The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-12-29 00:00:00

CORRESPONDENCE.

THE ALBION'S

SIR,--_

ATTACK ON THE CLERGY

CONSISTI

Saturday, December 26, 184

A. HINT TO

THOSE

WHO LIVE

GLASS

HOUSES

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.
SIR,—You have always contended, and I am now con-
vinced of the justice of your opinion, that an elastic con-
science—one, I mean, that will stretch like Indian rubber—
is the one great desideratum of political agitators. With
this they can always manage to keep their heads above water
without it", ten to one they sink " deeper than ever plummet
sounded. The Liverpool Chronicle is an instance in point.
Now this newspaper, more than any other, indulges in party
spleen. For instance, I would refer you to its observations
on a reported speech of a lately-elected member of the Town
Council, in reference to the granting of spirit licenses by the
magistrates to the publicans of this town. Of the propriety
with which such a charge emanates from the Liverpool
Chronicle, perhaps your readers will be better able to judge
when they have read the following account of its conductors,
written, be it remembered, by a brother radical journalist-
-I now quote,from the Liverpool Times of Jan. 28th, 1840:
" As all these gentlemen belong to the class who, as Dr.
Eady says of himself, ' do good by stealth and blush to find
it fame,' it will be desirable that we should place them in the
box, and elicit by a slight examination, a rew facts respecting
their lives and conversation, which their well-known modesty
might otherwise incline them to keep back. We shall begin
with the editor.
" John Dignan come into Court. Is your name John
Dignan ? It is.—What are your means of living ? I am
editor to the Liverpool Chronicle.—You an editor ! why how
in the name of wonder did you become one ? Witness is
silent.—Were you not formerly a runner in the service of a
news-agent in this town? I was.—Well, sir, 1 ask you
again, and how were you metamorphosed into an editor?
Witness is silent.—Do you know Mr. 'Wallace Currie? I
know him by sight.—Well that was what I meant; no one
supposes that you know him in any other way. Did you
ever abuse him for hire? Yes.—Often? No, sir.—Remem-
ber what you are swearing ! I do so ; the libels on Mr.
Currie were written by another person.—Another ! then you
were not the only editor? No, sir.—Who was the other?
I decline to answer.—Was he a layman or a clergyman ? I
decline to answer.—Did you ever• write libels on Mr. Black-
burn? Yes, sir.—On Alderman Evans? Yes, sir.—On
Mr. Vincent Higgins? Yes, sir.—On Mr. Charles Law-
rence? Yes, sir.—On Mr. Henry Booth? Yes, sir.—Did
any one help you? I decline to answer.—Was it you who
described the Finance Committee of the Town Council last
week, as composed of men of ' double-distilled boobvism
It was.—Did you write the whole of the followini
graph

. 'lne proper course to be taken at the next council, would
be to pass a vote of censure upon the Finance Committee
for their jobbing propensities, and to remodel that precious
essence of double distilled boobyism altogether. Delenda
est Cathargo. The Finance Committee, as at present con-
stituted, is a disgrace to the counsel and the town. It is the
Corporate Refuge for the Destitute to which they send all
the members who are fit for nothing else, upon the plea, we
presume, that any one is clever enough to squander money.
But it ought to be remembered that the council loses charac-
ter by the mischievous conduct of this unhappy section of
its body.'
" You wrote the whole of it? Yes—(after a pause)—except

d
not know.—Who furnished it then ? vI
prOmisecinot to tell Well, sir, one more question, and you may go down. Am I
right in understanding that you are employed and paid by
Messrs. Ross and Nightingale, to discharge any quantity of
abuse which they think fit, upon any person against whom
they have a spite, though you may have never received the
slightest injury from him ? Yes, Sir.—Well, Sir, you may
go down.

