The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-03-29 00:00:00

E LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

allowed it to remain there for a single moment. But the
feelings of the inquisitors are wounded by the repug-
nance of the witness—their dignity is offended—and they
drag her before the grand assembly of the reformed par-
liament, these to answer for her contumacy. At the bar
of the house Mrs. Elizabeth Robinson repeats the same
story.
_lf she had been a Quaker, perhaps, she would
have defended her reluctance on the score of conscience ;
but not being of that persuasion she brazens out her first
falsehood with all the sentimentality of Eugene Aram.
What is her fate we know not; but we suppose it is
decided before this. Of her, or what becomes of her,
we care nothing; but with respect to the men who
dragged her forward, and who searched the dark lanes
and the blind alleys for such a witness,—who hunted
among the beer barrels and all the haunts of vice for such
a lady to support their cause, they must be dealt with
hereafter, and be made to drink deep of the cup which
they had filled for others.

The Morning Herald of Tuesday contains the follow-
ing observations on these Northern Patriots, the Polish
Exiles.
" We have received several letters on the subject of the
meeting which is to be held this day at the Freemasons' Hall
for the relief of the Polish exiles. It is with regret that we sub-
mit to the necessity of excluding these letters, in consequence
of wm:kt of room. But does the cause of the distinguished heroes
and patriots to whose sufferings they refer, require the aid of
such recommendations ? If wrongs can speak for themselves,
if virtue can speak for itself, the simple announcement we have
already made, unaccompanied by a word of exhortation or
comment, ought to be sufficient to fill the room with the friends
of freedom and humanity."

Without having the slightest wish to stem the stream
of charity, or of confining its beneficence to any parti-
cular class 'of the human race, we most earnestly pro-
test against these eternal appeals in fay.dur of political
sufferers, as holding out a direct premiurn to the worth-
less and the disaffected part of the subjects of every Go-
vernment in Europe. But for this spurious sympathy,
the countries that have lately exhibited those frightful
scenes of civil war and bloodshed in which they have
abounded, might now be 'enjoying the blessings of
peace and prosperity, carryingnn with ENGLAND their
accustomed commercial relations. And we would ask
our Philanthropists seriously to consider whether they
have in any one instance improved the condition of ,the
PEOPLE of the countries where those revolutions, have
taken place ? As long as this patriotic-refugee-charity-
systeM continues, so long will England be the hot-bed
of sedition ;—as long as we continue to support foreign
patriots there will be " enough and to spare ;" for it is an
axiom of political economy that the supply of any arti-
cle, whether of luxury or necessity, will always be re-
gulated by the demand. •

LORD ALTnonP's brother, who is a Popish Priest, and
who has recently returned- from .a pilgrimage to the
shrine of our Lady of Loretto, has been advertised to
preach at the opening of some Chapel in Dublin. If
the honourable and reverend father do not cut a more
respectable figure. in the pulpit than his right honourable
brOther does in the House of Commons it will be. some
considerable time before he will succeed in converting
our brother heretics in Ireland to the errors and super-
stitions of their ancestors.

This, however, we are told, is one of the principal
objects of Father Spencer's mission. He is embued
with the belief that he' possesses the power of recalling
to the fold the. stray sheep of his ,Holiness the Pope.
The miracles of Prince Holtenlohe were decided failures;
but what. the Prince could not do is to be clone by the
brother of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of this,
priest Spencer is not only convinced himself, but he has
also inoculated the elite of Maynooth with a similar
opinion ; and we strongly suspect that he has gained
over as his abettors and coadjutors in this grand work of
re-conversion the majority of his Majesty's ministers.
We judge men by their deeds; and when we look at the
system of education recently adopted in Ireland, and
supported by the taxes drawn from the already over-
taxed Protestant people of England, we can come to no
other conclusion than that the Cabinet in Downing-
street, the Cabinet in Maynooth, and the Parliament. in
Dublin, perfectly well understand each other, and that
popish ascendancy is to be the final " healing measure."
In order to conciliate this same Father Spencer and
the fraternity of priests, the Bible has been expelled from
those schools where the poorer order of Protestant chil-
dren, in conjunction with the children of Roman Catho-
lics, have hitherto received the first elements of education.
The grants of money by which these schools were
formerly supported have been withdrawn, on no other
ground than that the pure and unadulterated Word of
God, without note or comment, is allowed to be read by
the scholars. The Protestants are compelled either to
accept a few garbled sentences, culled by the priests,
and tainted with distorted translations from the Latin
Vulgate, in lieu of the Bible itself, or be content with
no Scriptural reading whatsoever. The consequence is,
that the chief portion of these grants has been given to
the monks and friars for the exclusive purposes of popish
idolatry. The Protestants have refused to accept these
mutilations of the Gospel—these crumbs offered them by
the jesuits-L-and, accordingly, the expense of education
is thrown upon themselves, while the sums voted by the
Parliament of England are expended almost exclusively,
upon the Catholic population. . Among the grants we
find £2O given to a nunnery at Clonkelty ; £3O to
certain monks at Ennis ; and I:50 to a school at Escar,
where an altar is erected in the -midst of the school,Mass
said at nine in the morning, at twelve spiritual instruc-
tion, at three the' catechism, and at four prayers and
sermons PRESCRIBED BY TILE FRIARS ! ! !

