The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-11-26 00:00:00

disqualified, and refused. We are aware that neither

Heathenism nor Popery has fettered the wing of poets ;
and we would allow that a certain order of poetic me-
rit might not be incompatible with all the earthward
propensities of tractarian philosophy ; but a pure
Christianity has not restrained the human mind from

ascending to the highest heaven of invention, and
where it comes in competition with a corrupt one, we
should feel ourselves by all means bound to " hold to
the one and despise the other," for the sake as well of
religion as of poetry. A perverted faith in religion
leaves us no security for the proper use of poetic
power. There is a sort of poetry in the mass as well
as the church-going bell—in convent Blooms—hermits'
cells, in hymns to the Virgin and prayers for the dead
—in short, in many of the fanciful things of Popery;
but we deprecate in this age the application of poetic
fire to such purposes, and at Oxford the choice of a
professor in whose mind we have cause to suspect a
leaning to them.

Our London contemporary assured us a short time
since, that " many had grown weary and faint under
the burthen of Protestantism, which is as to mere
church matters a formulary of no belief, and therefore
no support at all. They wanted a belief and a guid-
ance other than their own fallible judgment gathered
from original documents"—and they have found what
they wanted in Puseyism ! Well, we do hope that the
masers who will have to choose the poetical professor
at Ox:ord, or the majority of them, will prove that they
are not of the number of these " faint and weary"
professors, but amongst those who, having inherited
the inestimede blessing of our glorious reformation

•oin their fathers, are determined to hand it down—

so far as lies in ,them—unimpaired to their children

WEST INDIA MAIL QUESTION

We are impelled, by a wish to do justice to the mass of
evidence before us, to postpone, until Tuesday, our proposed
estimate of the advantages, of a nautical description, possessed
by the port of Liverpool, as the station for the West India
Mail Packets; and in the mean time we take the opportunity
to offer, although perhaps it is scarcely necessary, a few
words in reply to the observations of the Liverpool Times
upon our article of Friday last. Our contemporary is a
little indiscreet in his thick-and-thin advocacy of the con-
duct of his Whig friends in the council, or he would never
have ventured, in defiance of the universal sense of the town,
to have insisted upon their zeal in behalf of local interests, as
displayed by their conduct upon this question. The hands
of our representative—Mr. Cresswell—were nol strengthened,
we repeat, as they ought to have been, by the council, and as
they would have been had the question before the committee
been one of the same character as their pet warehousing
selaeme. Their effort was a late one. To have done all the
good which might have been done, it should have been made
snuck earlier. It should have been backed, as it easily might

have been, and as it was in other ports which put forward
their claims, by the authority of a town's meeting, in order
to have influenced the constitution of the committee itself,
in which it must be admitted that the interests of Liverpool,
and the manufacturing and commercial interests of the North of
England mod of Scotland, were most inadequately represented;
and we assert this, admitting fully the ability displayed by
Mr. CresswelL in conducting the case of our port, and the
great value of the evidence offered by Mr. Aiken, Mr. G. H.
Lawrence, and Lieut. Lord, in its favour.
For the fact that tials is the opinion of others besides our-
selves and the people of Liverpool, we refer to a letter upon
the subject which will ,be found in another column; and on
Taesday we trust to be able to make out such a case in
favour of our town as will .gatisfy all thinking men, (who
are inclined to look at it without partisanship,) what ought
to have been the ‘conduct of the ,council and of the public
of Liverpool last year; with regard to this question; and, as
wi.tll, how energetic ought to be their efforts now to repair, if
possible, the evil consequences of their past neglect.

be giveii Why the scriptural instruction of our school
should be dispensed with, we must negative the re-
quest; we have made up our mind long since on these
heads, and do not mean to stultify ourselves. It is
rather too bad—it is, in fact, presumptuous bf the
Romanist, who knows our sentiments, to ask us to do
anything so inconsistent. His " reasons" were better
kept to himself; we have long since weighed them in
the balance and found them wanting ; we are quite
persuaded of their futility.

