy"—and
just the happy selection of the moment for this pal-
pably hinting that the "awfully-suddenly" departings
of the deceased and of her children before her were the

ire have ken favoured with a copy of one of the
ablest pamphlets which has yet appeared on the ex-
tensive sultject of "Commercial and Financial Legis-
lation." It has been printed, we believe, for private
circulation only ; but its merits—the importance of
the statistical contents which it embodies and the
cleverness of their arrangement—will not long, we
apprehend, withhold it from an extensive diffusion to
the public. It does not often happen to us to fall
upon authors in any department of economic know-
ledge who sufficiently attend to the cogent necessity for
a clear statement of the elementary principles which
it is necessary for those, in the first place, to become
thoroughly conversant with whom it is proposed to
initiate into the infinite field of deductions and con-
clusions which lies beyond them. Those deductions
and conclusions are indispensable stepping-stones to
all progress in these branches of political knowledge.
They are carefully ascertained and repeatedly-tested
facts or quantities, which we must assume in eco-
nomics, as we reason upon axioms in philosophy.
It is, therefore, of the highest moment that as the
mass of facts, quantities, and results, to be digested
and classified, accumulates, the rules or course to be
established for the order in which they should be dis
cussed and arranged, be of the soundest possible cha-
racter. For, otherwise, either it will be impossible to
embrace the extensive scope of the matters to be cal-
culated and recorded; or operations, which have been
pushed through many series, will require to be
renewed and recast on account of not having been
properly commenced, or of having been irregularly
and intermittingly pursued. Entertaining these views,
we have been struck by the philosophy of an opening
passage in the introduction in the very clever paper
before us. We cannot do better than commend it thus
at length to the favourable attention of our readers :
"In estimating the elements of just commercial and
financial legislation, we should not only be well ac-
quainted with the physical power and resources of our
own, but also with those of other nations, as regards their
geographical position, configuration, natural produc-
tions, and population. An able legislator should also
understand the political and moral power of nations,
so far as their respective Governments may, in a corn
parative view, be considered as advancing or retarding
national prosperity, or as limiting or extending public
liberty and individual happiness. Then, and not be-
fore, in the present age of the world, can he com-
prehend in legislative usefulness the wise adaptation of
those elements of national- power which comprehend
the income and expenditure. the occupations of the
people, and the productions of labour.
" This division of legislation embraces the following
sub-divisions :
"I. Finance, or Revenue and Expenditure.
"11. Occupations of the People, whether in agricul-
ture, manufactures, or in any other way connected with
the product've operations.
"111. Commodities, whether they be of the growth m
the soil, of the productions of mines, of fisheries, and 01
manufactures. or as regards the arts, of wild and do-
mestic animals, for their skins, ivory, horns, bones, flesh,
oil, tallow, and fur,—and
" IV. Commerce, or the interchange of raw and ma-
nufactured commodities.
" The three last can only be made equitably subser-
vient to the first, so far as the obligations of the State
justifies taxation; no one of the three, viz., the occupa-
tions of the people, commodities, and commerce, should
be taxed at the expense of the other."
'The paper then divides itself, after a sort of natural
order, into various sections, which are thus headed
—lnterchange of Commodities; Taxes upon Con-
sumption ; Financial Revision ; Stamp Duties ; Post-
office; Excise Duties; Revision of the Customs
Duties. These are illustrated by tables of the arti-
cles, and quantities thereof charged with duties of
Excise for 1832, and of the net annual Customs for
the two years before and following the Tariff of 1842.
These are succeeded by an article entitled a pro forma
Scheme of Finance.

Under the section entitled "Interchange of Com-
modities," a clever, though rapid, sketch is given of
the origin of municipal inland and transit duties
levied at frontier stations of independent kingdoms
and territories, and of Customs taken on foreign
goods at the outports. We may conclude our present
notice with the following extracts applicable to the
principles of free-trade, the history of their develop-
ment, and of tariffs in modern Europe; and espe-
cially to the operation of wars upon countries, re-
spectively maintaining them under different circum-
stances, associations, or exigencies :
"The sound principle of unrestricted international trade,
although laid down long since by Adam Smith, in oppo-
sition to the more specious theory of Colbert, has in
British legislation only been practically attempted by the
Government, during the first four years of Mr. Mitt's
Administration, and during the time Mr. liuskisson was