The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1839-07-23 00:00:00

dent belief that they will take quarter-day as easily as
they can, and not peril their wretched Government
until the inevitable hour of necessity arrives.

We do not wholly subscribe to this opinion. We
have repeatedly urged upon our Conservative friends
the very rapid decline of the Whig-Radical Confe-
deracy in public favour, as the strongest possible
reason why they should take some bold and desperate
resolve. With the present House of Commons,
nothing can save them for a week of the coming
Session; but that week, which, since it is proverbial
for bunglers, and a person who shall be nameless, the
Whigs may reasonably count as their own. But this
they have traded on so long, that even in this last re-
serve of the destitute their bank is broken up. Some
escape must be found out, or the wretched affair must
be adandoned.

There is a choice and a chance. Like the choice in
the proverb, it may be only between drowning and
hanging—but still their is a chance, there is a choice.
The prospects on the old Registry have long been
tabled at the Reform Club—and we dare say, since
Mr. Parkes' grievous miscalculation in the never-to-
be-forgotten matter of Ipswich, some elder and abler
brethren of the craft have gone over the old scores
afresh—and have been cautious in avoiding the un-
pardonable sin of counting unhatched chickens. The
present Registry, then, is well known at the Reform
Club. 4

The coming Registry will soon be tabled on Mr.
Parkes' observant tablets—and the Commander-in-
Chief—our ancient enemy " the Bears" will soon have
a very shrewd guess how the two parties stand in every
county and town in England, and Scotland, and Ire-
land. It will thus he apparent at once, hod the
chances lie, upon the present House, a new House
within the old Registry, or a new House upon the new
Registry. We hope and trust it will be apparent to
that experienced tactician, that on every leg of the
Whig tripod there is rottenness and sheer despair.
Defeat, choose which alternative they will, stares them
}broadly in the face.
What then will a 'despairing faction do in this their
sad perplexity? Beaten in the present House, we
think they will scarcely decide for that. Desperate
men have recourse to desperate remedies. "In for a
penny, • in. for a pound," they will chance a more
ignominous failure rather than put up with the cer-
tainty of a present defeat. They will denounce Chart-
ism in one place, they will abet it in another : forswear
Ballot in the Whig counties, pro Claim it in the Radical
towns : " work the corn-laws" with the men of Man-
chester—and call the agitation " wild insanity", before
the gates of Brockett :—with a lie upon their lips, and
secret service money and Treasury missions in their
pockets, they will try every constituency with its own
supposed specific—they will practise all their well-
tried arts—they will fight as men who know that if
they fall, " they fall like Lucifer, never to rise again."
Now unfavourable as we know the expiring Registry
to be, we believe the coming one to be still more so.
We believe, therefore, that the desperadoes -of the
hostile craft will hail their colours to the piratical mast,
and fight a bold fight—as doomed and despairing
traitors.

It is hazardous to speculate upon the conduct of
these uncertain and most fluctuating Whigs : but we
flatter ourselves we know them well. Whatever seems
calculated to promote their sordid interests, we may
rest assured they will never omit to do. They often
overshoot the mark, and like all the tricksters of all

times, learn by sad experience to their sore dismay,
that the straight line is after all the shortest possible
way between the extremities. They will not ;;sacrifice
the power which place confers, and leave it to Sir R.
Peel to dissolve this devoted Parliament. Better to
sound alarms when all is quiet, than to slumber when
the walls are scaled. Once again, whenever the blow
shall be struck, let us in Liverpool be ready.

We would recommend to particular attention the
resolutions passed at the meeting of the Manchester
Wesleyan Education Committee on Monday the 15th
of July. It is refreshing to read such a memorial in
these times, emanating from so large and influential a
body of Dissenters. It is too often our painful duty t(
assume the attitude of hostility towards those who dis-
sent from the Establishment, and to use harsher lan-
guage in speaking of them than is at all congenial to
our feelings! But we are compelled to do this. When
we find sectarian hatred of the Church in close alliance
with Popery, and proceeding to overt acts which threa-
ten her destruction—when we see the sacred name of
Religion prostituted to the cause of Infidelity, and all
that we hold most dear vilified and brought into con-
tempt by men who have no part nor lot in the Chrisian
and Apostolic Church—we have no option as to the
course we must pursue, and we must stigmatise such
conduct with the loud and stern voice of condemna-

During the last few years there has been perhaps
more general and disgusting hypocrisy displayed by
large bodies of religionists in this country than at any
former period of our history. When the rebellion
broke out in 1642, the Puritans, however lamentably
wrong in their principles, were unquestionably sincere.
Deluded by their own overheated and fanatic imagina-
tions, they verily believed that in dethroning their law-
ful Sovereign they were wielding the sword of the Lord
and of Gideon, and it was this deep feeling of enthu-
siastic zeal for which they considered the cause of God
that enabled them to withstand and overcome the fiery
courage of the cavaliers in so many desperate encouu-
ters. But in the outcry that has been raised against
the Church and the decent maintenance of her minis-
ters and fabrics during the last ten years, we recognise
nothing but a spirit of rancorous and envious hate.
Religious scruples and conscientious objections have
been forced into the service of political agitation, and
a pretended zeal for the cause of Christianity has been
made use of by scamping demagogues as a cloak for
their nefarious design of sapping the foundations of
religious faith in the country altogether.
From behind the masked battery of Liberalism a
fierce and ceaseless fire has been directed against all
our institutions, but against none with such concen-
trated violeffce as the Church ; and she has been ex-
posed to the full fury of that destroying spirit which is
abroad in the land, and seeks to prostrate our national
existence at the foot of an unbridled and ungovernable
democracy. In this unholy warfare' we are bound to
charge the dissenting bodies with having lent them-
selves the willing and obedient allies of our most pro-
fligate assailants. As a general rule it will be found
that those constituencies, in which schism from the
Church has obtained the most numerous followers,
have returned to Parliament the most radical members.
It seems as though disaffection to the Establishment
and discontent with the Constitution were synonymous
and convertible terms ; and we deeply deplore this, be-
cause it tends to extinguish all feelings of charity to-
wards those who make scruples of conscience the os-
tensible reason for deserting the Church for the con-

venticle.
But we rejoice to think that such is not universall)
the case. We are very far indeed from calling fin
Scottish Presbyterians dissenters ; but, opposed as the)
are in all their forms of Church government and ritua'
of worship to ourselves, we should have hardly ven-
tured to predict, ten years ago, that they would give
such unequivocal proofs as they have done that the)
are the warm friends of the Established Church it.
England. The conduct of the Wesleyan Methodist:,
deserves the warmest praise. That they have done n(
more than their duty if they wished to remain true to
the principles of their Founder, and to give proof that
their professions of religion were sincere, we admit ;
but in these times this is to do a great deal, and we will
not be niggardly in our acknowledgments. They have
exposed themselves to a torrent of obloquy from quar-
ters whence praise ought to be felt as the heaviest cen-
sure, because they have refused to compromise their
character and confound themselves with the noisy herd
of revolutionists in whose camp the greatest number ot
their dissenting brethren is to be found.
The mode in which they have treated that officious
beggarman O'Connell is just what we could have
wished. In terms of cold contempt they decline to
have any intercourse with a controversialist who has,
by his coarse and ruffian-like attacks upon individuals,
put himself out of the pale of society, and rendered
treatment by the rules of ordinary courtesy impossi-
ble. We shall see by and by the filthy torrent of in-
vective which this " chartered libertine" will pour out
upon them when he gets back from St. Stephen's to
the congenial atmosphere of the Corn Exchange in
• PubliTl,
.Put w 11W .4.9 wish to waste a word upon