The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-03-06 00:00:00

CONTEMPORARY PRESS.

GOVERNMENT PATRONAGE OF PROTEST-
ANTISM.
(From the Times)
The seraphic zeal of the Palmerston print on behalf
of the Protestant cause is too well known and appre-
ciated to require any laudations of ours. As the un-
feigned respect which its Whitehall patrons have often
professed towards the established church in particular
has been more than confirmed by their many endea-
vours to do for it, so the journal in question, imitating
the consistency of its dictators, never misses an op-
portunity for commending the establishment to the
confidence and veneration of the country, by vindicat-
ing her usefulness as a national institution, by remon-
strating against the sectarian prejudices of her enemies,
and by proclaiming her undoubted loyalty in support
of the Crown and Constitution. Could we lay our
gloved hands upon a file of that cleanly paper for the
last three years, the innumerable extracts we might
quote from it, illustrative of its genuine Protestant
churchmanship, would doubtless be highly edifying to
our readers. Not that anything has appeared in that
quarter, more than in our own pages, to countenance
the frustration either of the Catholic Relief Bill, or the
practical repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts.
Such an endeavour, of course, was not to he thought
of for a moment. What we particularly allude to in
the ministerial organ refers, not to the unfair disparage-
ment of Papists and Dissenters in regard to their just
rights, but to the constitutional maintenance of the es-
tablished church in the moderate ascendancy still
awarded to her by the laws of the realm. On this lat-
ter point the Downing-street print professes to be as
strenuous as ourselves ; and the laborious pains it has
taken to realize the declared solicitude of its instruct-
ors, to this reasonable extent, gives one, we must own,
a very fascinating idea of its enormous candour and
honesty.
To Popish gentlemen entertaining the political opi•
nions of the whigs (albeit contending for the destruc-
tion of the Irish Church and the repeal of the Irish
union) offices of civil trust behoved to be awarded with
an even hand, that is clear. For what reason the Pro-
testant Dissenters do not come in for a share of this
impartial patronage, we cannot precisely say.
In Ireland, as all the world knows, the professors of
Popery carry all before them., If a candidate for a
government appointment in that country be neither a
member of the O'Connell family nor a worshipper of
the blessed Virgin, his merits cannot possibly be lis-
tened to. Indeed, Popery may almost be said to he at
a premium among ourselves. On this side of the
channel the whigs have elevated at least one Roman
Catholic (Lord Lovat) to the peerage ; and another has
been made a Master in Chancery. Adherents of the
same faith have been promoted to high situations in
her Majesty's household. We have, moreover, Papists
in the Treasury, Papists in the Admiralty, and Papists
at the Board of Trade. Now this, we dare say, is all
right enough, as matters go with the whigs. Yet,
apart from the ministry's habitual preference of Soci-
nians for vacant rerorderships, the itching Evangelical
non-conformists, such as Baptists, Independents, and
Calvinistic Methodists, cannot for their lives get a lu-
crative post wherewith to claw themselves. How is it
that not a single orthodox Dissenter has been made a
peer ? Why are there no tabernacle Dulcineas among
the Ladies of the Bedchamber ? How happens it that
we have neither a Baptist Lord in Waiting, nor a con-
gregational judge upon the bench, nor a Lady Hun-
tingdon commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, nor an
, evangelical non-conformist of any description what-
ever, either upon the Board of Admiralty, or upon the
Board of Trade, or upon the Treasury Board, or upon
the India Board, or upon any known Board in exist-
ence, connected with the Executive of the country ?
Far from imagining that the liberal Government, which
bestows its favours upon Papists for the purpose of
giving bond fide effect to the Catholic Emancipation
Bill, are at the same time deliberately maintaining the
repealed Test Acts in practical force against orthodox
Dissenters, we have no doubt that the latter's syste-
matic exclusion from state offices is just as strict a
piece of impartiality on the part of the whigs as the
prominent honours they confer upon the more fa-
voured professors of Romanism; nor will their even-
ing organ, recurring to its usual " enormous" re-
sources, f2il to justify this impartiality, on the allega-
tion, that as the Romish communion transcends in
numbers and wealth all the non-established sects in
this country, so it is but reasonable that its members
should exclusively possess the very few offices which
the desire of ministers to uphold the decent ascen-
dancy of the Protestant establishment can enable them
to withdraw from the members of the Church of Eng-
land.