The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-10-27 00:00:00

No traitor arm can e'er depress the spirit which is here

The firm and holy trust which finds a voice in every eheer ;
That trust is in the Word of Life, which, like the prophet's wand,
Laid dry the path for Israel ;—we fear not for our land !

" Britannia needs no bulwarks—no towers along the steep,"*—
Whilst o'er her loyal hearts and hands their watchful vigils keep
And whilst the blessed lamp of life sheds forth its radiance bland—
From every hill and raountain top, we fear not for our land

We fear not for old England,—for her church and for her crown :
A thousand hands this night would rise to strike the traitor down
A thousand tongues are mady now the recreant name to brand,
Who flinches from her banner ;—Oh ! why fear we for our land ?
G. B. J,

. Campbell.

SPEECH OF THE REV. HUGH M`NEILE,
AT THE DINNER TO LORD STANLEY, ON THURSDAY, OCT. 22

Notwithstanding that we presented a supplement to our
readers on Friday last, we were unable to rind room for the
eloquent speech of our distinguished townsman, the Rev.
Hugh M`Neile, at the dinner to Lord Stanley, on the occa-
sion of laying the foundation stone of the Liverpool Collegiate
Institution. In redemption of our pledge, we now lay it be-
fore our readers, convinced that its intrinsic merits will be
recognised by all.
The NOBLE PRESIDENT (Lord Francis Egerton) having
called on the reverend gentlemen to propose a toast,
The Rev. Mr. WNEILE rose, and the cheering which
greeted his appearance was most enthusiastic. He spoke as
follows :—My Lord, I have to assure your lordship, and you,
gentlemen, that I would attempt some reference to my own
feelings at this moment, but that I am really afraid and
ashamed to do so—afraid, because I think that anything like
an apology about the unworthy individual who has been
called up to address you would be more presumptive than
total silence. The reception which I have met with has cer-
tainly deprived me for a moment of my usual faculties of ut-
terance. (Loud cheers, during which the rev. gentleman
seemed to be deeply affected.) It is not to be attributed to
any rank, or station, or influence I possess, or can possess,
but I am in some degree reassured by the remembrance that
it is occasioned by the fact, that I have a heart and tongue
which I thank God are turned by his grace to the defence of
the institutions of our country, as they are based on the word
of revelation and presented in the formularies, the discipline,
and the order of that church of which I am an unworthy but
most attached member. (Vehement applause.)
My lord,—lt is my high privilege to propose for the adop-
tion of this distinguish: d assembly, and I doubt not for their
permanently practical as well as their immediately cordial
adoption, the prosperity of an infant society in direct opera-
tive connexion with our Collegiate Institution. (Hear.)
My lord, every thing conspires to strengthen our convic-
tion that in giving a largely improved education to the com-
mercial trading and working classes of our great community,
we are grappling, so far as our exertions can grapple, with
the fundamental question of our times.
That question, truly traced to its source, is not are we to
have peace or war? are we to have a conservative or a de-
structive cabinet ? are we to have a repeal or no repeal of the
legislative union with Ireland ? are we to have an increase or
a decrease of the unconstitutional influence within the realm
of a foreign ecclesiastical potentate ? These, and all such
things, are secondary and symptomatic. Englishmen, as
they ought to be, soon settle all these. The question is, what
is now to be done for Englishmen? (Loud cheers.) They
are not as they ought to be. They are not prepared as they
ought to be, to meet the great questions which are now more
than ever, brought before them, and on which they are now
more than ever called to decide.
[Here the mayor's deputy, Mr. Crooke, who appeared to
be labouring under an indistinct conception that it was he
who ought to be speaking, commenced addressing certain
mysterious and piteous sounds to the chairman, which were
suddenly cut short by u summary ejectment, vi et armis, by
his surrounding friends.]
Mr. WNEILE continued.—The progress of legislation
has placed the wielding in the last resort of the sceptre
of government in the hands of the middle classes of
the community. (Hear, hear, and cheers.) I am not
about to offer any comment upon the propriety or policy
of having done this. I speak of it now simply as a fact in
order to introduce in connexion with it, another fact more

