The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-12-21 00:00:00

TUESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 21, 1841

The successors of the late Mr. Egerton Smith have
made a demonstration in the last number of their pa-
per, which will go a great way to satisfy all the admir-
ers of that gentleman, that his mantle has fallen upon
the shoulders of individuals who are prepared to carry
out all his views both in the letter and the spirit. The
demonstrative article in which this consolatory fact is
made to appear, goes at once, and with much light-
hearted gaiety of manner, to vital matters, and can
leave no doubt upon the mind of the most cursory
reader, that the Mercury is resolved to stand forth,
henceforward and for ever, the dauntless foe of " fana-
ticism"—a terror to the over-religious—a sword sus-
pended over the head of all evangelical preachers—
snd a very dragon in the way of newspaper Conserva-
tive editors. " Fanaticism" is the great enemy which
he means to seek out and destroy—fanaticism which
he conceives generally to he the " besetting sin of our

country," and that species of it, in particular, which
he has found, by sad experience, to be most fertile in

practical results,

The leading promoters and agents of this great de-
lusion, the successors of the late Mr. Egerton Smith
allege, are of two classes ; first, the anti-popery par-
sons, and, secondly, newspaper writers—" knaves"—
whom it is not surprising to find " abundant, " when
there are so many "fools" to be made subservient to
their purposes, "under the pretence of doing service
to religion." From this it may be collected that the
fanaticism which these gentlemen have taken upon
themselves to deal with, is chiefly, if not altogether, of
one kind, and that in every instance it wears the cha-
racteristics of zeal for the Established Church and its
religion, and hatred of Popery and its superstitions.
Every anti-Popery parson, therefore, and every Con-
servative newspaper writer, is, according to these draw-
cansirs of scepticism, a " fanatic," and not only a
fanatic but a " knave;" and no man is wise, sober,
sensible, or even " honest," who is not of their own
party. It is a melancholy reflection that pure rationa-
lity is thus not only a monopoly, but a monopoly in
the hands of a party which has grievously declined of
late, which is still waxing less and less, and we may
fairly expect to see soon extinguished altogether, at
least in these parts. Liverpool grows every year, we
might almost say every hour, more and more " fanati-
cal," if the party of these new apostles of rationality
be conspared with that which they would consign so
unceremoniously to the discipline of the strait-waist-
coat; and as in these days, the majority do on all oc-
casions display the utmost aversion to being treated
with magisterial airs by the minority, we think the
question is likely to be contested with some warmth—
which party is really the rational party, and which
otherwise ; whether sound discretion and sound j udg-
ment is exclusively the appendage and possession of
the Mercury-ices, or whether they have passed over,
with other acquisitions, into the hands of their Conser-
vative opponents ?

For the present the writers in the Mercury enjoy the
advantage of being the assailants, and commence the
onset by presenting us with a sketch of what we are
to receive at their hands as the impersonation of a
" fanatical" clergyman, or genuine " anti-Popery par-
son." The picture will be found at full length in the
columns of their journal. It is vastly clever, to be
sure ; but we fear the greater part of it is only a
thieving from Sam Slick ; certainly the portrait in one
of the series in the Clockrnaker is before it in the order
of time, and has, therefore, of course, the better title
to being regarded as the original. However, great
minds do sometimes assimilate wonderfully in their
conceptions, and we forbear to stamp men with the
odious brand of thieves or copyists, till they are afford-
ed an opportunity of vindicating their pretensions.
The affair in the Mercury commences thus :

" A starving parson leaves his native bog, and drops down
in some community where the general intelligence is low,
but where bigotry is rife, and soon perceives the high road to
notoriety, it not to fame. lie commences roaring, ranting,
and raving against Popery. He terribly shakes the nervous
system of delicate young ladies, who, nevertheless, like the

excitement."
We have met a most marvellous resemblance to the
caricature in Slick, and no one of the disgusting de-
tails omitted. The "starving parson from his native
boy"—[by the by, wherever the Irish Popish priests
may be, we must tell these ignorant daubers, that ,the
Irish parsons to whom they, of course, allude, are very
seldom of the bog origin that they suppose ; the
Church in Ireland is, and always has been, almost ex-
clusively the profession of the aristocracy;] but this
"starving parson from the bog" is, of course, a very
vile character, a cheat, a hypocrite, and everything
that is odious and immoral. The painters seem here
to have forgotten that they were finishing their sign-
post for the meridian of Liverpool and England, and
not for America and the voluntary system, and, conse-
quently, that all the colouring they have thrown in
was not only superfluous, and in had taste, hut quite
out of character, and without vraisemblance. We
shall justify our conclusion by transferring a portion
of the patchwork to our columns ; we do so at the risk
of offending some of our readers ; but there is a ne-
cessity laid upon us by our own feelings which, for the
present, overbears every other consideration_ The
filthy caricature then runs thus :
" The fair devotees believe implicitly all their sable friend
tells them, however absurd, and are really willing to serve
him in all things, from pitch and toss to manslaughter. In
order to keep up the excitement, and to maintain his in-
fluence, our spiritual trader must necessarily indulge in all
kinds of strange flights and vagaries ; he, consequently con-
verts his pulpit into a kind of Punch and Judy box, where he
plays off his strange antics, to the great edification of his
long-eared followers, to the infinite merriment of the wicked
wags who go to the rarce show, and to the great jealousy of
the true and veritable Punch, who feels deeply injured by this
usurpation of his functions and privileges. More than one
of these clerical buloons we have really heard preach ser-
mons which no modest woman could have listened to'fbithout
her cheeks being suffused with the blush of shame ; and yet_
strange to relate—men still allow their wives and daughters
to-be contaminated by the filthy trash of these blatant, brain-
less bellowers. The nastiness to which some of these par-
sons give utterance, under a pretended religious sanction,
would really expose a poor man to the exercise of the i.5-ead-
mill, and would cause any gentleman, who used similito lan-
guage, to be banished from all respectable society."