" Mr. David Ross come into Court. Pray, Sir, are you
the same David Ross who was convicted at the Liverpool
Assizes in March, 1837, of publishing a false and slanderous
libel, and who was sentenced to be confined three months in
her Majesty's gaol of Newgate? I am.—Who was the per-
son whom you thus libelled on that occasion ? Air. Charles
Lawrence.—l believe that Mr. Lawrence is one of the first
merchants in Liverpool, that he is a county magistrate, and
that he formerly held the office of Mayor? Yes, Sir.—Pray,
Sir, what were the charges which you thought proper to pub-
lish with regard to that gentleman ? I made no charges.--
What do you mean? I only suggested.—Oh ! you threw out
insinuations. Well, Sir, do you think that a falsehood is at
all less a falsehood for being put forth in the form an insinu
atinn ? W. .int.—Did

itness is su, Jid the jury who tried you, think
so ? No, Sin—Well, Sir, what were the charges which you
only .suggested? Witness is silent.—Come, Sir! Did nor
you charge or suggest that Mr. Charles Lawrence had pur
chased land from the Corporate Estate at fraudulent - •
whilst '

le was a member of the Corporation, and sold it'again
Iso, at fraudulent prices, to the Liverpool, and Mancheste
ent

ry , WA. n'Llltal LIG V lb Lou coalman w 'mess lb
—'Was not this the infamous slander with which you were
charged on your trial ? It was.—And for which you were
convicted by a jury of your countrymen? It was.—And for
which you were sentenced to three months imprisonment in
Newgate ? It was."

" Let Mr. William Nightingale stand up. Who are you;
The partner of the last witness. Were you also tried for the
base libel on Mr. Lawrence ? Yes, Sir.—Were you con-
victed? Yes, Sir."

Dec. 26, 1840

I am, &c

OBSERVER

THE REV. FIELDING OULD AND HIS

TRADUCERS

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

" Pure attachment to dissenting principles requires to be
kept up in minds of a certain class by keen hatred, and now
and then a little round abuse of the iChurch."—Dissenters'
Eclectic Review, 1832, p. 144.

SIR,-Of the many unprincipled attacks upon the Esta-
blished Church and her clergy with which the radical press
and the dissenting publications of the present day teem, one
cannot but be amused at the puerility of that on the above
rev. gentleman,. which appeared in the pure columns of the
Albion of last week. That the faction must be hard up for
matter of accusation is manifest, when such a trumpery
charge as that, even if it were true, can find a place in the
well collated pages of the Albion, whose editor cannot be
supposed to be entirely ignorant of the principles and for-
mularies of the church.

But supposing the charge made against the rev. minister
of Christ Church were true to the very letter, does it carry
any imputation upon his integrity, or on his moral or religi-
ous character I—not the least in the world ; on the con-
trary, it argues a modesty not always to be found in men of
first-rate talents; a modesty that could appreciate excel-
lence in another, and avail itself of, and fortify itself with,
accumulated powers to bring into a contest of vital import-
ance, an overwhelming force of argument that should carry
conviction to the hearts and consciences of those supposed to
be in error, and for whose eternal safety and advantage the
course was undertaken.

But what shall we say of the organised slanderer, and
of the publication in which it first appeared. However
mildly we may be disposed to censure the Albion for
lending itself to the dissemination of such slanders, it is
impossible not to burn with indignation at that vile
publication, the Eclectic Review, which first gave it cur-
rency. That this is not too strong an epithet to apply to
that pseudo-religious periodical, a reference to the prefix
above is sufficient proof, and yet, Mr. Editor, there is a more
infamous publication than that—one, too, whose assumed
title, the Evangelical Magazine, ought to have been a gua-
rantee for the asumptlon that nothing slanderous, and cer-
tainly nothing untrue, would find insertion therein---instead
of which, it is one entire mass of lying, slanderous abuse of
the Church of England, and full of the most bitter malignity
against her clergy. I have no right to presume upon your
indulgence, or I could give you a body of quotations from it
that would fill your readers with indignation too violent for
quiet endurement; but that they may be their own inter-
preters and their own judges of the correctness of my con-
demnation of it, I refer them to the Church Magazine for
the preceding month, in which they will find extracts suf-
ficient to satisfy a glutton in detraction and falsehood. This
said veracious Evangelical Magazine might be supposed to
be edited by Alderman Harmer's right hand man from its
virulence; instead of which, however, there are sixty-four
Dissenting Ministers, who give their names as the Trustees
and stated Contributors to it : the list is now before me,
among which I find Dr. Burder, Dr. Bennett, Dr. Morrison,
J. Parsons, of York, J. A. James, of Birrningham—and also
one, to come nearer home, who stands in high estimation
with our townsmen, and who tags as riders to his name,
L.L.D and all but a whole alphabet of letters, indicative, I
presume, of merits or attainments of some kind or other, al-
though conferred by neither university--even our own Dr.
Raffles.
To vindicate myself from the sugnininn no .