immediately the subject of our present consideration. The
middle classes of the community are called to the exercise of
the most responsible duties, for the adequately intelligent dis-

charge of which they have not the requisite information. (Hear.)
Possessing the power, they ought to possess the intelligence
of statesmen. They are substantially their own legislators ;
and to acquit themselves as they ought to do for the safety
and irnpro‘ement of the country, they ought to be able to
take comprehensive views of the great balanced and balancing
jut erests of the state. Not to mention our foreign connexions,
and the high principles involved in international laws, they
ought to be able to sae the inseparable connexion (instead of
any party rivalry) which subsists between the apparently con-
flicting, but really harmonious interests of manufacture and
agriculture, of landlord and tenant, of employer and work-
man, of the liberty of commercial enterprise and the nation-
ality of protecting duties, of sound permanent policy and truly
enlightened humanity, of true religious consistency and genuine
christian toleration—so that to rush headlong in any one
direction is not only to injure the other side but in the ine-
vitable recoil to injure if not ruin both sides. (Loud cheers.)
Correct views on these subjects, my lord, are acquirements
of no ordinary difficulty. They cannot be had impromptu.
They are the results of painstaking investigation, and discri-
minating wisdom—a field into which no man can enter with-
out a competent stock of preliminary and sound erudition.
(Hear, and applause )
To question the duty of cultivating the minds of our mid-
dle classes up to a statesman's growth, or to hesitate about
the vigorous performance of that duty, is little short of sui-
cidal madness. We have armed them for the political field,
and now if we leave them ignorant of the great questions and
interests of national policy, we leave them as a ready engine
for mischief in the hands of the experimental empiric, urging
on his one-eyed, narrow theory, to the inevitable upsetting
of the machine ; or to the factious demagogue, clamouring
about patriotism, while his object is to put money in his
purse ; or to the wily traitor, who, practising on their igno-
rance, may turn their energies against themselves and their
country. (Hear, hear, and cheers.)
If it be alleged that it is utterly hopeless to put the im-
mense mass of the middle classes in possession of the erudi-
tion necessary for such high and delicate investigations; that
their habits, and the necessities of their existence demanding
the daily toil of their hands, render such cultivation altoge-
ther beyond their reach : our reply in the first instance is
this—lf so, if it be utterly hopeless to make them statesmen
in irtelligence, then it is utterly ruinous to make them states-
men in privilege—to put into their hands an instrument, and
a sharp one, which they do not know, and cannot learn, how
to wield. (Hear, hear.)
But, my lord, our answer in the second place is this—lt
is not hopeless. Ido indeed believe that it is utterly hope-
less to make the physical and mathematical sciences popular.
I am well persuaded that in those sciences the middle classes,
considered as a body, can never acquire more than that little
knowledge which is a dangerous thing : and experience con-
firms the opinion that those educationists of our day who are
leading their pupils of the middle classes to devote all, or
nearly all, their studying time to those sciences, are not
doing them the good they intend. A few individual cases of
almost miraculous success may be pointed to, but these con-
firm instead of superseding the rule. (Hear, hear.)
But my lord, after all, and without meaning to convey the
slightest disparagement of those lofty pursuits where they
can be fully followed, I am free to confess that, notwithstand-
ing the boast of mathematicians that their intellectual ab-
stractions teach men to reason, I do not think such reason-
ing is the most helpful in the attainment of true practical
wisdom, either in this world, or for the next. (Hear, hear.)
I will briefly say why. In the practical affairs of nations,
as of individuals, the mind has to balance probabilities and
decide on comparative degrees of the eligible and the in-
eligible. For such balancings and decisions, the school of rigid
demonstration is not the best. (Hear.) Calculations conducted
with unerring certainty, either among the unchanging rela-
tions of given quantities, or among the uniform effects, in
due proportion to the distances, of the attraction of gravita-
tion and the centrifugal impetus; are not the most appropri-
ate cultivators of that practical wisdom, and sound good
sense, which must daily determine, not between the proved
and the disproved, but between the more or less judicious or
injudicious. (Great applause.)
Most true it is, and will be found, that no very large