But it may be said, the cause, whatever it be, ought
not to suffer from the injudiciousness of the advocate.
Suppose that no reasons whatever were put forward for
the indulgence solicited, but that it were suffered to
rest simply on the allegation of a conscientious scru-
ple,—shall we not in this case, it may be asked, grant
the exception in favour of conscience ? The answer
is, that our institution is Scriptural, and cannot be
changed in that vital respect, either for bad and insuf-
ficient reasons, or for none at all.

If a member of Mr. Owen's Socialist community
were to come forward and say, " Omit your Scriptural
teaching with regard to my children ; I have a scruple
on the subject ;" his request would be, of course,
refused ; nor does the Roman Catholic, who begs the
same favour in the same way, stand in a better position.
We adhere, then, to our rule ; and now let us ask
what is the inconvenience ? It is this, that we may
perhaps deprive some Roman Catholics of the advan-
tage which they would derive from the merely secular
instruction of our school. Observe, that Roman
Catholics are not proscribed as such ; they are as free
to enter our schools as any other class of persons, if
they will only comply with their regulations; they pro-
scribe themselves.' But what do they lose in not ob-
taining their own terms ? They lose only that which
we esteem a very secondary and minor object,—that

knowledge without the guiding power which is then
just as convertible to an evil as to a good purpose.
Nor is this all ; there are many Roman Catholics who

will break away from the tyranny of their priests and
the assumptions of their church, and avail themselves
of your Scriptural schools in defiance of them. This
reduces the number of the etcluded and the amount

of the supposed evil, already not a little diminished b
the considerations to which we have adverted. I

aught still remains, it is more than counterbalanced by
the evils avoided on the other hand—evils whose extent
we cannot foresee, nor fully estimate, because flowing
from an abandonment, though partial, of an incon-
testible principle. It is better that a few Roman
Catholics should foolishly deprive themselves of a
little secular scholarship, than that their community in

- - , .
general should receive countenance or confirmation in
errors of the most serious and important kind.

There is shortly to be filled up in the University of
Oxford a certain Professorship of Poetry, the election
to which, we are informed, is to determine something
more than who is the best poet, or who is best qualified
to deliver lectures on the divine art. We never ex-
pected to find the name of that learned controversialist,
Doctor Pusey, so intimately connected with the charms
of verse, or the peculiar doctrines to which he has
given a title, brought under discussion as a criterion
to determine the merit of a candidate for the chair of
poetry; but so it is. The learned doctor has espoused
the cause of a Mr. Williams, and being so recom-
mended, there can be no manner of doubt that Mr.
Williams is a Puseyite—a Puseyite not only in poetry,
but in divinity, body, and soul. Now, Mr. Williams
is opposed by Mr. Garbett, who is no Puseyite, and
the consequence is, that in the contested election for the
vacant Chair of Poetry, Oxford will be polled on the
question of Tractarian High-Churchism ! The conse-
quence is inevitable; Dr. Pusey's patronage has settled
the point.
The London Morning Post—a journal notoriously
Puseyitical--deprecates the idea of the election being
connected with theological controversy :
" Such an object," he says, " has the least possible con-
nection with either poetry or philosophy, or candour or
common sense. The Oxford Masters of Arts are not, we
imagine, the most promising men in the world,upon whom
to practise such an experiment as that of attempting to in-
duce them to dismiss all that is poetical from their minds
when engaged in the selection of a University Professor of
Poetry."

We would infer from this, that Puseyism is not
altogether so potent in the University as some have
supposed, and that the Puseyite candidate is alarmed
lest the election should turn upon the extent to which
that peculiar system of doctrine may prevail therein.
We sincerely hope that the fact may turn out so, and
that the Puseyite will be well beaten.
But why does the Post say that the Masters, in
viewing the contest in any degree of connection with
the famous controversy, should " dismiss all that is
poetical from their minds ?" Is Puseyism so very
anti-poetical that Poetry cannot breathe the same
atmosphere with it ? or whence this anxiety to discon-
nect the two? We differ from •the Post in thinking
that the Masters ought not to make Puseyism an
ingredient in the determination of their choice of can-
didates; we think they ought, and that the party con-
victed of Puseyism ought by all means to be deemed