.....er in fiction or unfairly towards those now introduced, 1 again refer
to the same No. of the Church Magazine, p. 327, in which
the true character of dissent and its diabolical principle'.
fully set forth_ and

La, aau a very proper scourging applied to the
horny backs of these sixty-four unprincipled Dissenting Mi-
nisters, who are not only confessedly but professedly Trustees
and stated Contributors of monthly venom to this periodical,
which numbers a sale of some thirteen or fourteen thousand
copies.

nC t-nurcn is out too apt to lose sight of the bitter hostility
of these Dissenters, and to consider them as embued with
merely a supersanctity of profession, with but a slight departure
in form to itself; but if a correct picture were drawn, Mr.
Editor, it would display feelings of rancorous hatred, inferior
to nothing which papacy itself could manifest, were it even in
the plenitude of a restored and renovated power, with all the
agency of state ascendancy, and the fulminations of his holi-
ness to back it. Little do we churchmen think of the depth
of that hatred which lurks in the heart of the genuine dis-
senter, while a simulated suavity covers his outward de-
meanour, and a religious solicitude falls from his tongue.
We are disposed to look on Roman Catholicistn as the only
religious form we have to guard against; but, believe me, as
a man's enemies are frequently those of his own household,
so are the bigotted antipathies of dissent quite as exterminat-
ing, if not so cruel, as those of the church of Rome. Politi-
cal dissent and disloyalty are twin sisters--you find them
hand and glove on all occasions where a stab is to be given—
the most heterogeneous compounds are not too gross for
amalgamation, if any measure hostile to the church is to be
accomplished—witness the embrace of dissent and papacy
and the unity of purpose with which those two antagonist
principles will fraternise and move together : of the two,
popery is a fairer, because a more open enemy; the stab of
dissent is that of the assassin—that of popery, undisguised.
But to return to Mr. Ould : if the paragraph was intended
to injure that rev, divine, the party inserting it will be de-
ceived ; the intention is there nevertheless ; but on Mr.
Ould's own flock and personal friends it will fall innoccuous,
and with the public, I think something more_ and frnm
"""--

mom, aim crow a
more important-q;;;ter, will be requisite to damage so well.
established and well-earned a reputation. To those who
know him, it is unnecessary to enter on his vindication ;
and to those who knoW him not I venture to say, not, that he
is superior to, but that he is not surpassed by, any one of the
present day, either in the pulpit, at the bar, or in either
house of Parliament, in powers of extemporaneous eloquence
and the finished beauties of oratory. This may be called

THE EDITpR OF THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.
-On taking up the .Albion, on Monday last, I thought
I had discovered a circumstance so singular, and yet so
pleasing, that I determined at once to make it publicly known
through your journal, namely, that on the last page I found
no abuse of any clergyman of the, Church of England; this
perfectly astonished me, but at the same time gratified me.
and I concluded to announce the fact through your means;
but before doing so I thought it better to search more
thoroughly, when at length I found (in an article where one
would hardly look for it) that the editor calls a clergyman by
the elegant and expressive epithet of a " shaved poodle."
You will often find this editor talking of charity and
liberality; but I think it would be more seemly in Liu►, a
Dissenter, if he exercised a little more charity himself when
speaking of any clergyman.
I should recommend him taking an example of his brother
Editor of Tuesday's Times, who agrees with him both in reli-
gion and politics, (and perhaps they both belong to Dr.
Raffies's congregation,) but who never descends to any low,
vulgar abuse of any minister of the Church of England ; in-
deeed, of any other person.—Yours,