_
section of the working classes ever will, or can, become com-
petently conversant with the abstract sciences. I have said
completely conversant, for I do not mean to deny, that a
superficial smattering (enough for dangerous vanity, but not
enough for real wisdom) may readily be acquired. But my
lord, the working classes can learn what is much better :
better for themselves and better for their country. They
can learn the history of nations, and therein the character of
man, and the dealings of God. (Hear.) These are the elements of
true political science. (Hear.) They can learn, that although
every fact considered as a fact is new, never was before and never
can be again, yet that considered with reference to the un-
changing principles of this world's history, there is nothing
new. " The thing that bath been, it is that which shall be,
and that which is done, is that whi" ch shall be done, and
there is no new thing under the sun. They can learn that
all people, nations, and languages have to do with one great
Ruler, who is the same yesterday and to-day, and for ever.
They can learn the great principles of his moral administra-
tion over the empires of the earth. (Cheers.)
" At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation
and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plarkt it, if that
nation do evil in rnv sight, that it obey not my voice,
then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I
would benefit them. And at what instant I shall speak
concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom to pluck
up and to pull down and to destroy it; if that nation against
whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, and obey my
voice, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto
them.' They can see these principles illustrates, and prac-
tical light thrown upon what is here called good and evil, by
the history of nation after nation ; from Assyria and Baby-
lon, of by-gone centuries, down to the frightful termination
of the last century in France. They can have the applica-
tion of these principles to their own time and circumstances.
My lord, I adopt in seriousness the phrase, however intended,
of the present Lord Chancellor of Ireland, when be called
history an old almanack. For what, let me ask, have we to
change in an old almanack to make it new? Not the pro-
gress of the seasons : these remain the same : not the recur-
rence of the equinoxes, not the evolutions of the earth on
her axis and in her orbit, not the changes of the moon, not
the rising and falling of the tides, no, they all continue sub-
stantially the same ; and what then have we to change ? only
the dates, and the rare and comparatively unimportant,
though for a moment alarming, prodigies of eclipses of the
sun or moon, and passing comets with their tails of lurid
fire. (Hear.) And so it is with history. . (Hear, hear.)
Changing its dates from year to year, its fundamental
principles are of perpetual recurrence. The real cause
of the overthrow of governments is now what it was when
Pharoah in the pride of power and fancied self-sufficiency,
gave honest utterance to the infidel principle, " who is the
Lord that I should obey his voice ? I know not the Lord,
Neither will 1 Ist Israel g 0,,, (Hear, hear.) The real