Now, we are not here contending that the monks,
friars, and nuns have not a right to do what they please
with their own-we have no objection to their indulging
in all their absurd mummeries—we are not here making
war upon their bedaubed images, their beads, or their
holy water—but we protest against the application of
.the money taken from us, the Protestants of England, to
such idolatrous uses. We are liberal enough when we

allow them £BOOO a-year for the support of the College
of Maynooth, without being called upon to vote addit
tional sums to the monks and friars. If this system be
persevered in, the protestants will be justly chargeable
with the sin of encouraging popery in Ireland—thus
virtually denying their own faith, and promoting that
which they believe to. be idolatrous and abominable.
The Irish Protestants do not now seek any pecuniary aid
from the British government, or other words, they
refuse to accept it on the condition that their children
shall be denied the perusal of the unmutilated Scriptures.
And they act wisely. They see that the policy of the
present administration is averse to the established reli-
gion—that its members are in the trammels of the popish
priests—that a brother 'of a minister of the Crown is a
zealous missionary in the cause of superstition—that
the • refornied Creed, in vindication of which Our .fathers
shed their blood, is not deemed worthy of their protec-
tion—and that the church itself, and her bishops, must
give way before the encroachments of doctrinaries, 'agi-,
tators, lazy monks, and beggarly friars. Seeing, there.;
fore, that they have no guardians in the servants of the
King, and that an insult is offered to that book in which
they lisped the first accents of their mother tongue, which
conveys to them the precepts of unerring justice, which
assures them of a 'world beyond the grave, which con-
soles the languid spirit at the bedside- of affliction, and
ministers to the almost heart-broken mourner weeping
over the mortal remains of a beloved relative—seeing,
and feeling poignantly all these indignities, the Pro-
testants of Ireland have resolved to educate their poor at
their own expense, and all that they demand is that the
Roman Catholics shall have no advantage over them in
point, of pecuniary assistance. Nothing can be more
reasonable, and we heartily join in their prayer. There
must be no more tampering or flirting with Popery. Our
hands must be washed of the guilt of nurturing it in se-
cret—of encouraging it .by parliamentary grants—of
paying for the idolatrous education of embryo priests—
of promoting that which is inimical to peace, liberty, and
true religion. We hope, tih that in the next ses-
sion of parliament Mr. Hume, Mr._ Ewart, or some other
economist will move that these grants be stopped.

As the revolutionary j urnals, in order to effect their pur-
pose of oversetting the church by sliewing its inefficiency,
are labouring to exaggerate the amount of the dissenting
population, it will be expedient to furnish our readers
with as much accurate information as we can collect on
the other side ; and, in order not to be suspected of exag-
geration or partiality, we will principally refer to the
statements of dissenteis themselves. The British Ma-
gazine collects from these sources that the Presbyterian
denomination, which, during the great rebellion, was
powerful enough to overthrow the church and occupy its
benefices, has now only about 258 chapels, of which, ac-
cording to the Eclectic Review, (a dissenting journal,)
235 are Unitarian.

The Congregational Magazine, the chief organ of the
independents, gives the following returns of the meeting-
houses of the three denominations, in 1812, 1827, and
1829 :

Press. Indep. Bart. Total.
In 1812 . . 252 . . 799 . . 532 . . 1583
1827 . . 204 . . 1205 . . 805 . .. 2212
1829 . . 258 . 1289 . . 888 . 2435

In seventeen years, then, the chapels of the three deno-
minations had increased by about one half, and the popu-
lation had increased somewhat in the same proportion ;
that is, from nine millions and a half in 1811, to fourteen
millions in 1831. But now let us inquire how these
meeting-houses have been increased.
According to Mr. Ballantyne, who is quoted as autho-
rity by the Eclectic Review, Feb. 1832, we are to attri-
bute one half the number of meeting-houses to internal
division. "Our dissent," says the Review, Sept. 1831,
p. 192," is itself fraught with dissent and breaks and breaks
again into distinct masses, as often as any excitement
puts the'body in motion." The Review also talks of the
multipliCation of societies by division : the propaga-
tion of dissenterism by slips : the raising of congrega-
tions by architectural forcing glasses called chapels.'
Such is the view given of dissent by Dissenters.
Again—the Congregational Magazine talks about the
necessity of checking "rashness in building ;" and it ap-
pearSthat chapels are built when there are no more than
a dozen to fill them. A fluent preacher or a lazy church
minister gives rise to a new chapel—a better church mi-
nister succeeds, or the preacher loses his popularity,
and thus, as the Eclectic Review observes, "the name of
a church is not unfrequently retained by the organic re-
mains of a body, in which all social life has long been
extinct; we have Old Sarum and Gatton churches among

Hence the miserable poverty complained of by many
dissenting ministers : hence we hear of "congregations
which can offer no salary to their teachers; while others
afording an income of £6O a year have been canvassed
by nearly forty applicants."—Congregational Magazine,
1827, p. 485.
Such is the state of dissenterism described by Dissen-
ters themselves, and such is the state to which the liberal
politicians of the present day, in their tender regard for
the welfare of the people, would reduce the ministers Of
the Established Church.

Supposing, then, that the number of dissenting cha-
pels be ever so numerous, their number is no criterion of
the actually dissenting population. The Unitarian cha-
pels are, miserably attended. "Of our own knowledge,"
says a Unitarian writer in the Monthly Repository, " we
can speak of scores that scarcely chew signs of life. Thu
number of hearers in them will not average more than
thirty. Few beings are more to be pitied than a Unita-
rian minister, placed in one of these societies." And if to
these we add the rotten borough chapels, described in the
Eclectic Review, and the rashly built chapels, with their
unsalaried ministers, which the Congregational Maga-
zine so feelingly deplores, we shall have reason to believe
that, even ir the number of chapels of all denominations,
as stated by dissenters, should be 7500, yet that the num-
ber of dissenters themselves, so far from being, as they
state, three millions and a half, will not be found to equal
two.