The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-07-16 00:00:00

TUESDAY MORAING, JULY 16, 1844.

If we do not live in such eventful times as those
of the last generation,—if no present master-afflic-
tion, or danger, presses upon our country,—we fear
it cannot be denied that we are surround..d with
sufficient portents of future and not f-r distant ca-
lamity. It is true that England is still first amongst
the nations of the world—first in arms, in wealth,
and in civilization. She is still able, as of old, to
maintain her proud position aga nst any power, or
combination of power, which can be brought against
her. Like a mail-clad warrior, confident in her
innate strength and the tried metal of her panoply,
she keeps still her proud stand amidst contempo-
rary powers,—at once the peaceful arbiter of their
contentions and the stern repressor of international
wrong and crime. But, though strong externally,
England, nevertheless, bears that within her own
bosom which threatens eventually to sap the foun-
dations of her power, and to yield up to the grasp
of anarchy and destruction the noblest empire upon
which the sun ever silone. A consuming cancer is
gnawing at her heart, which, if not arrested in its
spread, must, at no distant period, induce national
decrepitude, and ultimately bring down upon her
the fate of those empires which, once almost as
mighty as her own, are now half forgotten things,
whose names are dimly recorded on the page of his-
tory, as warnings and emblems to mankind of the
fleeting character of all monumei_ts of human power.
What is it which has been for centuries past the
fruitful source of England's greatness—the basis of
the proud position which she has held in Europe,
and of the happiness of her own people? The con-
formity of her institutions to the requirements of
God's word; her firm and faithful attitude of pro-
test against all the error with which self-seeking
man has striven to overlard the plain teachings of
that word. From these have arisen the moral in-
fluence which she has been able to exercise amongst
nations. From these have resulted the rational
liberty which she has been enabled to afford to
Englishmen ; their freedom of thought, of speech,
of action ; and the protection which they have been
enabled to afford to oppressed humanity in all climes
and under all circumstances. England has been
great and prosperous in proportion as she has been
YAITHFUL—in proportion as she has clung to the
Truth; and she has retrograded in power and hap-
piness as she has swerved from the assertion and
maintenance of the truth.
From such a fatal backsliding—from such a na-
tional abandonment of the high principle which
once animated the councils and the mind of the
British nation, we look for the evil days which we
fear are in store for us. Where is now to be found

the manly recognition of our duty—the first of all

duties uhich we owe as a favoured and Christian
people—to support against every assailant, external
and internal, and at whatever sacrifice, national or
individual, that pure Protestant church which we
acknowledge to hold in its holy keeping, the truth—
all the truth, and nothiag beyond the truth—which
is our surest guide in legislation as in the every-
day affairs of life ? Alas ! we see it not in any one
of the great parties which now control the destinies
of England. It is not in fainting, time-serving Con-
servatism, any more than in that cold and haughty
abstraction which we call " Liberalism." It is not
to be found in our philosophy; it is rarely even to
to be heard, fully and plainly enunciated, from our
pulpits. In profession, we revere the wisdom of
that Book, of which our Church is the divinelj-
appointed expositor ; but, in practice, we treat that
wisdom as mere theory, excellent and admirable in
itself, but too transcendental to be taken as our guide
in the regulation of our mundane affairs.
To the working of this infidel spirit—we must at
all hazards call things by their fitting names—to the
working of this infidel spirit, which has taken hold
of the national mind, is directly traceable the bulk
of those evils which now afflict and distract society,
and wit se issue we dread to contemplate. But
more especially we trace them to this spirit animat-
ing the legislative bodieS. Can it be a legislature
acting upon the teachings of the word of God which
refuses, cr neglects, to extend the borders of his
Church in our land—which sees spiritual destitu-
Lion on every side, and yet hangs back—" counting
the cost"—from the plain Christian duty of remov-
ing that destitution ? Can it he such a legislature
which, with the divine command ringing in its ears,
"suffer little children to come unto me," prefers to
band them over, chained in ignorance, to the con-
suming Moloch who demands them for factory
toil ? Is it such a legislature which upholds a poor
law, whose iron despotism tramples in the dust the
weak and the afflicted—whose leading principle is,
that " the poor shall cease out of the land"—that
human philosophy shall work out what divine autho-
rity has declared shall "never" be ? It is not such
a legislature. It is one which palters with its own
convictions of right; and prefers the teachings of
temporary and mistaken worldly expediency to the
solemn warnings of divine truth.
The fruits of such a forsaking by the legislature
of the only faithful guide, in this life, of the cause
of nations as of individuals, are to be traced abun-
dantly in the unsettled temper of the national mind,
acting upon, or aggravated by, the physical evils
which have been induced in our social system. We
have taught our masses, whilst we have been chain-
ing them down to the necessities of an artificial
state of Society, to look forward to wild and specu-
lative social changes for the improvement of their
condition; and they are, even now, fast progressing
towards that state of feeling in which the resort to
physical force will be welcomed for the working out
of their various objects. In one portion of the land
the incendiary is at work ; and the very food for
which his hungry family are crying out is nightly
sacrificed to the gratification of ignorant and savage
revenge. On every side agitation is busy, directing
the passions of the many against the persons and
the property of the few; whilst dissent, infidelity,
and Popery, leagued together in an unholy and re-
volting confederation, are insidiously approaching
the consummation of their labour of generations