cam of prosperity and pes,cs. ana influence ari hononr,
in a nation, (beautifully illustrated by our own history), is
what it was when Hezekiah and Josiah and Jehoshaphat
cleansed their country from the pollutions of idol's temples,
and established from Dan to Beersheba, the true worship of
the true and living God. We have only to change the dates,
and make allowance for a French eclipe of king and church,
or an Irish comet with a lurid tail, and the old almanack
becomes the daily newspaper. (Immense cheering.)
Now, my lord, to teach the middle classes of our commu-
nity these principles is our object in our Collegiate Institu-
tion ; and to begin with their children is our object in the
kindred Institution of little more than a year old, for whose
infancy it is my pleasing duty to solicit your fostering regard,
and for whose growth I venture to anticipate your nourishing
liberality. (Cheers.)
My lord, our labours in this cause are not the random
shots of unenlisted volunteers, but the orderly and well di-
rected fire of disciplined regiments, under epiecot al comman-
ders. We educate not as insulated individuals, to make in-
sulated scholars, but as churchmen, to make educated, intel-
ligent, and attached members of the church. (Cheers.)
I am ashamed to have so long trespassed upon the time of
your lordship. With this mention of its connection with the
church, I have to propose " Success to the Diocesan Educa-
ti ,nal Society." (Cheers.) It is the peculiar feature of the
society, that it leads you to see our vocation as clergy-
men ; to see us take the formularies of the church to the chil-
dren of the middle classes, and invite them to the nourish-
ment of that bread which grows in the stature of the perfect
churchmen who is the perfect citizen. I believe there is no
society but the church that can meet the aching necessities of
the population of the world in the state into which it has
now fallen. There is a longing anxiety in man to have the
desire of his heart for communion fulfilled, and where shall
we find it fulfilled ? Communion here is interrupted by the
thousand accidents of life, it is cut off entirely by the inevi-
table stroke of death All social communications are liable
to perpetual interruptions. Family bonds, ardent attach-
ments, must give way to the iron necessities of life, dragging
children from their homes, breaking up the domestic circle,
carrying men into foreign lands to traverse whole nations.
The whole state of human society is, at best, but transitory.
All that man's heart most longs for is most interfered with,
and be is left a longing creature, still looking for higher, more
satisfying, more sanctifying communion. (Hear, hear.)
My lord, it is the church of God, as it appears to us
in the book of Revelation, the church of God as mi-
nistered by his appointed servants, that supplies this
communion. (Hear, hear.) It supplies a permanent com-
munion, and not that only, but a communion that gives us
a foretaste of that which is to come. So, my lord, we read
the communion of the saints. We read it as the communion,
not merely with those that are now bound in the social circle,
or in our congregational societies, but as a communion of the
whole body of Christ, part of which are already departed, and
are with the Lord. We come together by faith—with the
spirits of just men made perfect. (Hear, and great applause.)
The church offers communion with the mighty dead, who
being dead yet speak, not only in the example they have left
but in the communion which they held forth ; and in pre-
senting such a society as the Christian church more and
more prominently to the eyes of men, as we do in
these educational institutions, we are using God's own
ordinance, the only effectual one, for the best organiza-
tion of society. (Hear, hear, and cheers.) I deeply feel
that in the attempt to shew thus briefly the nature of the
claims the church has upon the best affections of the heart,
superior to any other that can be propounded to man's
observation, I have not succeeded to my own heart's
wish i❑ conveyirg the desire of that heart in these words.
But if I have intimated it to any—if I have opened a line,
might it in that way lead to the duty of believing communion
by faith with the spirits of just men made perfect ? I trust
I have done a service. Though you may not see the benefits
resulting from it at present, or perhaps ever, I shall perhaps
not have any occasion to be sorry for it when I meet many I
now address in another and a more enduring society. (Cheers.)
Returning to the matter in hand, and desiring to come to a
close, I cannot look along the line of tables, and see the in-
dividuals which compose the present company without feel-
ing disposed—and I hope I shall be excused—l cannot
see the two distinguished characters on your lordship's right,
without being tempted to let my real last words on the pre-
sent occasion be the fabled last words of a gallant chieftain.
When I consider the investigating vigilance and public warn-
ings of our beloved diocesan with reference to rising heresy
in the church, and the ability, power, and indomitable perse-
verance of our noble guest, where the battle of the constitu-
tion is to be fought, I am urged to use words whose fami-
liarity can be sanctioned only by the associations of their
context—

" Charge, Chester, charge! on, Stanley, on!"
[The reverend gentleman then resumed his seat. It is im-
possible to describe the enthusiasm of the long, loud, and
vehement cheering with which the concluding line was taken
up by the auditory. Mr. M`Neile was heard to say only,
" Charge, Chester, charge !"—" on, Stanley, on !" from a
thousand voices, was the exciting response.]